Inclusive instructional communication in higher education: A comparative policy analysis of South Africa and Malawi.
Ben De Souza
PMID 42549705WHAT IT FOUND
South African and Malawian higher education policies promise inclusion but never say how a lecture, assessment, or online course should be adapted for a student who is deaf, uses AAC, or has a language disorder.
The gap is in the policy, not in the student.
Key findings
01Both countries' higher education policies express broad commitments to equity, disability inclusion, and ICT access, but neither translates these into specific requirements for how teaching, learning, and assessment communication should be adapted for students with hearing, speech, language, or cognitive-communication disorders.
02Malawi's 2024 Persons with Disabilities Act provides the strongest communication-specific legal language in either country, explicitly defining accessible communication to include sign language, braille, accessible multimedia, and augmentative or alternative modes, but does not specify how these rights should be implemented in higher education teaching and learning.
03Neither country's policies define what lecturers should be able to do to make instruction communication-accessible; the competencies the authors identify as missing include clear speech, visual supports, captioned content, communication-flexible assessment, sign language coordination, AAC awareness, and referral pathways to communication support services.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 10 policy documents were analysed (five per country), selected purposively for richness rather than to represent the full policy landscape. The authors state the sample was not intended to represent all higher education policies in both countries. The study analysed national policy texts only. It did not examine what individual universities actually do, what lecturers do in their classrooms, or what students with communication disorders experience day to day. The authors call the findings 'indicative policy insights' for this reason. This is a document analysis, not a study of outcomes. It identifies what is and is not written in policy; it does not test whether any specific accommodation (captioning, sign language, AAC) improves a student's participation or learning. All documents were written in English. The analysis does not examine how policies are implemented in other official languages or how language of instruction interacts with communication disability at the classroom level.
Declared interests
The authors declare that the research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. No conflicts of interest are reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the absence of captioning, sign language, or AAC in these policies as evidence that those supports are needed or effective for your students. This is a document analysis: it tells you what is and is not written in ten policy texts. It does not measure whether a student's participation improved when a caption was added, whether a sign language interpreter changed a lecture outcome, or whether an AAC-compatible platform made a difference. The finding is a policy gap, not a treatment effect, and it cannot be used to justify or reject a specific clinical intervention.