This project investigates the nature and extent of educational inequalities or injustices that manifest in academic language testing evaluation regimes. The focus is on Fiji, a multilingual, multicultural country situated in the South Pacific. The major languages spoken in the country are Fijian (iTaukei), English, and Fiji Hindi. Other languages spoken in the community include Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Due to the colonial history of Fiji, English has emerged as the main lingua franca among the various ethnolinguistic groups in the country. English is also the sole medium of instruction at all three universities in the country. The dominance of English in the context of tertiary education results in a sociocultural problem when students enter universities in Fiji from a variety of high school backgrounds. Some come from urban or semi-urban high schools, while others come from rural high schools, which are located in the interior of the country and on smaller islands. Depending on the school, students may acquire different levels of English proficiency, which may leave them ill-equipped for university study. This situation directly draws attention to educational inequalities that students face at the tertiary level due to the variable levels of English language skills provided to them at the primary and secondary levels.

Drawing on the review of the relevant literature and ethnographic research, this study uses grounded theory methodologies to gain insight into the underlying educational inequalities and injustices emanating from lack of epistemic access for those university students with inadequate English language skills. To this end, the study analyses the level of difference in writing abilities at the beginning and end of the first-year of study. The findings and conclusions from this study hold key insights for informing ongoing efforts towards ameliorating educational inequalities in Fiji. The study was conducted at a university in Fiji. The first-year enrolment number was 400 students. One hundred and twenty students (30% of the student cohort) were sampled at the beginning of the first year and at the end of their first year of university program. The same cohort of 120 students was tracked throughout the project, out of which 30 students were interviewed at the end of the first year to assess the writing interventions and to gauge the nature and extent of educational inequalities faced by the participants. The interviews were analysed using grounded theory methodology to generate themes from raw data.

The study uses the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to evaluate student writing skills. The CEFR is one of the most comprehensive frameworks for language evaluation prevalent today, and has been widely used by language testing organisations in Western countries. However, since its introduction in Europe in 2001, the CEFR has so far not been applied to the unique sociolinguistic context of the South Pacific. This study is the first to do so, and gauges the framework's relevance and usefulness in a non-European multilingual context.

The outcomes of this research make significant contributions in informing policy discourse on reversing educational inequalities at the tertiary level. Firstly, it reaffirms the CEFR's capability in successfully gauging students' preparedness for English-language university study and work life. Secondly, it attests to the CEFR's suitability for use in the intensely multilingual (or plurilingual) South Pacific context. Most importantly, the study identifies four specific indicators of educational inequalities that Fijian students in higher education encounter from primary school through to high school and university that hinder the development of adequate academic English language skills. These include: (i) lack of teaching and learning resources, (ii) language barriers, (iii) problems with the medium of instruction, and (iv) shortage of experienced teachers. Although these indicators of educational inequalities are reported in comparable studies from other parts of the world, they are significant findings for this study, not least because the South Pacific is a geographical locale where individual nation-states such as Fiji consist of several islands with unique socio-cultural formations and complex linguistic landscapes.

The methodological contributions and the unique data set of the study will advance scholarly and social policy conversations on this topic. Through analysing the rich narrative stories of research participants and qualitative data, the study makes an original contribution to the body of knowledge on how grounded theory research methodologies can be applied to a longitudinal language testing research context. At present, language testing in higher education relies on data from conventional formative and normative assessments. Approaches such as grounded theory and longitudinal research design have rarely been used in intensely multilingual contexts such as the South Pacific. The findings of this study hold promise in informing higher education policies for improving support systems to enhance the smooth transition of multilingual students from high school through to university and into the workforce.

The universalizing posture of claims made by colonial approaches and their regimes of representation continues to inform most mainstream sociolinguistics research agendas and project designs. Such claims reflect an imperial scientific tradition that overlooks and marginalizes other ways of knowing, particularly those from communities of the global South. Decolonizing sociolinguistics entails doing at least three things. First, we must decolonize ourselves through critical reflection on our own practices and how such practices contribute to the continuation of inequalities in knowledge production and in society. Second is the need to develop new narratives, new words, new grammars, and new vocabularies for eliciting empirical data to support the suppositions and arguments we advance in our anti-conventional and anti-colonial theoretical approaches to language and society research. Such alternative trajectories require a decentering of the dominant (colonial/imperial) voice and an increase in other voices speaking from other equally valid approaches that are currently being overlooked. Third, decolonizing sociolinguistics entails developing new models that draw on a rich collection of thought from a broad spectrum of traditions of knowing. This is about promoting convivial scholarship through mobilizing diverse resources to advance collaborative engagements that link our academic pursuits to public interests, including the interests of marginalized, minority, and global Indigenous communities. Convivial scholarship says the paths we follow in doing sociolinguistics research must be those that are committed to re-membering and rehumanizing Indigenous and other Southern peoples subjected to more than 500 years of coloniality. Decolonizing sociolinguistics must, therefore, mean freeing the field from the colonial tradition of knowing by bringing back to the center historically marginalized Indigenous and Southern knowledge systems. The premise is that a sociolinguistics that works for all must open pathways and avenues for epistemic access and cognitive justice through valuing diverse founts of knowledges as key contours.

The quite contemporary epistemological postures that are critical of the dominance of Euro-modernist knowledge traditions are sometimes guilty of inadvertently perpetuating the very same hegemonies they seek to unsettle. For this reason, the intervention by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa is timely and relevant. In re-assessing the "common sense" assumptions that belie the concept of "raciolinguistics," Flores and Rosa remind us of the need to pitch our conversations with boldness, conceptual clarity, and conviction to avoid essentialisms that tend to hide and reveal—in equal measure—the co-naturalization of language and race and the concomitant discourses they invoke. This short commentary engages their reflections.

The human and social science communities have over a long time committed themselves to the pursuit of an ever-growing list of new conceptual frameworks, but often only to rob such theories of profundity in the end. Such habits and practices reduce into 'slogan' ideas that otherwise hold the promise for robust interrogation of how we came to be where we are. In this article, I extend scholarly conversations in cultural discourse studies (CDS) that trouble and unsettle Westcentrism as a global discursive practice that overlooks and eclipses non-Western intellectual legacies. In contributing to the project of CDS, I discuss four key points that draw attention to a deeper understanding of the history, genealogy, contours and foundational goals of decolonising in the search for strategies we can use to redeem the field from the pitfalls of 'sloganisation'. I invite all of us to engage in reflexive thought-work about how best to advance decolonising in ways that are committed to the pursuit of the anti-colonial and counter-hegemonic agendas advanced in CDS scholarship. I posit that decolonising is not a universal concept that can be expressed in terms of a universal academic language because there are various loci of enunciation from which to do decolonisation in praxis.

From the 1940s to the mid-1950s, South African intellectual and political activist, Jacob Mfaniselwa Nhlapo, championed the forging of African political unity through harmonising writing systems for mutually related African language varieties. Owing to his diverse intellectual, professional and political background – a scholar, lawyer, journalist, and political activist – Nhlapo proposed harmonisation not as a purely linguistic enterprise, but as a project centred on the political economy of language. The motivation was to push back the frontiers of colonially imposed fragmentation of African identities through leveraging African language diversity for the political goals of uniting and empowering African people. The fragmentation of African people along ethnic and linguistic lines that prompted Nhlapo's ideas remains to this day, which means the political imperatives of harmonisation are still relevant now, probably more than ever before. In this article, I revisit the harmonisation proposal to explore those spheres of possibility and promise that it holds for mapping pan-African identities and literacies that transcend current inward-looking, nativist and nation-state-centric conceptions of being and becoming African. What promises do common writing systems for mutually related varieties of African languages hold for enhancing pan-African literacies, education and cross-cultural understanding both in and out of school contexts? To support the arguments advanced in this article, I draw on examples of Nguni languages and the Shona group of languages, with some passing remarks on the Sotho/Tswana group of languages.