Sound vocabulary repertoire is a requisite for reading and all learning. Teaching a language's vocabulary is a mammoth undertaking, unless particular lexical items are isolated and accorded explicit attention. Words taught explicitly should coincide with learners' core vocabulary needs. This study generates words reflective of South African Grade 3 learners' vocabulary needs for transition to Grade 4; a transition replete with challenges. We document challenges besetting the determination of learners' core vocabulary needs from a textbook corpus. These included words to exclude from the frequency counts, challenges presented by multiword units, the unit of counting for word frequency generation, among others. High frequency words from the Grade 4 textbook corpus were generated and compared against five available word frequency lists as well as across different subject areas. The present study's adapted unit of counting was applied to the word list with the whole process yielding 212 core words requisite for Grade 3 to 4 transition within the South African context. We advocate infusion of grade-specific core vocabulary lists in curriculum documents based on a robust large-scale word frequency generation process, among other things.

The urgency for a decolonised university curriculum in South Africa, occasioned by student protests, demands interrogation of conceptions of decolonisation academic staff hold, seeing that the design and implementation of decolonised education rests largely with them. To determine the academics’ conceptions, the study adopted the interpretivist paradigm, using semi-structured interviews to solicit data from 13 purposively sampled academic staff at a South African university. Data analysis took a grounded analysis approach, where content analysed categories/themes emerged from the transcribed and coded data, not from apriori assumptions. Findings reflected both the conception of decolonisation as recentring and decentring. Findings also pointed to the ubiquitous use of the terms Africa and African(s) in defining decolonisation, conflating Afrocentric philosophy and Africanisation with decolonisation. Such findings represented the conception of decolonisation as a recentring of curriculum from the West to Africa as the centre. Other academics’ conceptions also represented a decentring of knowledge from Western hegemony without necessarily recentring it to African hegemony. Much advocacy was for achieving equality and parity between extant knowledges and hitherto marginalised local knowledges. There was also a manifest vacillation in respondents’ conception of decolonisation as they responded to the different questions, almost evincing a continuum between what can be termed a hard version and a soft version of the concept. The study recommends broader, intensive, institutional discussion of conceptual issues around curriculum decolonisation prior to implementation.issues around curriculum decolonisation prior to implementation.

Background: This article investigated the potential of Grade 3 English Second Language (ESL) teachers' vocabulary development practices to equip learners in English-deprived environments with English vocabulary requisite for transition to Grade 4 where English is the Language of Learning and Teaching and where learning to read gives way to reading to learn.Aim: This study sought to document and interrogate incidental and explicit Grade 3 ESL teachers' vocabulary development practices vis-à-vis learners' vocabulary needs.Setting: Three classrooms from one township and two diverse rural schools in three different districts of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa were observed. Methods:The case study sourced qualitative data through video and field notes recorded in classroom observations in 10 English First Additional Language classes for each teacher. Quantitative data on teacher talk vocabulary exposure and recycling were generated using the AntConc 3.2.4 software. Results:The study found that the incidental vocabulary development was compromised by low English language exposure occasioned by teachers' frequent recourse to the Home Language, little word recycling in classroom talk and lack of rich contexts in which words were encountered. Explicit vocabulary instructional practices mostly drew learners' attention to novel words and had a narrow range of strategies dealing with word meanings. Conclusion:In view of the manifest lack of a robust vocabulary development programme among ESL teachers, the study recommends planned and deliberate attention to vocabulary development on the teachers' part and a reconsideration of the learners' vocabulary needs and learner meaningful engagement in vocabulary development.

Ensuring that education serves the needs of a rapidly and ever-changing society is one of the defining challenges of education providers. This paper projects future trends in education on the basis of documented evidence which predicts the shifts in education (teacher education in particular) in terms of how it should prepare its products. The study views education for the future as not discarding subject content, but utilising content as a means rather than an end. The shift transforms both instruction and assessment to developing students not just to imbibe content knowledge, but also habits which make them adaptable to the changing world, as well as empowering them to become change-agents. Accordingly, the teaching environment needs to respond to the dynamics of technological developments, and to changing student profiles. What changes is the authoritative position of the teacher as the repository and dispenser of knowledge, and the learner’s passive role as the consumer of knowledge. Knowledge acquisition is now a co-creation within the teaching-learning context. This paper recommends further delineation of the current trends that define 21st century education, and what they determine for the future.

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