The role of the mother tongue in enhancing English for Academic Purposes in the linguistically diverse context of first-year students at the North-West University

Abstract

This dissertation investigated the role of the mother tongue in the acquisition of English for academic literacy among first-year students in two flagship modules in the Faculty of Education at the North-West University, South Africa. The literature review, that forms the basis of the theoretical framework of this study, focusses on Cummins's theory of second language acquisition as well as the notion and role of Translanguaging in multilingual contexts. These theories are relevant because they corroborate students' English additional language knowledge alongside their mother tongue and other languages in their linguistic repertoires and how the knowledge assists them in learning. A convergent mixed-method research design was employed, and the data collection instruments included language repertoire questionnaires, language portraits, individual interviews, as well as participants' scores of academic literacy tests and their final marks in the flagship modules. Afrikaans, English, one German and African mother tongue participants took part in this study. The findings from the language portraits, and individual interviews provided evidence of the relevance of Cummins's Developmental Interdependence Hypothesis and it affirmed the importance of the role of the mother tongue in strengthening English for Academic Purposes. However, no relevant evidence of Cummins's Threshold Hypothesis was established among the study participants. The findings indicated that, instead of the mother tongue strengthening the additional language, the African mother tongue participants mostly use their English FAL to strengthen their mother tongue. Furthermore, findings from the language repertoire questionnaires, language portraits and interviews established that the African mother tongue participants used English for education and the Home Language to establish and confirm their identity. The findings also revealed other possible roles the mother tongue fulfils in a multilingual classroom for communication related to identity and cognition.