The Paradox of Teaching English as "Home Language" in South Africa : A Decolonial take

Abstract

The South African national curriculum mandates that all learners study at least one home language, selected from the country’s 11 official languages. The policy is intended to promote linguistic equity and affirm cultural identity in the post-apartheid era by supporting a language that learners speak regularly at home. However, in practice, some students opt to study English as their home language, even though it is not the primary language spoken in their homes. This creates a paradoxical situation where the label "home language" inaccurately represents their actual linguistic environment culminating in students being taught and assessed at a level intended for first-language speakers, despite having only limited proficiency in English. Therefore, in this paper I reflect on the pedagogical difficulties and successes that I have encountered as an educator for English Home language in Mthatha in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. This I do by employing a decolonial framework underpinned by decolonial love as decoloniality, and a living theory methodology with action-reflection cycles. One key finding is the difficulty of reconciling the demands of a standardised curriculum with the linguistic diversity of South African students. Ultimately, the paper advocates for a shift away from uncritically imposed Western models toward more adaptive, context-sensitive practices to improve educational outcomes in South Africa’s heterogeneous classrooms. The argument challenges the continued dominance of Eurocentric methodologies which were developed for monolingual Western contexts and often prove mismatched with South Africa's complex multilingual classrooms.