Thabisile M. Buthelezi is an Associate Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the Language and Arts Cluster of the School of Education. She is a qualified teacher, nurse, and practitioner in Adult Basic Education and Training. She has vast experience in Teacher Education. Professor Thabisile Buthelezi currently teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and supervises postgraduate research at Honours, Masters and Doctoral levels. She is a recognised scholar and a rated researcher by the South African National Research Foundation. Her research interests are in the areas of African Languages, Language Education, Curriculum Studies, Socio-Education, Sexuality Education, HIV and AIDS in Curricula and Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
African languages pedagogy and cultural heritage preservation: from structural towards sociocultural approaches
This paper discusses the historical developments in African languages pedagogy and argues for the de-emphasis of structural methods to advance sociocultural approaches that will preserve cultural heritage through language and literature education. Originally, the speakers of African languages did not use abstract writing systems and it was the European missionaries who first recorded African languages with an aim of translating the Bible. As Africans learnt to read and write using their own languages, many utilised the opportunity to defeat the distance barrier and engage with one another through media and fiction. The result was the emergence of many African prolific writers who produced works of fiction in
African languages such as isiZulu, Kiswahili, Sotho, Yoruba, Pedi, isiXhosa, and so on. Most of these works reflected the best responses of African intelligentsia registering the effects of racialised capitalism, Christian proselytising, land theft, marginalisation of Africans by different governments, cultural loss and change, the absurdity of racial discrimination, and many other sociocultural and political issues.
However, influenced by the missionaries’ own linguistic approaches to learning and documenting African languages, the pedagogy of African languages has long been dominated by structural approaches such as grammartranslation method in language and formalism in literature. While such methods provide knowledge regarding the nature of language and the artistic form of fiction, they do not adequately engaged learners to uncover the wealth of ideas that are embedded in both African languages and the related fiction material. Therefore, this paper uses the sociocultural theory to show the necessity for African languages pedagogy to pursue the wealth of knowledge embedded in these languages by carefully considering a noticeable move away from formalistic approaches in language education.