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Significance: This Invited Commentary discusses how language-in-education policies and practices that embrace multilingualism and multilingual learning can promote epistemic justice, constructing more equitable, just, and ethical conditions for learning. The findings considered are significant in that they illuminate sustained multilingual knowledge-building among peers, showing how these processes enhanced disciplinary learning, legitimated all learners as producers of knowledge, and simultaneously constructed a decolonial ethics of knowing. In so doing, they challenge persistent, colonial linguistic and epistemic hierarchies of value as well as longstanding assumptions about the difficulties and costs of implementing mother-tongue-based multilingual education across the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study of a postcolonial school, we expand understandings of epistemic justice from the perspective of language, addressing issues of know-ledge, understanding, and participation in communicative practices. We suggest that monoglossic language-in-education policies constitute a form of epistemic injustice by diminishing learners' ability to make epistemic contributions, a capacity central to human value. We further suggest that translanguaging in formal school settings generally promotes epistemic access rather than epistemic justice , leaving value hierarchies and relations of knowing unchanged. Conversely, this study presents linguistic ethnographic data from a three-year project where learners could choose their language of learning to Grade 6 and use all languages in subject classrooms. We analyse how a Grade 6 learner used laminated, multilingual stances to construct others as knowers, negotiate epistemic authority, and promote solidarity. We argue that she thereby constructed new decolonial relations of knowing and being. Moreover, the shift from monolingual to multilingual episteme, which substantially improved performance overall, enabled new social, epistemic, and moral orders to emerge from below, laying the basis for greater epistemic justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Language learning in iran is a site of struggle between two ideologically opposed spaces: state schools and non-state language institutes. • This study drew on the construct of investment , which combines ideology, capital , and identity. • The learners discussed the factors influencing their investment, their expectations, and their language learning activities. • The findings indicated that diverse ideological, cultural, and economic resources and imagined futures had led learners toward investing at the institute. • Some aspects of investment, language-related beliefs, and identities varied across proficiency levels. Language learning in Iran is a site of struggle between two ideologically opposed spaces, state schools and non-state language institutes. This study drew on the construct of investment , which combines ideology, capital , and identity , to investigate the investment of Iranian English language learners at A1 and C2 proficiency levels at a non-state language institute. The learners in focus group interviews discussed different language-related resources influencing their investment, their expectations, and their language learning activities. The findings indicated that diverse ideological, cultural, and economic resources and imagined futures had led them toward investing at the institute. They were further found to be invested in diverse language learning activities beyond the pedagogical frame of the institute. Some aspects of investment, language-related beliefs, and identities varied across proficiency levels. Even though the ideological structures of these institutes are learner-centered, there are strong possibilities for enslavement to an extreme globally-oriented pedagogy or native-speakerism. It is hence suggested that state schools and non-state institutes draw upon more flexible language pedagogies embracing both local and global values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with Bourdieu's notion of field as a 'space of play' to explore what happens to the educational field and the linguistic regimes operating within it in a site in which new discourses and practices of identity, language, 'race', and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The context is a primary school in a low-income neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa. We draw on multilingual classroom and playground data from observations, interviews, and audio-recorded peer interactions among Grade 6 learners to illuminate the strategic mobilization of linguistic repertoires in encounters across difference: as identity-building resources and as means of shaping new interaction orders, restructuring hierarchies of value, subverting indexicalities, and sometimes resignifying racial categories. We further draw attention to a set of circumstances in which local actors have the potential to change, not only the rules of the game, but the game itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from ‘common sense’ discourses to the more abstract, specialised discourses of school subjects and, simultaneously, to a new language of learning, in this case English. It describes an intervention using a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) genre-based pedagogy involving 72 learners and two teachers in a low socio-economic neighbourhood of Cape Town. Using an SFL analytical framework, we analyse learners’ development in the information report genre. All learners in the intervention group made substantial gains in control of staging, lexis, and key linguistic features. We argue that the scaffolding provided by SFL genre-based pedagogies together with their explicit focus on textual and linguistic features offer a means of significantly enhancing epistemic access to the specialised language of school subjects, particularly for additional language learners. Findings have implications for language-in-education policy, teacher education, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in multilingual classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the guest editors’ introduction to the special issue ‘Language in Epistemic Access: Mobilising Multilingualism and Literacy Development for More Equitable Education in South Africa’. The issue offers complementary perspectives on improving epistemic access for all learners but especially those whose home language does not match the language of learning. Plüddemann examines the complex configurations of ideological and structural factors in South African language policy processes and the diverse positions taken up by teachers in response. Makalela argues that a methodology that encourages translanguaging can overcome historical separations between groups and promote transformative pedagogies. Probyn points to the importance of principled ‘pedagogical translanguaging’ in the mediation of secondary school science knowledge. Kerfoot and Van Heerden illustrate the substantial benefits of Systemic Functional Linguistic genre-based pedagogies for second or additional language writing in the middle years. White, Mammone and Caldwell in Australia offer evidence that similar benefits were maintained over six years for learners who faced both socio-economic and linguistic disadvantage in schools. Finally, Cummins and Heugh offer expansive perspectives on the issue. The editors argue that dynamic plurilingual pedagogies can be allied with the explicit scaffolding of genre-based pedagogies to help redress asymmetries in epistemic access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The language policy of the University of the Western Cape (2003) reflects the tempered traces of historically and politically charged negotiations. We argue that a reinterpretation of ‘policy failure’ as responsive engagement with complex new forms of linguistic and social diversity can lead to a critical rethinking of the nature of multilingualism and language policy in a South African tertiary education sector in transformation. We submit that university language policies need to consider (a) how the complex linguistic and non-linguistic repertoires of students can be mobilised for transformative discipline-specific curricula and pedagogies, and (b) the concept of multilingualism both as a resource and a transformative epistemology and methodology of diversity. We suggest a policy development process that moves from micro-interaction to macro-structure, tracing processes of resemiotisation, interrogating legitimised representational conventions, and reshaping institutional practices and perceptions. We discuss the implications for register formation and for broader epistemological access and ownership. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]