EXPLORING THE TERRAIN: SCHOOL LANGUAGE CHANGE, CHANGE AGENTRY AND SUSTAINING CHANGE
2.2 Part A: Literature Review
2.2.1 The South African context
2.2.1.4 Experimenting with Multilingual Education
schools, which had previously been open only to people classified white or coloured.
However, this inflow of learners was not accompanied by a redeployment of appropriately qualified isiXhosa-speaking teachers, especially to those schools where isiXhosa-speaking learners became the majority or a sizeable minority of the school population. Since all the teachers spoke English and Afrikaans but hardly any isiXhosa, and most of the learners had either no grasp of or, at best, an imperfect proficiency in the English language, it was almost impossible for them to interact meaningfully. Three staff members from PRAESA engaged in a six-month field investigation into the problems which teachers were raising and made recommendations to address these problems. The recommendations are outlined below:
For teachers at classroom level, the biggest challenge would be to shift their beliefs about and attitudes towards the African languages, and to use these as learning resources across the curriculum and throughout schooling.
At school level a language plan has to be developed in keeping with the new LiEP and the new curriculum, and ways should be found to monitor its realisation and support teachers in doing so. Mechanisms need to be found to encourage English- and Afrikaans-speaking teachers to do conversational courses in the most relevant African language. Schools, in conjunction with all relevant role players and stakeholders, must campaign for time off from work for ongoing In-service Education and Training (INSET) for teaching staff.
At teacher education level the promotion of multilingualism in pre-service and in-service courses is crucial to the enterprise of facilitating multilingual learning. A coherent new set of language requirements for teachers teaching in public schools needs to be developed following the scrapping of the old language requirements for teachers.
In partnership with the relevant provincial education authorities, teacher in- service providers should be offering courses in which the intersection of multilingualism with Curriculum 2005 is systematically explored.
The development and distribution of appropriate learning support materials such as textbooks, stories, charts and posters, amongst other things, in the African languages (or in two or more languages) remains an urgent undertaking.
A national terminology databank for the African languages should be set up in partnership between national and provincial education departments, publishers and writers of learning support materials, academics and other stakeholders. It is crucial to complement corpus planning „from above‟ (e.g. via lexicography units) with spontaneous corpus planning „from below‟ in order to legitimise and extend the use of African languages in high-status schooling domains such as „content-subject‟ teaching and textbooks.
These recommendations are also relevant for the study for the following reasons. The Western Cape Schools, comprising linguistically heterogeneous learner populations and large numbers of educators who do not have the linguistic repertoire to interact meaningfully with these learners, particularly the isiXhosa L1 speakers, are contextually similar to the schools in the study which have isiZulu-speaking learners with whom the majority of English-speaking educators, possessing little or no competence in isiZulu, have difficulty in interacting meaningfully. In addition, the recommended conditions necessitating and supporting school language change which advances multilingual education are equally applicable to both the Western Cape schools and schools in the study. In this respect, the recommendations point to the need to revise outdated school language policies and practices, the need to train teachers to interact bilingually or multilingually with learners, and the need for ongoing development of African languages to enhance their potential to be used effectively as LOLTs, all of which resonate with the change agenda of the language change agents in the study.
With regard to PRAESA‟s MLDS programme, the isiXhosa/English biliteracy project is a revised version of the MLDS which takes the form of a multilingual stream at an ex
“coloured” school in Cape Town. The project involves exploring, as far as is possible through the primary years, beginning with Grade 1, how to bring isiXhosa into the class as a language of learning and as an additional language. Using a trained isiXhosa- speaking primary teacher to teach alongside the existing English-speaking Grade 1 teacher, the project attempts to raise the status of isiXhosa in the classroom as an oral and written language, to support and maintain isiXhosa for the isiXhosa-speaking children, and to introduce isiXhosa to the English speakers (Bloch 2002). The visible gains of the project to date are that the isiXhosa-speaking children, who are developing fluency in isiXhosa reading and writing, are equally fluent in English. According to Bloch (2002), using less English has not retarded development in English while the use of isiXhosa has brought gains for both isiXhosa and English. Although the gains for the English-speaking children are not as significant as that for their bilingual and biliterate isiXhosa peers, the greatest gain for the English-speaking children is their open and positive attitude towards isiXhosa speakers, the language itself and their willingness to try. Bloch (2002) observes that within the classroom, isiXhosa and English have equal status in the eyes of the children, and they are curious and respectful of one another‟s ways of saying and writing things.
The other MLDS project, PRAESA‟s dual-medium primary school programme, is an ongoing project which began with initial classroom observations leading to the formulation of a new school language policy to curricular intervention and research (Pluddemann 2002). The research team workshopped the outline of a new language distribution model with the teachers to be discussed with parents. The language distribution model (almost identical for both schools) comprises mother tongue instruction almost entirely in isiXhosa in Grades 1-3, with isiXhosa being taught throughout as L1, English being introduced orally from Grade 1 and Afrikaans (orally) from Grade 3 in one school and Grade 4 in the other. From Grade 4 all learners have to offer three fully-fledged language subjects and in Grades 4-7 all content subjects are
taught through the medium of two LOLTs (Xhosa and English). The language model is additive with isiXhosa being the formative medium and English, the supportive medium.
Among the main interventions of the programme are bilingual teaching and assessment (in isiXhosa and English) of content subjects (mathematics, science, history and geography), upgrading of science teachers‟ conceptual understanding through workshops conducted by science specialists on the research team, an initiative to develop science terminology in isiXhosa which entails compiling lists of terms that will facilitate comprehension and conceptual development and eventually standardised in collaboration with the National Terminology Services and on-site in-service training with regard to improving language teaching in Grades 4-7 (Pluddemann 2002).
According to Pluddemann (2002), it is only once the dual-medium schools are self- sustaining and no longer able to rely on outside intervention that the impact and sustainability of the Programme will become evident. As yet an evaluation of the sustainability of the Dual-Medium Primary Schooling Programme has not been done which would have been crucial in informing the present study which focuses primarily on sustaining language change initiatives in similarly linguistically diverse schools.
In addition to PRAESA, another language NGO (The Molteno Project) is committed to additive bi- and multilingualism and mother tongue instruction particularly in the formative years. The Molteno Project began in 1975 at the Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes University. In 1976 a decision was taken to start with literacy in an African language (then isiXhosa for the Transkei), as the failure to read in English was largely due to literacy failure in the main language. An African language course was developed called Breakthrough to isiXhosa/isiZulu/Sesotho/Setswana. The programme is a language experience approach in which learners are helped through a “sentence maker”
to encode language which is produced from discussions around their experience (Rodseth 2002). The programme is currently available in 36 African languages and has produced exceptional results in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Lesotho and Swaziland.
According to Rodseth (2002), the success of the programme is due to the use of African main languages for initial literacy, successful promotion among teachers of the need to
overcome prejudice against teaching in the home language of learners and the realisation among teachers that main language literacy speeds up the learning of English, and does not slow it down.
The bi- and multilingual programmes implemented by PRAESA and The Molteno Project all underscore the need for an additive bi- or multilingual model of learning which exploits the value of using two or more languages to accomplish learning and teaching and language learning. Such an approach is instructive for this study, which is primarily concerned with language change that similarly exploits the value of a multilingual approach to teaching and learning.
A selective review of the literature of research carried out in the South African context reveals that there is a reasonable body of South African research that confirms the value of multilingual education over a straight for English approach. However, with the exception of work conducted by PRAESA particularly with its MLDS programme, the Molteno Project and the support by ELTIC, ELET and HLP cited in the HSRC report (2004) there is limited research on intervention aimed at intended language change to address linguistic diversity in post-apartheid schools, the work of internal change agents in bringing about such change, and the sustainability of such change initiatives. It is the gap in this area of research that the study addresses.