The persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns resulted in increased contact and interaction between parents and children at home as governments encouraged a work-from-home approach, with schools opting for online and remote teaching. Without sufficient infrastructure to support online learning in Zimbabwe, alternative teaching methods were adopted. For Zimbabwe, the pandemic could not have hit at a worse time. It found the country afflicted by socioeconomic and political challenges, driving the cost of online learning beyond the reach of many. Most schools opted for the affordable social messaging platform, WhatsApp, where children's school work was shared with parents, who in turn administered it to their children at home. This meant that parents had to assume the role of teachers in this new setting, positioning them as authorities in various subjects. This blurred the binaries of home/school as parents participated in children's schooling more formally. For minoritised language families, these lessons presented opportunities for parents to reinforce Family Language Policy (FLP) and authoritatively influence children's language practices. By focusing on the role of parents as teachers during heritage language lessons, this paper discusses how parents' language ideologies are embedded into the teaching and learning of Ndebele in a family living in an urban area in Zimbabwe and how language transactions and negotiations in these encounters are infused with FLP dynamics. Ndebele is a historically minoritised and marginalised language in Zimbabwe.
Interactions between parents and children during heritage language lessons and other literacy activities are part of FLP since 'these dialogues illuminate what language inputs parents provide, how the quality and quantity of inputs enrich the linguistic environment in which children develop bi/multiliterate skills' (Curdt-Christiansen, 2013:102). Drawing on this view of FLP, I discuss how the focal family's language transactions during lessons reproduce the tensions, negotiations, resistance and agency which characterise their FLP. The study also shows how children negotiate agency by deploying resistance strategies, sometimes resulting in parents' revision and negotiation of their FLP. Given the history of minoritisation of Ndebele in official spaces in Zimbabwe (Ncube and Siziba, 2017; Ndhlovu, 2008), the family is key to its survival. Ndebele language lessons provided a temporary redress to the problem of Ndebele being taught through the lenses of non-first language Ndebele teachers in Bulawayo and other parts of Matabeleland. This problem has resulted in frequent and often emotionally charged outcries. The school closures presented opportunities for the teaching of Ndebele by parents through a 'Ndebele lens' at home, legitimising its use in an English-Shona dominant context.
Curdt-Christiansen, X. L. (2013a) Negotiating family language policy: Doing homework. In M. Schwartz and A. Verschik (eds.) Successful Family Language Policy 277–295. Dordrecht: Springer.
Ncube, G. and Siziba, G. (2017) Compelled to perform in the 'oppressor's' language? Ndebele performing artists and Zimbabwe's Shona-centric habitus. Journal of Southern African Studies 43(4): 825–836.
Ndhlovu, F. (2008). The conundrums of language policy and politics in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Australian Journal of Linguistics 28(1): 59–80
