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The Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) is an independent research and development unit attached to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. Established in 1992, PRAESA emerged from the struggle against apartheid education.
Circumstances since 1995 have focused the project's work on language policy in education. Today, the rationale for the project's research and development activities continues to be the democratisation of South African society, particularly in the key area of language-in-education policy implementation. Focal areas of work include language planning and policy formulation at national and provincial government levels, in-service teacher education, developmental research into multilingual classrooms, early literacy, dual-medium primary schooling, language surveys, as well as generating publications and learning support materials.
Our main funders in this endeavour over the years have been the Independent Development Trust, the Royal Netherlands Embassy (Pretoria), the Flemish Government and the University of Antwerp (Belgium), the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Pan South African Language Board.
Most South Africans want (and need) to be proficient in English because of the immediate and obvious economic and social benefits of English. However most South Africans are unable to acquire a sufficient degree of proficiency in English under the present educational and social conditions so as to empower themselves. Many South Africans believe erroneously that to acquire this proficiency, their children should be taught through the medium of English from as early a stage as possible. Many speakers of (South) African languages undervalue their own first or home languages ('mother tongues'). There is a myth that only a few languages are capable of use for high status functions, for example in higher education, the formal economy and scientific, technological, political and philosophical discourse. A close relationship exists between economic development and the full functional use of indigenous languages at all levels of education. Equally, there is a close relationship between underdevelopment and an over-reliance on high status languages which are inaccessible to the majority of people. Ideally, for the foreseeable future, all South African schools should become dual-medium institutions in which the home language is sustained as a language of learning and teaching for as long as possible alongside a second LoLT, and in which additional languages are offered as subjects. A concerted campaign over the next decade or so is essential to shift the self-defeating language attitudes of the majority of the people. This will succeed only if both public and private sector initiatives are undertaken to give economic value, as well as political and social status to the marginalised - mainly African - languages.
The most critical issue currently is South Africa's capacity to implement the new language-in-education policy of additive multilingualism. This task is exacerbated by a shortage of
suitably trained teachers and adequate materials for multilingual classrooms and a lack of empirical research into existing language practices and attitudes.
PRAESA therefore strives:
- To further an additive approach to bilingualism and biliteracy in education
- To raise the status of the (official) African languages, particularly isiXhosa in the Western Cape
- To assist teachers in coping with the challenges of working in multilingual classrooms
- To contribute towards a database of research relating to language policy, planning and practice.
- To initiate the development of materials for use with children in multilingual situations |
