Testing the waters: exploring the teaching of genres in a Cape Flats Primary School in South Africa

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.

Keywords:

• adolescent literacy
• English as a second language
• genre-based pedagogies
• middle school
• multilingualism
• second language writing
• systemic functional linguistics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen and three reviewers for careful, insightful, and very helpful comments. We also thank the school for its support of this research and, in particular, the two teachers and the learners for their indispensable contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. We use the term ‘second language’ (L2) in the knowledge that for many children this may be a third or fourth language or language variety.

2. The term ‘coloured’ historically included descendants of Khoi and San populations, slaves brought from the Dutch East Indies, and those of mixed parentage. Black African is generally used to distinguish those of African heritage from coloured or Indian groups. These apartheid categorisations are retained by the democratic state to monitor redress and equity.

3. In SFL, theme is ‘the point of departure’ for the clause (Halliday 1970: 161). The choice of this first constituent in a clause plays a crucial role in framing and organising the message.

4. The Western Cape Education Department only started providing differentiated results per Grade 6 class in each school from 2009. No individual class results were available for 2008.

5. By appraisal resources, we mean the language used to express attitudes, take up stances, and adjust degrees of feeling (Martin and White 2005).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa [grant number 62314].