The Impact of Language on Educational Access in South Africa

The role of Medium of Instruction (MoI) or Language of Learning and Teaching (LoL&T) has not received sufficient attention as a factor denying meaningful access to education in South Africa. Yet the majority of under-performing learners are also children who learn in a language that is not their mother-tongue. This research aims to assess how recent language policies have changed the linguistic practices of schools and how this impacts on 'meaningful' access (understood as learners' access to the curriculum and therefore broad content knowledge). Interviews and open discussions were conducted with principals, teachers and parents from various township schools located in Mlazi (KwaZulu Natal) and in Soweto and Attridgeville (Gauteng) to illustrate the problems. The paper unpicks the different solutions - taken and proposed – to the disjuncture between MoI and meaningful access, whilst taking into account the legacy of past policies. Several proposals have been made to improve educational outcomes within the existing policy regarding medium of instruction (MoI) and language in general. Other proposals, in order to give transformation in education more immediate and concrete content, seek to exploit to its limit, or even alter, the official framework. They claim that such a move is a condition to reverse the overall poor outcome among learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. The MoI issue has sometimes been invoked in the debate on the relevance in societies of the periphery of what some see as essentially a Western educational model, a debate that the African renaissance ideology has helped rekindle in South Africa

Target Acquisition in Multiscale Electronic Worlds

Since the advent of graphical user interfaces, electronic information has grown exponentially, whereas the size of screen displays has stayed almost the same. Multiscale interfaces were designed to address this mismatch, allowing users to adjust the scale at which they interact with information objects. Although the technology has progressed quickly, the theory has lagged behind. Multiscale interfaces pose a stimulating theoretical challenge, reformulating the classic target-acquisition problem from the physical world into an infinitely rescalable electronic world. We address this challenge by extending Fitts’ original pointing paradigm: we introduce the scale variable, thus defining a multiscale pointing paradigm. This article reports on our theoretical and empirical results. We show that target-acquisition performance in a zooming interface must obey Fitts’ law, and more specifically, that target-acquisition time must be proportional to the index of difficulty. Moreover, we complement Fitts’ law by accounting for the effect of view size on pointing performance, showing that performance bandwidth is proportional to view size, up to a ceiling effect. The first empirical study shows that Fitts’ law does apply to a zoomable interface for indices of difficulty up to and beyond 30 bits, whereas classical Fitts’ law studies have been confined in the 2-10 bit range. The second study demonstrates a strong interaction between view size and task difficulty for multiscale pointing, and shows a surprisingly low ceiling. We conclude with implications of these findings for the design of multiscale user interfaces

Essentially nonoscillatory postprocessing filtering methods

High order accurate centered flux approximations used in the computation of numerical solutions to nonlinear partial differential equations produce large oscillations in regions of sharp transitions. Here, we present a new class of filtering methods denoted by Essentially Nonoscillatory Least Squares (ENOLS), which constructs an upgraded filtered solution that is close to the physically correct weak solution of the original evolution equation. Our method relies on the evaluation of a least squares polynomial approximation to oscillatory data using a set of points which is determined via the ENO network. Numerical results are given in one and two space dimensions for both scalar and systems of hyperbolic conservation laws. Computational running time, efficiency, and robustness of method are illustrated in various examples such as Riemann initial data for both Burgers' and Euler's equations of gas dynamics. In all standard cases, the filtered solution appears to converge numerically to the correct solution of the original problem. Some interesting results based on nonstandard central difference schemes, which exactly preserve entropy, and have been recently shown generally not to be weakly convergent to a solution of the conservation law, are also obtained using our filters

A Predictive-reactive Approach for JSP with Uncertain Processing Times

The paper is supported by the Asia-Link project funded by the European Commission (CN/ASIA-LINK/024 (109093)), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (50705076, 50705077), and the National Hi-Tech R&D Program of China (2007AA04Z187)JSP with discretely controllable processing times (JSP-DCPT) that are perturbed in a turbulent environment is formulated, based on which, a time-cost tradeoff based predictive-reactive scheduling approach is proposed for solving the problem. In the predictive scheduling process, on the basis of a proposed three-step decomposition approach for solving JSP-DCPT, a solution initialization algorithm is presented by incorporating a hybrid algorithm of tabu search and simulated annealing and a fast elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm; in the reactive scheduling process, Pareto-optimal schedules are generated, among which every schedule that is not dominated by any initial schedule can be selected as the responding schedule so as to maintain optimality of the objective that is to minimize both the makespan and the cost. Experimental simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

High order filtering methods for approximating hyberbolic systems of conservation laws

In the computation of discontinuous solutions of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, the recently developed essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) schemes appear to be very useful. However, they are computationally costly compared to simple central difference methods. A filtering method which is developed uses simple central differencing of arbitrarily high order accuracy, except when a novel local test indicates the development of spurious oscillations. At these points, the full ENO apparatus is used, maintaining the high order of accuracy, but removing spurious oscillations. Numerical results indicate the success of the method. High order of accuracy was obtained in regions of smooth flow without spurious oscillations for a wide range of problems and a significant speed up of generally a factor of almost three over the full ENO method

Axes de recherche linguistique en Afrique du Sud : usage des langues africaines a l'école, modélisation des langues africaines,

fichier son : http://www.etudes-africaines.cnrs.fr/ ficheateliers.php?recordID=25 ou http://www.etudes-africaines.cnrs.fr/Description and justification of a research program on language in South AfricaLa question linguistique en Afrique du Sud prend une importance croissante, ce qui justifie un programme de recherche dédié

Asikhulume! African Language for All, a Powerful Strategy for Spearheading Transformation and Improvement of the South African Education System

Almost twenty years after Bantu Education was repelled and fifteen years into democracy, the South African education system remains bedevilled by huge social inequalities. Language is part of that realm of inequality to the extent that the medium of instruction has become the hallmark of a school's social status. If this situation is allowed to continue, there is little hope that any change in this domain will be willingly accepted by the parents of those for whom such a change would be most beneficial, i.e. African learners whose mother-tongue is at odds with the ‘language of learning and teaching', pedagogically sound though it may be. Still, the failure rate among those remains unacceptably high. To overcome this seemingly untractable situation, I argue that mother-tongue education should be made available to all the speakers of any one of the 11 official South African languages, whatever the type of school they attend, and that passing an African indigenous language should become compulsory for all learners writing the senior certificate examination. Such measures could go a long way to trigger transformation in the education scene, and might even lead to a degree of racial and social integration, bringing about the long due transformation of the country.Près de 20 ans après la fin de la Bantu Education et 15 ans après la transition démocratique, le système éducatif sud-africain reste profondément inégalitaire. La langue d'instruction reste l'un des signes forts de cette inégalité au point d'être devenue emblématique du statut d'une école. Tant que cette situation prédominera, il est peu probable que des changements soient acceptés par les parents des élèves pour qui de tels changements seraient pourtant pédagogiquement bénéfiques. Pourtant le taux d'échec parmi les élèves africains de langue maternelle autre que la langue d'enseignement reste inacceptablement élevé. Pour dépasser ces contradictions, nous soutenons que l'enseignement en langue maternelle devrait être la norme pour tous les élèves , quelle que soit la catégorie d'écoles qu'ils fréquentent, et qu'une langue africaine devrait être obligatoire à l'examen terminal du secondaire (matric ou Senior Certificate). De telles mesures seraient à même de transformer réellement le système éducatif, et pourraient provoquer une certaine intégration sociale et raciale