Surviving in the Multilingual Jungle A Collaboration between Pre-Service Language Teachers and in-Service Content Teachers to Promote Academic Literacy

Abstract

South African universities are required to engage in research that meets the economic and social needs of society and to build partnerships with the communities which they serve in order to meet these needs. This article will discuss the conceptualisation and the results of a service learning project that paired pre-service language teachers with in-service content teachers in a research collaboration effort to identify and address needs related to learners' cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) in different content classrooms. The article will discuss how the structure of the project allowed a relatively small department to generate data useful for both undergraduate and postgraduate modules while providing tailor-made language services to specific classrooms in the community. The results from the project also indicated that pre-service teachers developed empathy for in-service teachers, grew into their roles as researchers in the profession, developed leadership skills and an awareness of the complexity of diversity in content classrooms in South Africa.