Abstract
After achieving democracy in 1994, South Africa experienced major socio-political reforms in a number of areas, including a new constitution, language policy reforms, and new national curricula for schools. Due to the perceived instrumental value of English, many local schools rejected indigenous languages as medium of instruction in favour of English. This shift toward English-medium education has resulted in the limited development of students' academic language proficiency and hampered their access to higher education. At the University of the Free State, 65% of students struggle to understand academic content in English. This paper describes the national curricular reforms; the language-in-education policy and the intervention designed to meet this challenge at the university. The paper reports the implementation process of the academic literacy program and preliminary findings on the effectiveness of this intervention.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
