New tool promotes languages in school

TEACHING complex terms to pupils so that they understand them in the language they’re most familiar with has just become easier for teachers.

They now have access to a spreadsheet containing at least 84 000 words from seven subjects, and all those words are in the country’s eleven official languages.

Terence Ball, who heads up the South African National Lexicography Unit, which oversees the publishing for all of the nine official Indigenous language dictionaries, says the document contains all the terms used by pupils from Grades R to 6 in any language.

So far they have not received feedback from any of the teachers but a number of academics involved in education and particularly language teaching, as well as members of the Principals Association of South Africa, are pleased with the new resource, he says.

Ball says terminology lists are not generally available in schools and so this will be a great teaching aid. Previous lists were not user friendly and this one makes it pain free for teachers to do their work.

“We feel that it is much, much easier to work with because you have all of the terms on the same line across the 11 languages. This will allow teachers now to search for a particular word. If you look at the terminology lists as they currently exist on the Department of Sport Arts and Culture website, you have the English word as the header and then below that the word in different languages. And the entries are then arranged alphabetically by the English word.

“Now that's fine, except that if you're an IsiZulu first language teacher, teaching a multilingual class and you know what the term is in your mother tongue, but you don't know what it is in Sesotho, you have no way of finding the term because you don't know what the English word is. Whereas using this list, the teacher can then search for the IsiZulu term and see the same term in all the other 10 languages.”

Ball says teachers can also do data sorts alphabetically by language and across all of the subjects, making the new list much more flexible.

He says through this project, they’ve also been able to determine the number of terms that a pupil is required to learn between Grade R and Grade 6 in mathematics, for instance, and that number is 977.

“That's over a period of seven years, because it's Grade R to Grade 6. Then if you go to technology there are 2766 terms that are needed to be learned.

“What we are now proposing is that we need to ask future terminology meetings and strategy sessions to indicate the lowest grade at which each term is used so that teachers can then start producing terminology wall charts per grade to reinforce the meanings of those terms in the young minds.”

Ball says it's not a static list because it will develop as time goes on.

He says the subject terms were previously available, but they took the terms from the Department of Arts and Culture's existing lists and reformatted it into one comprehensive document. The earliest list was developed around 2013/14 and the most recent in about 2017/18.

“That's why we say that these are the official terminology lists for South African schools. We are only using what has been approved by the Department of Arts and Culture as the department responsible for terminological approval in our indigenous languages.”

Ball says that the project didn't take long but there was a lot of “careful checking” to ensure that where synonyms are provided, those were pulled through as either word two or word three. He said it took about eight weeks to do all the reformatting and then consolidate all of the Excel spreadsheets into a single document. In total there are 5 873 terms but once the synonyms of those terms are added, the total word count in the final document increases to 84 221 across the 11 languages.

The consolidated list can be downloaded free of charge from the South African National Lexicography Unit's website. Ball says they are keen to receive feedback from teachers because it's a living document which will be updated.

“By learning in the mother tongue, by knowing the words in the mother tongue, we think it will facilitate a better retention of knowledge. The Department of Basic Education is introducing mother tongue based bilingual education at Grade 4 this year in maths, science and technology, so we are hoping that we can support those pupils, but also support pupils in English as a language of learning and teaching,” said Ball.

While the use of language in the country’s education system has been a contentious issue, this week Nomusa Cembi, spokesperson for teachers union Sadtu, said they were excited about the latest development.

“I would see it as a positive step towards ensuring that other languages are developed. This is a step towards ensuring that all languages ultimately become languages of instruction in our schools. So we feel this will assist in ensuring that.”

• The consolidated language list can be downloaded from https://sanlu.africa/mtbbe/
• To comment on the list the South African National Lexicography Unit can be emailed at lexicographyunitsinfo@ lexicunitsa.org