Phumelele Ndlela
South Africa, Johannesburg.
Phumelele Ndlela is a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) for IsiZulu in the Program in African Languages (PAL) at the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida.
Phumelele is in the final stages of pursuing a Master’s in Education by dissertation from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa. Her research focuses on language use in multilingual classrooms and is conducted entirely in IsiZulu. It explores code-switching as a teaching strategy and investigates the gaps in language policy implementation. She also holds an Honors Degree in Education from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) under Language, Literacies, and Literature. Her undergraduate research explored the role of language within a poem ‘Sibuna Sibe Nje’ by C. Mkhwanazi. The poem is centered around employed diction that demeaned women and harbored patriarchal elements, negatively influencing learners’ perceptions and attitudes towards women. Her findings underscored the potential escalation of violence against women if such poems continued to be part of the curriculum for High school learners. Phumelele has extensive experience teaching Isizulu and English language. She has taught and mentored learners at middle, high school, and university with a strong passion for teaching and student engagement. Recently she served as a full-time lecturer at Rosebank College (South Africa) where she was responsible for teaching undergraduate English courses and academic literacy, developing curriculum, assessing student performance, and providing academic support. She was previously an Adjunct Instructor for IsiZulu Communicative Language module for education undergraduates and for Centre of Academia, a community-based educational program in the township of Tembisa, South Africa. This experience honed her ability to employ diverse approaches to reading and writing, enabling learners to contextualize and articulate their ideas effectively.
Venturing beyond the classroom, she was a Teaching Assistant for students from the University of Pennsylvania in America under the Fulbright Hays GPA program in 2023 and 2024. She facilitated language learning for students visiting South Africa and introduced South African history and the Zulu culture to a diverse audience. In addition to teaching, Phumelele has contributed to advancing multilingual technologies as an IsiZulu Language Translator and Validator for Vambo AI, a technology company specializing in developing multilingual AI tools for underrepresented languages. In this role, she ensured accuracy, cultural relevance, and adherence to project guidelines in isiZulu translation, reviewed and verified isiZulu language data, and offered feedback and corrections to improve translation quality. Phumelele’s commitment to isiZulu language development is reflected in her consistent academic performance. She earned First Class in her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS). Phumelele is also a member of the Golden Key International Honor Society, consistently ranking in the top 15% of academic achievers globally from 2019 through 2023. Phumelele received competitive funding from South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF) for both her Honors and Master’s degrees, underscoring her status as an emerging scholar in language education and research.
At the Center for African Studies and in collaboration with the Languages, Literatures and Cultures department at the University of Florida, Phumelele is working with Dr. John Muchira—the Coordinator of African Languages among other Faculty, Staff and Cultural ambassadors to promote African Languages within the university and beyond. Her primary goal is teaching and promoting isiZulu, the most widely spoken language in South Africa and an important part of the continent’s linguistic landscape and consequently expanding University of Florida’s distance learning initiative through the Shared Language Program. This initiative of the State University System of Florida (SUS) and Florida College System (FCS) enables students enrolled in any SUS and FCS institution to study an African language offered by any other SUS institution and pay home institution fees. Teaching IsiZulu is integral in strengthening UF Study Abroad program and less commonly taught languages considering collaborations with various partner universities such as cooperative agreement with Agricultural Sciences and Life Sciences, Engineering, and Liberal Arts and Sciences units at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa. Phumelele is passionate about outreach, and she is excited to support Program in African Languages visibility through a targeted partnership with student-led and student-focused organizations such as the African Students Union (ASU), Pazeni Sauti Choir, the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), UF Arts in Health etc. Her teaching will focus not only on developing students’ communicative abilities in isiZulu, but also on deepening their understanding of the cultural values, histories, and lived experiences that the language carries. She is committed to designing classes that make learning isiZulu accessible, interactive, and relevant to students’ academic and professional interests. In her role as a cultural ambassador, she hopes to create meaningful connections between South Africa and the University of
Florida community by sharing aspects of Zulu traditions, storytelling, music, and everyday life. Through classroom instruction, cultural programming, and informal engagement, she aims to foster cross-cultural dialogue, build appreciation for African languages and identities, and encourage students to see multilingualism as a resource for global citizenship. Her goal is to ensure that isiZulu is not only taught as a language but also experienced as a living culture that enriches shared academic and social spaces.
Phumelele embraces the call Hlangana Zulu!- A reminder to come together in acclaiming, preserving, and sharing isiZulu language and culture.