Browsing by Author "Arend, Moeain"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    There's a hippo on my stoep': constructions of English second language teaching and learners in the new national senior certificate
    (Stellenbosch University, 2011) Kapp, Rochelle; Arend, Moeain
    The focus of this paper is an analysis of the conceptualisation of language teaching and the construction of learners in the new National Senior Certificate grade 12 curriculum and examinations taken by students for whom English is an additional language. The paper examines the values, attitudes and beliefs, as well as the required levels of cognitive engagement and notions of reading and writing. The authors argue that the curriculum represents a significant improvement on the previous version. However, there is a considerable mismatch between the Curriculum Statement and the examination papers. The curriculum emphasis on the role of language as a tool for critical, independent thinking is not evident in the examination papers, which reinforce traditional gender norms and essentialised notions of Africa. The examination papers are cognitively undemanding, requiring only the most basic understandings of texts. The authors argue that, by making it possible to pass at a very basic level, the examination system in effect obscures the contradiction that although the majority of learners have to use English as a first language across the curriculum, the language itself is taught as a second language.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Writer's stance in disciplinary discourses: a developmental view
    (Taylor & Francis, 2008) Paxton, Moragh; Van Pletzen, Ermien; Archer, Arlene; Arend, Moeain; Chihota, Clement
    An approach to writer's stance will differ depending on whether one looks at it from an analytic theoretical perspective or a developmental perspective. This article describes a training activity in the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town which led the authors to evaluate the concept of writer's stance as used in corpus studies against the way it is used by academic literacy practitioners working in developmental fields. Corpus analysts tend to construct a general and theoretical conceptualisation of writer's stance, while academic literacy practitioners who work in complex developmental fields focus on what actually happens (or needs to happen) when individual readers or writers grapple with texts within particular social environments such as academic disciplines.