The Department of English Language and Linguistics invites applications to the Postgraduate research programme:
Strategic Early Literacy Imperative: Linguistic and social partnerships in Foundation-Phase Learning in African languages.
The research programme explores the relation between formal and applied linguistics and Foundation-Phase literacy education, specifically focussing on the contributions that can be made by linguists.
These contributions include, but are not limited to the following dimensions:
- Sociolinguistic-dialectological dimensions: including language standardization and the mismatch between home languages and languages of education
- Morpho-syntactic dimensions: the mismatch between psycholinguistic and orthographic representations of words and morphemes with the attendant need for thorough linguistic analysis of African languages within descriptive and theoretical frameworks.
- Linguistic-educative dimensions: the paucity of educational resources such as reading norms, vocabulary lists, graded texts, testing instruments, comprehension tests etc.
We invite students excelling academically to apply for teaching assistantships and postgraduate bursaries in order to undertake research in the above Research Focus Areas. Successful applicants will be expected to undertake duties in the department and to be present during term times.
More information about the project, subject matter and application procedures can be accessed at: http://www.ru.ac.za/englishlanguageandlinguistics/research/sandisaimbewu/