1. The Teaching of English as a Second Language in Primary Schools in the Cape Province.
- Author
-
English Academy of Southern Africa, Pretoria. and McMagh, P.
- Abstract
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)
- Published
- 1967