This article reports on the outcome of utilising a multilingual strategy that promotes translanguaging to support primary grade learners and the enablers and constraints of the implementation of such strategies. Purposive sampling was used to select two schools. Grade 5 and 6 learners (N = 162) and their teachers (N = 3) participated in the study.…

Students with a mother tongue other than English often struggle with the demands of an academic programme at tertiary institutions where the medium of instruction is English. If their English language proficiency is inadequate, it may hamper their academic progress. Students feel that their command of English is unsatisfactory, and this causes…

Competence in the use of prepositions is versatile because they mark special relationships between persons, objects, and locations. However, using prepositions of time is challenging for many. The research investigated embodied pedagogical game approach in learning selected prepositions of time by Grade 7 English First Additional Language learners…

The low enrolment, lack of interest, exacerbated by the general poor performance in physical science in South Africa paints a gloomy picture about the status of physical science in the country. Despite the fact that there might be other factors at play, one factor which cannot be ignored is the discourse about the use of language in the science…

The nature of discourse within classrooms strongly predicts students' ability to think about, around, and with text and content (i.e. comprehension and critical-analytic thinking). However, little is known about the nature of classroom discourse in remote, rural South African schools, a context in which students face well-documented language…

Increasing international mobility has raised awareness on the fluidity and porous nature of boundaries not only between nation states, but also between named languages. Despite the complexities of overlaps across a wider spectrum of languages and classrooms worldwide, orthodox education programmes still reflect monolingual and epistemic biases,…

The purpose of this paper is to describe and reflect on the position of what are called second additional languages in the language teaching landscape of South African schools. This landscape is crowded, with different South African languages vying for attention. Amidst efforts to increase the number of learners who offer an African language as…

Background: Several isiXhosa home language (HL) learners are excluded from meaningful mathematics learning because they are taught in English. Not only do teachers lack epistemological and pedagogical confidence in using multiple languages when teaching mathematics, but there are no mathematical registers for African languages that allow for…

There are many assumptions about the ways in which textbooks and other learning and teaching support materials (LTSM) can contribute to improved learning outcomes in many international contexts. These can focus on ways that they can implement the school curriculum, often in lieu of good pedagogical practice. Drawing on case studies from Rwanda and…

This paper proposes a transdisciplinary framework to allow for a multifocal exploration of classroom talk practices. It draws on data from a broader study of talk in South African Grade 4 mathematics classrooms where the language of teaching and learning (English) was the home language for neither the teachers nor their students. Lesson transcript…

Background: In the education sector, technologies are (or can be) repurposed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) to facilitate teaching and learning. However, this shift may impact on learners' access to reading materials and reading motivation. Objectives: The aim of the study was to determine whether Grade 8 English First Additional…

This article presents a systematic review of research on language and multilingualism in mathematics education published in the South African journal Pythagoras from 1994 to 2021. This time frame was chosen as the year 1994 marked the acknowledgement of 11 official languages in the new democratic South Africa (including 9 indigenous languages),…

Multi-grade teaching is a widely accepted phenomenon in both developing and developed countries. In this article I report on a phenomenological inquiry into written feedback practices of teachers in multi-grade classrooms and how they described and interpreted their feedback practices pertaining to learners' writing activities in English First…

In the study reported on here we investigated the use of post-method practice to optimise pre-service teachers' teaching practice and English First Additional Language (EFAL) proficiency. This study was premised on the theoretical framework of Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy which promotes diverse perspectives in language learning and teaching…

Background: In South Africa, developing criticality among learners is essential for their careers in school and outside school. However, knowledge and understanding of critical literacy within the schooling context is unclear, with only patchy guidance available for teachers. Objectives: An intervention project was set up to discover how community…