Page 53 - EDUCON 2022 Book of Abstracts

that construed Mother tongue as obstacles to good English command
and socioeconomic mobility. Furthermore, we argue that treating
languages as bounded entities and not embracing the heterogeneity of
the Namibian linguistic situation is a problematic concern.
Keywords: language ideologies; mother tongue; monoglossic
ideology; multilingualism; policy

16. Set, B., How can the teacher’s heteroglossic approach be
expanded and supported so that it becomes more transformative for
the learners
Background: The multilingual turn experienced in the 21st century
has led to a call for the educational systems to try catch up with their
sociolinguistic realities by embracing the language diversity of their
learners as a resource to learn. However, the Namibian education
system is found to be deeply rooted in a monolingual ideology that
enforces a unitary language policy aimed at homogenizing a
linguistically diverse population. For instance, the Namibian post-
apartheid Language in Education Policy (LiEP), prescribed, “named
languages as unitary, stable objects, clearly differentiated from one
another”. Thus, the Namibian education system can be said to be
failing to meet the needs and demands of learners who are not learning
through their mother tongue in early grades and beyond. Despite the
expectations of the MBEC that by Grade 4 learners will have acquired
adequate proficiency to read texts in English for concept
comprehension, in fact very few have done so.
Critiquing the positioning of children from non-dominant groups as
well as bilingual non-English native speakers as linguistically
deficient, empirical studies call for the radical shift from the
monolingual paradigm to that of heteroglossic practices which is
commonly referred to as the ‘multilingual turn’. The multilingual
approach is particularly relevant to post-Colonial Africa, where in the

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