Making sense of living in the tower of Babel

Against the background of the dream to be an internationally recognised university in Africa, distinguished for engaged scholarship, social responsiveness and an ethic of care, the council of this South African university adopted a new language policy in November 2018 to pursue, accommodate and provide a fair and functional multilingual language environment across all components of the university. The language policy emanates from the orientations of language as a right and language as a resource and strives to elevate the academic status, use and development of four co-existing languages: English as the lingua franca and dominant language of teaching and learning at all levels of education in South Africa, and three indigenous languages: Afrikaans, Setswana and Sesotho across the three campuses of the institution. In effect this comes down to English-Plus multilingualism on two of the university’s campuses and Afrikaans-Plus multilingualism at the campus where Afrikaans has traditionally been the dominant medium of instruction. Aligned with the principles that need to be considered with the development of multilingual pedagogies, as identified by Garcia and Flores (2012:242), this university endeavours to promote ‘social justice’ and ‘social practice’, the latter focusing on the successful implementation of these pedagogies to enhance teaching and learning. In its quest to attain these objectives, the university tasked the authors of this paper to design a short training course for lecturer-volunteers from 8 different faculties and across the three campuses as part of a pilot project. This paper will explain how design-based research was used to design and implement the short course. Furthermore, preliminary results on the data that will be gathered in the first six months of 2020 from the participants in the programme regarding their awareness of and attitudes towards applying multilingual pedagogies in their lectures for first year students will be discussed.