There are concerns that the South African higher education system is not producing sufficient graduates to meet national needs in respect of economic and social development. Systemic reform such as strengthening the undergraduate teaching and research relationship, which is inextricably tied to curriculum structure, is necessary to meet the goals of equity and development and enhancing graduate quality. This can potentially widen the pipeline into postgraduate studies and produce the next generation of academics. The main argument of this chapter is the need to profoundly change the manner in which teaching is structured in South Africa, in order to shift the prevailing culture of undergraduate students as receivers to one in which they are inquirers. This requires pedagogies that enable inquiry-led learning to be developed, to actively engage students in the research process and for them to make the linkage to their discipline-specific practice. An increased focus on building an undergraduate research culture through pedagogical reforms is still needed.

This chapter seeks to explore the potential of increasing epistemological access for university students of African languages through the translation of English academic texts. It uses charts and tables to illustrate the negative effects that the scarcity of academic texts written in African languages has on students’ academic performance. A scientific text based on periodontal examination was translated from English to isiXhosa. Thereafter, ten test questions based on this text were drawn up using Bloom’s Taxonomy model. These questions were made available in both English and isiXhosa and were distributed among twenty-five first-year students of an isiXhosa mother tongue course. In this group, thirteen students wrote the test in isiXhosa, while twelve of them wrote it in English. The test results were compared to investigate whether students obtain higher marks when taught and examined in their first language or in their additional language. Ultimately, the researcher tried to investigate whether or not there is a relationship between students’ academic performance and their language of teaching and learning (LoTL). Furthermore, the study investigated the significance of mother-tongue-based education for curriculum access.