Abstract
The management of language diversity and the mastery of language required by educational institutions affect those institutions from early education through to higher education. This paper will deal with three dimensions of how language is managed and developed in education. The first is the design of interventions for educational environments at policy level, as well as for instruction and for language development. The second dimension concerns defining the kind of competence needed to handle the language demands of an academic institution. The interventions can be productive if reference is made throughout to the conditions or design principles that language policies and language courses must meet. The third dimension concerns meeting an important requirement: the alignment of the interventions of language policy, language assessment and language development (and the language instruction that supports the latter). The paper will use a widely used definition of academic literacy to illustrate how this supports the design of language assessments and language courses. It is an additional critical condition for effective intervention design that assessments and language instruction (and development) work together in harmony. Misalignment among them is likely to affect the original intention of the designs negatively. Similarly, if those interventions are not supported by institutional policies, the plan will have little effect. The principle of alignment is an important, but not the only design condition. The paper will therefore conclude with an overview of a comprehensive framework of design principles for language artefacts that may serve to enhance their responsible design.
Highlights
In South Africa, the problem is further compounded by the mismatch between language assessment and language instruction at school, as well as the disharmony between the curriculum (Department of Basic Education 2011) and the school-leaving, exit examinations for language (Du Plessis, Steyn and Weideman 2016)
Once we have considered how and whether these three kinds of applied linguistic artefacts – language policy, language course and language assessment – work together in harmony, we shall be able to check, with reference to real-life examples, the hidden assumptions behind their mismatch in educational settings
In the third stage of language intervention design, we find the further development of the initial formulation of an imaginative solution to the problem
Summary
The problem of our time that has engaged many of us professionally for more than a decade now is the doubt that surrounds the competent use of language for academic purposes in an era of massification in higher education (Read 2015, 2016) This massive broadening of access to university education – in South Africa, but globally – constitutes the first unexamined assumption, as The Economist (2018) pointed out recently: Policymakers regard it as obvious that sending more young people to university will boost economic growth and social mobility. The analysis will present us with a framework of technically stamped design principles that attempts to be more comprehensive, and strives to provide the basis for the responsible design of the language interventions envisaged
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