I am a research professor in the research entity UPSET that investigates the “Understanding and Processing of language in complex settings”. The entity is associated with the School of Languages in the Faculty of Humanities at the Vaal Triangle campus of the North-West University. I am the editor of the Journal for Language Teaching (2012 – 2015). You can also look at my work on my Google Scholar profile .

Academic associations: I am member of the following academic associations: • Linguistics Society of Southern Africa (LSSA) • South African Association for Language Teachers (SAALT) which I chaired in 2010-2014 • International Association of World Englishes (IAWE) and I served on the international programme committee in 2013 and 2014 • International Association of Pragmatics (IPrA)

INTERESTS: I study the nature of the multilingual repertoires of South African people with a view to understand how and why multilingual repertoires are maintained, expanded, or why languages are lost from multilingual repertoires. I also study the role of English in multilingual repertoires in education and in society.

Based on the understanding I gain from large scale questionnaire surveys of multilingual repertoires (supplemented by interviews), I offer explanations of language maintenance, loss and/or acquisition; and explanations that relate to the failure or success of language policies in the educational and public domains.

I try to use South African data about multilingual repertoires to answer global questions about language acquisition, maintenance and loss.

PUBLICATIONS:

Coetzee-Van Rooy, A. Susan. 2016. The language repertoire of a Venda home language speaker: Reflections on methodology,.Language Matters, 47:2, 269-296.

Van Rooy, Bertus & Coetzee-Van Rooy, Susan. 2015. The language issue and academic performance at a South African University. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 33(1): 31-46.

Coetzee-Van Rooy, A. Susan. 2014. A multilingual church leader for a multilingual world: A case study. In die Skriflig, 48(2) #1865