Stellenbosch University
Welcome to Stellenbosch University
Validating the highest performance standard of a test of academic literacy
Start: 20/08/2019, 12:00
End: 02/09/2019, 16:00
Contact:Rose Richards - 021 808 3611
Location: Room 3008, Education Building

​In the last two decades of the post-apartheid era, the language policies of higher education institutions in South Africa have been a contested terrain, with many of such policies changing to a lesser or greater extent.  Stellenbosch University (SU) is one former Afrikaans medium institution whose current language policy has shifted towards promoting multilingualism with Afrikaans, English and IsiXhosa, the three languages mostly spoken in the Western Cape, at the centre.  While parallel efforts are ostensibly made to promote the other two languages at this university, English continues to be widely used as a language of teaching and learning.  This is why the university uses the English version of the National Benchmark Test in Academic Literacy (NBT AL) to measure levels of academic language readiness among first time entering students.  This presentation will focus on the degree of accuracy to which the highest performance standard set for this test can classify students from the three language (English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa) backgrounds of preference to SU's language policy, as those that are likely to do well in their first year of university study as opposed to those that are unlikely to do so. 

 

Time: 13:00-13:45 on 5 September 2019

Place: Room 3008, Faculty of Education

Refreshments will be served from 12:45.

Enquiries: Rose Richards (rr2@sun.ac.za)

RSVP by Monday 2 September 2019

Internet reservation: Click on the following link to register your seat on Eventbrite

(Inetkey open - go to the website and click on the Register button):