'To open the bright doors': Student responses to multilingual learning material

Abstract

Students at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology were provided with Harvard referencing system guides in isiXhosa, Afrikaans and English. Without exception, isiXhosa mother-tongue students rejected the isiXhosa guide in favour of the English version. We explore reasons for their reaction, using analysis of free-writing and focus group findings as the research instrument. The central finding is that the formal register used in the isiXhosa translation is experienced as alienating and inaccessible. We argue that learning materials and even corpora should be developed in negotiation with student input, thus opening a transformative pedagogic space, while using students’ dialect and register as a learning asset to enable epistemological access, and to deal with threshold concepts.