Abstract
This article is about an investigation into the English spoken language competence of 144 first graders in two urban (‘township’) schools in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. The study was conducted from an anthropological and a cognitive developmental perspective. In one school isiZulu and Sesotho are used mainly as medium of instruction, while in the other school the language of teaching and learning is English. The inquiry is part of longitudinal panel research in which children’s overall development and school progress over four years is documented by way of growth modelling. This initial assessment of the children’s basic interpersonal communication skills in English found, not unexpectedly, that the children in the first mentioned school know English mostly to the extent of the naming of objects, while the children in the other school are able to use morpho-syntactically more complex language. These findings may shed some light on the phenomenon of school culture liminality in its interplay with linguistic liminality, considering that children’s basic English may scaffold their academic English.
Highlights
Moving from home to school and into the ‘mother tongue’ debateIn this article we investigate one aspect of the issue of language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in the early grades in South African schools, namely linguistic liminality, a term which refers to a transition phase, such as the initial phase of getting to know the discursive practices of school learning
The children from School A, where English is introduced at least two years before the children enter Grade R, performed significantly better than students from School B, where instruction is conducted in the mother tongue of the respective classes, i.e. isiZulu and Sesotho
There are many publications on this topic and it is becoming a burning issue in manuscripts submitted to South African journals, such as the South African Journal of Childhood Education and the South African Journal of Education
Summary
In this article we investigate one aspect of the issue of language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in the early grades in South African schools, namely linguistic liminality, a term which refers to a transition phase, such as the initial phase of getting to know the discursive practices of school learning. CALP is language specific Does not transfer, but translates forwards and backwards – requires bilinguality From this discussion of a double liminality our argument emerges: We make the claim that urban children in multilingual contexts in South Africa may, be advantaged if they can learn English in their pre-school years as they do in School A. The majority of children in School B provided answers that fall within the categories 0, 1 and 2 on the rating continuum, which suggests that for the most part students were able to name objects using one word, nominals only and no verbals
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