* WITHDRAWN * Intersections of orientations in language planning in university language policy reform in South Africa

More than three decades after publication of Richard Ruíz’s 1984 seminal article[1], orientations in language planning and their specification remain a powerful analytical tool for understanding language planning processes... [ view full abstract ]

More than three decades after publication of Richard Ruíz’s 1984 seminal article[1], orientations in language planning and their specification remain a powerful analytical tool for understanding language planning processes in disparate locations (in this case South Africa) and domains (in this case higher education) as well as a tool for progressively managing real-life language related tensions. This duality underscores the descriptive, predictive, explanatory and theoretical power of Ruíz’s framework. The presentation will seek to validate this observation through a critical appraisal of language policy reform processes at the University of the Free State (UFS) that started in 2015 and which are set to conclude in 2018. The reform processes are a cumulative consequence of enduring concerns that language policies in Historically Afrikaans-medium Universities (HAUs) of which the UFS is one are inimical to social justice and transformation imperatives as well as being unaligned to pedagogical and internationalisation realities. Recently however, clamor for university language policy reform in South Africa has largely been a spin-off of the 2015 #RhodesMustFall Campaign – a protest movement that highlighted lack of transformation in South Africa’s higher education. Against this backdrop, the presentation will use analytic autoethnography and content analysis a methodological frameworks to analyse participant-observer and documentary data in the form of UFS Language Committee Minutes, Senate and Council Minutes, stakeholder submissions and media briefings and reports with a view of outlining how the three orientations of language-as-problem, language-as-right and language-as-resource shaped discourses antecedent and attendant to the just-concluded UFS language policy reform process. Further, the analysis will seek to outline how different stakeholders attempted to use the three orientations to frame and advance arguments on preferred outcomes from the language policy reform processes. As a synthesis, the presentation postulates that outcomes of the language policy reform processes under review are premised upon and justified on the basis of the three orientations, albeit in nuanced ways that are largely determined and framed by perceived “winners” from the processes; thus, further underscoring the descriptive, predictive, explanatory and theoretical power of Ruíz’s framework.

[1] Ruíz, R. 1984. Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8(2): 15– 34.