Research Areas and Goals
Research Projects
The research projects fall under three broad areas: Linguistics and Applied African Language Studies, Second or Additional African Language Learning and African Language Literary Studies. Some of these activities build on projects that flow from recently completed and internationally funded research areas: for example the South African-Norway-Tertiary-Education-Development Programme (SANTED).
AREA ONE: LINGUISTICS AND APPLIED AFRICAN LANGUAGE STUDIES
Project 1:
- Designing Techniques, methods and approaches for language policy and implementation as well as teaching in multilingual higher education contexts.
Project 2:
- Corpus development in African languages with a focus on isiXhosa translation, terminology development and lexicography.
Project 3:
- African languages and ICT for development.
Project 4:
- African theoretical linguistics.
AREA TWO: SECOND OR ADDITIONAL AFRICAN LANGUAGE LEARNING
Project 5:
- Acquisition of African languages as second and additional languages in professional disciplines.
AREA THREE: AFRICAN LANGUAGE LITERARY STUDIES
Project 6:
- Documenting literary studies in African Languages.
The objective here is to complete a historiography of the development of literature in African languages, focusing on changes in thematic repertoire, gender studies and various theoretical approaches.
Research Goals
The research areas are in response to some challenges that currently elude the African university such as the development of strategies to facilitate the access, retention and success of historically disadvantaged students, and using African languages to enable development, change and transformation within the university environment.
Last Modified: Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:00:28 SAST