Orientations to text: how classroom discourse affords or denies the enactment of critical literacy and learner agency in an English First Additional Language classroom
Master Thesis
2014
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University of Cape Town
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Despite improvements in educational provision since 1994, the opportunities for learners from historically under resourced schools to gain access to powerful English resources remain limited and unequal (Prinsloo 2012), with a dearth of research into how school literacy practices in South Africa might contribute to this lack of access. This case study contributes towards the development of a detailed description of school literacy practices, with a focus on the orientations to text that are made available to learners in a black township high school. This study is informed by poststructuralist theory, in which the subject is theorised as constructed and contested in language, as well as by critical literacy theory. I draw on feminist poststructuralist theory to describe the key concepts of subjectivity, subject positioning and agency and to define the ways in which power works in language to construct difference. I describe orientations to text and theorise ways in which subject English pedagogy defines the kinds of readings of text that are possible in a particular classroom context. The case is a Grade 11 class studying English as a First Additional Language, in a black township high school in the Cape Metropolitan Area. The data was gathered from observing and recording English lessons over a four-week period, interviewing four selected learners and collecting the written work they produced over that period. My analysis of classroom discourse and text-based tasks shows that the orientations to reading that were offered were characterised by a focus on the surface meaning of the texts and by an absence of critical engagement. I found that the racial, gender and class constructions of apartheid continue to impact on how teachers teach, how they position their learners and what positions learners are able to take up in their learning. Teachers seem reluctant to enable engagements with text that challenge the ways relations of domination continue to negatively shape the lives of their learners. I produce evidence that the resources learners bring to school as a result of the multiple positions they occupy could productively be used in their learning, but are largely ignored. The orientations to text and literacy practices described and analysed in this study can be situated in a long history of unequal access to resources and I conclude that the resources afforded by critical orientations should be made available in all schools, through changes in the teacher training provision for all teachers.
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Lloyd, G. 2014. Orientations to text: how classroom discourse affords or denies the enactment of critical literacy and learner agency in an English First Additional Language classroom. University of Cape Town.