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Teaching and learning English as a Home Language in a predominantly non-native English classroom: A study from KwaZulu-Natal

This study focuses on a secondary school in
an Indian-African suburb of Merewent in
KwaZulu-Natal, an example of a suburban school where English as a Home Language
(EHL) is taught to a majority of non-native English learners from township schools.
The EHL classrooms were investigated for ‘communicativeness’ and then compared
to English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms. It might be expected that EHL
classrooms would exhibit an affinity with ESL classrooms. However, although
non-native EHL has many aspects in common with ESL, there were significant
differences between the two. The most important difference from the standpoint
of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) was in the learning content selection,
with the EHL settings using more literary works, and so focusing less on the direct
teaching of grammatical forms. However, a disturbing pattern was the inability of the
learners in both sets of settings to take full advantage of CLT, which suggested that
the learners might not be at the appropriate level of language development.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:tut/oai:encore.tut.ac.za:d1001179
Date January 2010
CreatorsMoyo, J, Beukes, A, van Rensburg, W
PublisherJournal for Language Teaching
Source SetsSouth African National ETD Portal
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText
FormatPdf
RightsJournal for Language Teachning
RelationSouth African Journal of Applied Languages

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