This study focuses on how children in the post-Foundation phase of Primary Schooling encounter reading and writing practices and learn to be certain kinds of readers and writers in poorly-resourced school settings in the Western Cape in South Africa. The aim of this research was to investigate how literacy practices in a socially situated domain, such as a classroom in a poorly-resourced school, are shaped by both the internal dynamics of classroom teaching as well as by external factors beyond the school, relating to the social location of the school within a peripheral social context. Through an ethnographic-style case study of a multilingual context in one primary school site, this study examined how specific notions of Grade Four school-appropriate language, literacy and learning activities operated as locally normative resources that produced complex outcomes in relation to the language-of-instruction and in relation to what counted as worthwhile classroom learning. By focusing on two Grade Four classes (the 'Afrikaans class' and the 'English class'), this study investigated the ecological and cultural dimensions of the language debates that were operating at the research site, and how these influenced the children, teachers, and the school. It was found that what characterised teaching and learning at this research site involved peripheral normativity: the downscaling and localisation of educational standards and language debates to attainable local levels of possibility. The children received localised, restricted versions of language use and literacy that was context-specific. The school's educational response to the multilingual context and to the social pressure for access to high status linguistic and literacy resources was to stream the predominantly Afrikaans-speaking school community into two parallel streams where the language of learning and teaching was either 'English' or 'Afrikaans,' and these divisions reflected a broader division in the wider community between those aspiring to upward social mobility and those who more clearly constituted a social underclass. The language and literacy learning practices characteristic in both the Grade Four classes did not, however, provide the resources for school success for children in either group.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/8276 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Ralphs, Liana |
| Contributors | Prinsloo, Mastin |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Humanities, School of Education |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MA |
| Format | application/pdf |
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