MULTILINGUALISM EDUCATION PROJECT REPORT : 2007
MULTILINGUALISM EDUCATIONPROJECTREPORT : 2007-2010Compiled by:A/Prof Mbulungeni MadibaCo-ordinator: Multilingualism Education ProjectUniversity of Cape TownTel: 27 (0) 21650 5359Fax: 27 (0) 21650 5045E-mail: mbulungeni.madiba@uct.ac.zaInternet: -----------------------20 October 2010
Multilingualism Education ProjectCentre for Higher Education Development, UCTMULTILINGUALISM EDUCATION PROJECTREPORT: 2007-2010CONTENTSExecutive Summary . 11. Project Description . 32. Project Progress Report and roll-out . .43. Project Achievement or outputs . . 144. Lessons learnt .145. Synopsis .156. Conclusion 187. Exit strategy/ Sustainability/ Integration 19Executive SummaryBackgroundThe Multilingualism Education Project (MEP) was launched in 2005 followingthe approval of the University’s Language Policy (approved by Senate andCouncil in 1999 and revised in 2003) and the Language Plan which was approvedin 2003. MEP was granted SANTED funding from 2007. This report outlines theproject activities covered by SANTED funding from 2007 to 2010. During thisperiod, MEP carried out a number of activities aimed at meeting the followingobjectives set out in the project’s Business Plan:To provide Xhosa communication skills course to staff and studentsTo facilitate the compilation of multilingual corpora and glossariesincluding the development of machine translator for African languages.AchievementsDuring the period under review, the UCT SANTED Project achieved most of itsobjectives set at the beginning of the project in 2007. The following are somehighlights:1
The Xhosa Communication skills course for staff which was piloted in2006 became a huge success among staff. The number of participants grewfrom 60 to over 800 staff members.The Xhosa Communication skills course was piloted in three StudentsResidences and was a great success.The Xhosa for Law course was also piloted in the Law Faculty with about20 students. About 15 students successfully completed the course andwere awarded certificates of attendance.Special Language Corpora were constructed for Statistics and Maths, Law,Economics, Physics and the Health Sciences. These corpora vary in sizeaccording to the availability of the texts.Three glossaries were compiled and two of them, viz, Statistics and Mathsand Economics have been translated from English into all the other nineofficial indigenous languages of South Africa and Afrikaans.The Online Multilingual Glossaries Hypermedia was developed on Vulafor the glossaries.CD ROMS were developed for the ‘Becoming a doctor’ course in theFaculty of Health Sciences (4 for Xhosa and 4 for Afrikaans)A workshop was held on Human Language Technology and was attendedby all Universities in the Western Cape and other universities such asRhodes University and University of Kwazulu-Natal and DurbanUniversity of Technology.Several papers were presented at national and international conferenceson language acquisition and multilingual glossaries. Out of these papers,three have already been published.ConstraintsThe main constraint to this project was shortage of people with expertise in fieldsuch as Second Language Teaching and Human Language Technology. It wasmainly through the help of expertise and funding from Harvard University thatA/Prof Mbulu Madiba was able to develop the Vula Online Hypermedia for theglossaries during his five months sabbatical leave at that university.Mbulungeni Madiba (Co-ordinator: MEP)220 October 2010
Multilingualism Education ProjectCentre for Higher Education Development, UCT1. Project descriptionThe Multilingualism Education Project (MEP) is based on the University’sLanguage Policy and Plan. The University Language Policy takes as its startingpoint the need to prepare students to participate fully in a multilingual society,where multilingual proficiency and awareness are essential. Accordingly, MEPhas the following objectives:To provide guidance on how to foster a multilingual environment within theUniversity;To ensure the consolidation of existing multilingual and languagedevelopment projects;To ensure the development of appropriate multilingual materials in thecurriculum in order to support students for whom English is a secondlanguage;To ensure the development of communicative, workplace-orientated coursesin Afrikaans and Xhosa for staff and students.1.1 Location and Management StructureThe project is hosted at the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED)and is managed by the Senate Language Policy Committee (see Annexure 4),which is chaired by a Deputy Vice-Chancellor.1.2 Scope of the ProjectThe SANTED project is focused on two areas:1. Xhosa Communication skills course for staff and students.2. Multilingual Concept Glossaries (including the development of MachineTranslations).1.3 BeneficiariesBoth areas are beneficial to the University staff, students and African languagesspeakers in general. The Xhosa course for staff and students further contributesto the University’s transformation programme. The focus on multilingualconcept glossaries mainly benefits students for whom English is not a firstlanguage. However, English first language students can also benefit greatly fromthe vocabulary lists and concordances from the Special Language Corpora.3
2. Project Progress Report and roll out(a) Project roll outThe SANTED Project commenced April 2007. The roll out of the Project wasfocused on two main areas: Xhosa Communication Skills and MultilingualGlossaries (hereafter referred to as Component 1 and Component 2). Component2 also included the development of machine-translator engines for selectedAfrican languages.Component 1: The Xhosa Communication Skills courseThis project was aimed at promoting multilingual awareness and multilingualproficiency among staff and students as required by the National LanguagePolicy for Higher Education (2002). Although UCT has many indigenouslanguages that are spoken by staff and students, only Xhosa is recognized as theofficial language alongside English and Afrikaans. The choice of Xhosa is basedon the fact that it is one of the major indigenous African languages spoken in theWestern Cape. The learning of Xhosa is important as students in professionaldisciplines such as the Health Sciences, Education, Social Development and Lawas some of them do their practical work in surrounding Xhosa communitieswhere this language is dominant.The objectives of this project were to:Provide Xhosa Communication skills course to staff and studentsTrain tutors in Second Language Teaching for African languagesThe Xhosa Communication skills course was piloted in 2006 with about 60 staffmembers from the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) and theUniversity Libraries. SANTED funding helped in the roll out of this course to thebroader university community. Initially, the course was only offered atElementary level (Basic Xhosa), and then later at Intermediate level (Intermediate1 & 2). The courses were offered in-house in different faculties, namely, theCentre for Higher Education Development, Commerce, Engineering & BuiltEnvironment, Health Sciences, Humanities, Law and Science and the GraduateSchool of Business. Our plan was to recruit at least 160 staff members per year tothe Xhosa courses. This number was always exceeded because of the populardemand for the course, especially at beginners’ level. In most cases, staffmembers requested the course themselves to meet their communicative needs.4
Multilingualism Education ProjectCentre for Higher Education Development, UCTComponent 2: Multilingual Glossaries and Machine-TranslationThe project involves the development of Special Language Corpora for Science(Statistics and Maths and Physics), Health Sciences and Law and the compilationof Multilingual Concept Glossaries for these disciplines to support students forwhom English is an additional language. The Corpora comprise electronicacademic texts selected and compiled according to generally accepted principlesof designing a Special Language Corpora. The project has the following goals:The construction of Special Language Corpora for Science, Health Sciencesand LawThe compilation of multilingual glossaries for these three disciplinesThe development of machine-translation engine involving English and AfricanlanguageThe Multilingual Glossaries Project was launched in 2007. As already,mentioned, the glossaries are aimed at optimizing EAL mastery of concepts andvocabulary of different content-learning areas. The initial plan was to developmultilingual glossaries for Statistics and Maths, Computer Science, Law, Physicsand Health Sciences as part of the pilot project. But we later abandoned the ideaof developing the glossary for Computer Science as Rhodes University wasdeveloping one. Instead of Computer Science, were then decided to develop theglossary for Economics which is one of the major courses at the university andhas many EAL students who needed academic language support. We alsodecided not to develop the glossary for Health Sciences after we were advised bythe members from the Health Sciences Faculty to focus on translation and thedevelopment of CD ROMS for Afrikaans and Xhosa service courses. All theseglossaries are corpus-based, that is, they are based on texts collected andarranged systematically in electronic form to allow the mining of terminologiesand their related linguistic forms such as concordances using different HumanLanguage Technology tools. The construction of a corpus for each disciplinebecame very challenging and laborious that we finally decided to focus only onthree disciplines, namely, Statistics and Maths, Economics and Law. The first twoglossaries have been completed and are available in all the eleven officiallanguages of South Africa. The Law Glossaries is only in English and will betranslated into all the official languages next year.The SANTED funding also assisted in the development of the OnlineMultilingaul Glossaries Hypermedia on Vula which is the University OnlineEnvironment developed by the Centre for Education Technology and poweredby Sakai. This networked Online Learning Environment provides students with5
easy access to the multilingual and other online courses. The MEP OnlineLearning Environment on Vula is shown in Screenshot 3 below.Screenshot 3: Vula Multilingual Glossaries HypermediaAs may be observed from the Screenshot above, Vula Multilingual GlossariesHypermedia provides several other functions such as Chat room, Forums andBlogs which are quite useful in allowing EAL students to engage interactivelywith the terms and concordances. Students can also give comments in thecomment spaces provided for each term.Beside the development of multilingual glossaries, an attempt was made todevelop machine translation engine for African languages. The aim of thisproject was to develop machine-translation engine which can be used for thetranslation between English and African languages and between Africanlanguages themselves. This project was carried out in collaboration with theDepartment of Electrical Engineering. Three students were recruited to work onthis project as part of their studies. One student worked on the creation ofparallel corpora as part of her doctoral thesis on Text-to-Speech technology, andthe other two did their undergraduate mini-theses on machine translation. Theirstudies final resulted in the development of two machine-translation engines forAfrican languages with a Graphical User Interface which performs basictranslation using Moses which is an open source tool. The following is theinterface of this machine translation system developed by one student under mysupervision:6
Multilingualism Education ProjectCentre for Higher Education Development, UCTThis translation engine requires more data to be able to function effectively. Moreparallel texts still need to be collected from sources such as the SABC News. Thetranslation engine requires a parallel corpus of at least a million running tokensto translate more accurately.(b) Activityo As set out in the workplans annually, were these successfully met?Consult previous reports (Annual and Progress Reports)o Sum up each main activity providing analysis on its success or lack of.o Layout: indicate activity, goal and outputComponent 1: Xhosa Communication skills coursesThe following activities were carried out to implement the project:Activity 1: Curriculum development7
The first challenge in offering the course was the development of the appropriatecurriculum and the Unit Standard. Based on the pilot course, the final curriculumfor the beginners’ course for staff was developed at the beginning of 2007. Thecurriculum allows the course to be completed in three months. Participants haveto attend twelve sessions of one hour each. At the end of the course participantshad a choice to take assessment and then be awarded a certificate of completionif successful or to receive a certificate of attendance if they have attended at least10 sessions. The teaching of the course is based on the task-based approach withstrong emphasis on conversational skills.Activity 2: The writing of the Xhosa manualAfter the development of the Curriculum, the compilation of the teaching andlearning materials began. The Course Manual for the Beginners course wascompleted in March 2007. What is unique about this course manual is that it isbased on a Task-based approach to second language teaching. In this approachparticipants learn the language as they try to perform certain communicativetasks such as greeting, introducing themselves to colleagues, giving their lifehistory, family backgrounds and information about their occupations. Thisapproach differs from the traditional approach which put much emphasis ongrammar instead of communication. A mini-Xhosa-English glossary wasdeveloped to assist participants with learning the common vocabulary used inthe manual. The vocabulary was extracted from the manual by means ofWordSmith Tools. This manual was revised each year.Manual for Intermediate course was developed in 2008 for the pilot course andwas revised during in 2009 and 2010.Activity 3: The Development of Xhosa Communication skills CD ROMA CD ROM was developed for the 2008 for the Beginners course. It comprisesdialogues taken from the course manual. Each year more copies were madewithout changing the content. This CD ROM was highly appreciated by courseparticipants. However, some of them felt that it is bit fast for them to hear what isbeing said.Activity 4: The Development CD ROMs for Health Sciences coursesFour other CD ROMs were developed for the Becoming a Doctor Course (Badr)in the Health Sciences for students who are doing Xhosa. The CD ROMs weredeveloped in collaboration with the School of Languages (Xhosa Section) and theFaculty of Health Sciences.8
Multilingualism Education ProjectCentre for Higher Education Development, UCTThis year four more CD ROMs were developed for Afrikaans. The Faculty isquite excited about these CD ROMs as they have greatly improved the teachingof Xhosa and Afrikaans Service courses.Activity 5: Training of tutorsThe original plan was to provide train eight (8) tutors per year. Accordingly, wedesigned a two weeks programme in which tutors would receive training in thetheory of second language teaching, material development, presentation(including PowerPoint presentation), classroom management and assessment.But this training never took place since we were not able to find post-graduatestudents from the Department of African Languages and Literatures. TheDepartment has over the last few years experienced serious decline of Xhosastudents at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Only three tutors weregiven short training since all of them had already has good experience in secondlanguage teaching.Activity 6: Provision of isiXhosa course to staffSince the introduction of the pilot course in 2006, the number of courses offeredper year increased drastically. A total of 52 courses were offered during theperiod under review. About 758 staff members participated in these courses.The courses were offered mainly during lunch time and the retention was quitesatisfactory. Although assessment was optional about 350 staff members optedfor it. The feedback from participates clearly indicates that staff members havebenefitted greatly from the courses. They felt that the course has not onlyempowered linguistically, but culturally also.Activity 6: Provision of Xhosa course for studentsThe Xhosa course for students was piloted in 2008 from March to May) in oneresidence (Graca Machel). The course was later extended to other two residences,namely, Kopano and Clarinus. A total of 10 courses have been offered and about213 students participated in these courses.Component 2: Multilingual glossariesDuring the period under review a number of activities were carried out toimplement the multilingual glossary project. This project is an innovation toprovide language support to students for whom English is not the first language.The first part of the project was focused on the construction of Special Language9
Corpora to be used for the compilation of multilingual concept glossaries. Thefollowing activities were carried out:2.1 Design of corporaIn the first year, the main focus of the project was on the design of the SpecialLanguage Corpora for Statistics and Maths, Law, Economics and Physics. Thecorpora were designed according to their purpose. A generic design wasdeveloped for the four corpora.2.2 The construction of Special Language CorporaFive Special Language Corpora were constructed during the period underreview:Statistics and MathsThe Statistics and Maths Corpus comprises the Students Handbook and thesesabstracts ofUCT students. The corpus has about 118 000 running.LawThe Law corpus is also made of Prescribed books, tutorial letters and thesesabstracts from texts from Private Law and Public Law. It also includes bookextracts and cases.EconomicsThe corpus for Economics was constructed using prescribe books and a reader ofEconomics 1. The corpus has about 84 000 running tokens which is a good sizecompared to the required size of 30 000 for this type of corpus.PhysicsThe data for the Physics corpus was collected from two texts books for anIntroductory Physics course. Theses abstracts were also added to the corpus. Amodule system has been used to construct the corpus. Although the size of thecorpus is small, it is above the threshold of 30 000.Health ScienceThe corpus for Health Sciences is also small as much of the focus was on thedevelopment of the CD ROM which the Faculty requested. This corpus isdifferent from the rest because it is a parallel corpus of English and Xhosa orEnglish and Afrikaans to cater for language needs of students learning the twolanguages as additional languages.2.3 Corpus encoding10
Multilingualism Education ProjectCentre for Higher Education Development, UCTOnly minimal encoding was done on each corpus. The corpora did not requireencoding since the analysis was done by using WordSmith Tools which identifiesterms on the basis of their statistical significance. However, the main the maintask was cleaning the texts as some of the features of texts were lost during textconversion from word or pdf to text files.2.4 Extraction of terms and concordancesThree term extraction tools were used to extract terms, namely, WordSmithTools, Multiconcord and Paraconcord. These tools have proven to be veryuseful. The tools were also useful in generating concordances of the key terms.2.5 Compilation of word listsAfter extracting terms from each corpus, the word lists were compiled. Theselection of terms was on the basis of their frequen
Component 2: Multilingual Glossaries and Machine-Translation The project involves the development of Special Language Corpora for Science (Statistics and Maths and Physics), Health Sciences and Law and the compilation of Multilingual Concept Glossaries for these disciplines to support students for whom
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