Abstract
This paper assesses the effectiveness of essay tutorials offered to first-year economics students at the UCT (University of Cape Town) in their first language (L1). All students in the study are first-language speakers of an African language. Firstly, using propensity score matching, we econometrically assess the impact of these tutorials on students’ essay marks. Although our sample size is small [n=220], our findings provide preliminary evidence of a positive impact of the intervention on a student’s final essay mark. The results show that the average gain for students who attended an essay tutorial in their L1 was 4.85%, with this result being statistically significant at the 10% significance level. Secondly, students’ perceptions of the tutorials’ effectiveness, as documented by online evaluations and focus groups, are examined. These findings suggest that allowing for unmediated L1 use in tertiary education classrooms can foster inclusivity and promote participation in otherwise largely monolingual spaces.
Highlights
South Africa’s colonial history resulted in the marginalisation of indigenous South African languages1 and the disempowerment of their speakers (Alexander, 1999; Kamwangamalu, 2000)
We explore the outcomes of an first-language intervention when language use is unmediated – rather than attempting to define a dominant multilingual practice through which benefits accrue – the concept of translanguaging is well suited as a theoretical framework for this study since it promotes multilingual education practice not as a prescribed choice between English and an African language (Heugh, 2002: 193), but as both
We argue that the relevance in Paxton’s (2009) findings on the positive response to a multilingual glossary for Economics is not in the existence of the glossary per se, but rather how it points to the importance of students with an African language as an L1 being empowered to use a range of languages and discourses to negotiate their understanding of concepts, thereby improving their epistemological access
Summary
South Africa’s colonial history resulted in the marginalisation of indigenous South African languages and the disempowerment of their speakers (Alexander, 1999; Kamwangamalu, 2000). For many speakers of African languages at UCT (University of Cape Town), and other historically white institutions, the ramifications of this past persist. The university environment can be alienating and cause students to feel let down by the very education system that ought to be navigating them out of the country’s persistent inequality. As noted by Keswell and Poswell (2004), there is robust convexity in the returns to education in South.
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