Little Learning; Less Grammar: Observations on Curriculum for English as a First Additional Language

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONAt the end of 2011, a few of the first cohort of the Department of Education"s (DoE) Outcomes Based Education (OBE) learners graduated with their first degrees. These new graduates will be congratulated, as were their predecessors, but their achievement should be considered all the more laudable as the odds against their graduating seem to have increased in recent years. According to the National Benchmark Tests Project 1 produced for the vicechancellors" association Higher Education in South Africa (HESA), the objectives of which were to assess the literacy and mathematics proficiency amongst first-year students, fewer than a third of our students graduate within five years of entering university. More than half will drop out and never graduate. Fewer than half first-year university students have the academic literacy skills to succeed without support, and most cannot adequately read, write or comprehend English, the dominant language in higher education. Only 47% are proficient in English and roughly the same proportion (46%) fall into the "intermediate" category, while 7% have only "basic" academic literacy. The results of the tests show that the school system is clearly failing our learners in English.Academics in the tertiary sector often find that their second-language students of English are fairly confident, and apparently fluent in the spoken variety of the language, but weak in the written variety. It is generally acknowledged that their written English reveals a large number of morphological and syntactic errors, such as incorrect word-order, incorrect tenses and concords, and the preponderance to use run-on sentences and sentence fragments when complete, well-made sentences are called for in writing. These basic errors are often compounded by an inability to structure paragraphs properly, to create clear links between ideas and to make smooth transitions from one paragraph to the next. In short, their written discourse frequently lacks cohesion and is poorly constructed. In this article, I explore aspects of how, in recent years, curriculum statements for English as a First Additional Language (FAL) might have exacerbated the problems surrounding English, rather than alleviated them. These curricula include the OBE National Curriculum Statement (NCS) for English as a First Additional Language (FAL), its predecessor, the National Senior Certificate syllabus for English Second Language (L2) and the current National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS). Some of the causes for the dismal state in the proficiency level of English probably lie within these statements. These causes will be investigated here.All learners in South Africa are required to take a home language, that is usually their first language (L1), and a first additional language, that is usually their second language (L2), at Grade 12 level. English is by far the most commonly chosen first additional language amongst the 91.5% of our population who are not mother-tongue speakers of English.Over the last 25 to 30 y...