Academic literature on the topic 'Swahili, Language Research, Kenya, University'

The subject of this research is the African paremiology. The object is the history of studying proverbs in the Swahili language. The author examines the chronology of studying this field of linguistics by Western European and African scholars, cites their major works, and describes the peculiarities of their scientific views. Special attention is given to the works of the founders of African paremiology, as well as the perspective of modern scholars of Tanzania and Kenya upon the scientific heritage of proverbs and sayings of the Swahili language. The article employs the theoretical research methods, namely the comparison of theoretical works in the Swahili and English languages. The analysis of a wide range of works in the Swahili language alongside the works of certain European authors, allows reconstructing the chronology of the process of studying Swahili paroemias, as well as highlighting most prominent African and European scholars in this field of linguistics. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that this topic is viewed in the domestic African Studies for the first time; foreign linguists also did not pay deliberate attention to this question. The author’s special contribution consists in translation of the previously inaccessible materials of the African and Western European into the Russian language, which helps the linguists-Africanists in their further research.

Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. By DEREK NURSE and THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH. Edited by THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH, with a special addendum by GERARD PHILIPPSON. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 121). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1993. Pp. xxxii+780. $80 (ISBN 0-520-09775-0).Shanga. The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of East Africa. By MARK HORTON. (Memoirs of the British Institute of East Africa, 14). London: The British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1996. Pp. xvi+458. £75 (ISBN 1-872-56609-x).Nurse's and Hinnebusch's Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History is the most comprehensive study yet done of Swahili history through linguistic analysis. It is an encyclopedic work representing many years of research by the authors and other scholars, and it focuses particularly on the emergence and evolution of the Swahili language. The massive and diverse evidence they marshal is, of course, almost entirely linguistic: as such they discuss four basal parameters of language relationship and change, namely lexis, morphology, phonology and tone. (The last two are treated together, and G. Philippson reviews the latter.)

In January 2001, a team of researchers from the University of Ulster (Northern Ireland) conducted an innovative maritime archaeology project on the East African coast in partnership with the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the National Museums of Kenya. Its focus was Mombasa Island on the southern Kenyan coast, a historical settlement and port for nearly 2000 years (Berg 1968; Sassoon 1980; 1982). The East African seaboard, stretching from Somalia in the north to Madagascar and Mozambique in the south, was culturally dynamic throughout the historical period. This area, traditionally known as the Swahili coast, is culturally defined as a maritime zone extending 2000 km from north to south, but reaching a mere 15 hi inland. The origins of ‘Swahili’ cultural identity originated during the middle of the 1st millennium AD, following consolidation of earlier farming and metalusing Bantu-speaking communities along the coast and emergence of a distinctive ‘maritime’ orientation and set of cultural traditions (eg Allen 1993; Chami 1998; Helm 2000; Horton & Middelton 2000). Previous research produced evidence of exploitation of marine resources for food and an early engagement in longdistance exchange networks, linking parts ofthis coast with the Classical world by at least the BC/AD transition.

Youth ‘languages’ are an important topic of research in the domain of linguistic change through language contact because the change is rapid and observable and also because the social dimension of change is inevitably present. Engsh, as a youth language in Kenya expresses not only modernity and Kenyan identity but also, the status of being educated, and it differs in this respect from Sheng, the dominant Kenyan youth language. The element of Engsh that expresses this aspect most directly is the use of a grammatical system from English whereas Sheng uses Swahili. In lexicon, Engsh draws upon Sheng and urban English slang. This is a first extensive description of Engsh. The social function of Engsh is interesting in that class is expressed in it, which is not often reported in African urban youth codes. Also the fact that Engsh is a non-exclusive register, which expands through its use in (social) media and most of all in computer mediated communication.

 There is scant research-based evidence on the development and adoption of open access (OA) and institutional repositories (IRs) in Africa, and in Kenya in particular. This article reports on a study that attempted to fill that gap and provide feedback on the various OA projects and advocacy work currently underway in universities and research institutions in Kenya and in other developing countries. The article presents the findings of a descriptive study that set out to evaluate the current state of IRs in Kenya. Webometric approaches and interviews with IR managers were used to collect the data for the study. The findings showed that Kenya has made some progress in adopting OA with a total of 12 IRs currently listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and five mandatory self-archiving policies listed in the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP). Most of the IRs are owned by universities where theses and dissertations constitute the majority of the content type followed by journal articles. The results on the usage and impact of materials deposited in Kenyan IRs indicated that the most viewed publications in the repositories also received citations in Google Scholar, thereby signifying their impact and importance. The results also showed that there was a considerable interest in Swahili language publications among users of the repositories in Kenya.

To understand this book, a little background information helps. I first encountered Ali Mazrui in 1968–70 when I was the first lecturer in linguistics at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; Mazrui, a member of the political science faculty, was already a famous orator, acknowledged by all as possessing “a golden tongue.” Since then, he has gone on to become probably the most famous African studies professor in the United States; he was the presenter of the nine-part BBC/PBS television series The Africans: A triple heritage, and he is the author of many books and articles on Africa. He has taught at many universities around the world, and is now director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His junior co-author (a relative?), Alamin M. Mazrui, was trained as a linguist and is an associate professor of Black studies at Ohio State University. Both are native speakers of Swahili from Mombasa, Kenya (they prefer to refer to the language as Kiswahili, with its noun class prefix, as it would be if one were speaking the language itself). Kiswahili, of course, is probably the best-known African language; many people in East Africa and other areas (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo) speak it as a second language. Furthermore, it is one of the few indigenous languages with official status in an African nation; it is the official language of Tanzania, and the co-official language in Kenya along with English. However, Kiswahili is spoken natively mainly along the East African coastline and on the offshore islands (e.g. Zanzibar), often by persons with a dual Arabic-African heritage similar to that of the Mazruis.

Code-switching (cs) is a common occurrence in spoken language among bilingual and multilingual language speakers. This makes its use a customary practice in Computer Mediated Communication (cmc) genres as used by such speakers. This study examines instances of Code-switching in the Computer Mediated Communication data collected in order to find out whether code-switching in cmc is equivalent to code-switching in spoken language in terms of spontaneity, motivation and discourse functions. The study is based on previous studies in code-switching, for example, Gumperz (1982), and Myers-Scotton (1992). These studies point to the fact that code-switching in spoken language can be “conscious and deliberate” when it is motivated by various factors. The examined cmc data is derived from Kenyan University students and is in form of messages from various cmc genres including sms text messages, e-mail, Instant Messages and Social Network Sites such as Facebook and YouTube. The languages in focus are Swahili, English and vernacular languages which are spoken in Kenya. The findings suggest that although code-switching in cmc is to some extent similar to spoken code-switching in terms of language manifestation and deliberateness, its discourse functions reveal features that are specific to cmc contexts. The study concludes that code-switching in cmc should be viewed and treated as a unique and distinct entity from spoken-code-switching in order to capture its inherent attributes.

The application of an appropriate teaching methodology plays an important role in the acquisition of language skills. Soft skills such as oral and listening skills are all important for young adults who are about to enter the working world. However, soft skills are not well captured in the curriculum at the university level. Thus, employing Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) may hinder learners from noticing these important skills that are useful in real life. This study aims to demonstrate that the combination of TBLT and web-based language learning enhances student’s ability to acquire soft skills that are paramount in their real life. The following hypothesis guided the study: soft skills are enhanced through the use of a combination of task-based language teaching and web-based language learning. The experimental research design was used for the current study where a pre-test/post-test methodology was utilized. The target population for the current study was 300 third-year students studying English as a second language. Therefore, thirty students formed a sample size of the current study and were subjects of the experiment during one semester. The experiment consisted of exposing two groups fifteen each, randomly sampled, to a set of activities but using different methods, one of which was Computer Assisted Language Learning. Participant observation method was also used and was deemed important for the interpretation of the quantitative data. Data were analysed quantitatively. Thus, the results of the current study were derived from statistical analysis. The mean in the performance of the control group and the experimental group was significantly different. The findings of the study show that when learners are exposed to the web and visual aids, they become actively involved in the process of learning unlike in an aural environment. The study recommends the use of Computer Assisted Language Learning as a method of motivating and enhancing student’s development of soft skills. The application of an appropriate teaching methodology plays an important role in the acquisition of language skills. Soft skills such as oral and listening skills are all important for young adults who are about to enter the working world. However, soft skills are not well captured in the curriculum at the university level. Thus, employing Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) may hinder learners from noticing these important skills that are useful in real life. This study aims to demonstrate that the combination of TBLT and web-based language learning enhances student’s ability to acquire soft skills that are paramount in their real life. The following hypothesis guided the study: soft skills are enhanced through the use of a combination of task-based language teaching and web-based language learning. The experimental research design was used for the current study where a pre-test/post-test methodology was utilized. The target population for the current study was 300 third-year students studying English as a second language. Therefore, thirty students formed a sample size of the current study and were subjects of the experiment during one semester. The experiment consisted of exposing two groups fifteen each, randomly sampled, to a set of activities but using different methods, one of which was Computer Assisted Language Learning. Participant observation method was also used and was deemed important for the interpretation of the quantitative data. Data were analysed quantitatively. Thus, the results of the current study were derived from statistical analysis. The mean in the performance of the control group and the experimental group was significantly different. The findings of the study show that when learners are exposed to the web and visual aids, they become actively involved in the process of learning unlike in an aural environment. The study recommends the use of Computer Assisted Language Learning as a method of motivating and enhancing student’s development of soft skills.

I Have Taught Literature at the University Of Nairobi Since 2009. Previously, I Taught at Masinde Muliro University and at Moi University. From my experience at the three universities, I can trace, in hindsight, two dominant influences on my knowledge of literature and expectations of how it ought to be conceived and taught. First is my graduate training at Moi University, in Kenya, and at the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa, where I was encouraged to see literature as a broad discipline that speaks to others in the humanities and in the social and natural sciences in terms of concerns, research methodology, and, especially, analytic tools. The second influence is the academic composition and orientation of the literature departments, as shaped by the politics of development. In the face of two competing forces—on the one hand, the Kenyan government and its preoccupation with development as an ideal and a pretext for de-emphasizing the teaching of some humanities disciplines and, on the other, the neoliberal political economy that gave rise to nongovernmental organizations' setting the scholarship research agenda in Kenya—literary academics seemed to be torn three ways: using the discipline and their knowledge of it to position themselves for government appointments, pursuing nongovernmental-organizations-funded research, or continuing to teach literature in the ways that they know. Those who chose the third option were also equipped with an institutional memory of the discipline as they were taught, the department, and its practices. Because, of these three groups, I have interacted the most with members of the third, my reflections here focus on them exclusively.

Unsupervised statistical analysis of unstructured data has gained wide acceptance especially in natural language processing and text mining domains. Topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation is one such statistical tool that has been successfully applied to synthesize collections of legal, biomedical documents and journalistic topics. We applied a novel two-stage topic modelling approach and illustrated the methodology with data from a collection of published abstracts from the University of Nairobi, Kenya. In the first stage, topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation was applied to derive the per-document topic probabilities. To more succinctly present the topics, in the second stage, hierarchical clustering with Hellinger distance was applied to derive the final clusters of topics. The analysis showed that dominant research themes in the university include: HIV and malaria research, research on agricultural and veterinary services as well as cross-cutting themes in humanities and social sciences. Further, the use of hierarchical clustering in the second stage reduces the discovered latent topics to clusters of homogeneous topics.

The Department of Linguistics and African Languages, in which Kiswahili is a central subject, was established in the Faculty of Arts at the University College of Nairobi in 1969. Since then, at least five more departments which are devoted to the teaching and study of the Kiswahili language and literature have been established in various Kenyan universities (see below). Most of these departments run post-graduate programmes leading to MA. and PhD - degrees. As a result, considerable research activity related to both the Kiswahili language and literature has been going on. This is evident from the dissertations that have been written and that continue to be written every year.

Makala hii inachunguza hali ya somo la isimu ya lugha linalofundishwa katika nyingi ya idara za Kiswahili vyuoni vikuu nchini Kenya. Inaangazia matatizo yanayotinga kufana kwa somo hili. Inahitimiza kwa kupendekeza kwamba iwapo matokeo mazuri yatapatikana na wanafunzi wa somo hili, yafaa matatizo yanayokwamiza somo hili yatatuliwe, hasa kwa upande wa usawazishaji wa istilahi, tafsiri, uzito wa kozi na mengineyo. Makala hii inapendekeza kuwa ni muhimu kila chuo kikuu kiunde kamati ya kuchunguza jambo hili.

Utafiti wa lugha ya Kiswahili katika Urusi ulianza mwishoni mwa karne ya 18. Lakini utafiti hasa wa lugha za Kiafrika katika Urusi ulihusu ukoo wa Kisemetiki. Lakini uchunguzi kamili wa lugha za Kiafrika hasa lugha hai ulianza katika Urusi baada ya Mapinduzi ya Oktoba yatokee. Na lugha ya kwanza ya Afrika ya kitropiki iliyofundishwa katika Urusi ya kisoviet ilikuwa ni lugha ya Kiswahili.

This chapter examines practical issues regarding Virtual Exchanges (VEs) for educational purposes in the university context and covers language use, cultural differences, time management, teacher collaboration, technology-related issues, assessment, and context specific factors. It charts the establishment of three academic collaborations between a university in Kyoto, Japan, and institutions in Asia, Africa, and Europe. The first collaboration follows a new hybrid model created at the Japanese university described here. In the Teaching Online Together (TOT) model, teachers in the Philippines interact with students in a tutorial style system to improve the students’ English presentation skills via video conferencing. The second project, with a university in Kenya, is modelled on the intercultural telecollaboration or Cultura-type exchange approach (O’Dowd, 2018). Students from the respective institutions work together asynchronously to complete tasks related to the development of intercultural understanding and sensitivity. The third collaboration, with a university in Belgium, follows a shared syllabus approach (O’Dowd, 2018) in which teachers create course materials for students who then work together both synchronously and asynchronously to achieve their goals.