Honey Ant Readers in South Africa! By Emma Browne.

A few weeks ago, Emma Browne-HAR administrative assistant (and enthusiast)- gave a presentation about the HAR program at the English Language and Linguistics Departmental Research Seminar Series, Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.

This was a particularly exciting privilege as this was the very same department where HARs author Margie James first became passionate about language and literacy issues during her Degree in Linguistics!

The presentation was attended by South African linguists and academics, as well as post-graduate students from South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria.

Inspiring teacher-linguist, Emma Browne, out working in schools with HARs Margaret James, is having fun making honey ants with a young learner in his community ‘out bush’.

Some of the team working on the dictionary of South African English were present and many of the issues brought up in the lively debate at question time involved issues around the status of Aboriginal English in Australia and dialects in education. Many of the issues in Australia are acutely relevant to the South African context, where 11 official languages are spoken, and mother tongue education has been a topic of hot debate in the schooling and policy arena since the end of apartheid in 1994.

It was exciting to hear that Rhodes linguists Dr Mark de Vos and Kristin van der Merwe have been awarded a grant of R1,5 million over three years by the Council’s Sandisa Imbewu fund to study foundation phase literacy in African languages through post-doctoral research fellowships (See their website for more information: http://www.ru.ac.za/englishlanguageandlinguistics/research/sandisaimbewu/).

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could do the same in Australia?