A Project by the English Academy of Southern Africa
Welcome to the 2012 summer editon of Teaching English Today We trust that you will find the articles that follow interesting, challenging and useful. Please feel free to respond to / add to / challenge any of the views expressed in the articles. And please do send us your contribution for the next […]
Teaching English Punctuation Sue McIntosh Some of you can identify with the interesting challenge of teaching the intricacies of the English language to a large class of varying home languages. Teaching some of these language concepts piecemeal, as presented in the textbooks, provides our learners with one or two concepts out of a […]
The very model of an amateur grammarian (With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan) I am the very model of an amateur grammarian I have a little knowledge and I am authoritarian But I make no apology for being doctrinarian We must not plummet to the verbal depths of the barbarian I’d sooner break my heart […]
Ill-discipline teachers Or Where ignorance is not bliss Malcolm Venter I have for many years been concerned about the inadequate training of language teachers – or more particularly English language teachers, which is my field of interest. This has struck me again forcefully in the past two or three years for a number […]
Improving writing skills Jeffrey Solomon I teach English Home Language to Grade 12 learners in a high school in the southern part of KZN. Their mother tongue is either Afrikaans or IsiXhosa, so their knowledge of English is often rudimentary at best. However, they have reached grade 12 and, as such, need to […]
Revisiting feedback to learner writing Bulara Monyaki In this article, Bulara provides an outline of different strategies to be found in the literature about providing feedback to learners on their writing. We suggest that teachers / subject departments scan it and extract useful tips for their own practice. One of the major points […]
Stagefright: Teaching Shakespeare as drama Hennie van der Mescht This article is based on the Shakespeare Soceity Birth Lecture which Prof van der Mescht delivered in Grahamstown on 20 April 2011. Who would have thought that one of the performance criteria for becoming a teacher of English literature was a head for heights? […]
‘On the move’ – a discussion of Thom Gunn’s poem Quentin Hogge The Sexual Revolution, Flower Power, long hair, Zapata moustaches, flared jeans, Led Zepellin, LSD – terms evocative of a by-gone era. For one who was a teenager during the heady excitement of the 60s, with the atmosphere of personal liberation and […]
It’s what you learn! AghoghoAkpome One of the reasons why some learners in South Africa struggle to achieve sufficient proficiency in English today may have nothing to do with the commonly debated issues invariably connected to historical disadvantage. I want to suggest here that the low proficiency in English (and academic literacy in […]
South Africa’s Education Crisis: Views from the Eastern Cape, NISC,2012 Edited by Laurence Wright Reviewed by Peter Titlestad This is a book for all interested in teaching English and for all those more generally interested in education in South Africa. The sub-title indicates focus on the Eastern Cape, but there is nothing […]