Archive | June, 2010
For some years now, the English Academy of Southern Africa has been mooting the idea of producing a magazine for English teachers. The older teachers might recall a publication entitled CRUX, which English teachers valued greatly. Since its demise, there has been nothing to replace it. So, at last, the Academy has launched this publication to fill the gap. This was made possible through a generous donation from the Donaldson Trust.
I don’t believe that it is just bias on my part which makes me believe that the most hard-driven teachers in our schools are our language teachers. From one point of view, they are better off because they have always had a huge marking load and were therefore not fazed, as other teachers were, by having to do Continuous Assessment (CASS); but the demands of the new curriculum have taken this to new heights.
I’d like you to imagine the following: A businessperson or teacher or journalist is required to write a report or prepare a lesson. She will be given one hour to do this task, with no access to shared ideas, dictionaries or the internet, and not even Microsoft and Bill Gates. She will not have time to do the work in rough, certainly no time to edit, and scarcely even time to do adequate proofreading. Oh, and by the way, she will be writing this during the graveyard session from 2 – 3 pm after doing a similar, though longer, exercise in the morning. That is what we are demanding of our young learners since the curriculum experts, in their wisdom, reinstated the writing paper as part of the FET exam process
11 April 2010 saw the formation of a professional association of English teachers in the Eastern Cape. The Association, which has been two years in the planning, was launched at the ‘Networking’ conference hosted by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa (ISEA) at Rhodes University (9-11 April). This article sets out to explore the need for such an association, and to consider the possible benefits it holds for members, for education management structures in the province and, indeed, for the nation. If the Eastern Cape has taken a lead in this regard, it may be worth teachers in other provinces considering the educational gains such organizations might offer in the struggle to improve the quality of education offered to our learners.
Through the use of examples of classroom discourse from three different classrooms in rural Eastern Cape schools, this paper highlights the difference between a teacher who uses students’ talk as an ‘instructional resource’ and two teachers who dominate the classroom discourse by themselves for the most part of the instructional time.
Madeyandile Mbelani Madeyandile Mbelani is a research officer and PhD candidate in the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. His MEd dissertation is an action research case study on ‘Making visual literacy meaningful in a rural context’. (m.mbelani@ru.ac.za) This paper reports outcomes from a workshop on cartoons that took place [...]
Many years ago I decided something had to be done about the scrappy, incomplete and useless literature notebooks belonging to my weaker pupils. Every year it was the same story. The year would start off well: logical, legible notes would be written in the first two, or maybe three, pages but gradually, as books were left at home or someone was absent or the day was hot and I was boring, the notes descended into chaos. And yet these pupils were not trying to be difficult. What to do? After much reading and thinking I decided that I had to spend more time with the pupils formatting these books.
Many years ago I decided something had to be done about the scrappy, incomplete and useless literature notebooks belonging to my weaker pupils. Every year it was the same story. The year would start off well: logical, legible notes would be written in the first two, or maybe three, pages but gradually, as books were left at home or someone was absent or the day was hot and I was boring, the notes descended into chaos. And yet these pupils were not trying to be difficult. What to do? After much reading and thinking I decided that I had to spend more time with the pupils formatting these books.
How may the study of Shakespearean play be undertaken in the time available in a First-Language classroom?
‘Motivate,’ meaning ‘to give reasons for’ is a South Africanism that is, perhaps, a little too well established. It comes from the Afrikaans ‘om te motiveer’. In the rest of the English-speaking world, ‘to motivate’ is to impart a sense of enthusiasm or a desire to get things done. South Africans should be aware that local usage could cause confusion elsewhere.
The question of mother-tongue education in South Africa remains a vexed one. On the one hand, it seems reasonable and desirable that learners should be able to receive education in their mother tongue, if they so wish. On the other hand, there are some very real difficulties involved in the implementation of this ideal. The purpose of this paper is to clarify what these difficulties are, and then to suggest what needs to be done to overcome them.
This year I have had the pleasure, as a retired English teacher and high school principal, of lecturing to the PGCE students at Stellenbosch University who are training to become English teachers. I set them an assignment entitled, ‘English in South Africa – a double-edged sword’. I was impressed by many of the assignments.
According to the 2001 Census (Statistics South Africa, 2001:5), English is the home language of only 8,2% of South Africans. In a diverse country with 11 official languages, English acts as an important lingua franca in commerce both within the country as well as in international contacts. It follows that a solid knowledge of English opens definite social and economic doors for South African learners. Having one’s education in English will definitely give a learner ample time to become fluent in English. But is it really to the child’s advantage in the longer term?
The Constitution recognizes a total of eleven official languages, all of which must ‘enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated equitably’ (SA Constitution, subsection 6, no. 4). This constitutional assertion often generates the impression that all official languages in South Africa also enjoy equal usage. Although this might be the case if ‘usage’ includes situations where languages are used as informal or private forms of communication, the reality is that in most formal contexts such as professional environments or sectors of commerce, the majority of languages fall into disuse, except for English.
The South African constitution states that all eleven official languages must ‘enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated equitably’. Equity refers to fairness and impartiality, and the English Academy of South Africa has a very valid point that this is not the same as calling for equal use (Venter Handout p. 1). In reality, English is still the most widely-used language across the nation, and is the language of parliament and general administration. The problem with this situation is that English holds a possible threat to the ten other official languages of the country.
Graham Bam puts the main problem plain and simply in a letter to the Cape Times: ‘The debate about the use of English as a medium of instruction is going nowhere.’ No more research, theories or proposals. We are running out of time. We have to make a decision.
Greater attention to language education in multilingual schooling is vital if we are to achieve national unity and social reconciliation through the removal of legacies of linguistic inequalities and prejudices that underpinned the racism of our past (Young, cited in Heugh, Siegrühn & Plüddemann 1995: 111).
It has been said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn to speak and spell correctly. The poem ‘The Chaos’ represents a virtuoso feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skilfully versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes. You should find this both entertaining and useful for teaching spelling and homophones.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
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