Language policy in South Africa: How rural teachers make sense of the language in education policy

This research focuses on mandated language-in-education policy in South Africa and how it is understood by a group of teachers at the local level. Since South Africa's period of transformation to a participatory democracy in 1994, very little has been done to identify satisfactory models for determining a language of teaching and learning that best serves the interests of teachers at the local level. Rather than examining the policy as text this study elevates the voices of local teachers to assess how tensions over the language in education policy are revealed in classroom practice.;The research questions how local educators come to know about and understand language policy, how these understandings are demonstrated in their daily practice, how local context factors shape understandings and the practices related to the language of teaching and learning, and if teacher subjectivities when connected with context factors cause disarticulation between what the policy requires of them and what their culture requires?;The study concludes that South African language policy borrowed from elsewhere has little relevance to local meaning making, and that teachers exercise autonomy in their own classrooms as they teach language. One salient finding is that in emulating their own experience of language learning, and given a lack of resources from the Province, teachers may be reproducing the reproductive model of the past. Teacher responses show that they value cultural cohesion over policy goals imposed from outside. The findings suggest a model for policy that foregrounds local cultural meaning as a prerequisite to understanding how teachers implement policy.