Terminology development versus concept development through discourse: insights from a dual-medium BA degree

Abstract

Drawing from our experience of conceptualising and implementing a dual-medium undergraduate BA degree (in Sesotho sa Leboa and English) at the University of Limpopo, we make a case for using African languages as media of instruction in higher education. In this paper, we challenge the view that corpus planning should precede acquisition planning and show how terminology can be developed for discipline-specific purposes through pedagogic processes. We believe that African languages in their current state can be used as media of instruction if the focus is on getting learners to engage with cognitively-challenging tasks for grasping new concepts. The absence of specialist terms can be compensated for by the efforts of teachers and learners to create terminology by using the well-documented practices of translators, such as transference, transliteration and omission. We provide several examples from the domains of materials development, classroom interaction and assessment to uphold our view that acquisition planning can drive corpus planning. The examples are all from the Sesotho sa Leboa strand of the dual-medium degree and show how teachers and learners cope with terminology for academic purposes. Such a pedagogically-responsive and discourse-embedded use of terminology locates the site of resource building for African languages within the pedagogic use of these languages as media of instruction.