Reinforcing IsiXhosa as a Medium of Instruction to Enhance English Second Language Acquisition: Decolonising Curriculum through Translanguaging

The conundrum of second language acquisition (ESA) persists to engulf the streams of education and ESA is at the forefront. Therefore, in a quest to fathom the nature of challenges and the varied strategies to address these challenges, it remains imperative to discern the core successes of isiXhosa as a medium of instruction in the context of achieving translanguaging for English subject matters. Amid this conundrum, the bone of contention is how translanguaging can mitigate the challenges of ESL to decolonise curriculum in the context of teaching first-year university students. Overly, decolonisation is premised on the ideology of social inquiries administered to reconstruct and deconstruct, imperial constructs that prejudiced and negated others. The empirical inquiry that seeks to correct the distortion and reframe the paradigms of social subjects to arrive at the justifiable conclusion is termed decolonisation. Therefore, the chapter relied on the auspices of participatory action research whereby structured interviews are employed to generate data and thematic analysis utilised to analyse data. Consequently, the mystery of these palliated challenges is raven from an emancipatory research lens where the principal researchers synthesise that isiXhosa as a medium of instruction promotes not only mastery of learning but also enhances the acquisition of ESL. In addition, results depict that the use of isiXhosa for translanguaging in the context of critical subjects earnestly harnesses ESL for conversational purposes. Concisely, the chapter recommends the use of isiXhosa for translanguaging as the primary source of ESL, which as a result, decolonises the curriculum.