I TENOR I
2.4 Implications for the Research Process
appendix 1.
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Content which gives learners an experience of a wider range of genres to take them beyond the confines of narrative/expressive writing and to give them access to academic and occupational genres. This process should start students working from familiar genres such as narrative and moving to those more removed from their immediate experience, such as analytical exposition (Prince 1989).
Assessment practices which encourage collaborative relationship amongst teachers. They should be linguistically principled, criterion-referenced and thereby diagnostic and formative as well as summative. This Macken and Slade (1993) maintain is accomplished by making clear the linguistic and structural criteria by which social/communicative purposes are achieved in different genres. They feel that systemic functional linguistics offered a systematic way of relating matters of purpose and audience to language. By attention to the four interrelated aspects of the environment of text, teachers and learners will be able to develop explicit criteria and an assessment metalanguage.This will assist students in the process of writing for real purposes (academic and occupational) and understanding the appropriate linguistic criteria for doing so.Itwill also enable teachers to diagnose problems and offer specific strategies for their resolution.
Principled and structured decision-making about course content and sequencing based on clear understanding ofthe interface between the domains ofthe everyday, the specialised and the reflexive and how each one builds on the other. This understanding highlights the particular responsibility of teachers to build on the primary discourses of learners in developing their ability to function in the specialised domain ofeducational learning. This in turn provides the basis for the development of critical literacy.
The development of a critical social literacy whereby learners are taken beyond the domain of educational learning and introduced to the genres of the world outside which contest both their everyday and specialised knowledge. This could lead learners to reevaluate the relationship between dominant and marginalised discourses.
The insights gained from the literature review also provide guidelines for the data that needs to be gathered in the research process if one is to gain an understanding of the teaching of writing in a school and the factors that have shaped that teaching. To do this one would need to gain an understanding of:
the range ofgenres learners had experienced in their school careers across the curriculum, how these were taught and assessed, and what the rationale was for these practices;
how language was taught and how it related to the teaching of writing;
the quantity of extended writing students did over a school year;
student attitudes towards writing and the reasons for these attitudes;
the knowledge and skills around writing students that have developed;
the knowledge, skills and attitudes teachers had developed around writing and how these impacted on the way writing was taught;
how far students had been taken across the continuum from the everyday to the reflexive;
the messages about the teaching of writing that filtered down from the education system via official documents such as syllabuses, examinations, and subject guides;
the impact of political, educational, social, and economic factors on the lives of the learners, on the school environment and on the teaching practices within it.
CHAPTER 3
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY:
CAPTURING LEARNERS' LITERACY EXPERIENCES
My research topic is an ethnographic investigation into the teaching ofwriting in an urban African (ex-DET) school in the Pietermaritzburg area. This research arose out of an awareness of unequal outcomes emanating from the different education systems operating in South Africa. My own teaching of Black students on the Pietermaritzburg campus, as well as my reading of Martin (1989,1993), Cope and Kalantzis (1993a,b), Bemstein (1996), Christie (1995), Gee (1990) and Johnson (1991), had made me aware that access to power in society (the ability to act on one's environment) is closely linked to access to a range of written genres. Students I was teaching seemed to have had little experience of genres that were crucial to their success at university and in wider society. A central aim of this research therefore was to understand all the factors that impact on the teaching of writing in the school context that I explored. This would enable me to provide some explanation for the unequal outcomes I was experiencing. These aims, I felt, would best be served by ethnographic research methods and thus this chapter begins by analysing and describing the nature of ethnographic research methods and establishing their appropriateness to my research area. This is followed by a description of the community and school in which the research took place. After establishing the principal research method, and the research site, a history of the research process follows and the issues and problems that arose in the research context are described. Responses to these problems and adjustments to research methods are explained. The rationale for the decisions taken are developed by reference to relevant literature around these research issues.It is in the description of the research history that Literate Life Histories (LLHs) are explored as a means of ethnographic data collection. LLHs form the central core of the data collected, and the rationale for their use as well as the issues and problems surrounding their use are examined. In addition, the chapter describes the process of triangulation of various sources of data such as:
classroom observation;
interviews with teachers;
participant observation of matriculation examinations;
examination of syllabuses and other officialdocuments; and analysis of student work.
These methods arebe evaluated in terms oftheir ability to provide an understanding ofthe factors thatimpact on the leaming and teaching of writing in the context ofthe school that I investigated, as well as on their ability to provide insights on questions of equity and access that were mentioned in chapters one and two. This last concem emphasises the inherently critical nature of ethnographic description.It 'does not take any given customary reality for granted' (Erickson 1988: 1807) and exposes what is 'hidden' to those who might have invested in certain practices.