Writing practices in additional languages in Grade 7 classes in the Eastern Cape province

[摘要] This thesis analyses the classroom writing of learners in their additionallanguages at four differently resourced schools in the Eastern CapeProvince of South Africa. The choice of languages on offer at schools andthe medium of instruction seldom meet current language education policyrequirements of additive bilingualism needed to support children’s homelanguage and general cognitive growth. The central question of my studyconcerns how school writing practices contribute to the development oflearners’ writing ability. The data collected and analysed in order toinvestigate this were all the regular classroom writing of Grade 7 childrenin Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa, where these were additionallanguages, not the children’s home language.My findings were that there is no check by the Education Department onwhether schools meet the official national curriculum policy requirementswith regard to the amount of curriculum time allocated to language. Also,that there is a mismatch between the languages on offer at schools andthe home languages of learners, and teachers, which is not monitored.My key findings with regard to writing were that there are significantdifferences and inequalities in the amounts that learners write at theseschools across Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa. Decontextualisedgrammar tasks predominate in what learners write in all three languages atall four schools. Children write relatively few extended texts, and theseare mainly personal expressive texts which are unlikely to develop theirability to write abstract, context-reduced genres. Teachers’ neglect ofimpersonal formal and factual genres at all four schools makes it difficultfor learners to experience the benefits of writing these genres – that thesegenres set the basis for the development of abstract cognitivelydemandinglanguage proficiency and disciplinary knowledge. In the caseof English, which is the commonest medium of instruction even though it isthe home language of less than 10% of the population, this shortcoming isespecially serious.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand