Abstract:
This thesis analyses the classroom writing of learners in their additional
languages at four differently resourced schools in the Eastern Cape
Province of South Africa. The choice of languages on offer at schools and
the medium of instruction seldom meet current language education policy
requirements of additive bilingualism needed to support children’s home
language and general cognitive growth. The central question of my study
concerns how school writing practices contribute to the development of
learners’ writing ability. The data collected and analysed in order to
investigate this were all the regular classroom writing of Grade 7 children
in Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa, where these were additional
languages, not the children’s home language.
My findings were that there is no check by the Education Department on
whether schools meet the official national curriculum policy requirements
with regard to the amount of curriculum time allocated to language. Also,
that there is a mismatch between the languages on offer at schools and
the home languages of learners, and teachers, which is not monitored.
My key findings with regard to writing were that there are significant
differences and inequalities in the amounts that learners write at these
schools across Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa. Decontextualised
grammar tasks predominate in what learners write in all three languages at
all four schools. Children write relatively few extended texts, and these
are mainly personal expressive texts which are unlikely to develop their
ability to write abstract, context-reduced genres. Teachers’ neglect of
impersonal formal and factual genres at all four schools makes it difficult
for learners to experience the benefits of writing these genres – that these
genres set the basis for the development of abstract cognitivelydemanding
language proficiency and disciplinary knowledge. In the case
of English, which is the commonest medium of instruction even though it is
the home language of less than 10% of the population, this shortcoming is
especially serious.
