Browsing by Subject "Applied Language and Literacy Studies"

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    An analysis of communication between health-care workers and Xhosa-speaking patients in a Cape Town hospital, from the perspective of language cognition and inter-cultural communication
    (2005) Nxasana, Nonceba Thandeka Jacqueline; Mesthrie, Rajend; Kaschula, Russell
    The investigation seeks to establish whether vital information is lost or not communicated properly due to differences in language between medical practitioners and patients. In particular the thesis is concerned with English-speaking doctors and their Xhosa-speaking patients in Cape Town. This thesis studies interactions between ten Xhosa patients and five English-speaking doctors at the Red Cross hospital in Cape Town. It examines terminological issues, especially the names for illness as understood by doctors and patients. It also examines communication difficulties pertaining to a lack of complete fluency in the respective second languages. Culture-bound assumptions about illness and communication of important information are also studied. The thesis contends that vital information does tend to be minimised or even lost and examines the consequences of this loss, and makes recommendations in order to minimise miscommunication and enhance communication.
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    English as a weapon of power : a double-edged sword
    (2005) Pamegiana, Andrea; Young, Douglas; Kapp, Rochelle
    This mini-dissertation explores the effects of the growth of English as an international and an intranational lingua franca with a focus on the South African debate about language and socio-economic empowerment. This exploration is carried out through an extended review of some of the theories that have challenged the notion that the spread of English is empowering for the majority of the world's population. I refer to these theories as the "critical discourse" about the power of English and argue that within this discourse there is a tendency to be exceedingly dismissive of the idea that the spread of English can in any way empower native speakers of other languages. I refer to this tendency as the "critical model" for looking at the power of English and analyze three metaphors that are often used as tropes to exclude from the "critical discourse" arguments that can be made for using English as a weapon of empowerment. These metaphors characterize English as a "linguistic poacher" that threatens endangered language species with extinction, as a "gatekeeper" that excludes the masses from socio-economic mobility, and as a "colonizer of the mind," or a mechanism that imposes Western-centric values. I argue that while it is important to be aware of these negative effects, the critics of English should not rely too heavily on negative constructions of this language, lest they create theories that are marred by epistemological fallacies that have negative pedagogical and political consequences. Epistemologically, sealing the border of a discourse can lead to tautological arguments that rely excessively on determinism and essentialism. Pedagogically, being exceedingly critical of the power of English can create obstacles in finding ways to teach this language effectively.
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    Exploring the impact of (im)materiality on the literacy and meaning-making practices of first year students at a South African distance education institution: implications for support
    (2023) Isaacs, Lynne; Bangeni, Abongwe
    Open distance e-learning has been implemented at South African distance education institutions as a way to redress the inequalities of the country's apartheid past by way of enabling access to higher education for everyone, irrespective of location. Teaching and learning are delivered through modern electronic technologies, based on the assumption that students have access to and can use these technologies. The affordances of the objects that distance education students utilise as they engage in key literacy practices, as well as the spaces within which these practices take place, has not been given much empirical attention as a constituent aspect of distance education. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic foregrounded the significance of this focus when access to public spaces such as libraries or regional learning hubs became unavailable. This qualitative case study draws on the theory of (im)materiality (Burnett, 2015), Fenwick's (2015) notion of sociomateriality and its relevance to educational research, and Thomas Moore's theory of transactional distance (1997, 1989, 2018) to examine the ways in which distance education students' academic literacy and meaning-making practices are distributed across various personal and public sites and domains. In so doing it foregrounds the performativity of the distance education discourse through the material objects students use and the spaces which become materialised for learning. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 first-year distance education students to understand their use and perceptions of these objects and their negotiation of the spaces within which they are used. Drawing on Fairclough's (1992) model of Discourse, a critical discourse analysis of a key material object – the tutorial letter which is used for the mediation of the students' learning – was conducted to explore the ways in which students are positioned and its implications for power and access. The interview findings illustrate how technology functions to influence the participants' engagement with literacy practices, with significant implications for those whose access to technological objects is compromised. In doing so, the inequality of the spatial resources that students have access to and how it affects their meaning-making and learning is foregrounded. The less space that distance-education students have access to, the more their enactment of their distance-education identity is restricted, which heightens all four types of transactional distance they experience. ii The critical discourse analysis of the tutorial letters yielded two salient themes. The first relates to the implications of the use of intertextuality in the form of hyperlinks in the production and consumption of the tutorial letters and the potential for this to affect students' meaning-making practices. The second finding points to contrasting views of literacy in the tutorial letters where the autonomous and ideological approaches to literacy are utilised simultaneously, as reflected in the use of discourse at the level of text via pronouns and vocabulary. These findings raise important questions about students' access to material objects and the implications of their production and consumption for students' engagement. The study draws on the above findings to propose an expansion of the theory of transactional distance by suggesting that another type of distance be considered: that of the distance between the student and the physical learning space. The study also takes into account one of the critiques of the theory of sociomateriality, which states that the role of social structures is largely not considered in research on this subject. This study illustrates how the social structures in which the sociomaterial intra-actions occur are central to students' meaning making practices. In so doing, it contributes to the field of higher education through the insights it offers into the ways of being of distance-education students and the significance of access to a conducive learning space and material objects. The study concludes by providing recommendations that contribute to raising awareness of the impact of these on the literacy experiences of distance-education students.
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    'Heteroglossia in IsiXhosa/English bilingual children's writing: a case study of Grade 6 IsiXhosa Home Language in a Township School
    (2020) Matutu, Samkelo Nelson; Mckinney, Carolyn; Guzula, Xolisa
    The South African constitution recognises 11 official languages, of which isiXhosa is one. IsiXhosa belongs to the Nguni language family which also comprises of isiZulu, isiNdebele, and siSwati. IsiXhosa is mostly spoken in the Eastern and Western Cape Provinces. Those that regard isiXhosa as their home language (HL) are referred to as amaXhosa. However, as a teacher of isiXhosa HL, I have observed that there is often a mismatch between the isiXhosa used by the students and the one used in the schooling context. Thus, this study explores and investigates the written language varieties Grade 6 isiXhosa HL students use in their formally assessed and informal writing. The theoretical framework used in this study reviews literature on discourse/language and literacy as social practice, language ideologies and identity, heteroglossic and translingual practices, as well as primary school children's writing in South Africa to understand the complexities of students' language varieties. Moreover, this study explores the way in which the isiXhosa HL students represent their varied language resources through use of a language body portrait. Further, issues of language standardisation in relation to children's literacy are also reviewed. This study takes the form of qualitative case study in design. Students' Formal Assessment Task (FATs), language body portrait and informal paragraph writing about their linguistic repertoire were collected and analysed. Data analysis revealed the following themes: language ideologies, linguistic repertoires, use of urban and everyday language varieties, Standard Written isiXhosa (orthography), language borrowings, as well as unconventional spellings. Themes and categories are intensively analysed in Chapters four and five of this study. This study displays evidence of hybridity and fluidity of named languages, as well as heteroglossic practices that the students employ. Analysing the students' writing was effective in helping understand how bi/multilinguals engage in writing and that, while the adopted curriculum approach to language and FAT is monoglossic, children's writing is heteroglossic (see also Bakhtin, 1981; Krause and Prinsloo, 2016). The implications of teaching languages as bounded, fixed and separate entities are explored and problematized. Chapter six of this study concludes the study and offers recommendations that are important for deliberation when teaching writing in isiXhosa/African language contexts.
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    Textual and social aspects of accessing high school economics and management sciences (EMS) : a case study of literacy, learning and identity in a social semiotic domain
    (2008) Kalil, Claudia; Prinsloo, Mastin
    The focus in this study is on literacy and learning in Economics and Management Sciences (EMS). EMS comprises integrations of language, mathematics, social elements and practical actions. The research identified ways of constructing knowledge in the EMS genre and evaluated application of principles of effective literacy learning in learners' practices. The research asked therefore: what are the semiotic practices, communication exchanges, and accompanying learning activities in the EMS classroom studied, and how do these constitute a productive domain of learning for students? The research site was a girls-only High School located in a middle-class suburb. An ethnographic-style case study method was used. To gain access to the variability of social life in the site and discern layers of meaning there, relatively long periods were spent recording classroom interaction. The analysis was concerned with the building of textual and social meanings related to which semiotic systems were made relevant and how. Key theoretical resources used included the situated practice approach of the New Literacy Studies (NLS), sociocultural models of cognition, and Gee's (2003) classification of learning principles in a social semiotic domains framework. It was found that various modalities were used in the classes and the teacher's conscious attention to making links between the different modes of communication, the written numbers and the visual, modelled talking about, responding to and interpreting information from visual texts. Learning was co-operative and distributed across people and the technologies of language, writing and numbers. The learning environment was set up so that learners could in dialogue with the teacher discover elements of the domain in an active way. Literacy practices enacted in a framework of everyday activity made learning events embodied and hence apprenticeship-like. A weakly framed simulation assignment meant that control over learning was largely vested in the learners themselves. Students came to appreciate interrelations across multiple sign systems as a complex system; they learnt that learning involves critical thinking about the relationship between semiotic domains at a meta-level. A typical teaching strategy was to scaffold learning to help learners take on knowledge in degrees and build up a complex understanding of the EMS domain. At times the teacher assumed knowledge on the part of learners and this acted as an obstacle to learners accessing the EMS genre. In the course of learning specific elements of EMS literacy, learners became exposed to social events and individuals from outside of the classroom and school. The way learners reacted to and interacted with these discourses resulted in the creating of positionalities for themselves at that time, as South Africans, as rational 'scientists' or academics, and in relation to one another. Teacher feedback on recognition from authority figures of learners' specialist EMS knowledge facilitated learners seeing themselves as insiders who have a recognizable level of achievement in the EMS domain, and helped them to bridge from their earlier (less experienced) identities to new ones as 'experts' in the domain. Through the stockbroker simulation assignment learners could develop identities through feeling the emotions, values and beliefs and experiencing the actions of a real-world broker. They thus had a scaffold to support later literacy learning and experience. The study showed that students were actively and critically learning the semiotic systems of EMS, developing an identity as part of the social group attached to the EMS domain, and being prepared for learning in the domain and future learning. These facts mean that it is possible to evaluate the classes researched as being a productive domain for learning.
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    Trying to make sense of the Trojan Horse incident: using historical documents to prompt discussion of politically sensitive issues in secondary schools in Cape Town
    (2003) Geschier, Sofie M M A; Young, Douglas; McCormick, Kay
    In this qualitative research, I hoped to get some impression of ways teachers and learners in five Cape Town schools deal with the process of making sense of a violent past. I offered five teachers material on the Trojan Horse Incident, partly generated by the TRC, and pondered the questions what for them and their learners is politically sensitive and how they position the people involved in the incident and how they position themselves. I understand by 'politically sensitive issues', issues centering on political and social divisions of the past and their ramifications in the present in this country. Applying a 'Foucaultian' approach to discourse analysis, I used the concepts 'indescribable' and 'undiscussable' as structuring categories, next to a differentiation between the discourse of classroom talk, and informal discourses outside the classroom situation. I also differentiated between the sense making processes of teachers, being part of a generation that lived through Apartheid, and of learners, the 'new' generation who didn't have that experience. The results of this research are: Firstly, teachers and learners in the five schools positioned themselves, the people involved in the incident and the researcher through dynamic practices of in- and excluding (shifting between 'us' and 'them') and of past and present framing (shifting between past and present tenses). Both groups seem to prefer to position themselves as 'observers'. In most classes, most of the time was spent on how exactly the Trojan Horse Incident took place (when, where, which tactics the policemen used, consequences,). Moral questions ('why' questions) were left for the end of the period or left implicit. Secondly, there was not a lot of space during classroom interactions for emotions and personal stories. The power/knowledge structure of the discourse of schooling seemed to be very strong, although it was also a matter of personal choices by teachers and learners. An 'official' image of Apartheid, with clear differentiations between victims and perpetrators prevailed. Personal stories were only situated in formal discourses of schooling before or after the actual lesson (learners speaking with the teacher about their personal experiences of or reactions to violence) or when 'others' were present, be it learners from 'another' community than the majority of learners and the teacher, or be it the researcher. Thirdly, a discourse of reconstructing personal histories and identities had more space in informal discourses (for example learners talking to one another during breaks) and during interviews with me. South African youth might have (similar to German and Irish youth) a 'fatigue' towards 'official', 'consensus' knowledge of the past and they might not to be able or not want to make sense of the 'wall' of silenced personal stories of those who have experienced the conflicts in the past. Fourthly, 'sensitive issues' were mostly expressed outside the classroom interactions. These were violence in past and present; moral stances towards violence and responsibility; schooling (teaching but also disciplining); and stereotypes people have of 'other' South Africans and the separate lives they have.