UWCScholar :: Browsing by Author "Kerfoot, Caroline"

Browsing by Author "Kerfoot, Caroline"

Now showing 1 - 17 of 17

ABET and development in the Northern Cape province: Assessing impacts of CACE courses, 1996-1999
(Centre for Continuing and Adult Education (CACE), University of the Western Cape, 2001) Kerfoot, Caroline; Geidt, Jonathan; Alexander, Lucy; Dayile, Nomvuyo; Groener, Zelda; Hendricks, Natheem; Walters, Shirley
This study presents the results of an investigation into the impact of CACE courses for adult educators, trainers and development practitioners. The report describes how the courses affected the training practices and lives of past students. Case studies document and analyse the problems and successes of implementing capacity-building ABET training in the Northern Cape.
Changing conceptions of literacies, language and development: Implications for the provision of adult basic education in South Africa
(Centre for Bilingual Research, Stockholm University, 2009) Kerfoot, Caroline
This study aims to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the circumstances under which adult education, in particular adult basic education, can support and occasionally initiate participatory development, social action and the realisation of citizenship rights. It traces developments in adult basic education in South Africa, and more specifically literacy and language learning, over the years 1981 to 2001, with reference to specific multilingual contexts in the Northern and Western Cape. The thesis is based on four individual studies, documenting an arc from grassroots work to national policy development and back. Study I, written in the early 1990s, critically examines approaches to teaching English to adults in South Africa at the time and proposes a participatory curriculum model for the additional language component of a future adult education policy. Study II is an account of attempts to implement this model and explores the implications of going to scale with such an approach. Studies III and IV draw on a qualitative study of an educator development programme after the transition to democracy. Study III uses Bourdieu's theory of practice and the concept of reflexivity to illuminate some of the connections between local discursive practices, self-formation, and broader relations of power. Study IV uses Iedema's (1999) concept of resemiotisation to trace the ways in which individuals re-shaped available representational resources to mobilise collective agency in community-based workshops. The summary provides a framework for these studies by locating and critiquing each within shifts in the political economy of South Africa. It reflects on a history of research and practice, raising questions to do with voice, justice, power, agency, and desire. Overall, this thesis argues for a reconceptualisation of ABET that is more strongly aligned with development goals and promotes engagement with new forms of state/society/economy relations.
Developing academic writing at the National University of Rwanda: a case study of first year economics and management
(University of the Western Cape, 2004) Kereni, Ildephonse; Kerfoot, Caroline; Faculty of Education
This aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which writing skills offered in the one-year intensive English course and in the 75 hour course of Speaking and Writing Skills, prepare students for academic writing in the subjects which are offered through the medium of English. The study focused on first year Economics and Management.
English: Language of hope or broken dream?
(Oxford University Press, 1992) Clifford, Marian; Kerfoot, Caroline
In this chapter, the ESL approaches adopted by seven different literacy organisations in South Africa are described and analysed. The approaches are identified in relation to developments in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching. The methods include formalist, functional/communicative approach, competency-based approach, natural growth approach, task-based process approach, popular education and ESL approach. The chapter concludes with principles for adult, popular second language learning curriculum and training.
Exploring habitus and writer identities : an ethnographic study of writer identity construction in the FET phase at two schools in the Western Cape
(University of the Western Cape, 2015) Van Heerden, Michelle; Kerfoot, Caroline
The purpose of this study is to investigate the writing identities constructed in the Further Education and Training (FET) Phase and the ways in which these identities either strengthen or impede academic writing at university. Success at university is predominantly dependent on students' ability to express their ideas through writing academic essays or assignments in most faculties. However, studies over the past decade highlight the inability of many South African learners, especially those for whom English is not a home language, to succeed at universities. The poor performance of such students is often linked to the lack of adequate preparation in the FET Phase, which is grades 10 to 12, the grades prior to entering first year undergraduate programmes. The significance of this study is that it sheds light on the discourse features of policy, texts, pedagogy and assessment in the FET Phase and the consequences of these for the construction of writers' identities. Further, it foregrounds the ways that policy positions teachers, learners and learning despite diversity in school cultures, identities and histories, and more importantly the ways that unique local pedagogical contexts construct writer identities as a bridge towards engagement in academic essays and the discourses valued at higher institutions. The intention was thus twofold: on the one hand to understand the writer identities constructed in the FET phase and secondly to shed light on the ways that these identities intersect with academic writing, in an attempt to inform first year writing programmes at universities. This was an ethnographic study that included participant observation, interviews with teachers and document analysis of national curriculum policies, grade 12 English Additional language external question papers and first year student texts. The participants were two grade 10 English classes from two schools with different profiles in terms of learner background, linguistic repertoire, and socio-economic circumstances. The rationale for focusing on grade 10 is that it is the first initiation point into the FET Phase and as such an important site to investigate the ways in which writing identities are activated. I thus ‘shadowed’ these learners for two years, up to the end of grade 11. Finally, I analysed first year student texts produced by learners from these two schools in their first year of study at a Cape Town university. In order to engage with my data, I first drew on Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and capital, to illuminate the ways in which national policies constructed theories and pedagogies of language teaching and learning, and positioned teachers, as well as the consequences of these policies and positionings for constructing sound writer identities. I then focused on the different organizing practices at the two schools, in order to foreground positionings enacted in local contexts. As a result, the study sheds light on the ways that writer identities were activated at two secondary schools in Cape Town, both of which served a previously disadvantaged population but with one classified as poorly resourced while the other enjoyed the status of a well-resourced school. My study centred on the visible and invisible curricula, the differing kinds of cultural capital they produce and the conversion of this capital into other forms of cultural and symbolic capital (such as access to university) which may eventually be converted to economic capital in the form of access to well-paid kinds of employment. Secondly, I drew on Systemic Functional Linguistics, with its conception of language as socially produced and politically situated and its development by the 'Sydney school' into genre-based pedagogy, as an analytical lens to unpack the language learning and teaching theories underpinning policy documents. This lens was also useful for evaluating the extent to which curriculum, pedagogy and assessment tools inducted learners into the key 'genres of schooling' (such as information report, explanation, and argument) that are necessary for success across the curriculum at school and university. Most importantly, it allowed for a rigorous linguistic analysis of first year student scripts and the extent to which writers managed the three metafunctions, ideational, interpersonal and textual. These metafunctions are the basis for coherent, well-structured, genreappropriate writing. The study found that mismatches between policy framing and the way that writing was taught and assessed in the FET Phase resulted in massive gaps between the writer identities constructed in the FET Phase and the first year writer identities valued at universities. Findings help to pinpoint some of the reasons why particular learners manage to make the transition into tertiary study and why a large number of learners studying through English as an additional language either fail to gain access into university or fail during their first year of study. Finally, findings pointed out the effects of post democracy curriculum shifts and national examinations on classroom discourse and pedagogy, especially in relation to constructing enabling writer identities, and more importantly on the ability of learners making the transition into university to produce academically valued texts in their first year of study.
Factors affecting grade 8 learners’ performance in reading in english at a Cape Flats Secondary School
(2009) Petersen, Christa Titus; Kerfoot, Caroline
In this mini-thesis, I explored the factors that affect grade 8 learners’ performance in reading in English.The study focused on reading as it was revealed by National Education Department and Western Cape Education Department that literacy and numeracy levels in schools in the Western Cape were poor. In addition, in March 1997, OBE was initiated in South Africa to develop a better educational system for all learners in schools and was perceived as a major step from the previous system (Botha, 2002). The system of OBE introduced the continuous assessment policies, which was a challenge for teachers already in the educational system. The study highlighted the theories of reading with particular emphasis on the evaluation of teaching of reading and assessment in the English classroom, learners’ home reading background and the influence of social practices and multiliteracies on learners’ reading proficiency. According to Alderson (2000) reading is perceived as a process of meaning- making with identification of different levels of meaning and understanding in and from text including reading skills. To elicit the factors that affect reading four variables were focused on during the study. The variables included reader, task, text and Social Practices and Multiliteracies variables, which interplayed in reading during tasks.In order to gather data the following data capturing methods were employed, firstly I highlighted the classroom observations to unpack the realities in classrooms for both the teacher and the learners. Then secondly I focused on the learners’ questionnaire to determine what happened during reading lessons and learners’ home reading practices. And thirdly I presented the teacher’s interview to highlight the reading strategies that she employed in class. Lastly I discussed the document analysis of grade 8 examination papers and classroom activities with a checklist. I discovered that the system of OBE put demands on teachers that they are not properly trained to do.Despite the fact that training was provided, it was too short and not clearly focused on interactive reading skills. When we consider the importance of multiliteracies, the teacher clearly draws on the learner’s home background by doing activities that make them feel that they are important. This teacher has the ability to successfully incorporate multimodal teaching methods in her class. The teacher also set time aside everyday to assess and mark the learners books, she then clarified issues that learners’ might encounter in the course of the reading lesson.However, there are some factors that could be addressed to improve reading abilities. The overcrowding and ghettoized condition of the class, did not promote morale within this environment. With the inception of OBE in-service training was provided, it was too short and not clearly focused on interactive reading skills. A further factor is learners’ use of Afrikaans during interactions with the teacher and each other,except for one learner who spoke English during the lesson.In conclusion, the evidence showed that the factors hat affect reading and therefore outcomes in education.
Identifying academic reading strategies in a multilingual context
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Cabinda, Manuel João José; Kerfoot, Caroline; Van Herreweghe, Mieke
In this thesis I explore the complexity of FL (Foreign Language) reading through qualitatively and quantitatively analysing the forms, ways, and mechanisms applied by adult readers at tertiary university education level to construct meaning in an ESP/EAP (English for Specific and Academic Purposes) multilingual educational context at the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM), in Mozambique
Interim guidelines for the national ABET curriculum framework
(Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD), 1995) Kerfoot, Caroline
In anticipation of the reconstruction and development of the education and training system, the CEPD established a number of curriculum task teams to develop subject-specific curriculum frameworks in line with the vision and principles as outlined in the draft discussion document released by the African National Congress in January 1994 - "A Policy Framework for Education and Training". This chapter presents the interim report of the Adult Basic Education and Training task team.
Language attitudes, medium of instruction and academic performance: a case study of Afrikaans mother tongue learners in Mitchell's Plain
(University of the Western Cape, 2004) Hendricks, Jessica; Kerfoot, Caroline; Dept. of Linguistics, Language and Communication; Faculty of Arts
The purpose of this study was to determine the implication for learning for learners whose home language is different from the medium of instruction at school.The study is focused on a group of Afrikaans learners for whom English is not a foreign language. Rather, English is a language that they are in contact with on a daily level through the media, their peers and in the classroom. The study looked at why these learners find themselves in English classes when the language policy of the country makes provision for their specific home language in the classroom. It also tried to determine whether these learners experience problems in their learning as they shift from Afrikaans as a home language to an English medium of instruction in class.
Language practices and identities of multilingual students in a Western Cape tertiary institution : implications for teaching and learning
(University of the Western Cape, 2012) Dominic, P. A.; Kerfoot, Caroline
In South Africa, there has been little research into the language practices of multilingual students in tertiary institutions or into how such students negotiate identities in these globalising contexts where the dominance of English remains an important factor. This research was aimed at exploring the appropriateness of 1997 Language-In-Education policy for schools and the national Language Policy for Higher Education (2002) for equipping students for tertiary teaching and learning. It therefore investigated the relationship between the language practices and construction of identities of a group of multilingual first year students in the Education Faculty at a Western Cape university. In this integrated institution, in spite of the current political and socio-economic transformation that has been at the centre of new policies, the medium of instruction is still predominantly monolingual. The premise of the research was that in a multilingual country such as South Africa with 11 official languages, tertiary institutions ought to more vigorously engage with their current language policies in order to value and extend the language practices of multilingual students for academic learning. Here multilingual repertoires are understood as resources rather than problems. The research draws extensively on Bourdieu's notion of 'linguistic capital' quantifying language itself as a form of capital with a market value. Through thematic analysis of themes drawn from questionnaires, interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation in both tutorials and lectures, the investigation concluded that a monolingual medium of instruction to non-native speakers should be practised alongside other languages as means to support in their academic attainment. Finally the research emphasised the importance of code switching as a strategy that facilitates learning and promotes understanding of the role language resources play in social and academic interaction.
Learning about action research
(Juta & Company Ltd, 1997) Kerfoot, Caroline; Winberg, Chris
The book gives detailed and theoretically-grounded practical advice on how to proceed collaboratively through the various stages of the action research cycle, including building a repertoire of literacy practices and activities for teachers and learners to draw upon in the research process.
Multilingualism and identity in new shared spaces :a study of Cameroon migrant in a primary school in Cape Town
(University of the Western Cape, 2009) Jih, Tatah Gwendoline; Kerfoot, Caroline; Dept. of Linguistics, Language and Communication; Faculty of Education
This thesis aims to explore the ways in which space patterns regimes of language use and language attitudes among Cameroonian immigrant children in a primary school in Cape Town. The presence of migrants in any classroom represents a significant challenge from the theoretical as well as practical point of view, given that schools are responsible for both socialization and learning (Gajo & Mondada 1996). Most African countries are going through large-scale migration from rural to urban areas as well as increasing transnational migration due to recent socio-economic and socio-political trends. These flows affect the sociolinguistic economy of the places concerned, not only the individuals within them. Thus immigrants' movement into an urban area not only affects their repertoires, as they find themselves confronted with the task of acquiring the communicative resources of the autochthonous population, but also those of the autochthonous population who find themselves confronted with linguistic communicative processes and resources ‘alien’ to their environment. Similar effects are felt by local educational and other institutions, now faced with learners with widely varying degrees of competence in the required communicative skills. The participants in this study are a group of young migrants from Cameroon where English and French are the two official languages. These learners already have some languages in their repertoire, which may include their mother tongue or either of the two official languages. My focus will be on the multilingual resources of these learners and how they make use of these in the daily life of their new spaces, the school, the homes and community spaces, to construct new social identities.
Negotiating a new centre: multilingualism and identities in a Cape Flats Primary School
(2009) Bellononjengele, B.O.; Kerfoot, Caroline
Meaning in human relations has always been based on inferred similarities (Holyoak & Thagard,1995). We are quick to liken the new to an old type. In this study, South African bi- or multilingual citizens post-1994 are perceived to hold the same ethno-linguistic perceptions as their progenitors. This explains the growing amount of literature on bilingual language ideology which is dissected upon the language attitude and space table. Following the same line but from a different perspective, Rampton (1995, 1999, 2003) discusses the relativity involved in labelling a bi- or multilingual repertoire. He suggests that the performative act of a bilingual through his/her linguistic repertoire should be structured according to expertise (instrumental), affiliation(integration) or inheritance (ethnicity). Starting with a note on the attitudinal myth, and closing with possible implications for various educational strata, the research explores Rampton�s notions in a rapidly changing educational context and proposes a revised understanding of �appellation� as a complementary concept, an agentive and non-essentialist form of approaching bi- or multilingual identity enactment. It asserts that each enactment is informed by and carries an element of one or all the other facets of the bi-or multilingual multiply identity. Central to the study�s argument is that a bi-or multilingual is not oblivious of the socio-cultural elements that come with each linguistic capital. So, while earlier literature on identity views appellation as �other- ascribed� identity, this study defines appellation as the construction of �self� using all the elements provided by one�s linguistic basket.Further, with its innovative use of spoken interactional data, the study is able to contribute to the ongoing research on the appropriate medium of instruction in the South African educational system. With a special focus on the primary stage, the study sheds light on the fluidity of bi- or multilingual identity formation and enactment inside and outside the classroom. It uses an analytical framework based on Conversation Analysis, the Ethnography of Speaking, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis to test the fit of Rampton�s original categories of inheritance, expertise, and affiliation with learners� actual conversations.In all, the study in a linguistically substantiated stance, argues for more situated perspectives on the mother tongue based educational policy.
Positioning : a linguistic ethnography of Cameroonian children in and out of South African primary school spaces
(University of the Western Cape, 2015) Tatah, Gwendoline Jih; Kerfoot, Caroline
This thesis traces the trajectories of a group of young Cameroonian learners as they engage in new social and educational spaces in two South African primary schools. Designed as a Linguistic Ethnography and using data from observations, interviews and more than 50 hours of recorded interaction, it illustrates the ways in which these learners position themselves and are differentially positioned within evolving discourses of inclusion and exclusion. As a current study in a multilingual African context, it joins a growing body of literature in Europe which points to the ways in which young people’s language choices and practices are socially and politically embedded in their histories of migration and implicated in relations of power, social difference and social inequality. The study is a Linguistic Ethnography of young school learners’ language experience, which falls outside the scope of much mainstream research. It is one of very few studies to focus on migrant children in contexts of the South where multilingualism is the reality yet where language-in-education policies tend to follow monoglossic norms. The focus is on how a group of 10-16 year old Cameroonian children use their multilingual repertoires to construct and negotiate identities both inside and outside the classroom. It also investigates in more detail the acts of identity of two individuals entering the same school with different linguistic profiles, who are positioned in differentiated ways in relation to transnational and local flows and interconnections. The context is a low socio-economic suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, where Cameroonian practices of language, class, and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The study also contributes to an emerging body of qualitative research that seeks to develop greater understanding of the relationships between language learners, their socio-cultural worlds and processes of identity construction (Cummins, 1996; Gee, 2001; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). ; Rampton, 1995, 2006). Recent international and South African studies tend to focus on secondary school learners, showing how they are struggling to negotiate the currents of a complex society (Adebanji, 2010; Sayed, 2002; Sookrajh, Gopal & Maharaj, 2005), although there is a recent and rapidly growing body of Scandinavian research on primary school children (for example, Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2008; Madsen, 2008; Møller, 2009; Møller, Holmen & Jørgensen, 2012). In contrast, the children in this study are negotiating the transition between childhood and adolescence, faced with issues of race, linguistic competence and discrimination at a time when moving from one age group to the next should have been relatively unproblematic. They are thus entangled in different levels of transition: emotional, physical and spatial. These issues of transition and negotiation will be highlighted through the lens of positioning. The concepts of ‘position’ and ‘positioning’ (Davis & Harré, 1990) appear to have origins in marketing, where position refers to the communication strategies that allow certain products to be placed in a market among their competitors (Tirado & Gálvez, 2007, p. 20). Holloway (1984) first used the concept of positioning in the social sciences to analyse the construction of subjectivity in the area of heterosexual relationships (Tirado & Gálvez, 2007). Positioning here was explained as relational processes that constitute interaction with other individuals. The present study focuses on how ‘interactants’ position themselves vis-à-vis their words and texts, their audiences and the contexts they both "respond to and construct linguistically" (Jaffe, 2009, p.3). As they make use of lexical and grammatical tools available to them in interaction, it becomes apparent that the process of identity construction through positioning does not "reside within the individual but in intersubjective relations of sameness and difference, […] power and disempowerment" (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 607). Thus to interpret multilingual children’s positioning requires a recursive process, using a double perspective: it means looking at the day-to-day moments of interactional and other practices, and also the wider political discourses in which these practices may be embedded and historically rooted (Maguire, 2005) and which they index in different ways. These day-to-day moments of practice thus involve different “acts of identity” (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) which can also be described as acts of stance-taking (Jaffe, 2009). A stance may index multiple selves and social identities. However, not all stances are open to everyone: those whose who have their social, cultural or linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991, 1997) recognized in a particular space will be able to position themselves more strongly there than those who do not. Moreover, stances are not successful unless 'taken up' by interactants (Jaffe, 2009): this uptake may take the form of interlocutors’ stances of alignment, realignment, or misalignment (C. Goodwin, 2007; Matoesian, 2005). Uptake in multilingual contexts is influenced by the prevailing "linguistic market" (Bourdieu, 1991, pp.55-67): day to-day acts of positioning take place in inequitable markets. These ‘markets’ are fertile grounds for social stratification where speech acts and the languages in which they are realized are assigned different symbolic values (Bourdieu, 1991, 1997). Mastery of the 'legitimate' language or languages is then often a pre-condition for claiming symbolic and material resources. New institutional spaces in South Africa become interesting here, because they are characterized by new formations of class, changes in gender roles and relations and other instances of macro-structural shifts. In such spaces, linguistic hierarchies and patterns of distribution of linguistic resources are rapidly changing (Kerfoot & Bello-Nonjengele, 2014). The school as a key institution in the distribution of social, cultural and linguistic capital is thus an important site for exploring the role of language and multilingualism in social and educational change. This thesis sets out to answer the following research questions: a) How do immigrant learners use their linguistic repertoires to construct, negotiate or contest identities in new school spaces? b) How do different spaces enable or constrain the new identities negotiated? c) What are the implications for language learning policy and practice? Data collection took place over two years between February 2010 and June 2013, and followed participants from grades 5 to 7 in the English medium and Afrikaans language classrooms. Participants were 10-16 year old Cameroonian children in two Cape Town schools, ten in each. The study contains nine chapters, with chapter 1 providing an overview of the background, rationale, and conceptual and methodological framework. Chapter 2 traces the shift towards the social in language studies, considering frameworks for understanding the differential values placed on linguistic resources as actors move across social spaces, both local and transnational. Here interaction is viewed as a crucial site for identity construction, generating a social stage through which reality is constructed, shared, and made meaningful. Chapter 3 reviews studies of interactional positioning amongst multilingual learners in social and educational contexts in South Africa and more globally. Chapter 4 focuses on the methodology used in the study, discussing the research design based on Linguistic Ethnography, a qualitative approach which is based on the two broad planks of ethnography and Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) and which enables an analytical framework combining Conversation Analysis (CA), Discourse Analysis (DA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Together, these analytical tools enable a multifaceted illumination of the construction of identity in discourse. The various tools used in data collection are discussed in depth followed by comment on reflexivity, challenges in the field and limitations of the study. Chapter 5 delineates the researcher’s trajectory in the field. This comprises profiles of the study schools (including the schools’ socio-economic, ethnic and linguistic make-up in relation to teachers and learners), perspectives on why the schools were chosen, the differing receptions to a research presence there, and some reflections on the researcher’s identity construction. The chapter further explores different techniques of data collection within this context: field notes and thick description, interviews, and audio recordings of interactions in and out of schools. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 present and analyse findings from classroom observation and interview data, together with audio-recordings of a group of Cameroonian learners interacting with each other and with children of other nationalities in classrooms, community and home spaces. These chapters aim to illustrate how these learners used linguistic resources to position themselves and others, to build, maintain and negotiate identities, and to assert or negate identifications. Chapters 7 and 8 build on the analysis presented in chapter 6 by focusing respectively on two key emergent themes: owning participatory spaces and defying positioning in multilingual spaces. Chapter 7 centres on the interactional and other means by which a 12 year old Anglophone learner, James, navigated his way increasingly successfully through new social and educational spaces, expanding his linguistic repertoire. Chapter 8 focuses on a 12 year old Francophone learner, Aline, and the ways in which she tried to convert her linguistic capital on new linguistic markets. Her efforts were more often than not met with negative evaluation, leading to a loss of both social and academic identities. The analysis of data thus serves as a rich point of entry for understanding the connections between linguistic repertoires, relations between ethnic groups, youth culture, and the experience of social change. Through their discursive production of selves, these adolescent learners supposed to be negotiating only the normal transition from one age group to the next) are here negotiating the currents of a complex society and dealing with issues of race, language and segregation. Findings suggest that participants had multiple identity options that were negotiated through different practices, from food choices to language and interactional norms. These different identity options were however constrained by existing norms and linguistic hierarchies in each space, allowing some to accommodate new linguistic practices and ways of doing things, while others experienced more ambivalent and contradictory processes of adaptation. In informal settings there was evidence of a third space characterized by a mélange of languages in which both formal and informal versions of English and French, along with Cameroonian Pidgin English (CPE) and other Cameroonian languages, were used. However, even in these settings there was a gradual shift to English, indicating the penetration of macrosocial and institutional discourses into private spaces. The thesis concludes with a set of recommendations for caregivers, teachers and policymakers seeking to create schools more welcoming of diversity. It is hoped, then, that this study will help families and schools to realize the variety of ways in which linguistic repertoires influence school success, both social and educational, and to find ways of using these repertoires for development and learning. In this way, they might contribute to immigrant youngsters’ ability to construct strong identities as learners and valued social beings.
Testing the waters: exploring genres in two English classes at a multilingual Cape Flats primary school
(University of the Western Cape, 2008) Van Heerden, Michelle; Kerfoot, Caroline; Dept. of Linguistics, Language and Communication; Faculty of Education
The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of current writing practices in the intermediate phase at a multilingual primary school on the Cape Flats and then to explore the possible benefits of a genre-based approach in this context. The study focused on the development of learners' writing skills in two Grade Six English classes. The aims of this study are to understand the writing curriculum plan and as practiced by two teachers with different levels of exposure to current approaches to the teaching of writing and different class profiles.
Testing the waters: Exploring the teaching of genres in a Cape flats primary school in South Africa
(Routledge, 2015) Kerfoot, Caroline; Van Heerden, Michelle
Twenty years after democracy, the legacy of apartheid and hitherto unmet challenges of resourcing and teacher development are reflected in a severely inequitable and underperforming education system. This paper focuses on second language writing in the middle years of schooling when 80% of learners face a double challenge: to move from ‘common sense’ discourses to the more abstract, specialised discourses of school subjects and, simultaneously, to a new language of learning, in this case English. It describes an intervention using a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) genre-based pedagogy involving 72 learners and two teachers in a low socio-economic neighbourhood of Cape Town. Using an SFL analytical framework, we analyse learners’ development in the information report genre. All learners in the intervention group made substantial gains in control of staging, lexis, and key linguistic features. We argue that the scaffolding provided by SFL genre-based pedagogies together with their explicit focus on textual and linguistic features offer a means of significantly enhancing epistemic access to the specialised language of school subjects, particularly for additional language learners. Findings have implications for language-in-education policy, teacher education, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in multilingual classrooms.
Towards English for academic purposes in the Rwandan context: The case of the first year of the Management Faculty
(University of Western Cape, 2001) Kagwesage, Anne-Marie; Kerfoot, Caroline
This study investigates the extent to which the one-year English course that the National University of Rwanda offers equips Francophone students with the linguistic tools they need in order to cope with content subjects offered through the medium of English. It argues that learning English in this context should go beyond foreign language learning to learning English for Academic Purposes, and beyond language learning to the understanding of content subjects. For the purposes of this study, the focus fell on students in the Management Faculty.

Browsing by Author "Kerfoot, Caroline"

Results Per Page

Sort Options