What does good practice mean when you work in a language unit at a tertiary institution? You are tasked to make language development possible so that students can meet the challenges presented to them. Specifically, the language demands placed on them at this level. So how do you approach it?
Continue readingI was heartened by a comment of one of the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript of my new book, A Theory of Applied Linguistics: Imagining and Disclosing the Meaning of Design (2024; Springer). It reads:
The strength of this work lies in its … rich and perceptive exemplifications and references spanning over fifty years.
So, we have examples to illustrate the point, and experience that acknowledges history.
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Tobie van Dyk and I continued this discussion on “Taaldinge”, the language programme on RSG, today.
Interested? Here is the podcast: https://omny.fm/shows/taaldinge/taaldinge-7-mei-2023
When Kees de Bot asked a few hundred applied linguists in 2015 whether they needed to have a theory of the field, he found that they thought they did not (De Bot, K. 2015. A history of applied linguistics: From 1980 to the present. London: Routledge). Are they missing something?
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Language assessment is a subfield of applied linguistics. That sounds like a reasonably incontestable statement. But can we simply assume that language assessment is a subfield of applied linguistics? In examining what has been written about that, we find that the claim is widespread — in fact since the earliest times, when applied linguistics was being established by the likes of Pit Corder and Alan Davies more than 50 years ago. Even to this day, language assessment scholars like McNamara make the claim quite confidently.
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We are very pleased with the review that Alan Urmston recently wrote in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes. You can read it here: Book review: Assessing Academic Literacy in a Multilingual Society: Transition and Transformation.
Assessing academic literacy in a multilingual society: Transition and transformation has just appeared in print from Multilingual Matters. I was privileged to co-edit this with the highly experienced John Read of the University of Auckland and my former head of department, Theo du Plessis.
As further contributors there were Tobie van Dyk (NWU), Alan Cliff (UCT), Colleen du Plessis (UFS), Avasha Rambiritch (UP), Kabelo Sebolai (SU), Laura Drennan (UFS), Jo-Mari Myburgh-Smit (UFS), Sanet Steyn (UCT), and a number of co-contributors to some chapters, including Linda Alston, Marien Graham (both UP), Piet Murre (Driestar Hogeschool) and Herculene Kotze (NWU). Most of them are steeped professionally in designing academic literacy interventions and assessments.
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The journalist and scholar H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) once observed that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” One would think that academic literacy, the ability to use academic language competently, would be the first and only language concern of the academic communities that make up the university. Such is the complexity of language problems, however, that not all solutions for them will have to do with making education and study more effective. Student communities may, for example, make language demands that are primarily politically inspired, and have little bearing on scholarship. When decision-makers yield to the politically expedient solution, that solution may be rationalized in many ways that might have the pretence of having to do with education, but that actually has no theoretical justification. There are at least two recent cases in South Africa where the language policies of universities were changed for reasons other than academic ones, with negative consequences that were foreseen, but ignored. Continue reading
Singapore Institute of Technology
There is something reassuring for university administrators and decision-makers in using the results of large-scale tests. They seldom worry about their contextual appropriateness, or about their cost, or even enquire about their quality. The large reach of the test in their minds ensures its reputation. As to costs? Well, the argument goes, if students wish to undertake studies at this university, they must be prepared to pay for that privilege. Continue reading
What influence does the institutional, social or political landscape have on the way in which we test a person’s ability to handle academic language? And how should one go about it? What impact should the tests have on language planning, instruction, and development?
Albert Weideman 