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 issue (due November 2012).  Send these to the Editor at drv@worldonline.co.za - and maybe you could win a copy of The Longman South Africa School Dictionary. 

Kind regards

(Dr) Malcolm Venter

EDITOR

Longman Dictionaries

Longman dictionaries have played a significant role in the development, analysis and teaching of English since

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•      PLUS: Photo dictionary and video clips to enhance understanding

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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 broad area of grammatical skills, which they find difficult to implement in their writing. The new textbooks are no better than the previous ones in this regard. Here we are, looking for help with the basic writing skills.

Because of this, I have developed a series of PowerPoint presentations for use in a classroom with learners speaking up to 10 different home languages (none of them English) or for a largely English-speaking private school classroom or for the small group at tertiary level. They are specifically geared to teaching language in holistic sections. By this I mean explaining all the rules systematically and applying them to the writing of English; not merely the answering of language questions which are found in the final section of Paper 1: USING LANGUAGE CORRECTLY. The presentations make use of visual stimuli, video clips, creative tasks and games.

One of the presentations which would be useful to teachers of grades 10 to 12 is focused on punctuation. [Click on the link at the end to download the PP presentation.] A major challenge for learners who normally use SMS and BBM language is learning to punctuate their writing correctly. It is possible to teach punctuation in the classroom using short, rule-based slides, followed by a writing activity or a game to facilitate active learning. Where there is no data projector available, a hard copy of six slides per page may be printed and the learner may be encouraged to take notes and answer exercises on the page. Learners with laptops in the classroom can use a soft copy of the PowerPoint on which they can make notes and complete the exercises.

It is recommended that this grammar presentation be used at Grade 10 level, in Term 1. Teaching this at the beginning of the year provides a basis for correcting errors and enables revision at later points during the year. This presentation has also been used successfully at tertiary level for language support in small groups.

Once you have perused the presentation, you may wish to adapt it to make it more applicable to your learners. While learners are completing the exercises, move around and assist them. Many learners have never written a sentence with a colon or semi-colon, and they find Exercises 2 and 3 particularly difficult.

CLICK BELOW FOR POWERPOINT PRESENTATION.

 Punctuation

    Sue McIntosh has been teaching and lecturing English for 28 years at high schools, tertiary colleges and

    universities. She was educated at the University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban (BA (Hons), HDE, Masters in South

    African Literature. She is currently the English Subject Head at Bloubergrant Secondary School on the Western

    Seaboard of Cape Town. Last year she set the North Metropole Preparatory Exam Paper 1 for Grade 12 in

    September. She is also a marker for Paper 2 Grade 12 Final Examinations.

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 in two than sunder an infinitive
And I’d disown my closest family within a minute if
They dared to place a preposition at a sentence terminus
Or sully the Queen’s English with neologisms verminous

I know that ‘soon’ and not ‘right now’ is the true sense of ‘presently’
I’m happy to correct you and I do it oh so pleasantly
I’m not a grammar Nazi; I’m just a linguistic Aryan
I am the very model of an amateur grammarian

I’m sure people appreciate my pointing out their grammar gaffes
And sorting out their sentences and crossing out their paragraphs
When you crusade for good English, it’s not all doom and gloom you sow
The secret of success is: it’s not who you know; it’s whom you know

The standards of our language are declining almost every day
Down from a peak in 18– or 19– I think – well, anyway
Pop music, TV, blogs and texting are inflicting ravages
Upon English and unchecked, this will turn us into savages

I fear that sloppy language is a sign of immorality
For breaking rules of grammar is akin to criminality
So curse those trendy linguists, lexicographers and anyone
Who shuns the model English of the amateur grammarian

Conjunctions at the openings of sentences are sickening
I wish that the decline of the subjunctive were not quickening
And that more people knew the proper meaning of ‘anticipate’
Of ‘fulsome’ and ‘enormity’, ‘fortuitous’ and ‘decimate’

I learned these rules at school and of correctness they’re my surety
I cling to them for safety despite having reached maturity
Some say that language changes, but good English is immutable
And so much common usage now is deeply disreputable

My pedantry’s demanding but I try not to feel bitter at
The fact that everyone I meet is borderline illiterate
When all around are wrong then I am proud to be contrarian
I am the very model of an amateur grammarian

Souce: http://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/

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 of reasons.

Firstly, I have been observing student-teachers who have at least English II, mostly English III, and are busy with their post-graduate diplomas or the last year of their BEd. Their inadequate knowledge – either because they have no knowledge or because they have superficial half-knowledge (which is worse) – is patent in the lessons they present. Here are just a few examples from lessons I have recently observed on figures of speech:

• They have no idea of what a figurative comparison is, as opposed to a literal comparison. Thus they will accept an example such as He is like Bill Gates or He is as rich as Bill Gates as a simile. The fact that figurative comparisons are based on similarities between different classes of things simply eludes them.
• Metaphors are presented as straight alternatives to similes – comparisons without ‘like’ or ‘as’ (e.g. He is a pig vs He is like a pig). So far so good – but not far enough. What about metaphors that are expressed as verbs (e.g. He barked at me)?  In fact, one student who had just taught the difference between similes and metaphors without mentioning that metaphors can also be verbs, went on to teach a poem where the only metaphor was a verb – we iron out our differences. Not surprising that the pupils did not pick up that it was a metaphor.
• Tautology is presented as mere repetition – e.g. He is a huge, big man. The fact that tautology always involves using a word later in a text whose meaning is part of the meaning of an earlier word (not repetition as such) is not understood. For example: He returned back (where ‘returned’ means ‘went back’).
• An example of an oxymoron given by two students was pretty ugly. Neither understood that in this context ‘pretty’ has nothing to do with looks but is an informal modifier meaning ‘to a moderate degree; fairly’ (Concise Oxford).

The same semi-knowledge phenomenon occurs when students teach word classes. Thus, for example, they will define a pronoun as ‘a word which replaces a noun’ – which does not account for a pronoun replacing a noun phrase. For example: The old man  = He. In terms of their limited definition, one should then say The old he.

Secondly, I noted the same ignorance when I reviewed the early drafts of the new CAPS for English. I could not believe the nonsense which was included – both in terms of blatantly wrong information (e.g. ‘concord’ was defined as a ‘tense’) and the proposed teaching programme – e.g. teaching adverbs before teaching verbs.

Thirdly, I recently paged through an English language textbook which had been approved by the DBE for the new CAPS. Here are but a few of the errors I noticed in passing:

• An adverb is defined as a ‘complement’. Certain adverbs (in particular, adverbs of place) may indeed function as a complement in a sentence such as He was there when it happened, but this is not the case with other types of adverbs.
• A complex sentence is described as a sentence which ‘is made up of a simple sentence and a clause that cannot stand on its own as a sentence’. Once a simple sentence has been combined with another simple sentence, each of the original simple sentences is now defined as a ‘clause’. By definition, a ‘simple sentence’ is an independent structure.
• Employer and employee are given as examples of antonyms. Pairs such as these – compare husband; wife; emigrant; immigrant – are not opposite in meaning as are pairs such as good, bad; pretty, ugly.

Why should this be the case? Why this ignorance? I think there are two main reasons:

• The tertiary curriculum: The vast majority if English teachers do a degree in English which consists purely of literature study. They are therefore not qualified to teach the language aspects of English. This is a strange situation – one would not regard a student who had studied Chemistry but not Physics as being adequately trained to teach Physical Science.
• The school curriculum: The curriculum has, for many years, sidelined the teaching of grammar; and the new CAPS exacerbates this situation – it practically outlaws dedicated language lessons and in its final draft abolished the language paper (which was reinstated – after a lot of fuss  - into the final version). The result is that teachers, already reluctant to teach grammar (and other language aspects) because of their feeling of insecurity in teaching something they are not masters of, do not feel the need to teach this because the curriculum plays it down.

The result of all to this is that most  English teachers have to fly by the seat of their pants when they teach the language aspects of the curriculum, using the inadequate knowledge half-remembered from their school days when they were taught by teachers who, like themselves, were only half-trained and who neglected these aspects; and so the situation perpetuates itself.

So what’s the answer? It is clear that the DBE needs to set criteria for teacher qualifications which include the language aspect, thus forcing all universities to extend their English degree courses beyond the literature level if they wish to retain students who are planning to become English teachers.

    Dr Malcolm Venter is a retired English teacher and principal and the co-author of a number of English

    langauge textbooks,  He is National Chairperson of the South African English Council and a member of the

    Executive Committee of the English Academy of Southern Africa. He received the English Academy’s Gold

    Medal Award for distinguished services to English in 2002. He is currently the editor of  Teaching English     

                                   Today.

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 be prepared for the final exam. I have found that I can use certain techniques to improve their writing during this short time in order for them to improve the marks they obtain. These suggestions allow the learners to improve their marks enough that they ought to obtain the required 40% to pass a home language.

Emphasise the importance of punctuation by marking primarily the punctuation of a piece of writing. Show the learners the mark before and after correct punctuation is used. It is not necessary to use the mark for a formal task, but it will show the learners that you are serious about punctuation. Concentrate on the full stops, commas, question marks and exclamation marks, as these are usually the ones whose functions are easier to understand and are used more frequently.

Dictate the length of a paragraph by telling them that you will accept only paragraphs between 5 and 8 lines. This will force them to adhere to a uniform length. I often find that there are no paragraphs in their essays because they simply do not bother to separate their paragraphs.

Write a paragraph with them. Let them choose a topic and the teacher writes the paragraph on the board. This will allow them to see what it means when teachers say ‘one idea per paragraph’.  You could also choose a topic that appears easy such as ‘My Best Friend’ and write down whatever they say about their best friend. You will find that they get stumped after two or three sentences. This is because they don’t know what to write and it’s the reason why so many of their essays are very short. Show them how the physical appearance, history of your friendship, some anecdotes and special qualities can be described in each paragraph.

Get them to vary the length of their sentences. Having only long or short sentences in a paragraph makes their writing monotonous and boring. Let them write only one long sentence and short sentences in a paragraph. This can be achieved if they use more punctuation.

Write an introductory and concluding paragraph so they can see a sample of these. Learners quite often are told to ‘Write an essay on …’ without ever having being taught how to do so. They therefore learn to write by default. Showing them samples of writing will help.

Do not accept words like ‘shock’ or ‘nice’ which they use to describe virtually every emotion or situation. Let them look for alternatives and in this way improve their vocabulary.

Do not allow them to count the number of words in their essay. This is time wasting and usually unnecessary. They should by this stage have an established writing style which will dictate how many words they use per line and should therefore be aware of how long a 200, 300 or 400 word essay is. Matric markers are also generally not rigid on the length of an essay, provided it is not ridiculously long or short.

These are some of the ideas I have put into practice over my 20 odd years of teaching English Home and FAL to learners in the FET phase. I hope they provide some solutions to your teaching.

Jeff Solomon hails from KZN. This article was first published in Naptosa INsight, October 2012.

Revisiting feedback to learner writing

Bulara Monyaki

One of the major points emphasised in the Curriculum, Assessment and Policy Statement is the process stages in reading, listening and writing skills. The success and progress of each stage depends on how effective the feedback given is to the ‘producer’, the learner in this case.

With the national outcry on poor reading and writing, it is worthwhile to dust all the literature available on feedback strategies. The focus in this article is on writing.

The process of writing is defined, by various researchers, as a slow, dynamic and recursive process which is continuous (Gay, 1992; Perl, 1994). The process consists of a cycle of re-seeing, re-creating and re-formulating one’s writing task in order to clarify and structure one’s thinking. This process requires, thus, a view which defines writing as an ongoing process, a text that may be improved on at every point of contact.

Although researchers do not agree on the value and effect of feedback on learners’ writing, teachers and learners alike believe that feedback on learners’ writing will help them (learners) to improve their writing. Various feedback strategies are used by teachers with the intention of giving learners guidance and cues on how to improve their writing. This view is also held by a number of researchers who agree that feedback is central to the process of teaching and learning to write (Dheram, 1995; Tchudi, 1997; Hyland, 1990; Muncie, 2000).

Despite the disagreement among researchers, the demands set by CAPS on English teachers do not make feedback an option, but a must for all teachers. Further attention should be given to how effective the feedback can be.

(1)       Providing Feedback in a Technology-Mediated Environment

In this programme, Cleveland State University’s William Beasley and Brian Harper outline a two-pronged model for providing feedback. According to Harper, ‘feedback has the power to engage or disengage students in the writing process’. They advocate a two-stage approach to feedback.

Part one requires adopting a method of communication that pays attention to what is being said as well as how it’s said. For example, the instructor should focus initial comments on what the student does well, and then build from there to develop other writing skills. To make feedback more meaningful, it’s also important to chip away at the widely held notion that good writers are born not made.

‘In short, the content of the feedback should communicate that you care about the student, that the student is capable of being successful as a writer, and that you are willing to help map a path to that success,’ says Harper.

The second part of the student feedback model involves using technology to help streamline the feedback process. During the seminar Beasley demonstrated how to use ‘track changes’ to highlight simple errors such as misspelled words, poor grammar, and punctuation errors that require minimal commentary. For more detailed feedback, Beasley showed how to use the ‘insert comment’ feature. Finally, on more ‘macro-level’ content errors, Beasley provided a quick tutorial on how to embed a brief audio clip that gives more detailed guidance to the student on ways to improve the paper.

A word of caution, when using ‘track changes’ or ‘insert comments’, Beasley recommends converting the Word document to a PDF so that students can’t simply click ‘accept changes’ and resubmit the paper without actually doing any of the rewriting themselves.

(2)     One-on-One Writing Conferences with students

[Source: J.C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. Jossey-Bass, 2001]

Tips

• Have an agenda in mind before starting the conference. The agenda and the higher-order and lower order questions (below) can serve as a guide. Finish one step/question before moving to the next.
• Encourage the student to do most of the talking.
• have students rehearse and explain what they want to say (I’ll often take dictation and give the student my notes to take home) or have students describe where they are stuck

Suggested agenda for the conference

1. Ask the student to summarize the assignment in their own words, and pose the following questions:

a)  What do you expect from the conference?

b)  How much work have you put into the draft? How much more time are you willing to put into the paper?

c)   Write down your thesis (or purpose, hypothesis) and supporting points; then write down the main problems you see with the draft [Instructor can

read/skim the draft while the student writes].

Note: Adjust (c) as needed, depending on the assignment. Examples:

- If it’s a lab report, the student can write the hypothesis, primary result, and summarize the points for the discussion.

- If it’s a memo, student can write the purpose of the memo, intended effect on the reader, and the main points.

2. Give the student positive reinforcement: ‘I really like ______’ or ‘You do a good job _____.’

3. Give the student an honest evaluation of the draft. Be specific.

4. Reassure the student that shortcomings and problems in a draft are a normal part of the writing process.

5. Use your personal experiences whenever possible.

6. Collaborate with the student to develop a list of 2-3 things the student should work on. Start with higher-order concerns first.

7. Jot down the agreed-upon areas so the student has a list to take home. Ask the student to describe to you what he/she plans to do to work on the 2-3    things.

Questions to guide commenting

Higher-order concerns

1. Does the draft follow the assignment?

2. Does the draft addresses an appropriate problem or question?

3. What is the quality of the argument (or quality of the ideas presented)?

4. Is the draft organized at the macro level?

5. Is the draft organized at the micro level?

Lower-order concerns

6. Are there stylistic problems that you find particularly annoying?

7. Is the draft free of errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation?

8. Does the draft follow style guide rules for citations (if library or external data sources are used)?

(3) Tips for Commenting on Student Writing

Teachers who require their students to write papers dedicate many hours each semester to reading, commenting on, and grading student writing, and they often wonder if the time they have spent translates into improvements in their students’ writing skills. For their part, students want constructive feedback on their writing and often express frustration when they find their instructors’ comments on their papers to be mysterious, confusing, or simply too brief.

The following tips can help you improve the effectiveness and efficiency with which you respond to your students’ writing. These tips focus on the process of writing comments on students’ papers (whether on rough drafts or final drafts), rather than on the process of grading papers. Grading and commenting on papers are certainly interconnected processes. However, while instructors often think of writing comments on papers as simply a means to justify grades, that purpose should be secondary to helping your students improve their writing skills.

A .Course Planning

Before the writing course / programme begins, think about what kind of writing you will assign, and how you will respond to that writing.

1) Design each writing assignment so that it has a clear purpose connected to the learning objectives for the course.
Craft each assignment as an opportunity for students to practice and master writing skills that are central to their success in the course and to academic achievement in your discipline. For example, if you want them to learn how to summarize and respond to primary literature or to present and support an argument, design assignments that explicitly require the skills that are necessary to accomplish these objectives.

2) Sequence your writing assignments to help students acquire skills incrementally, beginning with shorter, simpler writing assignments to longer, more complex papers. You might also find it helpful to develop a sequence for writing comments. In other words, decide ahead of time which aspects of the writing you will focus on with each assignment. For example, you may decide to focus your comments on the first assignment on the writing of the thesis statement, then focus comments on later papers on the success with which the students deal with counter-arguments. Sequencing your comments can help make the commenting process more efficient. However, it is essential to communicate to students before they turn in their papers which aspects of the writing you are going to focus on in your feedback at which points in the semester (and why).

3) Develop and communicate clear grading criteria for each writing assignment.
These criteria will help you be as consistent and fair as possible when evaluating a group of student papers. Developing and using criteria is especially important when co-teaching a course or when asking TAs to grade papers for the course. Distribute the grading criteria to students (or post the criteria on the course website) so that they will know how you will evaluate their work.

While there are shared criteria for ‘good writing’ that apply across academic disciplines, each discipline also has certain standards and conventions that shape writing in the discipline. Do not expect that students will come into your class knowing how to write the kind of paper you will ask them to write. For example, a student who has learned how to write an excellent analytical paper in a literature course may not know how to write the kind of paper that is typically required for a history course. Give students a written list of discipline-specific standards and conventions, and explain these in class. Provide examples of the kind of writing they will need to produce in your course.

4) Develop a process for writing comments that will give students a clear idea of whether they have or have not achieved the course’s learning objectives (and with what degree of success).
Students should be able to see a clear correlation among 1) written comments on a paper, 2) the grading criteria for the assignment, and 3) the learning objectives for the course. Thus, before you start reading and commenting on a stack of papers, remind yourself of the grading criteria, the learning objectives, and which aspects of the writing you want to focus on in your response.

B. Writing comments in the margins

1) The first time you read through a paper, try to hold off on writing comments.
Instead, take the time to read the paper in its entirety. If you need to take some notes, do so on another piece of paper. This strategy will prevent you from making over-hasty judgments, such as faulting a student for omitting evidence that actually appears later in the paper. (In such cases, it may be appropriate to tell the student that you expected that evidence to be presented earlier – and the reason why.) While you may expect this strategy to take more time, it can actually save you time by allowing you to focus your feedback on the most important strengths and weaknesses you want to bring to the writers’ attention (see ‘Writing Final Comments,’ below).

2) Respond as a reader, not as a writer.
Do not tell students how YOU would write the paper. Instead, tell them how you are responding to each part of the paper as you read it, pointing out gaps in logic or support and noting confusing language where it occurs. For example, if a sentence jumps abruptly to a new topic, do not rewrite the sentence to provide a clear transition or tell the student how to rewrite it. Instead, simply write a note in the margin to indicate the problem, then prompt the student to come up with a solution.

This strategy is especially important to follow when a student asks you to respond to a draft before the final paper is due; in this case, your aim should be to help the student identify weaknesses that he or she should improve and NOT to do the student’s thinking and writing for them. Of course, in some instances, it is necessary and appropriate to give the student explicit directions, such as when she or he seems to have missed something important about the assignment, misread a source, left out an essential piece of evidence, or failed to cite a source correctly.

3) Ask questions to help students revise and improve.
One way to ensure that your comments are not overly directive is to write questions in the margins, rather than instructions. For the most part, these questions should be ‘open’ rather than ‘closed’ (having only one correct answer.) Open questions can be a very effective way to prompt students to think more deeply about the topic, to provide needed evidence, or to clarify language

4) Resist the temptation to edit.
Instead, mark a few examples of repeated errors and direct students to attend to those errors. Simply put, if you correct your students’ writing at the sentence level, they will not learn how to do so themselves, and you will continue to see the same errors in paper after paper. Moreover, when you mark all mechanical errors, you may overwhelm your students with so many marks that they will have trouble determining what to focus on when writing the next draft or paper.

5) Be specific.
Comments in the margin such as ‘vague,’ ‘confusing,’ and ‘good’ do not help students improve their writing. In fact, many students find these comments ‘vague’ and ‘confusing’–and sometimes abrupt or harsh. Taking a little more time to write longer, and perhaps fewer, comments in the margin will help you identify for students exactly what they have done well or poorly. Information about both is crucial for helping them improve their writing.

Here are some examples of specific comments:

Rather than ‘vague’:

• ‘Which research finding are you referring to here?’
• ‘I don’t understand your use of the underlined phrase. Can you rewrite this sentence?’
• ‘Can you provide specific details to show what you mean here?’

Instead of ‘confusing,’ ‘what?’ or ‘???’:

• ‘I lost the thread of your argument. Why is this information important? How is it related to your argument?’
• ‘You imply that this point supports your argument, but it actually contradicts your point in paragraph 3.’

Rather than ‘good’:

• ‘This excellent example moves your argument forward.’
• ‘Wonderful transition that helped clarify the connection between the two studies you are summarizing.’
• ‘An apt metaphor that helped me understand your argument about this historical metaphor.’

3. Writing Final Comments

1) Begin by making positive comments; when pointing out weaknesses, use a descriptive tone, rather than one that conveys disappointment or frustration.
Give an honest assessment, but do not overwhelm the writer with an overly harsh or negative reaction. For example, do not assume or suggest that if a paper is not well written, the writer did not devote a lot of time to the assignment. The writer may have in fact struggled through several drafts. Keep in mind that confusing language or a lack of organized paragraphs may be evidence not of a lack of effort, but rather of confused thinking. The writer may therefore benefit from a few, targeted questions or comments that help them clarify their thinking.

2) Limit your comments; do not try to cover everything.
Focus on the 3-4 most important aspects of the paper. Provide a brief summary of 1) what you understood from the paper and 2) any difficulties you encountered. Make sure that whatever you write addresses the grading criteria for the assignment, but also try to tailor your comments to the specific strengths and weaknesses shown by the individual student.

While you may think that writing lots of comments will convey your interest in helping the student improve, students–like all writers–can be overwhelmed by copious written comments on their work. They may therefore have trouble absorbing all the comments you have written, let alone trying to use those comments to improve their writing on the next draft or paper.

3) Distinguish ‘higher-order’ from ‘lower-order’ issues.
Typically, ‘higher-order’ concerns include such aspects as the thesis and major supporting points, while ‘lower-order’ concerns are grammatical or mechanical aspects of the writing. Whatever you see as ‘higher’ in importance than other aspects should be clear in your grading criteria. Whatever you decide, write your comments in a way that will help students know which aspects of their writing they should focus on FIRST as they revise a paper or write the next paper. For example, if a paper lacks an argument or a main point in an assignment in which either an argument or main point is essential (as is usually the case), address that issue first in your comments before you note any grammatical errors that the student should attend to.

4) Refer students back to comments you wrote in the margins.
For example, you might comment, ‘Your argument loses focus in the fourth paragraph (see my questions in margin).’ You might also note a frequent pattern of mechanical error, then point them to a specific paragraph that contains that type of error.

5) Model clear, concise writing.
Before you write final comments, take a moment to gather and order your thoughts.

Sources and Recommended Reading

Bean, J. C. (2001). Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gottschalk, K. and K. Hjortshoj (2004). ‘What Can You Do with Student Writing?’ In The Elements of Teaching Writing: A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

‘Responding to Student Writing.’ (2000). Harvard Writing Project Bulletin. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Straub, Richard. (2000). The Practice of Response: Strategies for Commenting on Student Writing. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

      Dr Monyaki B.S. (Bully

      is the Chief Education Specialist: Languages

      in the Department of Basic Education

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? Or high tolerance levels for 100-year-old dust, rat droppings and bat urine? I certainly had no idea – when I took up an English post at Grey High School, and later at Queen’s College – that I would spend a lot of time on very high ladders, hanging and adjusting spotlights, or taking down or hanging up stage curtains and flies, or painting and building platforms and other similarly dangerous occupations.

Because that’s what you end up doing when you believe that Shakespeare lives on the stage and not the page. And in the early 70s very few schools had ‘theatres’, though they all had halls designed for virtually everything but theatre. School hall stages were dreadful places – badly lit, badly draped, dark, draughty and dangerous! No catwalks. Great for the opening scene of Hamlet and maybe the ‘Fair is foul’ scene from Macbeth – because the special effects were ‘built-in’ – but not much else. So if you really wanted to put Shakespeare on stage you had your work cut out for you. You would become an expert in wheeling and dealing, sabotaging school budgets and channeling some money away from rugby to drama, so that you could supplement the two 100-watt lamps that ‘light’ the stage. You would become knowledgeable about light fittings, tossing out words like ‘fresnelles’ with ease. You would adopt archeological tendencies, digging down layers of previous generations’ attempts at ‘theatre’ (mostly variety concerts) in the hopes of finding bits of costume that may work, or bits of metal that may become swords, or foils or halberds. Or a lump of something which may become a hump for Richard.

You would become a shameless liar as you kept reassuring the first team prop (Marcellus in your Hamlet) that he looks good in tights. And Oh! – you would need a honeyed tongue to persuade the girls’ school headmistress that her Ophelias, Juliets,  Desdemonas and Cornelias would be perfectly safe rehearsing till 12 every night in the very attentive company of sweaty 17-year-old boys, ardent with desire for culture; and that things really had changed since the days when ‘being on the stage’ inevitably led to dissolution and pregnancy.

Oh, and then of course there are other little things, like cutting the three hours (four in the case of Hamlet) down to about 90 minutes, auditioning, casting, directing, getting mothers to make costumes, designing posters, thinking about ticket prices and sales, refreshments (don’t sell potato crisps during interval), asking the metalwork teacher to make swords that don’t bend too easily but are light enough to wield. (There’s nothing more discouraging than a wave of laughter from the audience during a tense sword battle – and you’re sitting in the wings wondering why they’re laughing but when you look closely it’s embarrassingly obvious that one of the swords has bent at the first blow and is not ‘unbending’ because it’s made of the wrong metal.)

Why the bother?

And, well, why bother? Why go to all this trouble? Why, when you could more easily read the text in the comparative safety of your classroom, preparing your Grade 12s for the ordeal of the final examination? When you could be going to bed at a reasonable hour instead of figuring out how to give Lear grey hair that does not puff clouds of dust when he, Lear, ‘beat[s] at this gate that let thy folly in …’. (More unwanted laughter)

Well, it’s fun. That’s a good reason. Doing exciting things with groups of enthusiastic teenagers (mostly boys really pleased to be let off prep and allowed to grow their hair ‘for the play’ and chat to girls every night) is fun. It’s better than going to bed at a reasonable hour.

And you might learn something. As you struggle to explain why Iago has to say ‘Ha I like not that’ in a particularly secretive, suggestive yet quiet tone (but not so quiet that Othello and the audience can’t hear him), you learn something. And when Hamlet asks if it wouldn’t be cool for him to whisper his famous last words – ‘the rest is silence’ – you both learn something. And when Gertrude asks you to explain what she’s actually saying in the line ‘This bodiless creation ecstasy/Is very cunning in’ you wonder why you’ve taken on this job when all you can do is stammer and say ‘Hmm… good question’; but ultimately you learn – because you remember vaguely that ‘ecstasy’ meant insanity, and of course the bodiless creation is the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, so Gertrude is saying that Hamlet’s madness is cunningly/craftily creating hallucinations in which his late father appears to him. So you learn! And Gertrude learns. So that’s another reason.

And then – this is difficult to explain – somewhere among the dusty shadows backstage, or two storeys up on wobbly ladders, or in the wings waiting to prompt but losing your place because Ophelia is just so compelling tonight – somewhere there is a sense of joining a long line of performers, getting into step, of linking with what generations have done year after year, and you feel yourself part of a history and tradition that puts a bounce in your step and a song in your heart – even on the night Horatio gets so lost in his lines that Hamlet has to die twice before Fortinbras can enter and wrap things up. So that’s a third reason.

But the main reason by far is of course the obvious one: you go to the trouble to put Shakespeare on stage because that’s where he belongs. He did not write ‘books’. He wrote living text, full of movement, laughter, tears, joy and pain, and the best place to see and understand this is on stage. This is not a new idea at all. It’s been around – in education literature – since well before the turn of the 20th century, but it is rarely acted upon. I think Rex Gibson may have been the first serious academic/teacher/editor who deliberately included what he called ‘active’ methods in a Shakespeare pedagogy. Gibson, for many years Director of the Shakespeare and Schools Project and editor of Shakespeare texts, was among the first to include dramatic hints and interpretations in annotations to the texts, something the Institute for the Study of English in Africa editions are also very good at. As Gibson puts it, ‘Active methods … recognise that Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, and his scripts are completed by enactment of some kind’ (p. xii). In this country – and this province in particular – we have had our own champion of this approach to teaching literature, Andre Lemmer. Many of you will be familiar with his work. Andre’s annual Viva Shakespeare workshops – for many years part of the schools festival – were always received with great enthusiasm and usually resulted in several ‘conversions’. I was fortunate enough to co-present one or two of these with him and what an experience that was. And how exhausting! These workshops brought home the sheer physicality of theatre and fed into Andre’s notion of how to annotate the Shakespeare texts referred to above. And when you came away from one of these workshops you really were convinced that Shakespeare belongs on the stage.

All the world’s a stage

But I must immediately qualify the word ‘stage’, because I mean any space where people can act, interact, can say lines and move, can enter or leave. Often a space in the classroom or a quad will suffice. For expert or experienced readers of drama a space in the head works. But not for novices: they really do need to experience the play – they need to encounter the drama-ness of the drama.This is one of the most neglected literacies in the teaching of English – a dramatic literacy: finding a way of getting the reader to see ‘through’ the lines on the page, to ‘see’ the action behind the lines, and there is no better text than Shakespeare’s to teach this. Look at these lines from Othello. What’s going on here, dramatically? What can we tell – from the dialogue only since there are hardly any stage directions – about how these lines should be delivered, how characters should move, what tone of voice they should use? In short, how can the words on the page become the actions on the stage? Let’s look at a few possibilities: I have annotated the text to show possible ‘dramatic’ interpretations without which the text dies on the page. [Download extract below by clicking on the link and print separately.]

Othello extract

We can also look at the many film versions of Shakespeare, where we see a range of different directors’ interpretations of what’s happening on stage. But of course a movie set is not a stage.

A fascinating article in this context is Peter Thomas’ Shakespeare Page to Stage, in which he shows how an appreciation of the handkerchief as the central prop in Othello can lead to an understanding of the play as a whole. Here’s his opening paragraph, sufficiently entertaining to read in full:

Stuff compulsory written tests on Shakespeare and stick your statutory orders in the bin. No ring-binder can help teachers bring the dramatist to life as much as a Kleenex tissue. Departments with more lavish budgets may go for a cotton hanky or a silk neckscarf, but not even the most favoured CTC is likely to invest in a top-of-the-range strawberry number, woven by hallowed silkworms over twenty moons and dipped in mummified essence. I don’t suppose Shakespeare’s prop box had one matching Othello’s description of his gift to Desdemona. So, a Kleenex it is. This simple prop can give students a grasp of Shakespeare’s dramatic method – of writing crafted for an audience rather than a dutiful reader.

This is where the theatrical experience I’m referring to is different from the kind of thing a professional theatre company may do. For me – as a teacher – the point is not the performance – not really. The truth is you will not easily find 18-year-old Hamlets in your average Matric class. And for an adolescent to play Lear with any conviction is a big ask. So, while the play is indeed the thing, it is the educational project that interests me, and it is what those in the play and those able to see it performed will learn from the experience that really counts. And what do they learn? Well, the list is endless but here are some ideas.

• Those who are in the production learn how to move ‘naturally’ – to let the words dictate their movement, and to throw away their preconceived ideas about ‘acting’. Every year I auditioned I had to cope with the same phenomenon: that students find it impossible to stand perfectly still while speaking on stage. And so you had the wandering Hamlet and the striding Macbeth; even when they were speaking to someone they felt they had to move. When you questioned them the answer was usually ‘I don’t know what to do with myself … or my hands …’. And the way through that was to look at the lines again and try to detect ‘movement’, deliberate dramatic movement rather than aimless wandering about.

• So they learn how to move and not to move – how to be comfortable in their bodies. They also learn how to interact – how to listen, and respond. How to say lines so that they make sense, even when they are as tortuous as ‘This bodiless creation ecstasy/Is very cunning in’. Of course it helps to have the context. Hamlet is watching his father’s ghost leaving through the portal and Gertrude is staring at Hamlet in amazement because she can’t see the ghost:

Exit Ghost

QUEEN

This is the very coinage of your brain.

This bodiless creation ecstasy

Is very cunning in.                                                                                                                                                       

• They learn about stagecraft, how actors need to be positioned so that the action flows and makes sense. And of course they learn lines and can quote impressively from the text for years afterwards, perhaps forever.

• And those who merely watch learn a great deal too, but mostly they see that the plays are not words on the page. They look through the page, at the stage and through the stage at life itself.

But there’s more!

But it would be wrong to promote an ‘active’ approach to Shakespeare at the expense of other interests, or pursuits that the texts offer. This is a point argued by Jane Coles – who collaborated with Gibson on many projects – in a scathing attack on the testing system in UK entitled Alas, poor Shakespeare: Teaching and testing at Key Stage 3 (Coles, 2003). I don’t want to pick up the testing issue now – I’m coming to that – but I do want to take up her warning that it is possible to neglect the kind of close textual analysis that Shakespeare texts demand in favour of more ‘active’ approaches. Clearly the best place to engage Shakespeare’s poetry is the classroom, not the stage. And central to poetry is metaphor; any engagement with Shakespeare that ignores metaphor is missing something special. How could one not want to talk about these images?

Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

To cry Hold, hold!

To take arms against a sea of troubles [even Shakespeare mixes metaphors]

When I have shuffled off this mortal coil

When sorrows come they come not single file but in battalions

My predecessor in the Education Department at Rhodes University – Ken Durham – used to encourage teachers to ‘romp through’ four or five Shakespeares with their Grade 10s, not struggle painfully through one. I love the spirit of what Ken was getting at – as I loved most of the things he was inclined to enthuse over – but I did wonder how 14-year-olds could absorb anything but the plot if they really did romp through four or five plays in one year. And the plots are really the least interesting features of the plays. It is what Shakespeare was able to do with such unpromising material that is truly remarkable. I remember at university being warned that the comedies required considerable suspension of disbelief to be enjoyed. But I find the same is true of the tragedies and used to ‘tease’ my pupils with 7-minute Shakespeares, in which, if the tragic figure were not who he was, the play ends very soon. For example, in response to Horatio’s story about seeing the ghost Hamlet replies: ‘Really! You believe in that sort of thing? I think it’s rubbish. Let’s go and have a beer.’ You can try this on all the tragedies – works very well, but unfortunately destroys the plays!

Other than the stagecraft, the plot and the poetry, what else is worth looking at? The issues, of course; and Shakespeare is full of issues. It is in these – usually regarded as universal in applicability and moral values – that teachers who subscribe to the notion that teaching English is about encouraging personal growth find the material for their lessons. So Macbeth is about ambition; it’s about power corrupting absolutely; and Lear is about the arrogance of old age and authority; it’s about filial ingratitude. Hamlet is about indecision; thinking too much. And so on. I don’t mean to be scornful of these notions – because they are valid and worth pursuing in the sense that they can get learners to talk about the plays – but there is a danger in assuming that these ‘messages’ from the plays are somehow timeless and universal and that we can learn so much about ourselves from them. I don’t know what there is to be learned from the story and the motivation of a powerful thane who kills the king to usurp his throne; or from a silly old man who throws out the only child who truly loves him because of vanity; and so on. It is also possible to take this notion of relevance (real life stuff) too far, as one sees in examination papers (thankfully not in this country – not yet anyway) where candidates are encouraged to ‘apply’ the issues to their own experience. An example – cited by Coles – is a question inviting candidates to describe a person they truly admire (this after reading Henry V). Coles notes examples of journalists having fun with this approach producing questions such as Doesn’t King Lear make you appreciate your grandpa more? It is quite possible to answer these questions without any reference to the play whatsoever!

More importantly, the underlying assumption that everyone obviously admires Henry V, or really sympathises with Lear is highly questionable. Surely other readings are possible? This is what happens when these texts are read unproblematically, as though they contained ‘messages’ that would be true for all time. It leads to what McEvoy (2008) has called a ‘reverential acquaintanceship’ or ‘blank reverence’. It is what happens when teachers fail to present the plays as cultural products, growing from specific historical, political contexts. This approach to teaching English – a ‘cultural analysis’ model – is no less valid than a personal response approach – in fact arguably even more valid as our learners grow up in increasingly text-saturated environments.

Testing Times

So now I have arrived at the examination and this is the last point I want to make. These thoughts spring from a quarter of a century of teaching and testing literature. My over-riding impression of examinations is that it was very difficult – if not impossible – to test ‘active’ approaches to Shakespeare. I know because I tried many times and made some bad mistakes along the way. In my anxiety to get the candidates to think of the stage (rather than the page) I completely overestimated them and their teachers, and it soon became apparent that very few teachers were looking at Shakespeare as anything but a rather unusual novel or a long poem. My first attempt – I remember it well – was a scene from Antony and Cleopatra, one of those scenes where Antony greets Cleopatra exuberantly after an absence of some kind. I printed the scene and asked the candidates how they would put in on stage – I asked about grouping, costume, set, even music. O my goodness, what a lot of rubbish we got to mark. Everyone of course answered this question because it seemed that you did not have to know anything to answer it. So we got the full treatment of leather sandals, purple silk wraps, diamond necklaces, Antony’s brown curls, lots of gold of course, and soft romantic music – one huge Hollywood cliché. It was very difficult to award any marks at all. Credit went to candidates who showed understanding of the tensions and themes in the play, the characters, but mostly what was actually happening on stage and why.

My next attempt was one that is easily demonstrated in a classroom. It is the scene, near the end of Lear, in which Edgar, Kent and Albany are clustered in discussion about what to do with the country, while Lear is bent over the dead Cordelia, some distance away. At a point in their conversation Albany exclaims ‘O see, see!’ and the next dialogue is Lear saying ‘And my poor fool is hanged …’ in that unforgettable soliloquy which drives towards ‘Never, never, never, never, never.’ The question I asked was ‘What do you think makes Albany exclaim ‘O see, see!’?’ Obvious isn’t it? No. Very, very few candidates had a picture  of the stage in their heads, and so looked in vain at the text, the written text, for clues, and came up with rubbish – things like ‘He’s trying to emphasise what he means …’ whereas if one saw that there were two groups (Albany’s group and Lear and Cordelia) and that Lear must have made some noise or movement to draw Albany’s attention making him look at Lear bending over Cordelia, the answer is obvious. But this requires a dramatic reading.

Staying with examinations for a few more minutes, most of you will identify with the excessive and sometimes insane laughter that erupts in examination venues when one encounters howlers, especially when one has marked about 200 scripts and one is facing another 100. The following gems are part of a huge anthology collected over a period of twenty years of examining the former Cape Province literature exams. In the process of selecting these I wondered what it was that made them so funny, and realized with surprise that they were funny because one could see what the writers meant – they have a grain of truth in them, however minute. To keep things simple I select a few from Macbeth.

So here goes:

Macbeth undergoes several periods when his mind controls his body.

Just thinking about murdering makes Macbeth’s ribs knock together.

Lady Macbeth has many redeeming features. She is essentially ignorant.

Lady Macbeth’s milk went sour.

Before the killing Lady Macbeth even dances with Duncan mercilessly.

Although Macbeth has killed many people you could still describe him as a fairly normal person.

Macbeth carefully kills people at random.

She pushed his manhood in his face.

She played with his manhood.

Lady Macbeth commits suicide shortly before her death.

Macbeth weakly says ‘If we should fail’ and Lady Macbeth says ‘Screw your courage!’

Macbeth dabbled in the blood.

And finally this stroke of post-modern genius:

Lady Macbeth is driven mad by all the imagery in the play.

It took me many years as a teacher to realize that what you took into the classroom didn’t matter terribly – that whether you were looking at cummings or Keats, or Shakespeare or Shaw didn’t matter much. What you were teaching was poetry, not poems, drama, not plays, and any vehicle you could find to do this was acceptable. I know this sounds a little un-academic , but I believe it is educationally sound. Seen in this light, materials you take into the classroom are just an excuse really, a reason to talk and write and argue and discuss. This is one of the few notions that OBE actually got right, the idea that content was sometimes arbitrary and that it was the skills and attitudes that were learned that mattered. I have to say though, that Shakespeare is a pretty good excuse for teaching, definitely the best I ever encountered.

It is because of this conviction that I was a little startled to learn – a few years ago – that schools no longer need to ‘do’ Shakespeare. Schools can now choose a modern drama over Shakespeare. I must confess to wondering at the time whether this was not somehow illegal and I had to ask myself some serious questions. Was I disappointed because Shakespeare is so central to the canon; in other words, did I feel that one ‘ought to’ teach Shakespeare, and who was the DoE to think otherwise? Maybe a bit. But I think what I felt was sadness rather than injury, because I could not understand how a body of work that is without question the high point in English literature, and that provided me and (most of) my students with so much pleasure and just plain fun could be declared ‘optional’. The debate rages in other countries too, even the UK, where there is loud lamentation when there are suggestions that Shakespeare need no longer be part of the testing and examining regime. Lighthill (2011), in an article entitled ‘Shakespeare – an endangered species’ is afraid that ‘teachers might opt for a pedagogy of least resistance and thus expose poor Will to the slings and arrows of revisionists who for a long time have felt that Shakespeare was far too elitist and of little relevance to the young today’ (p. 38).

I’ve never thought Shakespeare to be elitist, or of little relevance. And if one has to work a little harder to ‘get it’, the rewards are all the greater.

But maybe I really am ready to retire!

References

Coles, J. (2008) Alas, poor Shakespeare: Teaching and testing at Key Stage 3. English in Education, 37(3), pp. 3-12.

Gibson, R. (1998) Teaching Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lighthill, B. (2011) Shakespeare: an endangered species. English in Education, 45, (1), pp. 36-51.

McEvoy, S. (2008) The Politics of teaching Shakespeare. English in Education, 25(3), pp. 71-78.

Thomas, P. (1994) Shakespeare Page to Stage: An Active Approach to ‘Othello.’  English in Education, 28(1), p. p45-52.

Hennie van der Mescht is Professor of Education at Rhodes University.

‘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 the celebration of youth, it comes as a continual and depressing shock to have to teach kids who were not born until after John Lennon’s death and have never heard of The Beatles. The virility, subtlety and energy of the Rock-and-Roll culture is alien to them. Theirs is the endless sterility of the vide-games arcade and the cocooning coma of the walkman CD perpetually circumscribing their contact with the world. [Editor’s note: Substitute i-pad, smartphone, etc for today’s generation.]

Properly handled, Thom Gunn’s poem ‘On the Move’ can go some way to providing an insight into those halcyon days without descending into romanticism. For, while there was innocence and creativity, there was an ugly underside too. Particularly for second-language pupils, a fairly detailed explanation of the Beat Generation and its origins is useful. This information is readily available, so I merely mention a few salient points before looking at the poem stanza by stanza. Some general comments and a few exercises follow.

For a variety of reasons, and broadly speaking, the end of the Second World War saw the rise of a Western society geared to materialism: a sort of aristocracy of avarice was created which was elitist and exclusive. Gaining entry to this materialistic society was difficult and not without problems of morality. Therefore many young people rejected it or ‘dropped out’. The next problem was: what was to be substituted for the society that was being rejected?

The Calvinistic work ethic and the Middle Class syndrome were to be replaced by a mixture of Zen Buddhism, Indian Peyote rituals and visionary mysticism. This philosophical goulash found its driving force in sex, hallucinatory drugs and unreal rhetoric.

Perhaps Marlon Brando’s film The Wild Ones ,about a motorcycle subculture, is the best way to sum up the alternative society that began to develop. A cult emerged, depicting the 50s bikers as heroes who had cast off the shackles of a society they could not come to terms with. In fact the motorcycle and rider became symbolic of a rebellion against a system that the young rejected. It culminated in the film Easy Rider  in the 60s. The alternative community that developed around the motorcycle gangs (and the communes of Haight Ashbury, etc) soon proved to be far short of ideal. Poverty, drugs, violence and venereal disease plagued them as much as the ‘normal’ society they spurned.

Conformity to any of the ‘normal’ society’s norms was scorned and considered traitorous. One of the slogans of the era was, ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty.’ Perhaps the majority irony in the rejection of society’s norms by the Flower Power mob was that they produced a rigid conformity of their own, a conformity often enforced by peer pressure or muscle or both, often far harsher and definitely cruder than that which they rejected (see Thom Gunn’s poem ‘Black Jackets’).

Through the reversed telescope of hindsight, it does, however, appear to have been a genuine effort to find a better way. Gunn’s poem, I think, captures the essence of the underlying confusion that prompted the sociological upheavals of the 50s and 60s. Many of society’s mores deserved to be rejected, but it was difficult if not impossible to find worthwhile replacements.

The title and subtitle of the poem suggest action and movement. Implied too is the underlying unsettled state of the bikers. The subtitle indicates an inexplicable urge to be in motion for motion’s sake, rather than for some articulate reason – such as a destination. ‘Man, you gotta Go’ was a slogan of the times, on a par with, ‘Groovy’ and ‘Like wow, Man’, along with the Woodstock classics: ‘Three days, Man’ and ‘We’re scarred shitless’ – not meaningful statements so much as components of an esoteric slang that expressed rumblings of ineffable dissatisfaction.

Stanza 1

In stanza one the first four lines describe a natural scene. Birds dart around in an energetic way doing what is instinctive (natural) for them to do. The birds, while undisturbed by humanity, are in harmony with their environment. In line 6 the pronoun ‘One’ is ambiguous and operates on more than one level. It refers to the poet, or people (mankind) or by extension to the bikers. This is usually difficult to explain to a class. I generally leave it at the level of the poet and if a brighter pupil spots the possible alternatives, I let discussion develop as far as they can take it. The point becomes clearer further on in the poem when the poet identifies with the basic feeling of indecision within mankind. In the final lines of the stanza mankind (or the bikers, or the poet) also acts with vigour, like the birds, but it does not know exactly what it is doing nor can mankind express its ideas clearly. In the attempt at articulation, a disturbance is caused – ‘an uncertain violence’. Humans are out of tune with themselves and their surroundings. (See stanza four – humans lack the instinct to direct their actions.) Note the words ‘dust’ and ‘thunder’ foreshadow the appearance of ‘the Boys’ in stanza two. Even the word ‘baffled’ operates on different levels, referring to frustration or an exhaust silencer.

Stanza 2

Stanza two opens with the view of the motorcycle gang in the distance as small and insect-like. They grow larger as they approach and the roar of their engines increases in volume. Soon the riders are seen astride their powerful machines. In their leather uniforms they all look the same (‘donned impersonality’). The distasteful images in line two suggest disapproval and even something alien. The gang’s physical (sexual?) mastery of the machines is suggested by ‘… held by calf and thigh…’. Lines 7 – 8 deal with the uniformity of clothing and behaviour – two aspects of the gang which are purposeful. The uniforms, their collective way of life and their constant movement almost give them a sense of purpose in life which may overcome their doubts about themselves.

Stanza 3

In Stanza three , the Boys’ are trying to prove their manhood, but are uncertain about how tough they really are. They know their origin, but they are not certain of their destination. The bikers disturb the birds and the poet sees this as typical of modern life: nature has now to submit to the will-power and control of man. This control is often unplanned and uncoordinated. Modern man makes ‘both machine and soul’ – he consciously shapes his beliefs and his characters – and he uses both these elements (although he cannot completely control either) to take great risks in unusual or novel enterprises. Men do not move (or are not motivated) by instinct only, as the birds do, but by their own acts of will – men have a measure of free will in their actions.

Stanza 4

Stanza four suggests that attempts by man (or the poet) to shape his future should not be condemned. Because man is only half animal he cannot act by pure instinct only, as the birds do. Man has to make decisions. These decisions are difficult and it helps him if he joins a gang or groundswell of human change (‘movement’: line 5) which will give him moral support and some values with which he can identify, while in that group. The actions of the gang make ‘the Boys’ feel that at least they are getting somewhere, but there is no concept of how or where the journey will end (death being an accepted absolute).

Stanza 5

In the final stanza, ‘the Boys’ do not stop for long. Soon these self-assured(?) young men mount their man-made machines and roar away. Their way of life (the route they travel) has no final goal or resting-place, and does not achieve a natural wholeness, as the lives of birds or saints do. Although they do not gain a feeling of satisfaction or completeness from life, they do at least feel that they are moving somewhere – which is better than sitting doing nothing at all. George McBeth in his book Poetry 1900 to 1975  (Longmans 1985) has this to say concerning the ending of the poem:

‘The last three lines of the poem have immense authority and might stand of Gunn’s central philosophy of life.’

Generally, the attitudes expressed in the poem are similar to the philosophy of existentialism: men have no God-given purpose, but must define themselves (line 34), manufacture their own souls (line 22) and choose their own destinations (line 31), thus creating some sort of value system where none existed before (line 30). (Elsewhere in his book McBeth states that Gunn has a

‘… clearly articulated group of attitudes. These seem to be that man is a creature possessinf free will whose identity lies in his power to choose and pick his future by his own actions. This philosophy derives from the existentialism of Jean-Paul Satre and Albert Camus.’)

Furthermore, men still have a measure of free will: life is a journey with an uncertain, if not unattainable, destination. Moving fast may give man the illusion of reacting vigorously to the difficulties of life. Man is not sure, however, that what is being moved forward is good or not so good.

It is worthwhile to note the ambivalence of the poet toof clear goals in life. Yet he seems to sympathize with them and to understand them, and he does not wish them to be condemned. He even seems to admire their powerful machines, their group feelings and their attitude that it is better to be doing something active rather than to sit inert.

EXERCISES

Title and subtitle

1)       Give a possible reason for the capital ‘G’ in the word ‘Go’ in the subtitle.

Stanza 1

2)       Quote three words that vividly describe the energetic movement of the birds.

3)       What, in your own opinion, is the ‘hidden purpose’ that motivates the birds?

4)       Quote three words (do NOT use ‘uncertain’) that suggest the uncertainty of man’s actions within the context of the stanza.

5)       Why does man act with uncertainty?

6)       Supply a synonym for ‘dull’ within the context of the poem.

Stanza 2

7)       What figure of speech is ‘… as flies hanging in the heat, …’? What is its effect?

8)       Fully discuss the poet’s choice of the participle ‘hanging’.

9)       Rewrite in your own words, ‘their hum/bugles to thunder held by calf and leg’.

10)   What does the poet mean when he describes te riders’ jackets as ‘… trophied with the dust …’?

11)   Discuss the significance of the adverb ‘almost’ in line 8.

Stanza 3

12)   What does the ‘direction where the tyres press’ suggest about the destination of the riders?

13)   What does this stanza reveal about the poet’s belief in an omnipotent God?

Stanza 4

14)   How does the punctuation in lines 3 and 4 reinforce what the poet is saying?

15)   Explain the repetition of the word ‘toward’.

Stanza 5

16)   What image is the poet trying to create in line 1?

17)   What is the effect of the verb ‘burst’ in line 3?

18)   What figure of speech is ‘towns they travel through’?

Quotes from Poetry 1900 to 1975 edited by George McBeth and published by Longmans in 1985. Both quotes from page 264.

Quentin Hogge is a former teacher at All Saints College. This article was originally published in CRUX, May 1993.

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 general) of some students may very well be associated with, among other things, a growing perception that they just cannot be good enough in English mainly because it is not their first language.

In trying to explain the difficulties faced by students and learners with an indigenous African language, too much is often made of the disadvantages of being an English second- or third-language speaker. Conversely, the perceived advantages of being a first-language speaker become exaggerated and presented as a myth. The suggestion is thus made that those who are born of English parents automaticallybecome masters in the language and have the natural ability expected to excel academically. Presumably, therefore, those with a different first language at birth are unlikely to become proficient in English and in academics beyond a basic level. In this way, mastery of language is represented, more or less, as an integral part of human ontology. It therefore assumes, in the mind of some, the shape of part of an individual’s racial and cultural make-up.

A great fallacy

This is, of course, a great fallacy, and one that can not only constitute a major psychological block to students but may also frustrate the best pedagogical efforts of teachers and institutions. I therefore strive, as much as I can, to convince challenged students that mastery of English – and any language for that matter – comes not by birth, but by learning. To illustrate the point, I often recall a joke by a Rwandan friend that his father can hardly read or write Kinyarwanda even though that is his first language. This reminds me also of my own elder brother whose command of English far surpasses his proficiency in our home language, Urhobo, in which he can hardly carry out an articulate conversation.

I do not wish to offer a simplistic explanation for what is a complex situation. Neither do I want to discount the undeniable fact that being a first-language speaker of any language affords the individual vital benefits, especially with regard to being educated in that language. What I aim to communicate is another fact that is not often emphasized (to struggling students at least): that the native speaker of English acquires mastery in the language by constant learning, rather than by the mere biological fact of being born to English-speaking parents. I hope, thereby, to assure students and learners, that regardless of what their mother tongues are, they too can become masters in any language if they apply themselves to rigorous, sustained and diligent learning.

I came upon this rather banal realisation as a primary school pupil when I read George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion, from the bookcase of my father (who was a literature teacher). The revelation that there could be English people who could not speak proper English hit me with the force of a speed train gone out of control.

Advantages of multlingualism

In the many debates on multilingualism worldwide, one consensus is that knowledge of more than one language can serve as an asset in the classroom. Research has shown that multilingual learners and educators have the benefit of various levels of meta-awareness of how languages work, and that this can particularly enhance the learning of a new language. Yet in my personal experience (which I must admit is quite limited), it is hard to find students and educators who articulate this awareness. What is often revealed, rather, is the tendency to expect, and accept, poor and mediocre performance from students because they are not first-language speakers. I find this disturbing and unacceptable.

Since I began studying in South Africa in 2010, I have been receiving commendations on the quality of my English. Initially I took this as a compliment. But I have long since understood that some of these ‘commendations’ are actually based on the low expectations some people have of me, as I am not English, and have never lived in England. With this realisation, I now treat some of these praises as less than flattering. In a similar way, I feel that it is patronizing to demand, expect and accept mediocre performance from students, especially those with African home languages, just because they are not first-language speakers of English. It is, in a sense, ratherVerwoerdian.

Change of mindset

And it is a mind set that needs to be changed if today’s generation of previously disadvantaged learners are to overcome the challenges of low English language and academic literacy skills. Many serious and practical challenges remain to be overcome before the multilingual skills of South African students and educators can be optimally harnessed. But in the meantime, the least that can be done is to affirm these skills, and to encourage learners and educators alike to place an uncompromising demand on their latent potentials.

         AghoghoAkpome is a doctoral student in the Department of English at UJ where he is also a  

         tutor. He has taught English and Literature in secondary schools and in a polytechnic in Nigeria.

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 that does not have a wider relevance. Much has to do with rural education but this should concern us all, in any case, and what is said generally has wider application. The work is based on research done by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa of Rhodes University which, among other things, has been deeply involved in the teaching and research into the teaching of English for a very long time.

There is one chapter, by the editor himself, about the relation between teaching  English and national language policy. It unflinchingly challenges the orthodoxy of equal use of all languages and of multilingualism, and the deploring of the power of English, that has been prominent for the last quarter of a century. This essay marks a welcome freedom and change in the terms of this debate hitherto and answers the well-meaning though misguided coterie of language planners of the 1990s.

Laurence Wright makes clear the friction between the National Language Policy (NLP) and the Language in Education Policy (LIEP), seeing hope in the latter if properly put into practice, though undermined by the NLP.

What we need is natural language planning, which takes into account the real situation, as opposed to interventionist language planning which refuses to accept the prevailing economic and sociological situation. What was thought “radical” in 1990 is now outmoded and has been overtaken by events.The bogey of colonialism is laid to rest, nettles are firmly grasped, and the absolute necessity for English as a national priority and the need for adequate teaching of English from the earliest stages bluntly stated. This does not imply that the African Languages are consigned to language death. In the debate about language policy that has, it could be said, “raged” since 1990, this article has a most significant place and, we hope, marks a new phase of discussion.

Other chapters in the book deal most interestingly with the various things that have gone wrong and try to find reasons for these and solutions. The problems range from administrative and political to classroom practice and the need for in-service training for many teachers. There is a chapter on science teaching that stresses the importance of language in science teaching. Science makes specific demands on linguistic competence. In passing, it could be remarked that official utterances on the need for better science teaching as a national necessity usually fail to say that science needs adequate general language control and also makes certain specific demands. An attempt is made to explain the apparent sense of hopelessness and the lack of will to pull things together. Among other things, there are some pertinent remarks about the malign influence of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU), which has caused a dual control to function in education. Departmental control has to deal with a second centre of political power, a divided rule of educators and politicians. Outcomes Based Education was, of course, a catastrophe that wasted years and enormous resources, and undermined the morale of the teaching corps.

The volume concludes with a chapter on ‘The Teacher as Hero’, a looking forward to what could be and, indeed, has to be.

South Africa’s Crisis in Education is published by NISC, and is available in most good bookshops, or from Blue Weaver (the distributor), or direct from the ISEA, Rhodes University (contact n.kelemi@ru.ac.za). The selling price from Rhodes is R150 (VAT inclusive).

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 their lives and times. Anyone with an interest in the country’s history, peoples and cultures will find much to enjoy, grieve over and admire. Talking animals and birds, tokolosh and fairies, sensitive children, independent-minded girls, boy heroes, teenagers swept up in the social upheavals of apartheid and subsequent changes in the country and in the African continent – the chapters of this book recall and analyse the stories, poems and personal narratives. This is a book that will provide insights and guidance for educators, librarians and parents – the intermediaries in bringing books to young people. Those who would like to pursue a study of the literature in more depth will find the research survey and overview of sources helpful.

‘This scholarly view of what went on in the world of children’s books in South Africa during the last two hundred years is utterly fascinating… There are invaluable lessons here, both for the writers who are mentioned in the book and the writers for South Africa’s children who are still to emerge.’  Lesley Beake, author

‘What a fascinating ‘dip into’ book! From such characters as Baden-Powell, Kipling and Tolkien, and from the earliest San legends through to cigarette cards, sentimental poetry and anti-apartheid protest writings by children themselves. If you take the upbringing of children seriously, then you must consider their books with an equally careful eye. Elwyn’s views are balanced, well-informed, highly relevant to our history and to our national literature.’ Jay Heale, international authority on children’s books.

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 English January Addendum

12 English January Memo

WELCOME TO THE WINTER 2012 EDITION 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 issue (due November 2012).  Send these to the Editor at drv@worldonline.co.za - and maybe you could win a copy of The Longman South Africa School Dictionary. 

Longman Dictionaries

Longman dictionaries have played a significant role in the development, analysis and teaching of English since

1755. Longman has a comprehensive list of dictionaries available for Grades 4 to 12.

 Longman South African School Dictionary plus CD-ROM Suitable for Grades 4 – 9

The interactive CD-ROM allows learners to:

•      Look up the full contents of the dictionary
•      Listen to the pronunciation of all the words
•      Record themselves to check their pronunciation
•      Practise spelling, vocabulary and grammar in the Language Trainer
•      PLUS: Photo dictionary and video clips to enhance understanding

9781408202630 Longman South African School Dictionary with CD-ROM

                                                  Editorial

English teachers – be an inspiration to your

students!

                  Dr Malcolm Venter

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. I can still remember one of the questions: Choose the correct word from the pair in brackets in the following: One of the apples (is/are) bad. I wrote are. When I discussed the exam paper with my father afterwards, he said: ‘No, it’s is; one is, not one are.’ I decided there and then that I was going to master the English language rather than allowing it to master me – and I decided (having chosen to be a teacher in my first year of school) to major in English. Mr Frankie Esselaar went on to inspire me for the rest of the year – and then he moved to the high school, where he continued his good work in Standard 8 (Grade 10).

I was most fortunate then to have Mrs Iris Dugmore in Standard 5 – someone who conveyed such a love for the subject and teaching it. Funnily enough, after she had retired, she came also back for a year – my Std 7 year. (Interestingly enough, her husband had taught my father English at Muir – and my father always said that this man developed in him a love of English.)

These wonderful people, along with others – Mrs Rhona Ashmead and Mr Cecil Clement – are examples of what teachers ought to be. They did nothing special in terms of methods – no group work, audio-visual aids – they just showed me that they loved what they were doing.

I was then fortunate to go on to Rhodes, where I had a series of wonderful lecturers – including the iconic Professor Guy Butler and the innovative Professor William Branford (who introduced me to Linguistics).

The result was that I went on not only to teach English but to continue studying it to doctorate level.

Having retired from the profession, I can say that these teachers gave me the chance to have one of the most fulfilling careers that anyone could hope for.

How about telling us your story about teachers who inspired you? Send you contributions to drv@worldonline.co.za.

‘Teach the books, touch the heart’

(With apologies to the New York Times, April 20, 2012)

‘This is not a (talk) about books. It’s a (talk) about people.’

(The Reading Promise, by Alice Ozma)

Pamela Neethling

Media Centre Hilton College

The following is a presentation which Pamela gave at the Hilton College English Conference on 18 May this year.

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 comforting. We are not alone in South Africa, as we face the terrifying truth that many of our young people cannot read, or will not read, never mind read adequately enough to ‘meet the demands of (future) work and social networks’ (The Global Literacy Challenge, 2008).

Literacy is a global concern because it is ‘a survival tool in a fiercely competitive world’ (The Global Literacy Challenge, 2008).  We are nearing the end of UNESCO’s Literacy Decade that began in 2003. With its slogan, Literacy as Freedom, UNESCO’s aim has been to provide a framework for literacy in a world where it is estimated that one in five adults cannot read or write, at all.  Literacy is a basic human right, which is why the goals of UNESCO have been coupled with strategies such as the Education for All campaign and the Millennium Development Goals.

According to the United Nations Development Programme report, 2011, our literacy rate in South Africa is 88 per cent and we are 113 out of a possible 183 countries, ranked number 58 in the world. But in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, 2006, which compared ten-year-olds from 35 different countries, South Africa was bottom of the pile, despite the fact that the South African students tested were older, at 11.9 years, than the average, a concession made due to ‘the challenge of multiple native languages and the language of instruction’ (Mullis et al, 2007).

Illiteracy – or even low literacy – is an expensive problem. The World Literacy Foundation estimates that the world-wide lack of literacy skills costs the global economy US$1.19 trillion each year. Individual countries, both developing and developed, have explored the cost of literacy challenges within their borders and the figures are frightening: inadequate literacy or a lack of literacy is not only ruinously expensive for the individual but for the society within which that individual resides.

Most of what I have read around the topic of literacy pertains to basic literacy skills. The definition of literacy as a concept is also under review. In a 2005 UNESCO report, the following, much lengthier and more sophisticated description (UNESCO is adamant that this is not a definition) of literacy caught my attention:

Literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, develop their knowledge and potential and participate fully in community and wider society.(UNESCO 2005:21)

This description is exciting but also divisive. How many young people and adults, currently considered literate in the more accepted sense of the word, would still be labelled literate based on this?

But the truth is if our students are to succeed in the twenty-first century world, we do need a broader, more enhancing vision of literacy. Recently I browsed through Future Work Skills 2020, published by the Institute for the Future, part of the University of Phoenix Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. Many of these sorts of reports and investigations are floating about at the moment and most of them, certainly the ones I have read, draw more or less the same sorts of conclusions about how we will work in the next few decades and what skills we will need in order to navigate these new worlds filled with new information. But what strikes me about the predictions these publications make is that they all require the same, basic skill.

Future Work Skills 2020 names concepts for the future work force such as Sense-making, Social Intelligence, Novel and Adaptive Thinking, Cross-cultural Competency, Computational Thinking, New-Media Literacy, Transdisiplinarity, Design Mind-set, Cognitive Load Management and Virtual Collaboration.  These are smart, exciting new labels designed to incorporate what is new and developing in our evolving world. But all of them, at their heart, have the ability to read – to predict, skim, scan, identify, infer, distinguish, evaluate, explain, interpret, motivate, analyse, respond, to consider socio-cultural and political values, attitudes and beliefs, and to evaluate how language may reflect and shape those values and attitudes. I am sure by now you are mouthing along with me as you recognise that I am quoting the key verbs from Learning Outcome 2, Reading and Viewing, in the IEB Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement. If our students are encouraged to read, not only for education, but for enrichment and enjoyment, of course they will (and I am quoting) be ‘able to express their identity, feelings and ideas, interact with others and manage their world’. Reading is not a future-anything skill – it is, it has and it always will be the single most important and life-enhancing ability we can offer our students anywhere in the world, at any time and in any environment.

Here is my concern, however, and it lies buried in the National CAPS document:

‘By the final phase of schooling, however, many of these activities [referring to reading] should need little emphasis: they have been part of the learner’s progress through preceding phases.’

This is where things could go horribly wrong. That assumption cannot be made. English teachers desperately need to engage with our students at every phase, urging them, motivating them and encouraging them to read for enjoyment by making reading accessible to them and by modelling the value and delight of reading through our own, personal reading habits. Reading will always need emphasis – teachers of senior phase students know that as well as teachers of foundation phase or primary phase. And often, for whatever reason, reading might not have been part of the learner’s progress through preceding phases.

In a Monitoring Learning Achievement surveyconducted in 25 145 South African schools in 1999, 22 101 schools had no space for a library, 3 388 had dedicated library spaces but not one book and only 1 817 schools had libraries with books. In other words, for the mathematically challenged of us, only 7 per cent of the schools surveyed had libraries.  A way around the absence of libraries is for teachers, especially in the primary phase, to have classroom collections for students to use – sadly, only 25 per cent of the schools offered this alternative.

Our government is very aware of the shockingly low literacy levels in this country and has devised a National Reading Strategy for South Africa; its vision reads: Every South African learner will be a fluent reader who reads to learn, and reads for enjoyment and enrichment. We must ensure that our students leave school as readers, preferably who read for pleasure, because the benefits of such an activity for the individual student and the society he or she will inhabit are almost immeasurable.  English teachers cannot assume that because a student can read, or has been a reader, he or she will continue to read without our support.

Believe it or not, as well as the heated debate around the words ‘literacy’, ‘illiteracy’, ‘low literacy’ and ‘adequate literacy’, there is academic debate around what we mean when we say ‘reading for pleasure’.  Other ways of putting this are ‘leisure reading’ (Greaney, 1980), ‘recreational reading’ (Manzo & Manzo, 1995), ‘voluntary reading’ (Krashen, 2004), ‘independent reading’ (Cullinan, 2000) and my personal favourite, ‘ludic reading’ (Nell, 1988) – I had to look up ‘ludic’: It means ‘spontaneous and playful’, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English!

Whatever we want to call it, reading for enjoyment is the reading we do of our own accord, because we want to. It can also refer to reading that we began at someone else’s behest, such as a teacher, but continued with because we became ‘hooked’ and wanted to carry on. Typically, reading for enjoyment will reflect our own choice of reading material – and this is a thorny area for English teachers because we need to allow choice (which has been proven to be a very important issue for teenage and senior primary readers) but within the confines of what we believe to be best for growing our readers.

Wanting our students to enjoy reading is not simply because we are passionate about the heart of our language, its literature, but because it has real, measurable benefits: in 2002 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development stated that ‘reading enjoyment is more important for children’s educational success than their family’s socio-economic status’. And Krashen adds, ‘When children read for pleasure, when they get ‘hooked on books’, they acquire, involuntarily and without conscious effort, nearly all of the so-called ‘language skills’ many people are so concerned about: they will become adequate readers, acquire a large vocabulary, develop the ability to understand and use complex grammatical constructions, develop good writing style, and become good (but not necessarily perfect) spellers. Although free voluntary reading alone will not ensure attainment of the highest levels of literacy, it will at least ensure an acceptable level. Without it, I suspect that children simply do not have a chance.’

But sadly, and this will not be a surprise, a lot of evidence is accumulating that a growing number of young people, especially between the ages of ten and fourteen, are not reading books for pleasure any more. They are reading – text messages, web pages and so on, but their choice of reading is veering away from fiction, and non-fiction has never really been a very popular genre for younger people anyway.  And teachers of boys will equally not be surprised to hear that boys tend to read less than girls and tend to enjoy it less, based on studies such as Clark and Foster’s in 2005.

As English teachers in well-resourced schools that doubtless have given much thought to our students’ reading,  we must continue to do everything we can to motivate reading and to encourage our students regardless of phase to embrace intrinsic and extrinsic reasons for reading.  Intrinsic motivation means that students read because they want to; thus they read more often and more widely; they enjoy it more; they retain more information and they are better able to persist with what they are reading. They see that reading is a valuable, important activity, they are curious to learn about a particular topic and they feel a sense of achievement at what they have mastered.

Extrinsic motivation to read means that students read because the activity is being imposed upon them, usually by their teachers. Extrinsic motivation is often linked to assessment or a task. Research (Deci et al, 1999, Wigfield and Guthrie, 1997) has discovered that extrinsically motivated students want their reading to be recognised, they want to receive a tangible reward; when reading for assessment, they want to earn good marks and they tend to read competitively – wanting to outperform other students.

Intrinsically motivated readers tend to have higher level thinking skills and to understand concepts better than students who read because they are forced to. But extrinsic motivation can be harnessed to bring about intrinsic motivation!

We must be able to answer the questions, ‘What should I read next?’ and most importantly, ‘What should I read?’ (Which usually in my experience, despite a collection of nearly 11 000 items in our library, follows the statement, ‘There is nothing to read.’) As busy, pressured English teachers trying to squeeze in reading for our own pleasure, never mind reading in order to motivate our students, sounds like an impossibly tall order. But there are ways of coping with the volume of new publications and authors that seem to come at us in a tsunami of texts. However we try to motivate our students to read for enjoyment, it is essential that they know we read for pleasure and that we share what we have read with them.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, also by C S Lewis, Lucy opens a magical book and we are told, ‘The longer she read the more wonderful and more real the pictures became …’.

Let’s cast a spell on our students… These are some suggestions of various ways to motivate our students to read (without trying to read every book that is published and managing to get 8 hours sleep a night). Modern life is certainly not all about Facebook and Twitter, but we need to accept that our students, especially our teenage students, are going to be using social networks and technology. This means we must try to meet them where they are and make their interests work for us. It is helpful if we can embrace some degree of technological savvy, without having to morph into Bill Gates…

• Set up reading programmes

At St Anne’s College we run two reading programmes: the Young Critics Award programme in Form 4 (Grade Ten) and the Battle of the Bookworms programme in Form 2 (Grade Eight). Both programmes run over approximately 15 weeks, both programmes are run closely in conjunction with the English department and both programmes are assessment-linked as well are reward-linked, to a greater or lesser extent.

Thus both programmes offer extrinsic motivations in the hopes of igniting intrinsic motivation to read – and they include that all-important aspect of choice, within broad parameters (YCA offers a list of twenty books; BoB offers a booklet running to 25 pages). Reading programmes are a lot of work to set up, but the rewards are as magical as Lucy’s book.

• Organise reading activities

These tend to work better at a primary school level than secondary school level, but anything is worth trying at any phase. These include reading games, reading groups, older, more confident readers helping younger children with reading, reading for prizes and other, creative reading activities. All research points to the fact that writing book reviews is the least welcomed reading activity!

• Set up displays (electronic and traditional)

Have a dedicated board in your classroom for latest book news, and in primary schools, offer reading nooks and corners – as well as classroom collections. Encourage your students to add material to your reading boards. Use technology if you can support it: book trailers are freely downloadable from YouTube, if you have somewhere to run them. QR codes are fun and easy to create – these can add a new dimension to your pleading for reading, as long as your students have smartphones and have downloaded the (free) app! If you have a classroom blog or a media centre blog use it as another platform to offer your students links. Use all the colleagues in your school – create READ posters of your colleagues holding up their favourite books and display these everywhere. Encourage all your colleagues to talk about their personal reading, not only the teachers of languages.

• Celebrate special days

Celebrate days that are linked to reading: International Mother Language Day, February 21, World Read Aloud Day, March 7^th, World Storytelling Day, March 21^st (the theme for 2013 is Fortune and Fate), World Book Day and Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, World Book Night is celebrated on the same day, only at night– there is a fantastic website and an exciting list of (mainly) senior reads each year. Let’s plan on bringing World Book Night to South Africa!

Look for the official websites of all of these occasions, sign up for the newsletters and begin planning special days for next year. Perhaps invite a professional story teller for World Storytelling Day? There is so much that can be done with the theme of Fortune and Fate in 2012 with primary school and GET phase students, especially. Research has shown again and again that everyone, children and adults, enjoys having stories read to them or told to them.

• Set up author contact / look up official websites, linked websites, webinars

There can be few things as exciting as live contact with authors. Now that we can Skype, it is a cheap option, but bring in live authors when feasible, link their talk to a point of sale and an autograph session. Most writers can be found online, via their official website.

There are so many ways to make a book come alive, for students of all ages. Webinars are online seminars, which are usually accessed by belonging to an online education forum or publication of some kind (membership is usually free).  Webinars can come at a cost but one that is considerably cheaper than flying somewhere for a week.

• Go to websites to help answer the question, ‘What should I read next?’

If you’re stumped, have your students register on Good Reads (www.goodreads.com).  There is a clever algorithmic test that readers can take for ten minutes or so, within the genres they have specified. Once the students have finished the ‘test’, the website, which is a jolly good resource anyway, suggests which books they should be reading next.  Good Reads has added their Good Reads for Facebook Timeline link, and in just under two weeks, Facebook readers the world over had added over a million books they had been reading! Shelfari (www.shelfari.com ) is also a goody.

Penguin South Africa has just launched The Wall(http://penguinbooks.co.za/young-adult-books)– if students ‘like’ the page, they have the chance to enter competitions, get books news and write their own reviews for others to read! (Facebook is not intended for users younger than 13.)

• Subscribe

Subscribe to the myriad of book news, blogs and letters online:  for example, lovereading4kids.  Read online book reviews from local and international sources. Subscribe to magazines such as The Good Books guide or follow them online.  Use online book stores too – you will be bombarded (in a good way) with useful information. Follow the literary prizes, too – the Man Booker is an obvious senior one with a fantastic website chock full of useful resources and information (www.themanbookerprize.com) but more junior ones include the Newbery, the Carnegie and the Greenaway medal.

• Use Twitter

Twitter (https://twitter.com/)  is not only about Justin Bieber – it is the most fantastic resource to follow your favourite authors, follow publishing houses and keep up to date with a myriad of book news. And before you groan and think that you get more enough to read every day, remember that Twitter is a micro-blogging service; the messages are only 140 characters long (including spaces) but you can add links or images. Set up a Twitter account that your (older) students can follow.

• Add yourself to bookshop mailing lists

In this way you can be invited to their book promotions and receive their new letters (this applies to e-books too). Many book stores are trying harder than ever to make p-books attractive, and you don’t need to live anywhere near the bookshop to benefit from the online newsletter.

• Encourage keen readers  to keep you informed

Let them tell you what they reading and what you need to be aware of – as a librarian, I encourage girls to tell me about books they think we must have and to give me the information I need to make an informed choice, which includes them.  My keen readers (and every school has them, you simply need to identify them) are an invaluable source of information.  And when you give your students a voice and they know it is being heard, that line of communication will never be closed again, even when the students move on.

• Set up cluster groups

We did not pursue this angle when I was part of cluster groups and teaching English, but it would work so well. We are in constant contact with one another about matters pertaining to assessment, teaching and learning and how we deliver the curriculum. Why not use those smaller, more intense groups to share recommended reading lists or ideas for reading activities, book programmes and assessments? A Twitter account in the cluster group’s name could be set up, for example, making communication fast and easy – straight to cell phones, short and to the point. Websites can be linked at the touch of a mouse.

The community of learning’s emphasis must fall on community.

The most important aspect of the latter part of this presentation is that we are not, as Lewis pointed out, alone.

To end then as I began – with a quote by one of my favourite authors, Dr Seuss, from his book, The Lorax:

‘Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, /Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.’

The status of English in a multilingual South Africa:

Gatekeeper or liberator?

Professor Rajendra Chetty, CPUT

In this paper, Professor Chetty argues that, instead of blaming poor literacy rates and academic performance on the fact that that learners in disavantaged communities are required to use English as their Language of Learning and Teaching, we should rather look to the low intake of teacher education students of indigenous languages at the Foundation Stage level to offer mother-tongue instruction, as well as the content and methology of the teaching of English (which in turn brings into the question the quality of the training of English teachers)..

This  paper analyses language politics in South Africa in an attempt to understand what is happening in multilingual classrooms. I humbly open this highly contested and ideological debate once again as I firmly believe that the language debate has to be more finely nuanced taking into consideration the realties of race, class and social marginalisation, together with the sensitivities of the language issue in SA and the unfortunate hegemonic stance taken against English.

Firstly, to contextual the debate, let’s look at how the past still informs the present with regards to compulsory mother-tongue instruction followed by circumscribed multilingualism

Education policy-makers in the 1950s made mother-tongue education a key principle of state policy, a move that may have been applauded, had the context of its implementation been different.

For practical reasons, African schoolchildren also had to have mastered a level of competence in the official languages, Afrikaans and English, that would make the country governable and ease communication in the workplace. African children therefore had to switch from mother tongue to English or Afrikaans for high school, a feat that research shows usually ensures barely functional competence in the target language.

In the context of the apartheid project, mother-tongue education was seen as part of a cynical strategy of divide-and-rule by diminishing access to the language of power, English, and lowering standards of education to ensure that African scholars were ill-equipped to participate in economic activity beyond manual labour levels. As apartheid education policy evolved and mother-tongue universities were established in ethnically defined regions, these institutions were widely seen by the African majority and their political activists as academically second rate, and tools of apartheid social engineering. Unsurprisingly, when ANC activists eventually returned from exile in the 1990s they advocated a single nationwide medium of instruction, English, and elimination of ethnic ‘bush’ tertiary institutions.It is evident that language was a contested factor to the apartheid discourse.

What are the language dynamics post 1994?

South Africans had to rethink their identities on a number of levels given the recent history of political freedom, economic liberalisation and social development. There is a sense in which this identity taking and identity formation in SA is a profoundly fraught experience. This is particularly the case with respect to race and class and it takes sharp expression in the language practices of individuals and groups. We see this clearly in young people’s use of language and the ways that they are schooled. The school system itself is complex in terms of language politics. The system that has emerged post 1994 is one where race has not gone away but has been significantly modified by social class. Permitted to charge school fees by the SA Schools Act, former white schools in particular have reconstructed themselves as schools for the new and expanded South African middle class. They have become racially diverse, which is an important development, but most of them have retained their elite identities. A Human Science Research Council study (Sekete et al. 2001, 27) shows that 60% of black and coloured children do not attend the school nearest to them, in other words, they actively evade them, informed by the manufactured desire for the school elsewhere. These children choose to access schools with English as medium of instruction because they regard it as crucial for cultivating the necessary aspirant dispositions that will allow entry into formal middle-class employment and lifestyles (see Fataar 2007a). A key question in this scenario as asked by the NEPI document in 1992 is: Has the enforced mother-tongue medium of instruction during apartheid cemented the view of African language medium education as inferior in the eyes of African parents?

Along with democracy in 1994 came a celebrated constitution enshrining 11 official languages, which both recognized and promoted South Africa’s de facto multilingulism. The consitituion is supportive of the ‘destabilisation of the hegemony of English’ and promotes the use of African languages in different domains of society. In alignment with this, the Dept of Ed’s Language in Education Policy promoted additive bilingualism, and the use of mother tongue as the language of teaching and learning in the early years of schooling.  However, this has not been successful in many cases, as no clear guidelines have been provided on how to implement the policy. Although the policy is potentially positive, many teachers, teacher education and parents wrestle with the consequences of handing over the responsibility for Language of Learning and Teaching policy formulation to school governing bodies, which are not adequately informed, trained or equipped to make such key decisions in disadvantaged contexts.  The language policy has had very little impact in practice. Rather, the status of English is growing, witnessed in its widespread use in high status domains of politics, the media and education.

The history of mother-tongue education in South Africa therefore makes language policy extremely complex, giving rise to baffling reactions from parents, to efforts to instantiate language rights in schooling. There is still a widespread suspicion among parents, especially the poor, that mother-tongue education will stifle their children’s aspirations for a better life. SGBs still choose English as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in more than half the schools in South Africa, although English is the home language of only 7% of the population. Linguists have yet to convince communities of the benefits of mother-tongue education, and crucially, the resources to support it have yet to be developed beyond basic levels of literacy.

The tragedy is that, having chosen English as the LoLT, the level of English offered and mastered in most schools still reflects inadequate functionality for meeting the aspirations of those wanting to move out of poverty. This may be partly attributable to the quality of learning in the mother tongue that has preceded the switch to English. There is a serious shortage of resources: qualified African mother-tongue foundation phase teachers, as well as a range of progressively conceptually challenging genres of children’s literature that facilitate engagement, vocabulary development, experience of alternative perspectives and world views, flexible use of language structures and modelling of text for different purposes.

To effectively support the acquisition of a first additional language as a language of learning, the learning in mother tongue must be richer than the level expected in the target language. The learner must be able to find the resources in the mother tongue to match the resources that have to be comprehended in the target language. If these resources are not available in the mother tongue, it is reasonable to conclude that the learner needs to be initiated into the Language of Learning and Teaching as early as possible, so that it becomes as effective for learning as a mother tongue should be.

Pinky Makoe found in her study of language discourses in a multilingual primary school that the value attached to linguistic competence in English renders some learners ‘successful’ and others unsuccessful. This means that competence in English as the language of learning and teaching is seen to be equivalent to a more favourable position of identity. Those who possess this kind of competence are privileged and engender more authority in relation to other learners.

The reality is that, although the significance of mother-tongue education is widely acknowledged and encouraged, it remains a thorny issue for most parents. This is especially so for African parents.

There is currently a great need to reinforce a critical literacy paradigm in the South African public education system given the socio-historical and political context. The unequal access to resources based on race and class continues to produce privilege as well as poor scholastic performance. Socially constructed patterns of power have been heightened, hence the need to understand the effects of power, the replacement of race with class, the lack of equity of access to public schooling and the need for redress at classroom level. For example, in 2006 a standard literacy test was conducted in all schools in the Western Cape. Ex-Model-C school learners achieved an 82.9% pass rate while in former coloured schools the rate was 26.6% and in black schools 3.7%. This is evident of the need to be more vigilant with our efforts to eradicate racism and entrench democracy. Less than 10% of public schools in South Africa have functional libraries of any kind (Department of Education’s 2007 NEIMS Report). These public schools that have libraries are the former model-C schools that are able to establish libraries and employ librarians through their own funds, collected through fees.

Children who grow up in communities that are embedded in orality develop different faculties with language, which although equally powerful resources for making meaning, are not equally valued by the school system when compared to middle class literacy norms (Heath, 1983). These children’s literacy abilities are not used as a resource in schools. Bordieu rightly points out that the school system privilege some children over others, hence marginalising the social capital of the children disadvantaged by the social system. School literacy is therefore not neutral. When we quote statistics with regards to literacy e.g. the Pirls test, we fall into the trap of what Street (1984) referred to as the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy, and we naively ignore the fact that literacy is not an issue of measurement or of skills but a social practice that varies from one context to another. In South Africa it is the context of learners who are privileged in terms of class versus those that are poor, disadvantaged and largely black.

Providing English knowledge is legitimate and it empowers learners. Good command of English will aid in minimizing socio-economic disadvantage, especially within the post-apartheid context of South Africa. English can also be seen as an attempt to unify a people susceptible to be divided along ethno-linguistic lines. In a sense one can argue that English equalizes our society. Ideally, because of our location on the African continent, an African language should be playing this role and indeed, current efforts to promote African languages into higher status functions should be encouraged. However, the fact remains that at least in the foreseeable future, English will continue to be a major language in this country and the world at large. One can therefore argue that imperatives for the foregrounding of English as language of teaching and learning should be examined so as to provide every South African child with an opportunity to master the language that might control his/her access to the means of socio-economic and educational empowerment.

I contend that those among us that are most vociferous about English as killer of other languages, who play the role of defenders of the victims of epistemic violence of the empire, ironically use only English in our righteous battle. One cannot leave one’s own baggage – or historical, geographic and class positioning – when encountering the marginalised and disadvantaged. What is advocated is critical negotiation from within, an engagement with and critique of hegemonic discourses and representations. We need to be vigilant of our politically correct denunciation of (neo)colonialism derived from an unexamined identification with, or benevolence towards, the subaltern (Moore-Gilbert, 1997:112). This acknowledgement of complicity (and complexity) also affects the way we address imperialism: while never underestimating its destructive impact, we should also recognise the positive effects too, in this case, the enabling violations of English (Spivak, 1994:277).

Is English a liberator or a gatekeeper?

I differ from Hilary Janks that African children’s learning and their sense of identity are compromised when they have to learn through the medium of English (2010:11). In fact, the struggle was not against English, but the forced use of Afrikaans as medium of instruction to maintain racial domination. Even in the promotion of African languages during apartheid, it was not a linguistic or language rights imperative, but rather a political tool of the regime to foster ethnic divisions and to keep black learners away from English which was a language of power and access. As a form of literacy redress, we should be advocating good quality English education that integrates both the linguistic and social capital of African children.

The ability of South Africans to communicate in English facilitates the evolution of a nation state. English is the language of the state and government documentation appears mostly in English. From the perspective of Bourdieu (1993) this represents cultural capital. English is therefore central to those who wish to succeed within the parameters of state-sanctioned power. Those who have good command of both English and an African language stand even a better chance of success. It is therefore not surprising that as early as 1991, the NEPI report shows that significant numbers of black parents have opted for English for their children, even from the first year of primary school (NEPI 1991:13f).

We would be highly irresponsible if we did not give learners mastery of English, and this in no way advocates the marginalisation of other languages. Together with mastery of English, we need to provide a critical view of the status of English as a global language (Granville et al, 1998). Linguistic diversity should be fostered. The social interest at work here is empowering black learners with the dominant linguistic capital of the country so that they benefit and they are advantaged in the school and higher education system. It is ironical that it is mostly white learners who only have English as a language and most black children speak African languages at home. Yet, the linguistic debates have centred on the deficiency of African children not knowing English and not on white children not being able to speak an African language. More realistically, learners who do not have an African language in South Africa are deprived of the opportunity for meaning construction within the African context that forms their life world.

English does not perpetuate the privileged status of an elite class, on the contrary, English promotes structural-economic development and social inter-group and inter-personal interactions, vital components for reconciliation and growth in a new democracy. In spite of postcolonial critique by language activists, English does not regulate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources between groups as South African speakers of English are not defined on the basis of language. All South Africans have access to English and an indigenous language. As such they may decide to claim any of the official languages as theirs.

Also, it is fiscal reasons that restrict the appointment of new language teachers to ensure the implementation of the language policy. Language policy seems to have simply moved African languages from the margin to the centre (on paper only) as a form of redress and there has been little training of African language teachers. Of serious concern is the low intake of teacher education students at foundation phase level to offer mother-tongue instruction in indigenous languages. What is needed is a concerted programme to ensure quality intake for teacher training and an effort by the state to reduce material inequities in schools as a step to attract quality teacher education students. The quality training of language teachers is unfortunately not foregrounded as there are more serious issues within the complexity of teacher education to be addressed.

Teachers are unwilling to embrace new methodologies and the concern is more around credentialism as opposed to gaining new knowledge in the increased interest in in-service programmes. Universities too, played the neo-liberal game by awarding certificates without adequate re-training of teachers as the concern was more on marketisation and massification. It is therefore not strange that in recent literacy tests in this province, it was found that the teacher knowledge was not much higher than learner knowledge in primary schools. The findings of this study are still embargoed through pressure by the teacher unions. The situation is very complex as it is not only the learner literacy levels that need to be addressed, but also the literacy of the teachers. There has been little retraining of teachers with regards to the multilingual nature of open schools (pre-1994 South African schools were largely segregated). English second language learners are marginalized and silenced in such contexts due to poor language teacher preparation, not due to English as language of instruction.

There should be greater accent on cognitive/academic language proficiency in the training of teachers, along with the reconceptualisation of the role of languages in teaching and learning. Language courses are limited to archaic pedagogics and consist of formal aspects of language, limited literature study and basic communication in English. The silences in these language courses include semantics and functional meaning, academic language proficiency, pragmatic aspects of proficiency, bilingualism and code-switching.

Meaning construction (Freire 1971), a theory fundamental to critical literacy, is the basis of context-embedded teaching, especially within post-colonial contexts. The teacher has to be trained to encourage learners to negotiate meaning and interpret texts. In her study of language and learning science in South Africa, Probyn (2006) concluded that teachers indicated a strong preference for English as the language of teaching and learning. The lack of training in teaching in second language was evident and teaching resources were limited. Teaching cannot be done in a language in which the teacher does not have an appropriate level of mastery.

The contextual frame that continues to condition English teaching in post-colonial contexts is scary and must be addressed in teacher training:

-          Pedagogy is based on European models;

-          The most prevalent teaching methodology is the transmission mode;

-          The prescribed texts are drawn from predominantly middle-class, high-culture positions;

-          Classrooms are characterized by a polarity between first language and second language speakers whose cultural capital is excluded;

-          A culture of silence results from non-mother-tongue based learners losing confidence. (Ashworth and Prinsloo 1994:125-126)

The move should be towards creative literacy. If learning to read and write is to constitute an act of knowing, the learners must assume from the beginning the role of creative subjects. It is not a matter of memorising and repeating given syllables and phrases, but rather of reflecting critically on the process of reading and writing itself, and on the profound significance of language (Freire, 1972a). Much of the curriculum reform in English education thus far was simply altering a reading list. Of course there was also the doomed educational experiment with OBE and countless reviews that had limited impact on the country’s literacy levels.

The implication of a critical literacy approach will shift the focus from listening and reading to reading and creation. Learners have for too long been taught to read and understand. Reading for the creation of texts has been ignored, perhaps historically because of its political implications. Incidentally, much of the literacy tests focus on writing through answering contextual type questions. There is a lack of emphasis on writing in the school programme, yet the testing of writing skills is foregrounded in literacy tests and this raises questions around validity of the scores.

If it is to be a ‘liberator’, English should be a resource to be appropriated and owned by all, not just the elite, to be used as a gateway to the wider world. For this to happen, creative solutions (and massive expenditure) would have to be applied to the teaching of English, particularly in the township and rural schools. If well managed, mastery of English in disadvantaged settings may be an invaluable tool of exchange between those living on the margins of society and those who are part of the global village.

Conclusion

A relevant language curriculum within a post-colonial context has to take into cognizance not only the local cultural diversity but also the global store of knowledge that characterizes the heterogeneity of our common humanity. Edward Said notes accurately the predicament of a racial and ethnic version of cultural nationalism:

To assume that the ends of education are best advanced by focusing principally on our own separateness, our own ethnic identity, culture and traditions ironically places us where as subaltern, inferior, or lesser races we had been placed by nineteenth-century racial theory, unable to share in the general riches of human culture.

The search for relevant knowledge (like English), should go beyond repudiating the west in favour of recovering and reconstructing Africa’s cultural heritage.  Concomitant with that, we have to be extra vigilant of the west with their politically correct denunciation of English as neo-colonialism and our own colleagues who continue to see English from a hegemonic lens. This benevolent stance towards African languages may be seen as patronising and ill-informed. We agree that we need to address imperialism and the destructive impact English has had on indigenous languages. However as Spivak maintains, we need to recognise the positive effects of English and see it as an enabling violation.

Two Yeats poems

(Adapted from an article published by S K King, in CRUX, April-June 1972)

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. Yeats sees again after nineteen years the wild swans which seem never to lose life, strength or beauty; ‘passion or conquest’ ‘attend upon them still’, and his own loss of these very things must come home to the poet. ‘All’s changed’ for him since that time he ‘trod with a lighter tread’.

The poem has that perfection which makes it appear simple, and only on reflection does one see how much the packed, yet seemingly easy language implies. This anyone must soon appreciate – how much, for instance, the first stanza suggests – the colour, the stillness (and the poet wandering through it) of the paths round the lovely lake, full, cool, with its reflections. Everything is put so simply that there must be delight in dwelling on the lines to get their full impression. What is not so immediately apparent is the masterly movement of the lines. The stanza form has been built by Yeats exactly for this purpose, and is so perfect that the speaking of the poem deserves an infinite care to get the intended rhythm. I know of no other poem which surpasses it in this. There is a constant definiteness of emphasis in a movement mostly slow, without any roughness, all quiet, yet intense. The long third and fifth lines of each stanza are demanding, and anyone with an ear would delight in getting them right.

The whole poem demands a slow deliberation, even the lines which describe the swans’ movements, strong and sure of purpose.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

A point that one needs to be careful about with this poem is the emphasis. The poem fundamentally is about the love of life (as all Yeats’ poetry is) and Yeats and the Irish Airman into whose experience he invites us, are not at all dwelling on ‘death’.

It is exulting in the thrill of flying –  its danger and challenge to the whole man. ‘This death’ is consciously there, but not primarily. It comes last in the poem, and it is ‘this life’, the fullness of living in the adventure of flying a war plane, that has made anything else seem ‘waste of breath’. Every word in the poem needs to be given its weight – what for instance ‘waste’ implies about the possibilities of ways of living. It is illuminating to read Yeats’s other poem about the same Irish airman, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’.

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.  PLEASE INDICATE WHAT GRADE LEVEL THE TIP IS AIMED AT. THE FIRST TEN TO SEND IN THEIR ENTRIES WILL RECEIVE A FREE DICTIONARY AND CD ROM.  PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR NAME AND POSTAL ADDRESS.

Well, in the end we received three entries – and the authors will shortly be receiving a copy of this very attractive and functional dictionary. Here are their suggestions:

 Children like to play

Grade 4 learners could use the dictionary as a FUN GAME. The teacher could have a list of words (one at a time) and ask learners to look up the words from the dictionary. Learners may work in pairs or individually. The learners who get the word first are allocated points. After 5-10 words, the groups’ scores are calculated and the one with the highest score wins. This may be repeated amongst different groups of learners.

Gregg Masondo, North West Province

‘A dictionary on every desk!’

When I was a teacher, it was an English class rule: A dictionary on every desk! When a child came to class, the dictionary had to be put on the desk. Every child knew the teacher’s answer if they asked how to spell a word, ‘Use your dictionary!’

Richard Hayward, Gauteng

‘Balderdash’

An adaptation of ‘Balderdash’ works really well with high school grades. (It’s the original pre-board game.) Team leader chooses a word. Everyone writes own definition.  Team leader reads all definitions including the correct one. Points  scored for guessing correct definition, and for being chosen.  Reinforces dictionary components and style.

Nicci Hayes, Eastern Cape

ARTHUR MILLER’S THE CRUCIBLE

Dr Barbara Basel

A presentation at a workshop for teachers in May 2012

I’ve decided to focus on three aspects of this play:

1.         Why did Miller write The Crucible – the circumstances and reasons?
2.         Three of the main themes in The Crucible.
3.         Three of the main characters in The Crucible

I will provide some theoretical background first and then suggest some ways in which students could be assisted towards a deeper understanding of these aspects of the play

THE REASONS MILLER WROTE THE PLAY

LIFE IN POST WORLD WAR II AMERICA

Miller’s The Crucible, was written in 1953 to expose the horrors of ‘McCarthyism’. It is a play that deftly examines ‘the work of the individual conscience when pitted against the uniform thinking of the mob’ (New Yorker).

According to Miller, ‘the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience.  However, drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us know more, and not merely evoke our feelings.’ (‘Introduction to Miller’s Collected Plays’.)

As a result of heightened fears of the communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents during the 1940s and 1950s, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy and his supporters used charges of communist sympathies or disloyalty to attack a number of politicians and other individuals inside and outside of government.  Suspects had to defend themselves before the House of Un-American Activities Commission and the identities of their accusers and even the nature of many of the accusations were typically kept secret from the accused. The term ‘McCarthyism’ was subsequently used to describe the making of accusations of disloyalty, subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence. (A practice that mirrors the treatment of the accused in the Salem witch trials of 1692.)

Elmer Davis, a highly respected news reporter, warned that ‘McCarthyism’ constitutes a ‘general attack not only on teachers, textbooks, schools, colleges and libraries, but on the freedom of the minds’ of all Americans.  Justice William O. Douglas stated that McCarthy’s purge was ‘based on a principle repugnant to our society, namely guilt by association, which is typical of what happens in a police state’.

Such were the conditions in American when Miller wrote The Crucible, a play which uses the 1692 Salem witch trials as a metaphor for ‘McCarthyism’, thus suggesting that ‘McCarthyism-style’ persecution can occur at any time or place. The play focuses on the fact that, once accused, a person would have little chance of acquittal, given the irrational and circular reasoning of both the courts and the public. One of the aspects that prompted Miller to write The Crucible; was exploring ‘the tragedy of people who, under social pressure, lose their integrity’. The Crucible explores this theme in the context of the Salem witch trials. Many citizens of Salem lost their sense of decency and community when they went along with the crowd to continue the persecution of the innocent.   Miller stated later that: ‘The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in America in the 1950s’. 

Miller’s The Crucible depicts trial scenes in which children accuse adults of evil abuse in a fury of fanaticism and paranoia. Similar scenes are replayed in historic documentaries about Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution in the People’s Republic of China.  In more recent years in Africa, a similar form of mass hysteria fired the 1994 Rwandan Genocide in which over 800,000 people died because, according to the Hutu Power group, ‘the Tutsi intended to enslave the Hutu’. This genocide was supported by the national government, local military and civil officials and the mass media.

Miller spent hours studying the testimonies of the participants in the Salem trial. He was particularly interested in the testimony against a farmer named John Proctor who was executed for conspiring with the Devil. Miller discovered a connection between Abigail Williams and the Rev. Parrish and that both were somehow linked to John and Elizabeth Proctor. There were sexual innuendos throughout the transcript. So Miller introduced the fictionalized adulterous relationship between Proctor and the young Abigail in order to create the necessary dramatic energy and provide the reason for Abigail to accuse Elizabeth of witchcraft. Miller became attached to his characters and to the real people they represented. He marvelled at Rebecca Nurse, Giles Corey and John Proctor who ‘could have such a belief in the rightness of their consciences as to give up their lives rather that say what they thought was false’.

LIFE IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES AT THE END OF THE 1600s

In 1689, the Puritans of Salem Village were finally allowed to form their own covenanted church congregation and ordain their own minister. Salem Village was torn by internal disputes between neighbours who disagreed about the choice of Samuel Parris as their first ordained minister, and about the choice to grant him the deed to the parsonage as part of his compensation. (In The Crucible the Rev. Parris frequently alludes to the fact that it has taken him ‘2 long years to gain the support of the community’, while John Proctor challenges Parris over his request for the deeds of the parsonage.)

Religious and political context

The Puritans were a political and religious party which began in the mid-16th century in England. The party opposed the doctrine of the Catholic Church and accused the new Protestant Church of England of continuing to follow Catholic traditions. Tension between Catholics and Protestants continued throughout the 1600s until England erupted into civil war, and the leaders of the Puritan Party executed King Charles I and made their leader, Oliver Cromwell, ‘Lord Protector’ of England in 1653. This success was short-lived and the resultant emigration of Puritans to Massachusetts in the US produced a population of fervently religious and politically astute settlers.

Social context

The Puritan community was a patriarchal society. They believed women should be subservient to men, and that women were more likely to enlist in the Devil’s service because women were lustful by nature. The ‘small-town atmosphere’ made secrets difficult to keep, and people’s opinions about their neighbours were generally accepted as fact. Children were at the bottom of the social ladder and girls were trained from a young age to perform household duties, serve their husbands and bear their children.(In The Crucible, Abigale Williams and her friends, Mary Warren and Mercy Lewis, all worked as ‘servants’  in the homes of Salem villagers.)

In accordance with Puritan beliefs, the majority of accused ‘witches’ were unmarried or recently widowed land-owning women. According to the law if no legal heir existed upon the owner’s death, title to the land reverted to the previous owner, or to the colony, thus making witch-hunting a means of acquiring a profitable piece of property.(Giles Corey accuses Thomas Putman of persuading his daughter to ‘call out’ for a witch so that he could purchase her property.)

Economic context

Increasing family size fuelled disputes over land between neighbours and within families, (such as those between Thomas Putnam and Giles Corey). Such quarrels were further enhanced by the religious fervour of the Puritans (Proctor was condemned for ploughing on Sunday). Consequently, loss of crops, livestock, and children, as well as earthquakes and bad weather, were attributed to the wrath of God. (Ironically, the death of Ruth Putman’s eight children is said to be the work of the devil.)

The Witch Trials and McCarthyism

The Crucible can be seen as symbolic of the paranoia about commof  Un-American Activities Committee’s rooting out of suspected communists during this time and the seventeenth-century witch-hunt that Miller depicts in The Crucible, including the narrow-mindedness, excessive zeal, and disregard for the individuals that characterise the government’s effort to stamp out a perceived social ill.

Just as had happened with the alleged witches of Salem, suspected Communists during McCarthy’s ‘reign of terror’ were encouraged to confess their crimes and to ‘name names,’ identifying others sympathetic to their radical cause. Miller’s main concern in The Crucible is not whether the accused are actually witches, but rather with the unwillingness of the court officials to believe that they are not. This was a matter of concern in Miller’s own time due to the fact that the excesses of McCarthyism had wronged many innocents.

QUESTIONS

In order to assist learners to better understand the context in which The Crucible was written ask them to identify and research the following issues:

• Countries, societies and religious communities in which the freedom of ordinary people is curtailed by those in power – namely by political and religious leaders.  Try to get learners to identify both past and present societies which exhibit repressive power structures, (eg Germany, Communist countries, South Africa).
• Countries and societies in which the repressive power structures have enabled the leaders to become wealthy at the expense of the poor, (eg Liberia, Zimbabwe, Eqypt).
• Countries and societies in which religious, ethnic and/or political fervour has lead to loss of life, (eg Afganistan, Sudan, Baltic States, Croatia, Rumania, etc).

2.       THREE OF THE MAIN THEMES IN THE CRUCIBLE

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. I will discuss three themes although there are others.

Intolerance

The Crucible is set in a theocratic society, in which the church and the state are one, and the form of religion is Puritanism, a very strict and ridged form of Protestantism.

• In a theocratic society moral laws and state laws are fused, thus the whole community is concerned with the status of an individual’s soul.
• Everyone must conform to established moral and social norms: thus any individual whose private life does not conform to the society’s norms represents a threat to both the public good and to the rule of God.
• In Salem, everyone belongs to either God or the devil; dissent is both unlawful and associated with satanic activity. As Danforth says in Act III, ‘a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it.’
• The witch trials are an expression of intolerance, hanging witches is the means of restoring the community’s purity; the trials brand all social deviants as devil-worshippers and necessitate their expulsion from the community.

Hysteria

The Crucible highlights the role hysteria plays in tearing apart a community. Hysteria thrives when people benefit from it. It suspends the norms of daily life and allows the manifestation of dark desires under the cover of righteousness. In The Crucible:

• Hysteria supplants logic and enables people to believe that their supposedly moral neighbours, are committing unbelievable crimes such as working with the devil or killing babies.
• The townsfolk become active in the hysterical climate for religious reasons and because it gives them a chance to express repressed sentiments and to act on long-held grudges. For example:
  -           Abigail uses the situation to accuse Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft in the hope that she can marry John Proctor.

-           Reverend Parris strengthens his position within the village by making a scapegoat of Proctor who questions his authority.
-           The wealthy, ambitious Thomas Putnam revenges Francis Nurse by getting Nurse’s virtuous wife Rebecca convicted of the ‘supernatural murders’ of Ann Putnam’s babies.

Empowerment

In The Crucible the witch trials empower several marginalized members of Salem society. In general, women occupy the lowest rung of male-dominated Salem and have few options in life. They work as servants for townsmen until they are old enough to be married off and have children of their own. In addition to being thus restricted, Abigail is also slave to John Proctor’s sexual whims—he strips away her innocence when he commits adultery with her, and he arouses her spiteful jealousy when he terminates their affair.

Because the Puritans’ greatest fear is the defiance of God, Abigail’s accusations of witchcraft and devil-worship immediately command the attention of the court. By pretending to align herself with God’s will, she gains power over society, together with the other girls in her pack, and their words become virtually unassailable. Tituba (Parris’s Barbados slave), who has the lowest status in the play because she is black, deflects blame from herself by accusing others.

QUESTIONS:

In order to assist learners to better understand the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in The Crucible ask them to identify and research the following issues:

• Intolerance

Societies and religious communities in which intolerance of other people’s ideas is common practice by both leaders and ordinary citizens. Ask learners to think about intolerance in their own communities, schools and extended families, (eg xenophobia in South Africa, intolerance towards people who are HIV/AIDS positive).  Ask learners to think of the results of such intolerance and to suggest ways in which it could be overcome.

• Hysteria

The Oxford English Dictionary defines hysteria as ‘wild, uncontrollable excitement, volatile emotions and overdramatic behaviour with physical symptoms such as unconsciousness and convulsions that cannot be attributed to physical pathology’.  Ask learners if they can identify situations in which logic has been supplanted by volatile emotions and overdramatic behaviour, for example when seemingly peaceful demonstrations by community members or street vendors turn into volatile situations in which people are injured and property is damaged.  How could such situations have been avoided?

• Empowerment

The empowerment of previously marginalised people is usually regarded as a positive action.  However, while The Crucible shows how the women of Salem used their empowerment positively, it also reveals the way in which it impacted negatively on society.  Ask learners to think about ways in which many women in today’s society have overcome their submissive position and then get them to discuss both the positive and negative results of this empowerment.

3. THREE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN THE CRUCIBLE

John Proctor

The Crucible’s structure is similar to a classical tragedy, with John Proctor as the play’s tragic hero. Honest, upright, and blunt-spoken, Proctor is a good man, but one with a secret, fatal flaw. His lust for Abigail Williams led to their affair (which occurs before the play begins), and created Abigail’s jealousy of his wife, Elizabeth, which sets the entire witch hysteria in motion.

Once the trials begin, Proctor realizes that he can stop Abigail’s rampage through Salem if he confesses his adultery. Such an admission would ruin his good name, and Proctor is, above all, a proud man who places great emphasis on his reputation. He makes an attempt, through Mary Warren’s testimony, to name Abigail as a fraud without revealing the crucial information. When this fails, he bursts out with a confession, calling Abigail a ‘whore’ and proclaiming his guilt publicly. Only then does he realize that it is too late, that matters have gone too far, and that not even the truth can break the powerful frenzy that he has allowed Abigail to whip up. Proctor’s confession succeeds only in leading to his arrest and conviction as a witch, and though he verbally attacks the court and its proceedings, he is also aware of his terrible role in allowing this fervor to grow unchecked.

Proctor redeems himself and provides a final denunciation of the witch trials in his final act. Offered the opportunity to make a public confession of his guilt and live, he goes as far as signing a ‘confession’. While initially, his immense pride and fear of public opinion compelled him to withhold his adultery from the court, by the end of the play he is more concerned with his personal integrity than his public reputation. He still wants to save his name, but for personal and religious reasons. Proctor’s refusal to provide a false confession is a true religious and personal stand. Such a confession would dishonour his fellow prisoners, who are brave enough to die as testimony to the truth. Perhaps more relevantly, a false admission would also dishonour him, staining not just his public reputation, but also his soul. By refusing to give up his personal integrity Proctor goes to the gallows redeemed for his earlier sins. As Elizabeth says to end the play, responding to Hale’s plea that she convince Proctor to publicly confess: ‘He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!’

Abigail Williams

Abigail is a very beautiful seventeen-year-old girl and one of the major characters in the play. Abigail is the least complex character in the play and her rather static nature does not change through the play.  However, Abigail is clearly the villain of the play; she tells lies, manipulates her friends and the entire town, and eventually sends nineteen innocent people to their deaths. Throughout the hysteria, Abigail’s motivations never seem more complex than simple jealousy and a desire to have revenge on Elizabeth Proctor. Abigail is driven only by sexual desire and a lust for power. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out a few background details that, though they don’t mitigate Abigail’s guilt, make her actions more understandable.

Abigail is an orphan and an unmarried girl, whose only relative, Rev. Parris, begrudgingly gives her a home. She thus occupies a low rung on the Puritan Salem social ladder (the only people below her are the slaves, like Tituba, and social outcasts). For young girls in Salem, the minister and the other male adults are God’s earthly representatives, their authority derived from on high. The trials, then, in which the girls are allowed to act as though they have a direct connection to God, empower the previously powerless Abigail. Once shunned and scorned by the respectable townsfolk who had heard rumours of her affair with John Proctor, Abigail now finds that she has clout, and she takes full advantage of it. A mere accusation from one of Abigail’s troop is enough to incarcerate and convict even the most well-respected inhabitant of Salem. Whereas others once reproached her for her adultery, she now has the opportunity to accuse them of the worst sin of all: devil-worship.

Reverend Hale

John Hale, the intellectual, naïve witch-hunter, enters the play in Act I when Parris summons him to examine his daughter, Betty. Miller describes Hale as ‘a tight-skinned, eager-eyed intellectual. This is a beloved errand for him; on being called here to ascertain witchcraft he has felt the pride of the specialist whose unique knowledge has at last been publicly called for.’ Hale enters in a flurry of activity, carrying large books and projecting an air of great knowledge. Initially Hale is the force behind the witch trials, probing for confessions and encouraging people to testify. Over the course of the play, however, he experiences a transformation, one more remarkable than that of any other character. Listening to John Proctor and Mary Warren, he becomes convinced that they, not Abigail, are telling the truth. In the climactic scene in the court in Act III, he joins those who are opposing the witch trials. In tragic fashion, his about-face comes too late—the trials are no longer in his hands but rather in those of Danforth and the theocracy, which has no interest in seeing its proceedings exposed as a sham.

The failure of his attempts to turn the tide renders the once-confident Hale a broken man. As his belief in witchcraft falters, so does his faith in the law. In Act IV, it is he who counsels the accused witches to lie, to confess their supposed sins in order to save their own lives. In his change of heart and subsequent despair, Hale gains the audience’s sympathy but not its respect, since he lacks the moral fibre of Rebecca Nurse or John Proctor. Although Hale recognizes the evil of the witch trials, his response is not defiance but surrender. He insists that survival is the highest good, even if it means accommodating oneself to injustice—something that the truly heroic characters can never accept.

QUESTIONS:

In order to assist learners to better understand the main characters in The Crucibleask them to identify at least 3 good and 3 bad points in each character and to say which characteristics are the most dominant and the affecs this has on the development of the play.

• The characters of Proctor and Rev Hale are said to change during the course of the play.  Do you agree with this statement? Give reasons for your answer.  What impact does this change have on both the character and the action of the play.
• Some commentaries say that Abigale is ‘the least complex character in the play and her rather static nature does not change throughout the play.  Ask students to comment on this, and to explain why they agree or disagree with this description.

The following questions are taken from http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/crucible/themes.html:

Study Question 1. Discuss the role that grudges and personal rivalries play in the witch trial hysteria.

The trials in The Crucible take place against the backdrop of a deeply religious and superstitious society, and most of the characters in the play seem to believe that rooting out witches from their community is God’s work. However, there are plenty of simmering feuds and rivalries in the small town that have nothing to do with religion, and many Salem residents take advantage of the trials to express long-held grudges and exact revenge on their enemies. Abigail, the original source of the hysteria, has a grudge against Elizabeth Proctor because Elizabeth fired her after she discovered that Abigail was having an affair with her husband, John Proctor. As the ringleader of the girls whose ‘visions’prompt the witch craze, Abigail happily uses the situation to accuse Elizabeth and have her sent to jail. Meanwhile, Reverend Parris, a paranoid and insecure figure, begins the play with a precarious hold on his office, and the trials enable him to strengthen his position within the village by making scapegoats of people like Proctor who question his authority.

Among the minor characters, the wealthy, ambitious Thomas Putnam has a bitter grudge against Francis Nurse for a number of reasons: Nurse prevented Putnam’s brother-in-law from being elected to the Salem ministry, and Nurse is also engaged in a bitter land dispute with one of Putnam’s relatives. In the end, Rebecca, Francis’s virtuous wife, is convicted of the supernatural murders of Ann Putnam’s dead babies. Thus, the Putnams not only strike a blow against the Nurse family but also gain some measure of twisted satisfaction for the tragedy of seven stillbirths. This bizarre pursuit of ‘justice’typifies the way that many of the inhabitants approach the witch trials as an opportunity to gain ultimate satisfaction for simmering resentments by convincing themselves that their rivals are beyond wrong, that they are in league with the devil.

Study Question 2. How do the witch trials empower individuals who were previously powerless?

Salem is a strict, hierarchical, and patriarchal society. The men of the town have all of the political power and their rule is buttressed not only by law but also by the supposed sanction of God. In this society, the lower rungs of the social ladder are occupied by young, unmarried girls like Abigail, Mary Warren, and Mercy. Powerless in daily life, these girls find a sudden source of power in their alleged possession by the devil and hysterical denunciations of their fellow townsfolk. Previously, the minister and the girls’ parents were God’s earthly representatives, but in the fervor of the witch trials, the girls are suddenly treated as though they have a direct connection to the divine. A mere accusation from one of Abigail’s troop is enough to incarcerate and convict even important, influential citizens, and the girls soon become conscious of their newfound power. In Act II, for instance, Mary Warren defies Proctor’s authority, which derives from his role as her employer, after she becomes an official of the court, and she even questions his right to give her orders at all.

Even the most despised and downtrodden inhabitant of Salem, the black slave Tituba suddenly finds herself similarly empowered. She can voice all of her hostility toward her master, Parris, and it is simply excused as ‘suggestions from the devil.’ At the same time, she can declare that she has seen ‘white people’ with the devil, thus (for the first time in her life, probably) giving her power over the white community. As the fear of falling on the wrong side of God causes chaos during the brief period of the hysteria and trials, the social order of Salem is turned on its head.

Study Question 3. How does John Proctor’s great dilemma change during the course of the play?

Proctor, the play’s tragic hero, has the conscience of an honest man, but he also has a secret flaw—his past affair with Abigail. Her sexual jealousy, accentuated by Proctor’s termination of their affair, provides the spark for the witch trials; Proctor thus bears some responsibility for what occurs. He feels that the only way to stop Abigail and the girls from their lies is to confess his adultery. He refrains for a long time from confessing his sin, however, for the sake of his own good name and his wife’s honor. Eventually, though, Proctor’s attempts to reveal Abigail as a fraud without revealing the crucial information about their affair fail, and he makes a public confession of his sin. But by the time he comes clean, it is too late to stop the craze from running its course, and Proctor himself is arrested and accused of being a witch.

At this point, Proctor faces a new dilemma and wrestles with his conscience over whether to save himself from the gallows with a confession to a sin that he did not commit. The judges and Hale almost convince him to do so, but in the end, he cannot bring himself to sign his confession. Such an action would dishonor his fellow prisoners, who are steadfastly refusing to make false confessions; more important, he realizes that his own soul, his honor, and his honesty are worth more than a cowardly escape from the gallows. He dies and, in doing so, feels that he has finally purged his guilt for his failure to stop the trials when he had the chance. As his wife says, ‘he have his goodness now.’

Essay Topics

1. Compare the roles that Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Williams play in The Crucible.

2. What role does sex, and sexual repression, play in The Crucible?

3. Why are Danforth, Hathorne, and the other authorities so resistant to believing the claim that Abigail and the other girls are lying?

4. What kind of government does Salem have? What role does it play in the action?

5. Analyze Reverend Parris. What are his motivations in supporting the witch trials?

6. Discuss the changes that Reverend Hale undergoes in the course of the play.

Quiz

1. What kind of government does Salem have in The Crucible?

(A) Democracy    (B) Theocracy     (C) Monarchy       (D) Kleptocracy

2. What is Parris’s position in Salem?

(A) Governor        (B) Judge (C) Minister         (D) Bailiff

3. Before the play begins, what did Parris catch his daughter and other girls doing?

(A) Trying to run away from home          (B) Dancing in the forest

(C) Reading Catholic tracts         (D) Conducting a black mass in the church

4. Why did Elizabeth Proctor fire Abigail?

(A) Abigail was too proud.                             (B) Abigail didn’t work hard enough.

(C) Abigail dressed like a prostitute.        (D) Abigail was having an affair withJohn Proctor.

5. As the play opens, whom has Parris asked to come to Salem?

(A) Judge Danforth          (B) Reverend Hale          (C) Tituba (D) John Proctor

6. What is John Proctor’s chief complaint against Parris’s sermons?

(A) They focus too much on fire and brimstone.            (B) They are too long.

(C) They are heretical.                 (D) They are too short.

7. What does Mrs. Putnam blame on witchcraft?

(A) Her husband’s cancer           (B) The death of seven of her children in infancy           (C) Bad weather                (D) Raids by natives

8. Who is the first person that Abigail claims practiced witchcraft?

(A)Tituba (B) John Proctor (C) Reverend Hale  (D) Mary Warren

9. In Act II, what does Mary Warren give to Elizabeth Proctor when she returns home from the trials?

(A) A cake            (B) A bonnet         (C) A kiss (D) A little doll

10. What news does Mary Warren bring from Salem?

(A) That someone accused Elizabeth of witchcraft

(B) That the witch trials have ended                    (C) That Reverend Hale is ill

(D) That someone accused John Proctor of witchcraft

11. Which commandment does John Proctor forget when Reverend Hale quizzes him?

(A) Thou shalt not kill.                              (B) Thou shalt not commit adultery.

(C) Honor thy mother and father.                        (D) Thou shalt not covet.

12. Whom do Ezekiel Cheever and Herrick, the marshal, come to the Proctor home to arrest?

(A) John Proctor  (B) Reverend Hale (C) Mary Warren (D) Elizabeth Proctor

13. To what does John Proctor convince Mary Warren to testify?

(A) That the girls are only pretending to be possessed  (B) That Abigail is a witch

(C) That Hale is a warlock           (D) That he and Abigail slept together

14. Who is in charge of the court?

(A) Giles Corey    (B) Danforth         (C) Hale                (D) Parris

15. Why will Elizabeth not be hanged if she is found guilty?

(A) Because she is a woman (B) Because the Puritans do not allow capital punishment (C) Because she is pregnant           (D) Because John Proctor is well respected

16. On what charge is Giles Corey arrested?

(A) Witchcraft       (B) Murder            (C) Contempt of court (D) Slander

17. When Mary Warren testifies against them, what do Abigail and her troop of girls do?

(A) They all confess.        (B) They claim that Mary is bewitching them.

(C) They attack her.         (D) They claim that John Proctor has bewitched Mary.

18. What does John Proctor do, in a desperate attempt to foil Abigail?

(A) He tells the court about his affair with her. (B) He accuses her of witchcraft.

(C) He tries to kill her.      (D) He tells the court that Abigail is a man dressed as a woman.

19. Who is brought in to corroborate John Proctor’s claims about Abigail?

(A) Elizabeth Proctor (B) Rebecca Nurse (C) Mary Warren (D) Parris

20. What does Elizabeth do when called upon to testify?

(A) Keeps silent   (B) Tells a lie (C) Tells the truth        (D) Kills herself

21. What does the court do with John Proctor?

(A) It frees him and sends him home.     (B) It orders him stoned to death.

(C) It exiles him to Maine.                        (D) It arrests and tries him for witchcraft.

22. When John Proctor is facing death, what does Hale urge him to do?

(A) Kill himself      (B) Blame someone else (C) Refuse to confess

(D) Confess, even though he is innocent

23. Why does Proctor retract his confession?

(A) Because the officials demand that he sign his name to it     (B) Because Hale asks him to (D) Because Abigail confesses    (D) Because new evidence has come to light

24. What does Abigail do at the end of the play?

(A) She kills herself.         (B) She flees Salem, after robbing her uncle.

(C) She is hanged.           (D) She is revealed as a witch.

25. What ultimately happens to John Proctor?

(A) He is freed. (B) He kills himself. (C) He is hanged.

(D) He escapes from prison and flees to Virginia.

“Pity like a naked new born babe” – the key Speech in Macbeth

Professor Peter Titlestad

The texts are Act 1, vii, 1-28 and Act 2, iii, 67-81.

Many people are puzzled by Macbeth’s speech about “pity like a naked new born babe.” Even when they realize that the speech may have something to do with the Apocalypse, there are still difficulties with some of the details.

The Apocalypse is what is described in the final book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. This book has given rise to numerous pictorial representations of Doomsday, and it is in these pictures as much as in the text that the clues to understand Macbeth’s speech lie. There was such a  Doomsday picture painted on the wall of Shakespeare’s parish church in Stratford-on-Avon. The most famous, of course, is Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel but one can guess that Shakespeare had not seen this particular one.

The speech starts with a metaphor of time as a “bank or shoal” surrounded by the limitless sea. Time is only a small, finite entity, it is not endless. Time will end. All around is eternity. The end of time is signalled by Doomsday, the Second Coming of Christ to judge the dead. This will involve the separation of the sheep and the goats, of the saved and the damned. These pictures show Christ sitting in judgement showing the wounds in his hands and side: his blood is part of the standard imagery of these pictures. Around him fly the Cherubim (traditionally depicted as naked infants) blowing trumpets. The graves have opened, the dead have arisen and those on Christ’s left hand, the damned, are dragged down to hell by devils while those on the right hand are the saved. Such pictures are intended to terrify the viewers and disturb their consciences. Macbeth’s speech is the utterance of the disturbed conscience of a man brought up in this tradition of iconographic teaching. Will he make the right decision, will he be among the sheep or the goats?

The speech is an anguished, terrified and deeply but confusedly imaginative meditation on the results of his planned murder of King Duncan. Angels will “plead trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of his taking off.” What one does on the little bank or shoal of time has consequences for all eternity. The following phrase merges a number of ideas in Macbeth’s  excited and disturbed mind. He should have pity on Duncan, a naked new born baby should excite pity, but the babe in this case is also one of the Cherubim riding the wind and blowing blasts on the trumpet that declare the horror of his contemplated deed and the judgement that will follow.

A pictorial representation of the crucified Christ in Shakespeare’s day was called a “pity.” The representation of Doomsday was called a “doom.” Later, Macduff is to call the sight of the murdered King the “great doom’s visage” and liken this blood to the precious blood of Christ. He tells Malcolm and Banquo “as from your graves rise up” evoking the picture of the opening of the tombs on judgement day.

Macbeth has only “vaulting ambition” which he, at this moment, realizes “o’erleaps itself” to spur him on. He knows what he should do. He tells his wife “we shall proceed no further in this business” but then gives in to the viscous tongue of a young woman, quite possibly a very glamorous one, who has already given herself to evil and who wants to be Queen. She says that she would dash out the brains of a baby: so much for “pity like a naked new born babe”!

Macbeth is a study of conscience disregarded and of the ever-worsening consequences that follow on an evil decision, for Macbeth becomes a tyrant and the killing never stops. It is also one of Shakespeare’s many and varied studies of the relations between a man a woman.

KING LEAR

Professor Colin Gardner

This article is based on a talk presented by to a school audience.

All Shakespeare’s play are remarkable, but many would regard King Lear is perhaps the most remarkable of them all. An amazing amount of value – narrative and dramatic power, human knowledge and insight, sheer poetry – is packed into this play, which on the Elizabethan stage would have taken about three hours to perform.

The play has two plots or stories, though these two plots become more and more intertwined as the play proceeds.  And the two plots are similar in various ways, and each serves to echo the other and to reinforce the point of the other story. The main plot tells us of King Lear, who in a fit of anger banishes his good daughter Cordelia and his friend the Duke of Kent, and then is cruelly treated by his evil daughters Goneril and Regan. The second plot (or sub-plot) tells us of the Duke of Gloucester, who together with his son Edgar is deceived and cruelly treated by his illegitimate son Edmund. Shockingly badly treated though they have been, Kent in disguise manages to help Lear, and Edgar in disguise manages to help his father Gloucester.

Set out in those terms, the play is clearly skilfully constructed and organised, but as one encounters the play – reads it and fully imagines it –one realises that there is nothing neat and certainly nothing predictable about it all. In fact, besides being very dramatic, the play is very complex.

I am going to ask myself a number of questions:

1. We know that Cordelia is good, but is she really right to challenge her father in the way she does in the opening scene?
2. Lear is rash to banish Cordelia and Kent. Could we say that he gets what he deserves? And what of Gloucester?
3. What do we make of the Fool?
4. Why does Edgar behave as he does as he acts out the part of poor Tom?
5. How should we respond to and interpret Lear’s madness? What sort of wisdom does he acquire? And what of Gloucester?
6. What do we make of the play’s ending?

1.   We know that Cordelia is good, but is she really right to challenge her father in the way she does in the opening scene?

Cordelia simply finds that she is appalled by the insincere statements made by her sisters. She has no desire to indulge in that kind of flattery, and she knows instinctively that her father is being vain and self-indulgent to demand these statements of love. After all, you show your love of your father by the way you act, by what you are – and Lear, in his more sensible moments, has been aware of this because he clearly has a special affection for Cordelia. Cordelia’s honesty and integrity simply don’t allow her to play her father’s foolish game. Besides, she has two potential suitors waiting for her, and she is perfectly sensible and reasonable to say: ‘Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, / To love my father all.’

2.   Lear is rash to banish Cordelia and Kent. Could we say that he gets what he deserves? And what of Gloucester?

It’s clear, then, that Lear behaves badly in the opening scene. He is old; he has been king for a long time; he seems to have grown used to people looking up to him and flattering him and obeying his wishes. He has a terrible temper tantrum, and this leads him to reject his favourite daughter and to banish Kent, who clearly honours the king and likes him. Should we conclude then that the moral of the play (if the play can be said to have a simple moral) is that if you do something wild and rash you may well suffer for it for the rest of your life, and that you have only yourself to blame? I think the play does suggest this up to a point – after all, there is no doubt that Lear does in a sense ‘ask for it’ – but no, that is not the main point of the play, not at all. King Lear is a tragedy, and one has only got the real meaning of the play when one recognises that tragedy involves suffering that is undeserved and ultimately inexplicable. When a person does something wrong and gets duly punished for it: that’s what one might call a morality play, or a crime-does-not-pay story. But a tragedy is when the main character suffers in a way thatcan’t be explained: it is for this reason that tragedies are plays which lead us to ask further questions about life and the universe in which we live. Is the universe just? How do we explain evil? You will probably have noticed that there is a good deal of talk about God and the gods – by Lear, by Gloucester, by Edgar. That’s because the suffering endured by Lear and Gloucester, and by others, leads us to ask questions of this sort.

Lear himself, at one of those moments where we trust what he says, makes the point that he doesn’t deserve what is happening to him. He says: ‘I am a man / More sinned against than sinning.’ He recognises very well that he has done wrong, but what is happening to him is disproportionate, far greater and more terrible than anything that he could have deserved.

As Lear rages in the storm, and when his mind finally snaps, he is constantly asking this question: How can his two daughters be like this? How can we explain the evil that seems to animate them? How can we account for the harsh realities that bear down upon human life? When Lear asks Poor Tom (whom at that stage he is regarding as a learned philosopher) – when he asks ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ the question perhaps sounds stupid but it is in fact a serious question. He is not looking for a scientific answer, of the kind that scientists could give nowadays, but he is wondering what it is in the nature of the universe which produces the violence within lightning and thunder – and of course in the scenes on the heath in the dreadful storm the wild forces of nature seem to collaborate with the wild cruelty of Goneril and Regan and Cornwall and Edmund.

I say Lear asks these questions about suffering and evil and violence and justice, but of course Shakespeare is using Lear and the whole play to ask these questions for himself. An artist like Shakespeare uses his play as a way of probing, as a way of trying to come to terms with some of the most difficult questions and problems posed by human existence. That, we can be pretty sure, is largely why Shakespeare wrote this play. He was of course a professional dramatist, and he needed to produce plays for his company to act, and he loved the stories that he found and remoulded for his own purposes, and he created characters with exuberance and obvious pleasure. But at the same time his plays are all about the meaning of human existence. That is why they are so powerful and have lasted so well. That is why you in 2011 are studying this play which was written more than 400 years ago. I have said that Shakespeare used Lear and the whole play as a way of tackling profound and important questions and problems for himself. But of course it was also, and just as much, for his audience, and for us, for we are his audience now, after all these years.

You are a young audience. You have all had many life experiences, some of you far more than others of course, but still at your age most of you haven’t got round to asking all the questions that one might ask about human life and about human beings. Some of the questions and problems that this play asks are ones that may well not have occurred to you before. But it’s well worth following Shakespeare’s lead, his train of thought and the emotions that he evokes. As you get older (and I have the right to say this, as I am quite old!) – as you get older you will realise more and more the value of the things that a play like this one offers.

One could say much more of course.But so much for Lear. What of Gloucester? He is a somewhat weaker, somewhat more passive character than Lear; Shakespeare couldn’t allow the main character in the sub-plot to dominate the main character in the main plot. But Gloucester is also represented as having sinned: in his case it is partly by having a child out of wedlock. He is also, like Lear, guilty of judging his children badly: he is deceived by the evil Edmund into turning against his good son Edgar. But with him it is equally clear that the suffering that he undergoes is disproportionate; and he like Lear wonders painfully about the nature of the universe and the gods. Lear’s suffering is largely inward, though he does have to endure the storm. Gloucester’s is inward too, but it is also extremely physical: he has his eyes gouged out.

3.    What do we make of the Fool?

Well, as you have probably been told, the Fool used to be a feature of many royal courts and noble households. The fool or court jester hung around in order to entertain people, to lighten the atmosphere, but he was also allowed to criticise the monarch – though he had to be careful not to go too far in what he said.

The Fool in this play certainly makes jokes and speaks in riddles, as jesters often did, and he is sharply critical of the King in his rash decision to hand his kingdom over to his daughters, whom the Fool knows to be deceptive and likely to be very cruel. The Fool’s remarks often seem cynical: for example, he laughs at Kent for following Lear when it’s clear that Lear is in for a rough time (to say the least). But beneath his witty and cynical surface, the Fool is a person with a strong affection for Lear, for all his faults, and he also has strong and sound moral values.

But why, one might ask, does he keep up his battery of satirical jokes? Why does he pursue and criticise Lear so relentlessly? We as the audience may well be puzzled by this as the play proceeds, but after a while it becomes obvious that the Fool feels that Lear must be made to face up to reality and must be made to recognise what a thoroughly bad decision he has made. In this desire to help Lear and not to flatter him the Fool is similar to Cordelia and to Kent.

As Lear comes to realise what he has done, and as he becomes enraged and maddened by the behaviour of his daughters, the Fool’s jokes and often peculiar sayings form an odd accompaniment to Lear’s growing intensity. Together the two of them, their two voices, produce a strange and memorable music.

4.    Why does Edgar behave as he does as he acts out the part of poor Tom?

And then of course, in the storm scene, another very strange voice is added to the music – that of Poor Tom. Many of the things that he says are even more weird than what we hear from the Fool. There is something phantasmagoric, something dreamlike and nightmarish, about the scene, with the storm beating down, and Lear, as he goes into his spell of madness, being surrounded by two  odd characters who both seem mad too.

Edgar, remember, had to disguise himself. His angry and deceived father ordered him to be hunted and killed on sight. He couldn’t even leave the country, as people at every port were put on the lookout for him. So he had to take on a convincing disguise, and once disguised he had to play the part effectively. Edgar throws himself into the role, and really seems to become Poor Tom the wandering mad beggar.

But what he says isn’t mere nonsense: Edgar finds himself talking obliquely about his own situation and about what is going on in the lives of those around him. He pictures himself as being pursued by the Foul Fiend, and of course he is in a situation where he is indeed being pursued by evil forces that he doesn’t really understand. He also sees human life very decidedly in moral terms, in terms of good and evil, and that is what the play as a whole invites us to do.

In the course of the play Edgar takes on more than one disguise, and with his occasional asides we are aware that he is intensely concerned about everything that happens – just as Kent, also in disguise, is at every point intensely concerned.

5.   How should we respond to and interpret Lear’s madness? What sort of wisdom does he acquire? And what of Gloucester?

This is a huge topic, which I am going to have to deal with quite briefly. What we see happening in the first half of the play is Lear’s intense anger and then despair as Goneril and Regan gradually undermine first his royal status and then his dignity as a man and a father, stripping him of his followers and finally allowing him to go out into the storm.  As the Fool says, and as I have said, he has partly brought all this upon himself – as he becomes deeply aware of this – but what happens to him is far vaster and more terrible than anything he could have deserved.

He soon begins to feel himself going mad. All the things that make up reality for him collapse, and his mind and emotions just cannot cope with it all. Things become blurred and topsy-turvy in his mind. But this collapse of normality within his mind also paradoxically opensup his mind. He becomes aware of things that he had never thought of before. As he moves towards madness he becomes compassionate. Looking at the largely naked Poor Tom he sees things about human beings that he hadn’t considered before. And he comes to recognise that many people live in poverty, and that somehow poverty should be alleviated. I wish I had time to quote and analyse some of his speeches at these moments in the play. He becomes aware of the ways in which rich people can cover up their crimes, while poor people easily get condemned. He is even prepared to understand sinners and pardon their sins. What has happened is that, partly in reaction against the shocking unkindness of Goneril and Regan, Lear has come to recognise the sheer value of goodness.

All this prepares him for the great moment when he wakes up from a long sleep after his spell of madness and sees Cordelia before him. He feels guilty and kneels before her, but of course she won’t let him do this. She loves and honours him. Fresh clothes have been put on to him while he was asleep. Gentle music is playing. It’s a sublime moment, one in which tragedy is transformed into harmony.  But of course this isn’t the end of the play

Gloucester, always something of an echo of Lear, goes through a similar process of learning, of understanding. He too becomes compassionate. He says, ‘I stumbled when I saw.’ He is now blind, but he sees many things more clearly than he did before.

6.    What do we make of the play’s ending?

I am referring to the very end of the play. For much of the last big scene we see the triumph of justice over injustice, of good over evil. Goneril, Regan and Edmund all die, in miserable circumstances. The firm and decent Albany comes to the fore. Edgar and Kent, both heroic characters, are able to reveal themselves. We seem perhaps to be heading towards a relatively happy ending.

And then Lear appears, holding the dead Cordelia, and cries out ‘Howl, howl, howl! O you are men of stones!’ The death of Cordelia is a terrible shock to Lear, a shock that kills him. But it is a shock to us too. Why should such a marvellous person be put to death? Clearly the forces of tragedy and evil are still operating. And then Lear dies. His last speeches are full of meaning, but perhaps ambiguous meaning. Does he die in despair or with some sort of hope in him? And how do we see his death? Does it seem to seal the fact that evil has triumphed after all? Or do we feel that the peace and joy that Lear achieved with Cordelia was a real triumph of its own?

Ever since the play was written people have argued and disagreed about the ending. How do we take it? There is no doubt that the moment is solemn and awe-inspiring: the final words of Kent and Edgar make this clear. It is tragedy indeed, what the poet Yeats called ‘tragedy wrought to its uttermost’.  But does tragedy overwhelm us with despair or does it leave us with a renewed humble sense of the mystery of human life?

My own view is that, terrible as the ending is, it’s not just a matter of despair. And I remember the constant parallel with Gloucester, whose heart, Edgar tells us, ‘burst smilingly.’

NOTICEWORTHY NOTICES!

Here are some interesting notices that could be used in teaching:

CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS

In a health food shop window

For teaching ‘owing to’ and ‘due to’ – if you want to bother!

ELEPHANTS PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAR

In a safari park

For teaching punctuation.

SLOW CATTLE CROSSING. NO OVERTAKING FOR NEXT 100 YARDS

On a road

Also for teaching punctuation.

THE FARMER ALLOWS WALKERS TO CORSS THE FIELD FOR FREE, BUT THE BULL CHARGES

In a field

For teaching ambiguity

WILL THE PERSON WHO TOOK THE STEP LADDER YESTERDAY PLEASE BRING IT BACK OR FURTHER STEPS WILL BE TAKEN

In an office

Also for teaching ambiguity.

MEN RECOMMEND MORE CLUBS FOR WIVES

In a newspaper

A further one for teaching ambiguity.

WANTED: MAN TO TAKE CARE OF COW THAT DOES NOT SMOKE OR DRINK

In a newspaper

For teaching ambiguity caused by  misplaced clauses.

Teaching the comma splice / run-on sentence

Roger Graham

Westerford High, Cape Town

Using the idea of newspaper headlines and articles to launch the correction of errors struck me as a possibility after I heard our head of department say at a meeting:” The comma splice is getting out of control.”  Beginning with the idea of a headline “COMMA SPLICE OUT OF CONTROL”,  I set out a frontpage of a paper, containing a number of other types of articles, also headlined by the relevant error within them.  Each article has further errors within it, but the lion’s share goes to the headlined one.

The ways I have done this in class is as follows:  photostatting the page, giving it to the pupils and having them number each error they spot on the page; then they write down the number in their workbooks and opposite it supply the corrected version of the error.  What has worked better and more efficiently is to have the whole class in the computer room, each at a console, present the page to them which they then save into their own drive and then they correct it as it is.  Hopefully, there is a big screen in the computer room where one’s memo can be put up after they have finished the page and they can see where they got it right or wrong.

Click below for an example of one of Roger’s news pages. (You will need a PDF reader.) Below it is the memo.

comma splice

Splice memo

Why not send us a teaching tip of your own? You could win a copy of the Longman South African English Dictionary. For more details of this dictionary, see ‘Welcome to the Winter 2012 Edition of Teaching English Today. Send your contibution to drv@worldonline.co.za.

Grade 12  LISTENING COMPREHENSION

Colleen Callahan

Colleen teaches English at St Joseph’s Marist College, Rondebosch, where she is Head of the Middle School

THE ELEPHANT WHISPERER

From rescuing a herd of rogue elephants destined to be shot, to saving the animals in Baghdad Zoo during the Iraqi war, maybe it is no surprise that Hollywood has made a film about maverick conservationist Lawrence Anthony. When Liz Else tracked him down she talked to him about reconnecting with nature and communicating with elephants.

………….

Liz Else: How did you end up being called ‘the elephant whisperer’?

Lawrence Anthony: Elephants communicate with me at least as much as I do with them. It takes a lot of time and you need to be alone with them. After a few days of benign presence they stop what they are doing and take an interest in you. They are generally interested in humans because they are intelligent enough to gauge that their predicament is brought about by humans, who shoot them, dart them, move them – something is always going on involving humans. I think they value good relations with us, but they don’t know what it is that would make us stop abusing them.

Liz Else: Do elephants communicate with us?

Lawrence Anthony: There is scientific work on communication between elephants via infrasound. But communicating with humans is another matter, it hasn’t really been studied. These animals are doing something, or maybe there’s something going on both ways — we somehow get into contact with each other and you certainly know when it is happening.

Liz Else: Surely it wouldn’t be difficult to investigate?

Lawrence Anthony: The trouble is that there isn’t the money. Studying elephant communication is a kind of luxury. Maybe we need an Elephant Foundation with our own Bill Gates?

Liz Else: How did you end up observing this first hand since you are not a scientist?

Lawrence Anthony: I have no formal training but I grew up in Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe and came to Zululand, South Africa, when I was young. I’m a bush child of the 1950s. Once you’ve got it in your blood it’s difficult to get it out. Eventually, after selling insurance and working in property development, I sold up and bought ThulaThula, a game reserve in Zululand which was then 5000 acres. There’s a sensibility, a sanity and a naturalness in the bush I missed when I lived in the city, plus I was becoming more and more concerned about the bush.

Liz Else: What was happening that worried you?

Lawrence Anthony: Before I bought Thula, I was working with Zulu tribes to try to rebuild their historical relationship with the bush. They’d been badly affected by apartheid and colonialism. For example, Zulu villagers who had long since shot what little game lived around them had South Africa’s huge Hluhluwe-Imfolozi game reserve on their doorstep — but villagers weren’t allowed in. Part of my work at that time was to take them into the park. The children had never seen a giraffe, which is very shocking. Their cultural and traditional ties to the bush had disappeared. This is the core of what I do — help rebuild the relationships between remote African people and the bush, and the plant and animal kingdoms.

Liz Else: So how did you end up with a rogue herd?

Lawrence Anthony: In 1999, someone called from the Elephant Managers and Owners Association, a private group, and said she had a herd of nine troubled elephants. They were on another game reserve, creating trouble by raiding buildings, charging staff and vehicles. They were going to be shot. The only thing that restrains an elephant is an electric wire, and it’s a maxim in the industry that if an elephant doesn’t respect a wire, you’ll end up shooting it because you can’t control it. Now these ones didn’t respect it any more — they’d got clever.

Liz Else: How do elephants learn to beat electric fences?

Lawrence Anthony: I’ve seen it zillions of times. They’ve got voltage metres in their trunks it seems! They’ll put their trunk under the wire and walk along it checking the power. If the power drops enough, they’ll push through. The elephants do all sorts of things to explore the wire. Sometimes they realise that their tusks don’t conduct electricity very well, so they can twist the wire and break it. They also learn that if they go through quickly the pain is very short.

Liz Else: But you took on this troubled herd?

Lawrence Anthony: Yes. They immediately broke out of the boma, the enclosure we put them in, and then out of the whole game reserve. We tracked them and found they’d broken into an adjacent reserve where they distinguished themselves by charging the senior ranger, nearly killing him.

Liz Else: How did you finally get through to the herd?

Lawrence Anthony: At that point I got really interested and thought there had to be another way around the problem. I managed to get the herd back and decided to get into some sort of contact with the matriarch. I placed myself outside the boma and ignored her when she charged at me and went on talking to her. I kept doing that and got closer and closer. She didn’t break out of the boma and slowly settled into a routine. Then one day, after a few weeks she came up to the fence with her ears down. She seemed relaxed and put her trunk through the fence and touched me. Then I let the herd out into the reserve. There are now 16 of them.

Lawrence Anthony founded the international conservation body The Earth Organization, affiliated to the South African Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the Explorers Club of New York, and was presented with the Earth Day medal at the UN for his rescue of Baghdad Zoo. His latest book, The Elephant Whisperer, is published by Sidgwick& Jackson.

http://www.nhne.org/news/NewsArticlesArchive/tabid/400/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/5893/language/en-US/New-Scientist-Interviews-Lawrence-Anthony-The-Elephant-Whisperer.aspx

QUESTIONS

1              Lawrence Anthony is described as a ‘maverick conservationist’. What is the meaning of the word, ‘maverick’ in this context. (2)

2              Name ONE requirement that is necessary for effective communication to occur between elephants and human-beings. (1)

3              According to Anthony, why are elephants ‘vaguely interested’ in human-beings? (2)

4              Why is it so difficult to conduct scientific research into the instance of communication between elephants and human-beings? (2)

5              Besides being a ‘maverick conservationist’, Anthony has worked in other career-fields.  Name one other career that he has pursued in his

life-time.(1)

6              Name one skill needed for his former careers, which would assist Anthony in his present role as a ‘conservationist’.  Give a reason for your

answer. (3)

7              In working with his ‘rogue herd’, why did Anthony first need to attain the trust of the herd’s ‘matriarch’?  (2)

8              How many elephants does Anthony have at present in his herd? (1)

9              Name the award given to Lawrence Anthony in recognition of his rescue of the Baghdad Zoo.(1)

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MEMORANDUM        

1. The answer MUST BE contextualised.  A ‘maverick’ is an independently-minded individual who often attains results through unorthodox means.   Anthony’s success as a ‘conservationist’ has been attained through his OWN way of doing things, which are often not rooted in traditional scientific practice. (2)
2. Time (patience) and solitude… the person needs to approach the elephant ALONE. (1)
3. Elephants are intelligent enough to sense that human-beings have a significant (often negative) influence on their existence.(2)
4. Scientific research is costly and researching the communication between elephants and human-beings is considered a ‘luxury’ and not a necessity.(2)
5. Any ONE of: Insurance-Broker and Property Development (1)
6. Accept any valid answer: e.g. the ability to PERSEVERE in marketing your product…(3)
7. She is ‘leader’ of the herd in that the rest of herd has been nurtured by her and they therefore trust her; if she trusts Anthony, then the rest of the herd will follow her example of trusting him.(2)
8. 16  (1)
9. The Earth Day Medal (1)

/15/

©Colleen Callahan, 2012

Some literary qualities of children’s

and young adult books

Professor Elwyn Jenkins

Introduction

Over the years, the style and content of children’s books have changed. Usually South African books have followed developments in other countries – often after a delay of a few years.

The end of World War II saw big changes in local books. Fairy stories set in South Africa, which had been fashionable for 40 years, came to an end. Cosy domestic and adventure stories for older children drew to an end in the 1960s. In the 1970s, novels for young adults emerged, and at the same time the structure of the novels became far more varied and enterprising. Picture books also became far more adventurous in their approach.

Many of the qualities of the modern young adult novel are to be found in Skyline, by Patricia Pinnock (2nd edition, 2007). These qualities are discussed below.

Departure from linear narrative

Most 19th and early 20th-century stories were straightforward, chronological (linear) narratives. At the most, the story might break off to recount what other characters were doing at the same time. Today, any sort of structure may be found. This flexibility is termed “postmodern”. Diaries are popular, some even using a postmodern technique of interrupting the diary to comment on it or report that someone has been reading it. See especially two young adult novels by Dianne Hofmeyr: Blue Train to the Moon (1993) and Boikie You Better Believe It (1994) (winner of the prestigious M-Net Prize), and two post-apartheid ones by Sarah Britten: The Worst Year of my Life –So Far (2000) and Welcome to the Martin Tudhope Show! (2002).

Multivocality is another technique: the story is told through the voices of various narrators. Time sequences can be interrupted and changed. In Skyline by Patricia Pinnock, through these techniques the stories of individuals are built up at intervals through the book until their full history is known.

Time shifts, fantasy and “magic realism” can co-occur with realism, sometimes leaving the reader not sure whether to believe that something is fantasy or fact.

Three fine young adult novels that deal with our present-day relationship with the memory of the extinct San all use the device of alternating between the present and the past: The Sound of the Gora by Anne Harries (1980) The Joining by Peter Slingsby (1996), and Runout by S.I. Brodrick (2006).

The paintings described in Skyline use the magic realism techniques of the artists Marc Chagall and Henri Rousseau.

A book may be multitextual and intertextual, including passages taken from other sources (which may be factual or fictional). The Sound of New Wings by Robin Malan (1998) is set in a school and brings in a variety of the kinds of writing to be found in a school, such as notices, reports, letters and questionnaires. Intertexuality, by referring to other material, is a way of broadening the scope of the story.

An outstanding example, in this case of bringing in another medium, is the inclusion of the descriptions of the paintings in Skyline by Patricia Pinnock. At first the reader does not know what to make of these descriptions at the end of each chapter. Often they refer to incidents, or stories of incidents, recounted in the previous chapter. The titles of the paintings that are quoted are in a non-standard form of English, which gradually can be identified as that of Bernard, a refugee from Mozambique.  It is only at the end that the reader learns that they are taken from the catalogue of Bernard’s paintings that was written by Mrs Rowinsky, another character in the novel. These paintings, furthermore, have the function of showing incidents in a new light – actually, through a different medium. Mrs Rowinsky’s comparisons of Bernard’s paintings with those by famous artists are another form of intertextuality. If it were possible, Pinnock would show us the paintings and not verbalise them, but the descriptions, with their lurid language (which is different from the normal language of the narrative parts of the book), are the next best thing.

Psychological and social problems

In the 1970s a wave of frankness swept children’s and youth literature around the world. Previously taboo topics were now openly discussed, and language became explicit. The problems, large and small, that children and adolescents experience formed the themes of everything from picture books for the very young to young adult novels. At one end of the age range, we have One Round Moon and a Star for Me (also in Afrikaans) (Mennen 1995), a picture book illustrated by Niki Daly about a little boy who feels threatened by the imminent birth of a baby sibling. At the other end, we have Skyline, which features an autistic child infested with bird lice. Social problems such as dysfunctional families or the plight of refugees – other themes of Skyline – feature often. This frankness, it may be noted, facilitated the introduction of race and apartheid as obvious themes in the books of the 1970s and 1980s. They would not have been acceptable to earlier generations.

Interiority

The shift in subject matter had to be conveyed in a different style of writing, which enables the reader to look into the thoughts and emotions of a character. Earlier books barely touched on emotions; instead they had plenty of dialogue, mostly inconsequential chatter. Compare the following passage from a children’s book, The South African Twins, written by a prominent South African novelist for adults, Daphne Rooke, in 1953, with one of the many passages of interiority in Skyline.

The best part of Dingaan’s Day, Tiensie thought, was the dressing-up. Ouma had made her costume, a replica of that worn by the Voortrekker women… All was as it should have been except for the shoes…

“What are we going to do?” Ouma was in a great fluster. “If you wear white or brown the whole effect will be ruined.”

“I know what, I’ll wear my ballet practice shoes,” said Tiensie.

Ouma looked dubious, but Tiensie liked the ballet shoes with her costume. She was preening herself when everybody else was ready to go, and Karel was sent to bring her to the car.

There stood Tiensie before the wardrobe mirror, chanting, “Goldilocks, Goldilocks, wilt thou be mine…”

“Can’t you hear Pappie blowing the horn?” Karel demanded. “Come along, we’re all waiting for you, Tiensie.”

Tiensie spun around on her heel. “Don’t you think I look like a character out of a nursery rhyme?”

“As a matter of fact, we make quite a good pair,”said Karel, looking into the mirror, “though I look more like a Voortrekker than you do, Tiensie. If only I had a beard. Gosh, this corduroy suit is hot…”

(Rooke 1953:87)

The following passage comes from the scene in Skyline when the narrator has visited her father, who has left his family, and he takes her home. Notice how the last paragraph is addressed directly to the reader.

There’s this pain inside me like a poem wanting to explode, and there is no wind, so the poem stays there burning and burning. And I know it will stay there forever, this pile of bad poetry aching inside me.

I have this longing, in his car, for the wind to blow and to batter against us, to throw us together and blow away everything that has gone wrong, blow it away like leaves. But there is no wind today. There is stillness and heat and moaning, disgusting traffic.

He drops me at Skyline, at the red robot. I want to say something but I can’t. I want to say: Is this it? Are you just going to drop me here at the robot and not come in or anything?

But I say nothing. I get out of the car without even looking at him and watch him drive off as the robot turns green. I shout out: You shit! You piece of shit! But the traffic drowns my words. The traffic thuds onto my words like a beast of prey and devours them. There are no words in the air.

So this is something you need to know, now. I never cry for him, you hear? I never, never cry for him, not now or ever. But the burning sits there in the middle of me, like a still wind. And only later, much much later, when I am grown up and can think about it all, do I get a sense of the sorrow which was stuck in his throat. Only then do I understand why he couldn’t look at me. (Pinnock 2007: 82)

Other literary devices

Writers nowadays use many other literary devices, often making no concession to young readers. An example is the leitmotiv or metaphor of the traffic in Skyline, which is introduced on page 1, becomes metaphorical on page 2, and can be seen at work in the passage quoted above.

REFERENCES

Britten. 2000. The Worst Year of my Life –So Far. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

___. 2002. Welcome to the Martin Tudhope Show!  Cape Town: Tafelberg.

Brodrick, S.I. 2006. Runout. Cape Town: OUP.

Harries, Anne. 1980. The Sound of the Gora. London: Heinemann.

Hofmeyr, Dianne. 1993: Blue Train to the Moon. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman.

___. 1994. Boikie You Better Believe It. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

Malan, Robin. 1998. The Sound of New Wings. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman.

Mennen, Ingrid and Niki Daly. 1995. One Round Moon and a Star for Me. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau.

Pinnock, Patricia Schonstein. 2007. Skyline. 2nd edition. Cape Town: African Sun Press.

Rooke, Daphne. 1953. The South African Twins. London: Cape.

Slingsby, Peter. 1996. Cape Town: Tafelberg.