R1.3 million boost for multilingualism

Trish Gibbon (SANTED), Zamo Shongwe (SANTED), Tove Kvil (NORAD), Mbulungeni Madiba (MEP) Inger Stoll (Royal Norwegian Embassy) and Ziyanda Cele (SANTED) during a recent visit to UCT to celebrate a R1.3 million donation to the development of multilingualism at UCT.

UCT's Multilingualism Education Project (MEP) has received about R1.3 million in funding from the South Africa Norway Tertiary Education Development Programme (SANTED) to boost the development of multilingualism at UCT.

A delegation from SANTED, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) and the Norwegian Embassy visited UCT last week to toast the donation. The delegation included NORAD advisor Tove Kvil; SANTED programme director and Royal Norwegian Embassy Counsellor, Inger Stoll; and SANTED's Ziÿanda Cele, Zamo Shongwe and Trish Gibbon.

MEP will use the funding to establish a communication skills course for staff, as well as the development of language resources such as multilingual corpora and glossaries to support students whose first language is not English, says Associate Professor Mbulungeni Madiba, co-ordinator of the project.

One of the key objectives of the project is to promote the learning of isiXhosa, and a communication skills course has already been set up for staff.