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Five papers focus on the interrelated themes of school organization and innovation. They report on some preliminary analyses of field studies conducted during 1968 on such structural, sociocultural, and sociopsychological variables as division of labor, performance of organizational functions, decision making studies and processes, hierarchies of authority and esteem, rule observation, value systems, reward systems, and leadership. The authors and their studies are (1) Max G. Abbott, "Programmatic Research and Development on Innovativeness and the Organizational Attributes of Schools;" (2) Terry L. Eidell, Ronald Little, and Jon Thorlacius, "Uniformity and Variability in the Organizational Characteristics of Elementary Schools;" (3) Nico Stehr, George Lewis, and Roland J. Pellegrin, "Task Differentiation in Elementary Schools: An Exploratory Analysis;" (4) Charles J. Dudley, Keith F. Smith, and Roland J. Pellegrin, "The Decision-Making Structure of Schools;" and (5) Max G. Abbott and C. Michael Stuart, "The School Over Time: Our Findings Compared with Those of Waller." (HW)

This paper reports on results of a questionnaire survey of 84 schools representing 25,928 Afrikaans-speaking pupils in the Cape Province of South Africa. The survey revealed that only 13 of the teachers were English-speaking; the rest were Afrikaans-speaking. Most of the children never hear English out of school, or hear it under conditions requiring only a fairly limited understanding. The majority of the principals maintained that the most important skill the primary school child had to master was to speak English. In addition to being the medium of instruction, it was needed in offices, at work and in commerce (because "most businesses are in English"), in the professions, as qualification for employment in the S.A.R. and civil service, and for a variety of other reasons. Of the most troublesome language problems, verbs and tense seem far more difficult even than prepositions, word order, and vocabulary, both to learn and to teach. Other conclusions reached were (1) many young teachers in these schools are not competent to teach English; (2) the methods of teacher training need revision; (3) the teaching materials used lack systematic planning, do not have enough drills and exercises, and have too much emphasis on formal grammar. Also commented on in this report are results of a questionnaire sent to 240 post-graduate and post-diploma students entering the faculty of education for one year's training. (AMM)

Pupils in South African Bantu schools spend one third of their time in Standards (Grades) 1 and 2 learning the official languages, English and Afrikaans. Nearly as much time is given to the learning of their own Bantu mother tongue, the language of instruction from Sub-Standard A (Preprimary) to Standard 6. In the Lower Primary schools, through Standard 2, the pupil is busy with language learning for over 45% of his time; in the Higher Primary school for 40% of his time. Surveys indicate that English teaching (as a language, and as a medium of instruction), is almost completely by non-mother tongue speakers of English. A 1963 survey showed that 45% of all Bantu teachers have had a primary school education only, followed by a three-year course of professional training. Other figures indicate that the qualifications of teachers in the city tend to be higher than the average for the whole country. The author feels that if a realistic view is taken of the other school subjects, including Afrikaans and the pupil's home language, the standards of English will not be improved by devoting more time to its teaching. A solution can be sought only in the improvement of the quality of the teacher and in the language materials and aids at her disposal. Comments on the improvement in the Johannesburg Bantu schools, as well as statistics on teacher qualifications, test results, and other relevant information appear in appendixes to this paper. (AMM)

This paper reviews the teaching of English as a second language in the secondary schools in the Transvaal, the syllabuses which have been in use since 1956-57, and the importance of an audiolingual approach. In attempting to discover the reasons for students' failure to attain a satisfactory standard of bilingualism, the author examines (1) the syllabuses and the teacher (the teachers are not linguistically trained); (2) the syllabuses and the pupil (the emphasis should be shifted to achievement of "articulacy" in language); and (3) the syllabuses and examinations (it is the examination even more than the syllabus that determines the kind of teaching which is carried out in all but the best schools, and an improved syllabus can therefore only be effective if the examination permits it to be so). Questions concerning which current linguistic theory to follow and whether to use traditional or audiovisual language teaching methods must be decided before revising the syllabuses. These two decisions will involve the whole hierarchy of the educational system in the Transvaal and South Africa--the administrators, the provincial authorities who will install the language laboratories, the examining boards who will have to devise new language proficiency examinations, university departments of English who will have to train linguists to write contrastive analyses of English and Afrikaans, and teacher trainers. (AMM)