Language Curriculum Development in South Africa: What Place for English?

As in other parts of the world, language‐in‐education planning in South Africa is composed of two interrelated domains: decisions about languages taught as subjects and decisions about languages used as media of instruction (or languages of learning, as they have come to be known in South Africa). Alternative political ideologies and educational philosophies have clearly determined the nature of each of these decisions and their implementation—a point especially true of the South African situation. In this article we focus on the changing role and status of English within new language‐in‐education policies in South Africa. Because the implementation of new policies needs to be understood in the light of past policies and their effects, we briefly place current policy debates in their historical context. We then present a model that provides a descriptive framework for analyzing and evaluating decisions made relating to language‐in‐education planning. We discuss existing constraints on policy implementation in the South African context and conclude by identifying issues related to the process of language‐in‐education planning that we discovered through ongoing assessment of the planning process itself.