Language Narratives and Shifting Multilingual Pedagogies

Winner of the UKLA Academic Book Award 2024
Shortlisted for the ASSAf Humanities Book Award 2024

This open access book challenges monoglossic ideologies, traditional language pedagogies and dominant forms of knowledge construction by foregrounding multilingual and multicultural students’ language narratives, repertoires, and identities.

The research is based on a sixteen-year longitudinal study of a sociolinguistics course at an English language university and the language narratives produced by the first-year education students. The study was borne out of a need to create a critically inclusive course that would engage a cohort of students from socially and linguistically diverse backgrounds in contemporary South Africa. Drawing on data from over 5,000 students who have journeyed through this course, this book shows how a narrative heteroglossic pedagogy harnesses students’ multilingual strengths. A close analysis reveals complex identity work by students located in the Global South. The authors argue that decolonising language education is about reconceptualising language, reconfiguring what knowledges are valued in the classroom, and reshaping pedagogy.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Wits University Open Access Publishing Fund.