Teaching English Today

Welcome to the Summer 2012 Edition of TET

Welcome to the 2012 summer editon of Teaching English Today     We trust that you will find the articles that follow interesting, challenging and useful. Please feel free to respond to / add to / challenge any of the views expressed in the articles. And please do send us your contribution for the next [...]

Teaching English punctuation

Teaching English Punctuation   Sue McIntosh   Some of you can identify with the interesting challenge of teaching the intricacies of the English language to a large class of varying home languages. Teaching some of these language concepts piecemeal, as presented in the textbooks, provides our learners with one or two concepts out of a [...]

The very model of an amateur grammarian

The very model of an amateur grammarian (With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan)   I am the very model of an amateur grammarian I have a little knowledge and I am authoritarian But I make no apology for being doctrinarian We must not plummet to the verbal depths of the barbarian I’d sooner break my heart [...]

Ill-disciplined teachers: The training of English teachers

Ill-discipline teachers Or Where ignorance is not bliss   Malcolm Venter   I have for many years been concerned about the inadequate training of language teachers – or more particularly English language teachers, which is my field of interest. This has struck me again forcefully in the past two or three years for a number [...]

Improving writing skills

Improving writing skills   Jeffrey Solomon   I teach English Home Language to Grade 12 learners in a high school in the southern part of KZN. Their mother tongue is either Afrikaans or IsiXhosa, so their knowledge of English is often rudimentary at best. However, they have reached grade 12 and, as such, need to [...]

Revisiting feedback to learner writing

Revisiting feedback to learner writing Bulara Monyaki   In this article, Bulara provides an outline of different strategies to be found in the literature about providing feedback to learners on their writing. We suggest that teachers / subject departments scan it and extract useful tips for their own practice.   One of the major points [...]

Stagefright: Teaching Shakespeare as drama

Stagefright: Teaching Shakespeare as drama   Hennie van der Mescht   This article is based on the Shakespeare Soceity Birth Lecture which Prof van der Mescht delivered in Grahamstown on 20 April 2011. Who would have thought that one of the performance criteria for becoming a teacher of English literature was a head for heights? [...]

‘On the move’ – a discussion of Thom Gunn’s poem

‘On the move’ – a discussion of Thom Gunn’s poem        Quentin Hogge The Sexual Revolution, Flower Power, long hair, Zapata moustaches, flared jeans, Led Zepellin, LSD – terms evocative of a     by-gone era. For one who was a teenager during the heady excitement of the 60s, with the atmosphere of personal liberation and [...]

It’s what you learn!

It’s what you learn!   AghoghoAkpome   One of the reasons why some learners in South Africa struggle to achieve sufficient proficiency in English today may have nothing to do with the commonly debated issues invariably connected to historical disadvantage. I want to suggest here that the low proficiency in English (and academic literacy in [...]

South Africa’s Education Crisis: A review

South Africa’s Education Crisis: Views from the Eastern Cape, NISC,2012   Edited by Laurence Wright   Reviewed by Peter Titlestad   This is a book for all interested in teaching English and for all those more generally interested in education in South Africa. The sub-title indicates focus on the Eastern Cape, but there is nothing [...]

Children’s literature

Elwyn Jenkins. Seedlings: English Children’s Reading and Writers in South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1-86888-652-4 seedlings cover Elwyn Jenkins’s previous books about South African children’s literature in English have established him as an authority in the field. In Seedlings his entertaining discussions of familiar and obscure books, and adult and child writers, recapture [...]

Grade 12 Exam paper

GRADE 12 EXAMINATION PAPER   The following examination paper was supplied by Colleen Callahan of ST JOSEPH’S MARIST COLLEGE SENIOR SCHOOL In order to download the paper, the addendum and the memo, you will need to click on the links. You will need a PDF reader for this.     12 English January   12 [...]

Welcome to the the winter 2012 edition of TEACHING ENGLISH TODAY

We trust that you will find the articles that follow interesting, challenging and useful.

From the Editor

When I was in Standard 4 (the equivalent of Grade 6) at Muir College in Uitenahge, we had a new English teacher arrive in May. He was actually high-school trained, and set us a stinker of an exam paper..

‘Teach the books, touch the heart’

C. S. Lewis said, ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’ Lewis was absolutely not thinking about literacy in South Africa when he uttered that much-quoted line, but I have still found it comfortin

The status of English in a multilingual South Africa

This paper analyses language politics in South Africa in an attempt to understand what is happening in multilingual classrooms.

Two Yeats poems

The Wild Swans at Coole

It will perhaps be difficult for children to appreciate this poem fully. It shares the general sorrow that the most beautiful things cannot be kept; but most of all it expresses a personal sorrow at the poet’s loss of youth.

Dictionaries up for grabs!

In the last issue of TET, we included the following announcement: LONGMAN HAVE DONATED 10 DICTIONARIES TO READERS WHO SEND AN EMAIL TO THE EDITOR (DR MALCOLM VENTER, drv@worldonline.co.za) GIVING, IN NO MORE THAN 50 WORDS, A TIP ON HOW TO USE DICTIONARIES IN THE CLASSROOM.

Arthur Miller’s THE CRUCIBLE

I’ve decided to focus on three aspects of this play:
Why did Miller write The Crucible – the circumstances and reasons?
Three of the main themes in The Crucible.
Three of the main characters in The Crucible