Testing the waters: Exploring the teaching of genres in a Cape flats primary school in South Africa
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Date
2015
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Routledge
Abstract
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.
Description
Keywords
Adolescent literacy, Language writing, Middle school, Cape flats primary school, Apartheid, Multilingualism
Citation
Kerfoot, C., & Van Heerden, M. (2015). Testing the waters: Exploring the teaching of genres in a Cape flats primary school in South Africa. Language and Education,29(3), 235-255. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2014.994526