Academic Support and Academic Progress: English-Second-Language Speakers in a Faculty of Commerce at a University in South Africa

Abstract

Tertiary education in South Africa has developed along the separate and unequal lines of primary and secondary education largely as a consequence of the apartheid policy of the South African government. Despite this policy, embodied in tertiary education by the Extension of University Education Act of 1959 and then by the quota system (Universities Amendment Act Number 83 of 1983), the traditionally White English-speaking universities have admitted an increasing number of nontraditional or Black' students into their student bodies. The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) is one of the traditionally White open universities. Table I illustrates this university's changing demography from 1950 to 1988. Universities in South Africa have a relatively high student dropout rate. A Human Sciences Research Council (1985) report indicates that only 44% of a representative sample of South African university students who registered in 1980 in science, commerce, and the arts graduated. Twenty-seven percent of the sample graduated in three years, and 17% graduated in four years. However, the dropout rate for Black students at White universities is disproportionately high when compared with the dropout rate of White students at the same institutions. For example, for the 1985 intake of the Faculty of Arts at Wits, the Black student dropout rate was 48% compared to 34% for Whites. In the faculties of Commerce and Science these figures were 61 % to 38% and 55% to 37%, respectively. In 1979 the University of the Witwatersrand became aware of the disproportionately high dropout rate of its Black students, which it attributed largely to the inferior education Blacks received in schools run by the Department of Education and Training (DET). The disproportionate