Rationale: The importance of well developed phonological awareness and the effect of poor phonological awareness skills on reading and spelling have long been recognised. However, a dearth of research exists regarding populations in multi-cultural, multi-lingual contexts both nationally and internationally. This issue is of particular importance in the South African context where many Black learners in the school setting have no other choice than English as the Language of Learning and Teaching (ELoLT). Aim: The purpose of the study was to explore the effect of a multi-cultural, multi-lingual context on the English phonological awareness skills of a group of Black Grade 4 learners in a primary school setting in South Africa. Method: An exploratory, descriptive and contextual research design was implemented, which incorporated both quantitative and qualitative paradigms. An assessment battery consisting of formal and informal assessments was used to determine levels of development. The researcher endeavoured to find statistical correlations between the participants' phonological awareness skills on the one hand, and their phonological abilities, their expressive and receptive language abilities, and their reading and spelling abilities in ELoLT on the other. Participants: Fifteen Black Grade 4 learners, each with a Black language as mother tongue, who attended a mainstream school where English was the language of learning and teaching (ELoLT), participated in the study. The participants' ages ranged between 9 years 11 months, and 10 years 11 months. Results: The participants’ phonological abilities in English as LoLT showed that 47% of the participants produced the target consonants with a consonant approximation, and vowel approximations were produced by all of the participants in single words. All fifteen the participants’ expressive and receptive language abilities in English as their LoLT, were on a below-average level and their expressive language abilities were more advanced than their receptive language abilities. All the participants evidenced problems in terms of their phonological awareness skills. Based on the results obtained for reading decoding abilities, only one third of the participants could be considered to be readers of an average standard. The reading comprehension abilities of all the participants were on a lower level than those of first language speakers of Standard South African English. Furthermore, the participants’ spelling abilities in English as LoLT were not age-appropriate. Even though no significant correlation could be determined between the participants’ reading comprehension and phonological awareness skills (due to the fact that memory probably played a role in their reading comprehension), it was statistically determined that their poor phonological awareness skills could be associated with their below-average phonological, receptive and expressive language, reading decoding, and spelling abilities. Conclusions: The results of this research have implications for the role of speech-language therapists in terms of collaboration, prevention, assessment, and intervention where the development of these learners' phonological awareness skills is concerned. Clinical implications focus on the dissemination of information, therapy planning, and EAL learner support. The need for further research in this field is emphasised. / Dissertation (M (Communication Pathology))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / M (Communication Pathology) / Unrestricted

‘A critical review of language errors in the writing of distance education students’ examines linguistic competence and investigates the language errors made by a heterogeneous group of 100 entry-level distance education university students with a view to improving their academic writing skills. The research follows a process of error identification and statistical analysis, and reviews intervention strategies based on the findings. Despite the continuing debates on the value of error correction, especially in relation to ‘World Englishes’, language accuracy remains a key factor in determining academic success. This is of particular concern in the South African multi-lingual context and in the light of the under-performance of South African students as evidenced in international comparative studies. The implications of the bimodal pattern of distribution in the review findings are discussed and pedagogically appropriate approaches and intervention strategies are suggested. / English Studies / M.A. (TESOL (Teaching English to speakers of other languages))

Thesis (DLitt (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / This study attempts a re-reading and re-evaluation of the work of black South African short story writers from R.R.R. Dhlomo (circa 1930) to Zoë Wicomb (at the end of the 1980s). The short story, along with the autobiography, was the dominant genre of black writing during this period, and the reasons for this are examined, as well as the ways in which black writers adapt or transform this familiar literary genre. The title – “Writing Black” – alludes to well-known works by Richard Rive (Writing Black) and J.M. Coetzee (White Writing), and foregrounds the issue of race and racialised identities. While one would not want to neglect other factors (class, gender), it is hardly possible to underestimate the impact of racial classification during the apartheid era. However, the difficulty of asserting the unproblematic existence of a homogeneous “black” identity also becomes evident. The approach adopted here reflects the need to recognise both the singularity of particular texts (their “literariness”) as well as their embeddedness in their particular place and time (their “worldliness” or their “circumstantiality”). Literary texts are complex verbal artefacts of an unusual kind, but they cannot be separated from their contexts of production and reception; black writing in this country would be largely incomprehensible if this were not taken into account. Close attention is given to the obvious spatial, temporal and ideological shifts in South African cultural production during this period, and to the two major phases of black writing (the Sophiatown and District Six writers of the 50s, and the Staffrider writers of the 70s and 80s). The work of these writers is not, however, subsumed into a political meta-narrative. In particular, this study resists the tendency to lump the work of black writers into one large, undifferentiated category (“protest writing” or “spectacular” representation). This approach has had the effect of flattening out or homogenising a body of work that is much more varied and interesting than many critical accounts would suggest. Finally, the contribution of three writers of the “interregnum” (Ndebele, Matlou, Wicomb) is explored. What is of particular interest is their break from established conventions of representation: their work reveals a willingness to resist over-simplification, to experiment, and to explore issues of identity and gender. By examining these texts from the vantage point of the post-apartheid present, one is able to arrive at an enhanced understanding of the form that black writing took under apartheid, and the pressures to which it was responding.

Autobiographical writing acquired increasing importance during the apartheid period, with greater numbers of autobiographical texts being published by a more representative range of South Africans across race, class and gender categories. This thesis analyzes the implications of shifts in autobiographical production, in English, during the years 1948-1994 through the examination of selected texts. The readings are informed by poststructuralism, modified by information about indigenous black South African cultural practices, as well as by input supplied by some of the autobiographical texts themselves. This theoretical approach may be referred to as a "pratique de metissage" (Glissant). The texts selected for close reading are from a field of over 120 autobiographical texts. They were chosen for their ability to illustrate important trends in South African autobiographical writing, specifically with regard to the three constituent parts of autobiography: autos, bios, and graphe. The chapter dealing with the depiction of self interrogates the hierarchized discourses of male-biased humanism in Roy Campbell's Light on a Dark Horse (1951). In Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985) I analyze the melding of the conceptual frameworks of indigenous black cultures and Western individualism by which the autobiographical subject is defined. Breyten Breytenbach's The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984) is read as an exploration of the postmodernist decentred self. In the chapter focusing on the portrayal of life experiences, I examine the ways in which the narrator of Albert Luthuli's Let My People Go (1962) seeks to secure the reader's approval of his version of recent South African history; while the analysis of the sub-genre referred to here as worker autobiography is principally concerned with the politics of life-writing. In Chapter 5, I look at how Godfrey Moloi's My Life: Volume One (1987) uses the discourses of popular American movies of the 40s and 50s in order to validate a self victimized by racism, and also at the ways in which Lyndall Gordon's Shared Lives (1992) probes the limits and possibilities of biography through autobiographical speculation. In general, apartheid autobiography moves away from individualism to contribute, through various means, to social and political change. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1994.

‘A critical review of language errors in the writing of distance education students’ examines linguistic competence and investigates the language errors made by a heterogeneous group of 100 entry-level distance education university students with a view to improving their academic writing skills. The research follows a process of error identification and statistical analysis, and reviews intervention strategies based on the findings. Despite the continuing debates on the value of error correction, especially in relation to ‘World Englishes’, language accuracy remains a key factor in determining academic success. This is of particular concern in the South African multi-lingual context and in the light of the under-performance of South African students as evidenced in international comparative studies. The implications of the bimodal pattern of distribution in the review findings are discussed and pedagogically appropriate approaches and intervention strategies are suggested. / English Studies / M.A. (TESOL (Teaching English to speakers of other languages))

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1993.

No abstract available. / M.A. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2014.

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of vowel quality in South African English (SAE) using the following data: firstly, the existing impressionistic literature on SAE and other relevant accents of English, the former of which is subject to a critical review; secondly, acoustic data from a similar range of accents, including new SAE data, collected and instrumentally analyzed specifically for the purposes of this research. These various data are used to position, on both a descriptive and theoretical level, the SAE vowel system. In addition, and in the service of providing a careful reconstruction of the linguistic history of this variety, it offers a three-stage koin´eization model which helps, in many respects, to illuminate the respective roles played by endogenous and exogenous factors in SAE’s development. More generally, the analysis is focussed on rendering explicit the extent to which the synchronic status and diachronic development of SAE more generally, and SAE vowel quality more particularly, provides support for a number of descriptive and theoretical frameworks, including those provided in Labov (1994), Torgersen and Kerswill (2004), Trudgill (2004) and Schneider (2003; 2007). With respect to these frameworks, and based on the results of the analysis, it proposes an extension to Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model, shows Trudgill’s (2004) model of new-dialect formation to be inadequate in accounting for some of the SAE data, provides evidence that SAE is a possibly imminent but ‘conservative’ member of Torgersen and Kerswill’s (2004) SECS-Shift and uses SAE data to question the applicability of the SECS-Shift to FOOT-Fronting. Furthermore, this thesis provides evidence that SAE has undergone an indexicallydriven arrestment of the Diphthong and Southern Shifts and a subsequent and related diffusion of GenSAE values at the expense of BrSAE ones. Similarly, it shows that SAE’s possible participation in the SECS-Shift constitutes an effective chain-shift reversal ‘from above’. It stresses that, in order to understand such phenomena, recourse needs to be made to a theory of indexicality that takes into account the unique sociohistorical development of SAE and its speakers. Lastly, the adoption of the three-stage koin´eization model mentioned above highlights the merits of considering both endogenous and exogenous factors in the historical reconstruction of new-dialect formation and, for research into SAE in particular, strengthens the case for further investigation into the possible effects of 19th-century Afrikaans/Dutch, Yiddish and north-of-English dialects on the formation of modern SAE. / Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of vowel quality in South African English (SAE) using the following data: firstly, the existing impressionistic literature on SAE and other relevant accents of English, the former of which is subject to a critical review; secondly, acoustic data from a similar range of accents, including new SAE data, collected and instrumentally analyzed specifically for the purposes of this research. These various data are used to position, on both a descriptive and theoretical level, the SAE vowel system. In addition, and in the service of providing a careful reconstruction of the linguistic history of this variety, it offers a three-stage koin´eization model which helps, in many respects, to illuminate the respective roles played by endogenous and exogenous factors in SAE’s development. More generally, the analysis is focussed on rendering explicit the extent to which the synchronic status and diachronic development of SAE more generally, and SAE vowel quality more particularly, provides support for a number of descriptive and theoretical frameworks, including those provided in Labov (1994), Torgersen and Kerswill (2004), Trudgill (2004) and Schneider (2003; 2007). With respect to these frameworks, and based on the results of the analysis, it proposes an extension to Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model, shows Trudgill’s (2004) model of new-dialect formation to be inadequate in accounting for some of the SAE data, provides evidence that SAE is a possibly imminent but ‘conservative’ member of Torgersen and Kerswill’s (2004) SECS-Shift and uses SAE data to question the applicability of the SECS-Shift to FOOT-Fronting. Furthermore, this thesis provides evidence that SAE has undergone an indexicallydriven arrestment of the Diphthong and Southern Shifts and a subsequent and related diffusion of GenSAE values at the expense of BrSAE ones. Similarly, it shows that SAE’s possible participation in the SECS-Shift constitutes an effective chain-shift reversal ‘from above’. It stresses that, in order to understand such phenomena, recourse needs to be made to a theory of indexicality that takes into account the unique sociohistorical development of SAE and its speakers. Lastly, the adoption of the three-stage koin´eization model mentioned above highlights the merits of considering both endogenous and exogenous factors in the historical reconstruction of new-dialect formation and, for research into SAE in particular, strengthens the case for further investigation into the possible effects of 19th-century Afrikaans/Dutch, Yiddish and north-of-English dialects on the formation of modern SAE. / Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

This collection of prose-poems and flash fiction, together with a few short stories, shows how romantic relationships colour our perspectives on the world. The collection has echoes throughout of speakers' voices, theme, imagery and tone. There is a narrative logic too, but working on a subtle level of echo and resonance