Meet the Team
Professor Frenette Southwood
Acting Head of Department
Qualifications: PhD
[email protected]
+27 21 808 2010
Short biography:
Prof Southwood's teaching and research focus on child language acquisition, including the assessment and remediation of children who demonstrate language learning problems. She is co-director of the national Child Language Development Node funded by SADiLaR, of which the flagship project is the development of a language assessment tool for children acquiring any of South Africa's 11 spoken official languages. Prof Southwood obtained her PhD at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Prof Mawande Dlali
Associate Professor
Qualifications: PhD[email protected]
+27 21 808 2014
ResearchGate Profile
Curriculum Vitae
Prof Mawande Dlali is the Associate Professor and Head of Department of African languages at Stellenbosch University. He has vast experience of University teaching and research on African languages and Linguistics and has published high quality journal articles and chapters in books. His main interest is Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, political discourse and Interpersonal communication. He is also preoccupied with the description and documentation of highly endangered languages. His central concern is to investigate the circumstances and processes of language endangerment and marginalisation.
Prof Dlali holds a PhD degree from SU and is a member of several editorial boards and academic associations. He has also been involved in many national projects aimed at promoting national languages.
Dr Zameka Sijadu
Lecturer
Qualifications: PhD
[email protected]
+27 21 808 2200
ResearchGate Profile
Curriculum Vitae
Dr Sijadu’s areas of specialisation includes pragma-dialectical theory in political discourse, humour in socio-political discourse, multilingualism, translation, and appraisal theory. After completing her PhD in 2018 she has worked in several research projects including publishing an article in 2020, “Metaphors as strategic manoeuvring in isiXhosa traditional argumentative political discourse” in 2021. She has further co-authored a Covid-related article in 2022 Politics of Language in COVID-19: Multilingual Perspectives from South Africa, which investigates the political discourse of official COVID-19 addresses by South African national government ministers with a focus on language practices and linguistic choices. Her next research project is also a Covid-related book chapter on South Africa Laughs at Covid-19: A functional perspective on humour in social media, to be published in 2022. This study explores the functional dimensions of humour in response to governmental speeches on social media during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown in South Africa. Dr Sijadu has served as an external examiner in various South African Universities and has reviewed articles in accredited journals and book chapters. Dr Sijadu is currently serving as chair of Social Impact Committee for the Faculty of Arts Stellenbosch University.
Dr Sijadu is involved in teaching Communication and Discourse Analysis both at under-graduate and post-graduate honours and masters students.
Research awards:
- Building Capacity for Early Career Humanities Scholars (BECHS-Africa) 2022
- Intra-ACP TRECCAFRICA 11 (2019)
- Early Career Academic Development (ECAD) Programme (2017)
- Cetra Summer School in Belgium (2016)
Mr TA Simayile
Lecturer
Qualifications: MA Stellenbosch University
[email protected]
+27 21 3842
Thulani Simayile is a lecturer in the Department of African Languages. Thulani’s teaching areas include Basic Xhosa communication skills for first years’ non-isiXhosa language speakers, literature, and culture. His research interest is within the language learning and teaching, in particular genre-based pedagogy underpinning systemic functional linguistic (SFL). The main focus of his research is based on literacy and language teaching, reading and text-linguistic analysis, writing and genre analysis. He is currently working on his PhD, which explorers “Genre-based language teaching in Senior Phase isiXhosa Home Language to advance bilingual literacy across the curriculum.”
Mr L Ngamlana
Junior Lecturer
Qualifications: MA ( African Languages) (Stell.)
ngamlana@sun.ac.za
+27 21 808 9200
Curriculum Vitae
The teaching and research activities of Lukhanyo Ngamlana at the Department of African Languages, Stellenbosch University, reflect a strong interest in the relationship between theory and praxis within African linguistics and language pedagogy. Holding a BA in Law and a BA Honours in African Languages (Cum Laude), and nearing completion of an MA in African Languages, Lukhanyo lectures isiXhosa to non-mother-tongue speakers, focusing on the formal properties of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics.
Lukhanyo’s research centres on the development of a task-based syllabus for isiXhosa as a second language for legal scholars and practitioners. This work examines the design and sequencing of tasks in relation to cognitive and linguistic complexity, with a particular focus on the role of task-essential lexico-grammatical structures in syllabus construction and focus-on-form instruction. Through this lens, Lukhanyo’s work aims to bridge educational theory, psycholinguistic insights, and the practical demands of language learning for specific purposes—Isixhosa for legal scholars and practitioners.