The new Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (Caps) for Home Language – out for comment and feedback by 18 October 2010 – presents an impoverished and limited understanding of what a home language might constitute in classrooms and the role it can and should play in the emotional, intellectual and spiritual development of children.
The new Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (Caps) for Home Language – out for comment and feedback by 18 October 2010 – presents an impoverished and limited understanding of what a home language might constitute in classrooms and the role it can and should play in the emotional, intellectual and spiritual development of children.
In an attempt to do away with the Outcomes Based Curriculum (OBE) and the kind of outcomes/competence-based thinking underpinning the previous National Curriculum Statements (NCS), the writers of this curriculum have swung the pendulum entirely the other way, so that there is now only the vaguest notion of why we teach home language, and what skills, values and attitudes teachers should strive to impart to learners.
What we have – again, in direct contrast to the NCS it replaces – is a stripped down document that is little more than lists of content – whatever this may mean in the context of language teaching. I’ll come back to this point later. First I need to engage with what the writers of this document believe home language teaching and learning is all about.
We can find statements that resemble a ‘rationale’ on page 6 (I think – in my copy the pages are not numbered). Here language is described as a “tool for thought and communication. It is through language that cultural diversity and social relations are expressed and constructed”.
Few people would argue with this. But what many wonder why this is ALL that is claimed. Whatever happened to creativity, personal growth, self-expression, playing with language in ways that make us who we are?
A home language is clearly more than a tool, and it is the responsibility of the curriculum to capture the profoundly subtle and powerful place language holds in our spiritual and emotional lives. This curriculum does not even attempt to do this.
Unsurprisingly, it is on the subject of literature that the document is particularly offensive, though nothing one reads now is in the least surprising, given the writers’ failure to devise an appropriate rationale. So when one reads, a little later, that the usual prescription of four literary genres is to be reduced to three one may be dismayed, but not surprised.
Is it really that surprising that someone who cannot see the critical role home language plays in personal development also sees a smaller place for literature? And is it surprising that this person also believes that “The teaching of literature should focus on teaching for comprehension”? And then, when one is told that there are several approaches to teaching literature, other than the ‘text-based’ approach favoured by this document, namely the ‘chronological’, the ‘author’, the ‘theme’ and the ‘genre’ approaches, laughing becomes a tempting option to weeping. If only it were not so damn sad.
The ‘author’ approach? For me a central question is: if literature is not the core of home language then what is? Where else can we find examples of great minds struggling and playing with the issues that make us human? In newspapers? In soapies? In politics?
And since I have now arrived at media studies, here too the curriculum is extremely disappointing. Increasingly – especially in countries where English is a home language – media studies has featured ever more prominently in language work.
Home language teaching today works on a cultural analysis approach, an approach which broadens the notion of text to include every comprehensible sign that surrounds and engages us – including, significantly, film and video text.
How is it possible that a home language curriculum statement written in 2010 fails to recognise this? But perhaps my biggest problem with this curriculum is the way it presents language learning as lists of items (referred to as ‘content’) and goes so far as to recommend which items should be taught during which weeks of the school year. I am amazed that anyone purporting to be in the field of home language teaching can think like this.
Much as it is useful to try to be analytical of the complex sets of skills and competences that make up home language, the notion that these can be taught separately, in some kind of special ‘sequence’, is naïve beyond belief.
At this point it is obvious to me that the writers of this document have never taught home language. They have never understood that language is learned (acquired, practised, explored) in ever-widening cycles, where each cycle is different from the previous in terms of cognitive level and sophistication, not ‘content’. I am embarrassed to think that someone – a committee I imagine – in language teaching in this country can project – at the highest level – a picture of home language that is so stripped down, instrumental and lacking in imagination and purpose.
And if South Africa is not already in serious trouble in terms of literacy compared to the rest of the world – as recent studies suggest – this curriculum will go a long way towards achieving just that.
Prof Hennie van der Mescht has taught the English Home Language method course in the Rhodes PGCE for the past 17 years. He taught high school English Home Language for 25 years and is past examiner of English Home Language and English Olympiad.
