Teacher's perspective of multilingual classrooms in a South African school

Abstract

The educational changes brought about by the South African Constitution and the Language in Education policy have resulted in many previously monolingual classrooms in South Africa becoming multilingual. Teachers in these classrooms now teach children whose mother tongue differs from the Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT) of their particular school. The focus of the inquiry was therefore to ascertain how these teachers make sense of teaching in such classrooms. Much of the current literature regarding second language teaching focuses on either the recommendation of different methods of teaching a second language or describing the experiences of second language learners. There are not many studies that try to understand the phenomenon of teaching children who are learning in English, a language other than their mother tongue, from the teacher's point of view. This study describes the lived experiences of six Intermediate Phase teachers, teaching second language learners in multilingual classrooms. The research context was an ex-Model C school1 in Gauteng (South Africa) where each of the eleven official languages are represented as home languages among the learners. The research design was qualitative in nature and a number of different data collection techniques were used. The findings from the data reflect that teachers found teaching in such multilingual classrooms both challenging and difficult. The study concludes that teachers in multilingual classrooms need support. Recommendations are made of how this could be accomplished. The results of this inquiry show that further research in this area pertinent to the South African context is needed.

¹A Model C school was a school that was created by the previous government predominantly for white children. These schools have now been converted into State schools and admission is open to all children.

Keywords:

• teachers' perspectives
• second language learners
• language barriers
• multilingualism
• South African classrooms

Notes

¹A Model C school was a school that was created by the previous government predominantly for white children. These schools have now been converted into State schools and admission is open to all children.