Towards the end of last year, a group of 25 staff members from various departments in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences completed the very first isiXhosa short course presented by the Department of African Languages.
According to Dr Anita Jonker, the Faculty's Student Support Coordinator, staff members in this environment have for years been encouraged to learn isiXhosa and other African languages in an effort to improve communication with first-year students who speak an African language.
"To us, it is important to make all our students feel at home at the University as well as in our Faculty. We also want to use our students' mother tongues to help them grasp the technical terminology of their respective disciplines. For this reason, we have developed glossaries for most subject fields in the Faculty, on our own as well as in collaboration with the Language Centre," Jonker explains.
Even though the Stellenbosch University (SU) Language Centre also offers employees a wellestablished isiXhosa course, Masazane, it is presented over a longer period and is more intensive. The Faculty's in-house course takes five weeks only and focuses on conversations that academics, administrative and support staff would typically have with students and colleagues, as well as on using language to create a welcoming atmosphere.
Jonker says the idea for an isiXhosa course came to fruition thanks to the efforts of the three isiXhosa lecturers who form part of the Faculty's Committee for Learning and Teaching (CLT). At the final CLT meeting last year, the three lecturers, Dr Zandile Kondowe, Ms Sibongile Xamlashe and Mr Simthembile Xeketwana, offered to jointly present a free conversation course aimed at the CLT's first-year lecturers and other interested staff members.
To Xeketwana, it was a wonderful experience to teach isiXhosa to the Faculty's staff.
"The need has long been identified and finally it is being fulfilled. The course enhances multilingualism, which speaks to the new Language Policy, broadens access to the University, and creates a welcoming environment and a great staff ethos within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the University at large."
The course was compiled to cater for the specific needs of staff, who requested that maximum time be spent on in-class conversation, and that the focus should be on the type of conversations one would have with a student or colleague to make them feel at home, display empathy or to wish a student success with a test or exam.
The staff members met once a week for five weeks to build an isiXhosa vocabulary under the guidance of Kondowe, Xamlashe and Xeketwana. On her own initiative, the Faculty's newly appointed coordinator of blended learning, Ms Miné de Klerk, integrated each class's course material with a podcast of the day's lesson to enable all participants to continue practising after class by logging onto SUNLearn.
Dr Lauren Mongie, a lecturer in the Department of General Linguistics; Ms Liesl van Kerwel, secretary to the Dean, and Ms Zahn Münch, a lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, say that apart from the course being fun, the lecturers' enthusiasm for the subject and their dedication also made it easy to learn a new language.
"Since hearing a student address the Rector without understanding what he was saying, I have wanted to learn how to communicate in isiXhosa. I was struck by the helplessness I felt during the course when called on to speak, so it was good to be challenged by how it feels to operate in a world where you are unable to communicate because you don't have all the tools. This has made me much more sympathetic to the many who constantly find themselves in this position. I loved the way the three colleagues embraced us with their infectious enthusiasm for the isiXhosa language, as well as their excellent teaching methods," said Münch.
Van Kerwel added that she can now greet people with confidence in isiXhosa and that "the rest is slowly but surely coming along!" while Mongie said that she "benefitted enormously from the course". "I have been having short little conversations with Xhosa people I run into in my daily life since the course ended and I am surprised at how much the lecturers managed to teach us in such a short time. They were amazing presenters. I will be forever grateful for their kindness and excellent teaching abilities," says Mongie.
Jonker says their aim with this course was to equip staff members to create a welcoming environment, and to do so at grassroots level where they actually encounter students and colleagues.
"We really wanted to develop a course where staff members could speak with students and colleagues as equals, while promoting dialogue in the process.
"That's what made it so useful when, after the first three classes, the isiXhosa lecturers brought some of their isiXhosa students along to offer staff the opportunity to practise their theoretical conversations with actual mother-tongue speakers. In addition, staff could have weekly conversations with their three isiXhosa colleagues who served as joint presenters of the course, as well as with other isiXhosa colleagues in their respective departments."
Staff members who are interested in taking the short course this year may contact Dr Kondowe on kondowe@sun.ac.za.
On the photo are (sitting, from the left) Dr Lauren Mongie, Dr Anita Jonker, Dr Zandile Kondowe (isiXhosa course coordinator), Dr Ilse Slabbert, Ms Rochelle Williams and Dr Tasneemah Cornelissen-Nordien. At the back are Ms Liesl van Kerwel, Mr Pieter Janse Van Rensburg, Ms Sibongile Xamlashe, me Miné de Klerk en me Amy Daniels. (Hennie Rudman, SSFD)
