Abstract
Background: At the beginning of the roll-out of Mother Tongue Based Bilingual Education (MTbBE) in South Africa, biliteracies in an African language and English still present an ideological frontier to be crossed. While the negative consequences of monolingual English instruction from Grade 4 have been well documented, there is little research on biliteracy practices in content subjects at this level.
Aim: The aim of this study was to explore biliteracies in learning materials and classroom practices and their impact on learner achievement.
Setting: The project was carried out in one Grade 4 science classroom in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. The teacher and 42 learners were the focal participants.
Methods: The article draws from an ethnographically informed participatory intervention study during 2023. A sample was taken from 168 photographs taken from the Grade 4 science classroom of bilingual texts. The texts were analysed using discourse analysis and Sebba’s framework for multilingual text analysis in order to answer the research questions.
Results: Children read bilingual materials in different language varieties; children wrote in more than one language and in a meshed register; and bilingual writing in a bilingual assessment produced higher achievement than that of children who wrote a monolingual English test.
Conclusion: The variety of biliteracies in which the teacher and children engaged point towards the need for both separate biliteracy and translanguaging literacies in developing children’s writing.
Contribution: The study contributes to the scholarship on biliteracies in the context of MTbBE and Southern schooling more broadly.
Keywords: biliteracies; biliteracy practices; translanguaging literacies; decoloniality; primary science; Mother Tongue Based Bilingual Education.
Introduction
Language policies and practices that favour colonial languages beyond the early years of schooling to the exclusion of indigenous languages are a major contributing factor to the widespread failure and drop-out rates of learners within post-colonial schooling systems (Macdonald 1990; McKinney 2017). The monolingual use of English and exclusion of African languages in content subject learning in South Africa has been most keenly felt in the domain of literacy. As the new programme of Mother Tongue Based Bilingual Education (MTbBE) is rolled out, bilingualism in literacy for content subjects such as science will be debated and given shape. Complexifying this debate in the South African context is the status of African languages in education currently. Until now, African languages have been under-developed and under-utilised as fully-fledged vehicles for academic literacy (Makoni 1998), and so policymakers and implementers are building the proverbial aeroplane as it is in flight.
The theoretical framework on which this study is built views literacy as a set of social practices (Street 1984), which are imbued with the power relations present in any literacy event. A social practice view of literacy contends that it is important to understand what people do with literacy and who and what shapes this. This perspective also holds that an individual engages in a range of literacy practices in his or her life depending on the context and purpose of the literacy event. Therefore, literacy is viewed as dynamic and multiple and sometimes is conceptualised as ‘literacies’ (García & Kleifgen 2020). This conceptual move has been extended to literacies in more than one named language, that is, ‘biliteracies’ (Nuñez, Degollado & Cervantes-Soon 2025). I consider the term ‘biliteracies’ to be equivalent to ‘biliteracy practices’ and use these terms interchangeably. This study adopts a biliteracies-as-social-practice lens to examine reading and writing for learning science in primary school. It sets out to explore what biliteracies were in evidence in an intervention pre-dating MTbBE, which allowed (and encouraged) children to employ their full meaning-making repertoires, including their African language resources, to learn science. In this way, this study seeks to contribute to the debates mentioned above through an examination of grassroots biliteracies and what they do, or do not, enable.
The data to be presented were collected during the teaching and learning of one science topic in a Grade 4 (10 years old) classroom in Cape Town, South Africa. I will argue that the development of biliteracies relied on diverse learning activities and texts. The discussion will also show how both reading and writing bilingual texts played a part in biliteracies development for these children. Each strategy builds the status of biliteracy in an African language and English to resist the vicious cycle of language disadvantage (Mohanty 2019) inherent in the exclusion of non-dominant languages from formal education. Furthermore, this study addresses a gap in a growing body of research investigating the relationship between language and literacy practices and epistemic justice (Fricker 2007) in post-colonial schools. While many classroom discourse studies have been conducted in Southern schools generating a fine-grained picture of oral bilingual language in learning, there are few studies of literacy practices in these contexts where children draw on more than one language in reading and writing.
The article continues with a discussion of the role of coloniality in literacy practices in South Africa. It then gives an overview of biliteracies in decolonial practice and presents a literature review on biliteracy practices in Southern schools. The research context, methods and findings follow. The article ends with a discussion of the findings and offers concluding remarks about the significance of the findings for MTbBE and bilingual education more broadly.
Coloniality and monolingual English literacy practices in South African schools
The African continent is well-known for societal and individual multilingualism (Makalela 2015; Ndhlovu & Makalela 2021). Despite this indigenous multilingualism, it is the colonial languages English, French and Portuguese that dominate education (Guzula 2018; McKinney 2017; Ngũgĩ 1986). From the fourth year of formal schooling, African language dominant children in sub-Saharan Africa experience a traumatic severance from their familiar language used in teaching, learning and assessment in favour of education in the colonial language. At the point when children begin to specialise academically in the fields of natural science, mathematics and social science, they find that their most familiar languages are excluded from the learning experience. In effect, this excludes children from full participation in knowledge acquisition and creation at school, a situation which has been described as ‘epistemic exclusion’ (Kuchah et al. 2022). The detrimental effects of these language policies on learning for African children have been well described (Antia 2021; Guzula 2018; McKinney 2017; Probyn 2009; Stroud & Kerfoot 2021) and increasingly interpreted as part of the wider scourge of the coloniality of language and racist language ideologies (Makoni 1998; Ndhlovu & Makalela 2021; Ngũgĩ 1986; Tyler 2023; Veronelli 2015).
Veronelli (2015) has described the coloniality of language as having two pillars. Firstly, colonisers interpreted colonised peoples as being deficient in true language capabilities and positioned them as mere communicators. Secondly, the speech of colonised peoples, such as Africans, was codified by missionary linguists within the logic of Western language theory and therefore scholars have argued that standardised African languages exist as colonial inventions (Makoni 1998). These registers are often far removed from how speakers use language in daily life. A South African scholar, Kell (2022:188), has extended this analysis to the domain of literacy in particular, arguing that it is based largely on English literacy and that the ‘coloniality of literacy’ is a dominant force in education.
One of the outworkings of the coloniality of language in the South African schooling context is the endurance of the ‘text frontier’ (Tyler & McKinney 2024) in African language use in schooling. While teachers and learners have long engaged in oral translanguaging (García & Wei 2014; Makalela 2015) or code-switching (Adendorff 1993; Probyn 2009) in classrooms, there has been a near-universal avoidance of the use of African languages or bilingualism in texts. Learning materials and assessments are provided in English only beyond Grade 3 (Guzula & Tyler 2025) and classroom walls and children’s exercise books are equally monolingual in English in the content subjects (Krause-Alzaidi 2023; Tyler 2023). One of the ironies of the infamous Bantu Education system was that it included the development of learning materials in African languages for the first 8 years of school. However, the mandatory use of African languages as languages of teaching and learning became aligned in the public imagination with the low quality of education, which was designed to prepare black1 children for a life of servitude to their white masters. The negative attitudes towards African language learning materials still remain an ideological barrier to their use in education today, even as the Department of Basic Education embarks on MTbBE. Furthermore, the high status of English is well established within a milieu of anglonormativity: the expectation that everyone will be proficient in English and is deficient if they are not (McKinney 2017).
In their article entitled ‘Translanguaging and Literacies’ García and Kleifgen (2020) describe a pernicious injustice against children, which occurs as a result of the exclusionary force of anglonormativity:
Racialised bilingual learners rarely have the opportunity to gain confianza in the school system and have confidence in themselves as literate beings. (p. 564)
McKinney (2022) describes this lack of confidence in the literate subject position in her study on note-making in a Grade 4 science class in Cape Town. McKinney describes the children’s rote note-taking as ‘safe writing’ resulting in the foreclosure of opportunities for the children to learn science deeply or for ‘making sense of text’ (McKinney 2022:14). As their familiar linguistic resources were excluded from their sense-making in text, the teacher resorted to a focus on securing the fixed wordings (Lemke 1990) of the science topic to be rote-learned in preparation for the assessment.
Arguably the most egregious manifestation of monolingual English literacy norms in schooling is in testing practices. Only answers which conform to assessors’ notions of standard English are accepted on standardised as well as local school-designed tests even if the non-English answers include correct content. Prinsloo and Krause (2018) describe the preparation for and administering of these tests as ‘a rather painful parody of effective engagement’ (p. 165). The results of these tests serve to sediment the bimodal schooling results in South Africa where, in the main, English and Afrikaans speaking children (predominantly White) succeed and African language speaking children (Black) do not (Christie 2020). McKinney and Set (2023) have shown how the schism between heteroglossic classroom practices and monoglossic assessment is prevalent in Namibia also.
Leaving behind monolingual English literacy practices, I now move to a discussion of how biliteracies have been theorised, including as part of decolonial practice in education.
Biliteracies in theory and (decolonial) practice
Traditional biliteracy development, which assumes the goal of literacy to be reading and writing in two separate named languages only, is deemed particularly inappropriate for emergent bilingual children (García 2009) who are speakers of non-dominant languages. Going beyond traditional biliteracy models, this study shows children engaging in activities employing separate named languages as well as fluid ubuntu translanguaging (Makalela 2015) or meshed registers (Gibbons 2006) for simultaneous biliteracy development (Benson 2022; Guzula 2018). For bi/multilingual learners, especially emergent bilinguals, confidence in being literate is fostered by having regular opportunities to express oneself in writing using familiar linguistic and other semiotic resources while also developing new resources for literacy. Biliteracy was originally conceptualised broadly as ‘any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in or around writing’ (Hornberger 1990:213). Hornberger later developed the notion of the continua of biliteracy. The theory of continua recognises the ‘highly complex and fluid systems’ in use during any biliteracy activity (Hornberger & Link 2012:264), building on the notions of flexibility, fluidity and dynamism already well established in bilingual language scholarship (e.g. García 2009). In line with the continua of biliteracy, García and Kleifgen (2020:1) argue that ‘bi/multiliteracies cannot be fully understood as simply the use of separate conventionally named languages or separate modes’. Features of named languages can co-exist in parallel in multilingual texts (Sebba 2013); or features of named languages can be combined in a meshed register (Gibbons 2006). Sebba proposes a framework for multilingual text analysis in which he shows how multilingual texts can be presented in relation to the following categories: linguistic properties, language-spatial relationships and language-content relationships (Sebba 2013). These relationships have consequences for meaning, which form part of multilingual text authors’ design decisions.
Scholars have argued that a critical Southern perspective on multilingualism(s) is key to the decolonial project (Ndhlovu & Makalela 2021; Stroud & Kerfoot 2021). Part of this perspective includes bringing Southern epistemologies to the fore. Ndhlovu and Makalela (2021) assert that African ‘ways of knowing’, or epistemologies, should be centred when designing learning. Taking into account the ways of knowing that children bring to the classroom will allow them to be positioned as embodying a ‘knower’ subjectivity (Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele 2023). Children gain confidence if their prior knowledge, including linguistic knowledge, is valued. Positioning children as knowers in a Southern context requires embracing a multilingual episteme (Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele 2023) where all linguistic resources are valued in classrooms. A central area in which the knower subjectivity is expressed is in reading and writing for learning. Children in school need to experience becoming ‘literate beings’ (García & Kleifgen 2020:564). Emergent literate beings are beginning to control reading and writing in a variety of styles for a variety of purposes. For racialised bilinguals, such as the children in the present South African case, this literate subjectivity will be catalysed by reading and writing experiences, which draw on their full and emerging semiotic repertoires (Lin 2015). They therefore need to be given opportunities to develop a range of biliteracies. The bua-lit language and literacy collective in South Africa have described these opportunities as ‘rich literacies’ (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2018) and have distinguished these from the impoverished literacy practices, such as safe writing, offered by the dominant monolingual, ‘back-to-basics’, skills-dominated literacy paradigms being used to try to address South Africa’s poor literacy results on international tests.
A review of biliteracy practices in Southern schools
Despite the dominance and official validation of monolingual English literacy practices, research has also traced biliteracy practices. In the following literature review, focused on studies from the Global South, I trace biliteracies in learning materials and biliteracy practices in classrooms. These activities involve the potential for children to both read and write in two or more languages.
Bilingual learning materials vary in terms of genre. Milligan, Clegg and Tikly (2016) and William and Ndabakurane (2017) reported on the use of language-supportive textbooks in Rwanda and Tanzania, respectively. Extracts from Biology and Mathematics textbooks written in English show occasional bilingual Kinyarwanda/English and Swahili/English glossaries among other language-supportive strategies. While bilingual pedagogies were implicit in the materials (e.g., learners were instructed to have discussions in Kinyarwanda), the use of African language text was limited to the glossaries. Abdulatief and Guzula (2024) studied one science teacher in the Western Cape who had been enrolled in a professional development programme, which included in-class mentoring. She employed multilingual science glossaries and Google Translate to enable her learners to create bilingual content posters for learning and wall display and presented her board notes bilingually. Charamba (2023) studied the practices of a primary science teacher in the Free State who created a cumulative English–isiZulu bilingual chart for the science topic under study. The teacher and his Grade 5 learners contributed to it throughout the school term and displayed it in the classroom. Makalela (2015), in his study of a Grade 6 bilingual Sepedi/English literacy intervention in Limpopo, observed that both Sepedi and English appeared in the print environment inside the classroom. Both ‘parallel’ and ‘dynamic’ bilingualism was present in children’s texts, which were displayed in multilingual literacy corners, giving legitimacy to the children’s biliteracies.
Biliteracies can be developed by teachers through the writing activities, which they set for their learners and through how learners recruit bilingual resources spontaneously in their writing. High school learners in Cape Town were shown to engage successfully in learning science through writing translations of isiXhosa science definitions into first standard English and then a familiar informal register of isiXhosa (Tyler 2023). In Kenya, Kiramba (2017) analysed writing by Grade 4 children for English and Kiswahili composition tasks. She found that while the task required children to write strictly in one language only, translanguaging in the compositions was common and allowed the children to display knowledge in English, Kiswahili and Kimeru and to renegotiate identities. Tyler and McKinney (2024) presented data from a mathematics classroom where a teacher set an activity for children to write down their thinking during a calculation. The children drew freely on both English and isiXhosa and translanguaging to represent their thinking. Charamba and Zano (2019) reported on a bilingual English-Sesotho classroom in the Free State province of South Africa. Science learners discussed and wrote their answers in their home language and then translated their answers into English (the school’s medium of instruction). The groups would then read their responses (in English) to the rest of the class. These learners were also given multilingual learning materials in Sesotho and English.
The culmination of biliteracy pedagogy is bilingual assessments. Although this component of a fully integrated bilingual education model is often the most resisted (De Backer, Van Avermaet & Slembrouck 2017), there are examples of innovative practice to be found. Charamba (2021) studied the difference in performance in Grade 5 Zimbabwean children when they wrote a monolingual English test versus a bilingual English/Shona test. The children performed significantly better on the bilingual test and also demonstrated their linguistic flexibility by answering the bilingual test in either English or Shona or a translanguaged register. Antia (2021) argues for the inclusion of African languages in multilingual examinations in South Africa for epistemic justice, by showing how South African learner research participants engaged in bilingual English/Afrikaans co-languaging when completing a school-leaving examination.
While the studies reviewed above have pointed to the efficacy of including biliteracy practices in learning for emergent bilingual children, a gap emerges in the literature where little is known about the range of these practices and the texts, which are produced in classwork and assessment. The need to fill this gap is particularly urgent in primary science, which is a key focus subject for MTbBE in South Africa. The present case study addresses this gap.
Research methods and design
In Southern contexts, the stranglehold of the coloniality of language (Veronelli 2015) and its administrative outworkings in schooling systems threaten to foreclose a decolonial ‘otherwise’ (Mignolo & Walsh 2018). Therefore, many researchers turn to intervention studies to explore possibilities for epistemic justice. It is this intervention research that has been used to provide the scholarly underpinning of MTbBE. The data in the present intervention study originate from the bilingual learning materials project housed at the University of the Western Cape (2022–2026). The project is an ethnographically-informed participatory intervention study, which centres around the trialling of bilingual learning materials in two Cape Town primary schools. One of the schools, Ilitha Park Primary,2 is a school catering to isiXhosa-dominant children in Khayelitsha, a peri-urban township. In 2023, the Grade 4 learners at the school numbered 168, divided into four classes of 42 children. As outlined above, in common with most African language speaking South African children, they have experienced an abrupt rupture from ‘home language’ (standard isiXhosa) instruction in the first 3 years at the school to an official English language of instruction policy in Grade 4. All the teachers at the school are bilingual in English and isiXhosa. The bua-lit language and literacy collective produced a booklet entitled ‘iSayensi Yethu’ (Our Science, Figure 1) designed to foster biliteracy within one curriculum topic. All Grade 4 learners at the school received a copy of the booklet during their study of the first topic in the Natural Science and Technology curriculum, ‘Living and non-living things’ and all were taught by the same teacher. The intervention was co-developed by myself, co-researcher Gilbert Dolo (who was also a co-author of iSayensi Yethu) and the Grade 4 science teacher Ms Azania. As part of the team that produced iSayensi Yethu and as a member of bua-lit committed to bilingual education, I had an interest in learning how children responded to the materials. While I did not teach any of the lessons or encourage the children to complete written tasks in any specific way, my interests have shaped the research questions and data analysis, as is the case in all ethnographically-informed interventions. For example, the texts selected for the present article were chosen based on how well they exemplified biliteracies as this is my interest here.
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FIGURE 1: The cover of the iSayensi Yethu bilingual materials. |
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The research was participatory in the sense that researchers and teachers worked together to plan the intervention, and the results of the data analysis by the researchers were checked by the science teacher. It was ethnographically informed (Copland & Creese 2015) in that the fieldworkers had been building relationships in the school for years and the data set was broadly conceived and shaped iteratively as the intervention progressed. The intervention and concomitant data collection centred on one of the Grade 4 classes (4G), but participants from across the school community were drawn into the research. Having learned from previous bi/multilingual intervention projects, which have taken place in Western Cape schools (see Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele 2023), the research team elicited support from all stakeholders, which was crucial to the success of the project. The full staff body participated in a language in learning workshop led by the bua-lit language and literacy collective. A similar workshop was held for Grade 4 parents during which the project was described, and their consent for their children’s participation in the research was obtained. Two focus groups were held with the three science teachers at the school, and a report-back session was held for Grade 4 parents to share initial findings of the research. The curriculum adviser from the Western Cape Education Department attended the staff workshop and followed the progress of the project closely. The project also featured in a documentary about multilingual education, Free to Learn: Soze ungayibambi (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2024).
All four Grade 4 classes were taught by Ms Azania and received the bilingual materials for the topic. Only one class, however, wrote the final assessment in a bilingual form, with all questions posed in isiXhosa and repeated in English with the opportunity to answer in either language. The other three classes wrote the English-only test, which was created prior to the intervention. The classes are all mixed ability and not streamed. The main data collection occurred in Grade 4G with the 42 learners and their teacher, Ms Azania. This was the class that received the bilingual final assessment test. Gilbert Dolo, myself and a research assistant, Sibusisiwe Mkulisi, observed and co-taught lessons, took photographs and fieldnotes, made video and audio recordings of the lessons and conducted focus groups with the learners and teachers. In total, five lessons were observed between February and March 2023, seven focus groups were held, and 168 photographs were collected. The focus of this article is on the photographs of texts, which were present and produced in the Grade 4G classroom during the unit on Living and Non-Livings Things. Therefore, the focused data set comprises the iSayensi Yethu booklet; all photographs of environmental text in the classroom; all photographs of children’s exercise books; a full set of fieldnotes; all test answer papers as well as the mark book for all children in Grade 4 (n = 168).
The research questions (RQ) that guided the study of classroom texts were:
- What biliteracies were present in the learning materials used in the classroom?
- What biliteracies were practised by the teacher and learners?
- How did biliteracies impact learner achievement on the final assessment?
A total of 168 photographs collected from the classroom included 95 examples of different kinds of multilingual texts produced by the teacher and students, as well as extracts from iSayensi Yethu. The nine texts selected for this article were chosen as they each represent different forms of biliteracies, which aided the answering of RQ 1 and 2. Analysis of the texts involved applying the categories in Sebba’s (2013) framework for multilingual text analysis and using the sensitising concept of biliteracies (García & Kleifgen 2020). For each text, notes were made about how isiXhosa and English were presented in these categories and what the affordances of these authorial choices were. RQ3 was addressed by examining the individual scores on the final assessment for Term One in science in the bilingual test group and the English-only test group. Finally, I performed peer debriefing with my co-researcher, Gilbert Dolo, to verify my interpretations of the data.
Ethical considerations
Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the Human and Social Sciences Research Ethics Council of the University of the Western Cape (No. HS22/6/32). Adult participants and children gave written assent and the parents gave written consent on behalf of their minor children. All participants’ identities, as well as that of the school, were kept confidential through assigning pseudonyms.
Results
The following findings are organised into three sections: biliteracies in learning materials, biliteracy practices of the teacher, and biliteracy practices of the learners.
Biliteracies in learning materials
There were monolingual English science textbooks in a cupboard in Ms Azania’s classroom when we arrived for our fieldwork in January 2023. Ms Azania reported, however, that she did not hand these out to the children because they did not know enough English yet to be able to use them. In contrast, we observed the children reading iSayensi Yethu independently on a number of occasions during the intervention. In this section I will describe the different kinds of bilingual text, which fostered biliteracies in the children, beginning with the bilingual textbook (Figure 1). Sebba (2013:113) argues that in analysing bi/multilingual texts, the visual and spatial relationships as well as the linguistic properties of the text need to be considered. Drawing on Sebba’s framework, I pay attention to language-spatial relationships, language-content relationships and linguistic mixing types of the textbook to show the diversity of biliteracies the children were exposed to in reading the textbook.
The introduction to the textbook is provided first in isiXhosa and then in English. The Grade 4 science teacher is addressed as follows in the English version:
The iSayensi Yethu learning materials provide one way of achieving multilingual education. You will see that both isiXhosa and English are used equally in these materials. A familiar variety of language is used alongside the language which is still being learned: English. Sometimes these languages are used together in one sentence the way our children are used to doing. Sometimes the languages appear in separate texts. (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2022:vi)
Here the authors of iSayensi Yethu refer to the linguistic mixing types (Sebba 2013) of the textbook, including both monolingual units (‘the languages appear in separate texts’) and mixed units (‘languages are used together in one sentence’). An example of a mixed unit, otherwise known as a translingual text, is:
abantu, izinambuzane, izilwanyana nezityalo are living things (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2022:2)
The purpose of the mixed units was to present the content in a more familiar, spoken-like way (Guzula & Tyler 2025). Presenting mixed units in the same textbook as monolingual units was intended to provoke discussion in classrooms about different kinds of language for learning (i.e., critical multilingual awareness) as well as to provide a model of how children may write. In terms of the language-content relationships, the textbook includes equivalent, disjoint and overlapping texts (Sebba 2013). An example of an equivalent text is a glossary of scientific terms presented in both languages. Here the same content is presented twice, for example, ‘iimpawu = characteristics’ (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2022:2). An example of disjoint texts is in the information text on cows where different content is presented in English and isiXhosa:
A cow is an example of a living thing. Ziyaphefumla kwaye ziyazala. (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2022:6)
An example of overlapping texts is found in the explanation of once-living things where only some of the content from English is repeated in isiXhosa:
These are things which were ‘once-living’ [ezazikhe zaphila]. (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2022:4)
In terms of language-spatial relationships, most prominent was the code preference system, which alternated. In headings, English was given preference, appearing above isiXhosa, but in the ‘did you know?’ boxes isiXhosa appeared above English. The authors designed this intentionally so that neither language dominated the textbook (Guzula & Tyler 2025).
In addition to the bilingual textbook, Ms Azania printed posters with key words from the topic in both languages and fixed these to the classroom walls (Figure 2). These posters produced a print-rich environment (Makalela 2015) in both languages. The posters consist of coloured card printed with text in isiXhosa and English. Ms Azania also affixed bilingual, laminated science posters to the walls produced by a local publisher and donated by the project. Using these durable, high-quality resources to present biliteracy on classroom walls increases the status of African languages and biliteracy for learning. This is in contrast to another school environment in Cape Town where African language text was displayed using non-durable, inexpensive resources such as cardboard and hand-written text and printing was reserved for English text (Tyler 2023:46).
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FIGURE 2: Bilingual wall displays created by Ms. Azania. |
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Biliteracy practices of the teacher
We observed high levels of participation in all classroom activities, and Ms Azania reported that participation had increased with the advent of the bilingual materials in comparison with the same period the previous year. Bilingual talk was common and was engaged in by the teacher and the children, who took longer turns and chose their language of response freely. Different kinds of pedagogical translanguaging (Gorter & Cenoz 2017), such as varying input and output languages and guiding children to use specific languages for specific activities were part of the lessons. It is beyond the scope of this article to analyse these oral practices, but certainly they reinforced the biliteracies.
Apart from the bilingual materials themselves, which guided the children to use both isiXhosa and English (and in some cases any other language) in writing, there were many examples of biliteracies in Ms Azania’s pedagogy. Ms Azania wrote bilingually on the board using equivalent texts (Sebba 2013). In the example in Figure 3, she contextualises the contributions made by the children in both the language in which they spoke (isiXhosa) and in English. In the boardwork, isiXhosa is privileged, appearing on the left, as this is the language in which the children offered the examples. In the colourful posters (Figure 2), English is privileged, appearing at the top. In this way she legitimises the children’s voices as well as teaches them the orthography of the less familiar equivalent English words.
Biliteracy practices of the children
With the support of the bilingual materials, Ms Azania guided the children to write in both languages in their workbooks (Figure 4 and Figure 5). Figure 4 shows a child labelling an activity in which he is identifying pictures of living and non-living things. In his book, he has written a list of seven life processes in both English and isiXhosa. In this case, he has followed the instructions to write each piece of information in both languages: an example of equivalent bilingual texts (Sebba 2013). The writing in Figure 5, however, shows a different pedagogical instruction given in the booklet where learners can respond by writing examples of living and non-living things in any language they choose. This child knows the names of things around her in English (fly, worm) and isiXhosa (ibhabatane, intethe) and uses these names to display her developing scientific knowledge. It is significant that the child chooses his most familiar language, isiXhosa, to display his emergent, hesitant ideas. Indeed, the child may have found a dead butterfly and grasshopper in the playground and grappled with the conceptual challenge of whether these were living or non-living things, consequently placing them in the ‘not sure/andiqinisekanga’ column.
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FIGURE 4: A child working with iSayensi Yethu and a workbook. |
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FIGURE 5: A child’s writing in two languages in the same activity. |
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During the course of the study of living and non-living things, I tentatively broached the possibility of bilingual written assessments with Ms Azania. According to general practice and the language policy of the school, these were usually written monolingually in English. We wondered together whether the head of the school science department, the principal and the education department official would allow the children to read and write a bilingual assessment. Aided by the careful introduction of the project, our requests to the powers-that-be landed positively, and we began working on the method of preparing bilingual assessments. The extract found in Figure 6 is taken from the summative test, which the children wrote at the end of the first half-year of Grade 4.
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FIGURE 6: Use of translanguaging literacies in successful bilingual test writing. |
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Ms Azania designed the bilingual test to pose each question first in the children’s most familiar language, isiXhosa, and then in English. However, the languages were not strictly separated, and flexibility was included. For example, the formal isiXhosa word for ‘fridge’ is ‘isikhenkcezisi’ but this word would be unfamiliar to the children in their daily lives. They would be more familiar with the word ‘fridge,’ and so Ms Azania accommodates this and includes it in brackets. In this way she also provides a vocabulary learning opportunity in isiXhosa. Biliteracy of this nature underscores the importance of language and content subject teachers working together in bilingual schools to consolidate new information across subjects. When writing the bilingual tests, learners had the option of answering each question in whichever language they chose. In some cases, learners chose one language and answered the whole test in that language; in other cases, learners answered some questions in English, some in isiXhosa and some in mixed units (see Figure 6).
Question 4.1 in Figure 6 requires the children to engage in a core scientific activity: prediction (Lemke 1990). By giving the children freedom to respond using their full linguistic repertoire, the teacher enables the children to focus this scientific activity rather than diluting their efforts by requiring them also to produce a complete English answer. For many children at this age and level of prior exposure to English, it would be impossible to produce a comprehensive monolingual English answer. Drawing on their full linguistic repertoire enables them to develop the cognitive and written genre skills necessary to make scientific predictions.
The child in Figure 6 has responded to the question using both English and isiXhosa resources. The second line of her answer justifying her choice of Bongi’s seeds, ‘kuba isefestileni and kukho ilanga elinobushushu’ [because they are on the windowsill and there is warm sun there], includes the English feature ‘and’ which is sedimented into the child’s linguistic repertoire and is unmarked, aligning with the concept of ubuntu translanguaging (Makalela 2015). The teacher awarded full marks for the answer, whereas in the previous year she would be obliged to award zero as the answer was not given in standard English.
A total of 42 children who wrote the bilingual test responded using both English and isiXhosa resources, with isiXhosa being used more than English. This is to be expected as only a summer holiday separated the children from a prior monolingual isiXhosa language of instruction. In the bilingual test group (class 4G), 36 of the 42 children (86%) achieved a passing grade, and in the English-only group, only 64 out of 126 children (51%) achieved a passing grade. While this study is qualitative in design, does not utilise an experimental control group and considers a classroom to be an open, dynamic system, this descriptive 35-percentage-point difference in pass rates suggests a possible relationship between the bilingual test and the learner performance that warrants serious attention.
Discussion
As MTbBE is rolled out throughout primary schooling and across learning areas in South Africa, debates will continue about the kinds of biliteracies, which are sanctioned (or not) in materials, teaching and learning. Case studies showing examples of successful grassroots biliteracy practices, such as this one, can inform these debates. The limitations of this case study are that the data are drawn from a small number of lessons on one topic in one school with a largely homogenous learner body. Nevertheless, the data presented in this article has demonstrated that there is a decolonial alternative (Mignolo & Walsh 2018) to the epistemic exclusion from science and other academic areas of study, which a monolingual approach to literacy can cause. For emergent bilinguals, this includes being exposed to text in different varieties of the languages over which they have control and those which they are still learning. Furthermore, part of a decolonial approach to schooling in the South involves children developing a literate subjectivity (García & Kleifgen 2020; Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele 2023) and bringing the ways of knowing inherent in their most familiar languages to their learning of subjects such as science. The inclusion of familiar, indigenous languages catalyses the inclusion of indigenous, Southern knowledge, which is sorely needed in science. As a virtuous cycle (Mohanty 2019) of non-dominant languages used as academic tools gathers momentum, these languages will contribute to a decolonial science of the future.
The biliteracies reported on in this article included:
- Reading bilingual texts with different linguistic properties and language-content relationships.
- Writing in more than one language during one activity.
- Writing in a meshed register or mixed units.
- Writing in the child’s chosen language in response to a bilingual assessment.
The presence of the formally printed, accessibly written and aesthetically pleasing bilingual learning materials within the school and the home raised the status of the non-dominant language without excluding the acquisition of the sought-after language of wider communication (English) among teachers, children and parents. The development of bilingual wall displays inside the classroom served to bolster the ideological work of the bilingual learning materials. Expanding the use of translanguaging and other bilingual pedagogies into literacy in post-colonial contexts demands a flexible approach to the use of named languages (García & Kleifgen 2020). The data showed that both separate and fluid bilingual practices contribute to an expanded repertoire (Lin 2015) of biliteracies as well as a productive method of tackling the text frontier (Tyler & McKinney 2024). Existing semiotic resources are validated as appropriate for academic literacies – both reading and writing – while new ones are added. In addition to an expanded repertoire, the group of children in the study who wrote a bilingual test performed much better than those who wrote the monolingual English test. The increased academic performance, in addition to the experience of successful learning in class supported the children’s confidence in themselves as literate beings (García & Kleifgen 2020).
A challenge in the systemic strengthening of biliteracies in the schooling of emergent bilinguals is creating a balance between making space for fluid translanguaging and providing enough opportunity to practice the unfamiliar academic register. The test that was reported on in this study allowed a freedom of choice by the children in the language of response for the whole test. This was appropriate given their early stage of development of written English. However, requiring children to use an increasing amount of the unfamiliar language in writing is an appropriate language stretching strategy (Gibbons 2006:219) within the expanded repertoire goal of biliteracies. The iSayensi Yethu materials employed this strategy on occasion when children were instructed to write in English (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2022:5). Pedagogies that give children the best chance at building their existing literacies in their familiar language as well as developing literacies in the less familiar language are essential. Therefore, further research into biliteracies that are graduated over a child’s school career is recommended in order to guide MTbBE roll-out. This growing body of research will be instrumental in informing the crucial in-service and pre-service teacher education, which MTbBE requires. Both bilingual teaching methodologies and critical multilingual awareness need to be included in teacher education programmes. Previous research has shown that challenging ideologies is as important as teaching teachers new pedagogies (Abdulatief & Guzula 2024; Tyler & McKinney 2024).
Conclusion
As African countries begin to review their language in education policies within the decolonial moment, it will be important to build in graduation and flexibility into bi/multilingual policies and pedagogies. Equally important is the planning and provision of rich literacies (bua-lit language and literacy collective 2018) to counteract the effects of the coloniality of literacy under which teachers and children have laboured for too long. The bilingual education policy envisaged in the present intervention study is one which is designed to suit the particular needs of racialised bilingual children, including the need for simultaneous biliteracy development as well as exciting and accessible texts. A focus on biliteracies and rich literacies is an important orientation when planning for teaching and learning which positions children as literate beings.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Quentin Williams for comments on an earlier draft of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers. In addition, she is indebted to her two research assistants, Sibusisiwe Mkulisi and Chante Petersen, and co-researchers Gilbert Dolo and Nosimo Ndzotyana. Finally, the author would like to thank the National Research Foundation for providing funding for this project.
Competing interests
The author reported that she received funding from National Research Foundation, which may be affected by the research reported in the enclosed publication. The author has disclosed those interests fully and has implemented an approved plan for managing any potential conflicts arising from their involvement. The terms of these funding arrangements have been reviewed and approved by the affiliated university in accordance with its policy on objectivity in research.
CRediT authorship contribution
Robyn Tyler: Conceptualisation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. The author confirms that this work is entirely their own, has reviewed the article, approved the final version for submission and publication, and takes full responsibility for the integrity of its findings.
Funding information
Funding for this research was provided by the National Research Foundation (CSUR230503101533).
Data availability
Figure 1 to Figure 6 have associated raw data. The data can be requested from the corresponding author, Robyn Tyler.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are the product of professional research. They do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency, or that of the publisher. The author is responsible for this article’s results, findings, and content.
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Footnotes
1. I recognise race as a social construct with profound materials effects. Apartheid categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’ are used in this article as they describe the social positioning of participants and are used in South Africa as levers for redress for the injustices of the past.
2. The focus school and all participants (apart from the researchers) have been given pseudonyms.
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