Datos de partida

Curriculum 2005 was implemented in grade 8 in high schools at the beginning of 2001 and implementation in grade 9 started in 2002. As the classroom implementation for this study was done in 2003, it provided an opportunity to study the implementation of the new curriculum in the Language, Literacy and Communication learning area in two grade 8 classrooms at one particular school. Grade 8 was chosen as it is an entry year in high school.

In addition to the class taught by me, another class was selected, taught by an experienced teacher of English. This teacher was briefed on the issues involved and asked to teach the same module from one of the sets of materials available to teachers and learners at the time. The selection of the material will be discussed below (4.10) and the implementation of the module will be dealt with in detail in the following chapter. I felt that having a different teacher in each class could result in a greater variety of teacher-learner interaction and reveal richer and more varied insights, and could possibly make me more aware of my own biases (Wallace 1998: 109). It could also suggest the role that different teachers play in the language learning classroom. Thus, the difference in gender, as well as other differences between us, could be seen as important factors in the teaching and learning of English, and the biographical information below is supplied in the knowledge that even this information is subjectively informed, “an inevitable feature of the research act” (Walford 2001: 9).

Because case study methods rely on human instruments and only limited knowledge is obtainable, there is a considerable risk that the researcher might become involved in the “issues, events or situations under study” (Macdonald and Walker 1975: 4). It should be remembered that “what people think they are doing, what they appear to others to be doing, and what they are in fact are doing” may not necessarily be the same thing (Macdonald and Walker 1975: 4, 6). In addition, problems might arise because readers cannot distinguish actual data from the researcher’s interpretation of the data (Macdonald and Walker 1975: 4). This has implications for the selection of events and data thus generated, as well as for the editing and presentation of the material. Furthermore, different people may draw different conclusions from the data which is presented because they come from different research traditions. It is important that data be presented as fully as possible and that the researchers’ possible biases be declared.

I attended this school, then under the auspices of the white House of Assembly, as a pupil in the 1960s. After teacher training at the University of Stellenbosch, then an almost entirely white institution, I returned to this school as a teacher and have taught here from 1974 until the present

(2010). I am an experienced teacher of both English First and Second Language (now known as English Home and First Additional Languages), have been subject head for English since 1975 and Head of Department at the school since 1984. In 1990 I completed a master’s study on the role of formal structural input in a communicative syllabus.

The other teacher attended Montana High School in Worcester and the University of Stellenbosch. She has gained extensive teaching experience in English at several large high schools over the last 25 years and has taught at this school for 8 years. I am generally regarded in the school by both other teachers and the learners as being a strict teacher, maintaining firm control of the classroom situation, while the other teacher, with a more gentle personality, favours a more democratic classroom. As a result, she might allow far more learner input and learner interaction in the class than I would, and learners might feel more free to speak their minds in her class than mine. Having two teachers involved in the implementation of the selected module could provide opportunities for reflection and reveal common insights as well aspects that might have gone unnoticed if only one teacher had been involved in the project. This opportunity for triangulation (Stake 2003: 148) would have been lost if I had taught both classes. Experience, gender, class management and attitude to learners could prove to be potentially important factors influencing teachers in an OBE environment.

The Afrikaans-medium high school where the modules were implemented is located in the northern suburbs of the Cape Metropole in the Western Cape. All the subjects, except English, are taught through the medium of Afrikaans. The classes contain about 35 - 40 learners each and these learners are of mixed ability as far as their academic achievement in general and their proficiency in English are concerned. Both classes contain boys and girls who have Afrikaans as their home language. None of the learners in the two classes selected for participation in this study were moved to or from other classes for the purposes of this study.

Before the amalgamation of the various education departments in 1994, the school fell under the auspices of the then Department of Education of the House of Assembly in the so-called tricameral parliament and later became a Model C school in which the parents undertook to fund certain aspects of the education of their children themselves. As such, the school population was exclusively white. Since 1994 the school has been a Section 21 school. This means that the school receives minimal funding from the provincial Department of Education and that the school fees paid by the parents fund all the expenses of the school, excluding the salaries and other benefits of the teachers funded by the government. In the year of this case study (2003), the school had 827

learners who were taught by 24 teachers on the government payroll and 11 teachers who were paid by the governing body of the school. This is a typical statistic for our school over the past several years. The classrooms are roomy, clean and well maintained. In addition they are well resourced with desks, blackboards and overhead projectors. There are also a number of tape recorders and also a few TV sets and VCRs in the school which can be loaned from the media centre, which has a full-time media secretary, who can quite readily duplicate material and notes for both teachers and learners. In addition, the school has two computer rooms for the instruction of Computer Application Technology.

The two teachers taking part in this investiagtion treated all the learners as if they came from the same Western background but, in reflecting on this case, I have been aware of the fact that I have to be “sensitive … to the patterns of knowledge introduced by colonialism” and that a researcher at an institution of “Western power-knowledge is given access to all that the colonial system has produced by way of intellectual resources, and the knowledge systems of the colonized … are rewritten into the text of Western science or literature” (McKeever 2000: 110).

The school has admitted learners of other races since 1992 and, at the time of this study in 2003, of the 827 learners, 0,7% were black,, 24,5% were coloured and 74,8 % were white (WCED Annual Survey March 2008, President High School). The coloured and black learners have to adapt to the predominant culture of the school and are treated as if they were no different from the white learners. The learners come from all levels of society and there are vast differences in their socio- economic backgrounds. There are some who come from stable home backgrounds and others whose parents are quite wealthy, while yet others come from adequately comfortable homes. Some come from very poor or disadvantaged homes. The families of the majority of learners in this school seem to have a lower socio-economic status than that of most families in the still largely white northern suburbs of Cape Town (perception of the senior teachers of the school). On the other hand, by way of comparison with other communities, the Western Cape Education Department has classified this school in the second highest of seven national categories with regard to school funding which is based on, among other things, parental affluence (oral confirmation by the Headmaster, 25 October 2005). The teachers in the English department are white, although there are 4 coloured teachers on the staff. There is an established culture of teaching and learning in the context of a safe learning environment and a reasonably effective system of discipline.