Language in Epistemic Access

Caroline Kerfoot is Associate Professor in the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University, Sweden. She was formerly Head of Language Education at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her current research focuses on multilingualism, identities, and epistemic access in educational sites characterised by high levels of diversity and flux. She is co-editor (with Kenneth Hyltenstam) of Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, forthcoming in Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism.

Focusing on how to address persistent linguistically structured inequalities, this book lays bare the tension between the commitment to multilingualism and language-in-education policy - particularly in South Africa - and the realities of the dominance of English and the virtual absence of indigenous African languages in educational practices. It suggests that dynamic plurilingual pedagogies can be allied with the explicit scaffolding of genre-based pedagogies to redress the asymmetry in epistemic access and to re-imagine policy, pedagogy and practice more in tune with the realities of multilingual classrooms. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Education.

Introduction - Language in epistemic access: mobilising multilingualism and literacy development for more equitable education in South Africa 1. Unlocking the grid: language-in-education policy realisation in post-apartheid South Africa 2. Moving out of linguistic boxes: the effects of translanguaging strategies for multilingual classrooms 3. Pedagogical translanguaging: bridging discourses in South African science classrooms 4. Testing the waters: exploring the teaching of genres in a Cape Flats Primary School in South Africa 5. Linguistically based inequality, multilingual education and a genre-based literacy development pedagogy: insights from the Australian experience 6. How to reverse a legacy of exclusion? Identifying high-impact educational responses 7. Epistemologies in multilingual education: translanguaging and genre - companions in conversation with policy and practice