For this particular question, I was trying to gauge an association between students’ pre- intervention academic essay score and students’ self-reported proficiency in English to get a better idea as to participants’ levels of confidence in their English ‘academic literacy’ skills. It is assumed that this may affect levels of motivation with regards to participation in the literacy intervention.
Class C
Given that English is the Department of Education’s mandated medium of instruction at school site B (even if this is not corroborated in practice), focus will be given to students’ self-reported levels of proficiency in listening, speaking, reading and writing in English.
129 Further, because this ‘literacy’ intervention targets academic English, English proficiency is necessarily the focus.
With regards to listening skills, 15 out of 31 (48%) students felt that they are fully proficient, giving themselves a rating of 5/5; 11 out of 31 (35%) students rated their listening skills in English as a 4/5 and 5 (16%) students rated their listening skills as a 3/4 or less. Only 2 out of 31 (6%) students rated their speaking skills in English as fully proficient with 23 out of 31 (74%) students rating their speaking skills as a 4/5. Again, 5 (16%) students rated their speaking skills in English as a 3/4 or less. Eleven (32%) students rated their English reading skills as fully proficient (5/5) and 18 (58%) students rated their reading skills as a 4/5. Only 2 (6%) students rated their reading proficiency at a 2/4 or less. This is contrary to verbal reports in class with a majority of students citing comprehension barriers for the reason they had not read their literature novel.
Interestingly, 12 out of 31 (38%) students rated their English writing skills as a 5/5 and 13 (42%) students rated their English writing skills as 4/5. That is 81% learners who felt they are capable of writing essays in English well. Only 6 (19%) students indicated that their English writing skills are a 3/5 or less. This is an important finding given that only 6 out of 3138 (19%) students scored above 50% for their baseline academic essay score. This does indicate a possible mismatch in students’ individual perceptions of their English ‘academic literacy’ skills and actual academic writing skills. Further, students were surprised and appeared distressed at the results of their initial baseline score, with some students indicating that they had never been taught how to structure and write an essay correctly before but thought they wrote well regardless. This could be indicative of an over inflation of class marks normally given to students various English tasks.
As a point of interest, when looking at students home language skills, 23 out of 31 (74%) students indicated that they rate their isiXhosa listening and speaking skills 5/5. Only 4 (13%) students rated their listening and speaking skills 4/5. Eighteen out of 31 (58%) students rated their isiXhosa reading skills 5/5 and all 31 students rated their isiXhosa writing skills 5/5 or 4/5. Compared to students’ perceived English proficiency described in the
130 paragraph above, an overwhelmingly larger majority of students rated themselves more highly proficient in isiXhosa as opposed to English, yet when asked what language students would prefer as the language of learning and teaching, 30 out of 31 (97%) students chose English. Further, a large majority of students who chose English as their preferred language of learning and teaching indicated that English is seen as the gateway to jobs, more respect and was equated to quality education, hence their choice of English for teaching and learning. I found the latter reason for the choice of English interesting (equality schooling) because students also expressed concern over the use of English during contact sessions at the school, citing it as their main struggle in comprehending the textbooks and exams in English. They seemed unaware of a potential contradiction in their understanding of English instruction being equated to quality teaching and learning despite being aware of their poor proficiency. This points very clearly to an ongoing struggle in education with linguistic imperialism. Class B
Students from this sample group attend a dual medium school so it was not unexpected that students in the English Additional Language group reported Afrikaans as the language of teaching and learning given that they are Afrikaans home language learners. For this reason, it was expected that students’ self-reported proficiency levels in Afrikaans would be higher than in English. However, and to reiterate again, given that this literacy intervention is an English ‘academic literacy’ intervention, more attention was given to students’ self-reported proficiency in English in comparison to actual ‘academic literacy’ performance as proxied by students pre-intervention academic essay score.
All 31 (100%) students reported full proficiency in listening skills in Afrikaans. Thirty (97%) students indicated that they felt that they are fully proficient in speaking in Afrikaans with 1 (3%) student indicating that he felt able to understand when listening in Afrikaans, but not very well. The student did not elaborate on this. The self-reported level of full proficiency (5/5) dropped slightly as one moved to the more cognitively demanding skills of reading and writing. Only 25 (81%) students felt they were very good (5/5) at reading in Afrikaans as opposed to the 6 (19%) students who felt they were good (4/5) at reading in Afrikaans, but not very good. This dropped even further for writing skills in Afrikaans. Only 21 (68%)
131 students felt they were very good at writing in Afrikaans, 9 (29%) students felt they were good, but not very good and 1 (3%) student felt he was merely adequate.
When taking into consideration students’ self-reported proficiency in academic writing in English, the picture changed slightly. Now only 17 out of 31 (55%) students felt they were very good at listening in English, 13 (42%) felt they were just good and 1 (3%) student felt his English listening skills was merely adequate. With regard to students’ English speaking skills, only 9 (29%) students felt they were very good at speaking in English, 19 (61%) students felt they were good, but not very good at speaking in English and 3 (10%) students were less confident in their English speaking skills and rated themselves as adequate only. Students’ confidence in their reading ability was slightly better with 14 (45%) students reporting full proficiency in English reading skills, 11 (35%) students felt their English reading abilities are good and 6 (19%) students reported that their English reading skills are only adequate. The picture looks a little more dismal with students’ self-reported writing skills in English. Only 7 out of 31 (23%) students felt that they are very good at writing in English, 18 (58%) students indicated that they felt they are good at writing in English and 6 (19%) students felt their English writing skills are merely adequate.
When pairing students’ self-reported perceptions of their writing abilities in English and actual pre-intervention essay performance, it became clear that students who reported full proficiency in their English writing abilities (5/5) perhaps were over confident in their writing abilities. I accept that this is a subjective judgement because, of the 7 students who reported full proficiency in their English writing skills, these students had an average score for their pre-intervention academic essay of 68%. In my opinion, this could be rated as good, but is not a very good score. Students who reported that they were good, but not very good (18 students), their weighted average was 66% which is probably a more closely aligned score with the category – good. Interestingly, students who felt they were merely adequate (6 students) actually had the same average as students who rated themselves as good. It is likely that these 6 students did not feel very confident in their writing abilities, or that they rated themselves against their L1 proficient peers.
132 Class A
This particular class appeared to report a greater degree of academic language proficiency across more than one language than the other two classes. This may be due to the fact that a large majority of students in this class come from homes where Afrikaans is the home language and have opted to take English and Afrikaans as home languages at school. All students (100%) in this class reported full proficiency in English for listening skills. Twenty eight out of 31 (90%) students reported full proficiency for English speaking skills with 3 (10%) students indicating that they have good, but not very good English speaking skills. Twenty seven (87%) students reported that they felt they are very good at reading in English with 3 (10%) students rating their English reading skills as good, but not excellent. One (3%) student rated his/her English reading skills as satisfactory. Incidentally, this student did appear to struggle with finishing writing tasks in class, possibly indicating an association between weaker reading skills and task completion. Slightly fewer students reported very good English writing skills with only 25 (81%) students now indicating that they felt they had very good English writing skills. Four (13%) students felt they had good English writing skills with 2 (6%) students reporting that they felt they had satisfactory English writing skills. With regards to Afrikaans proficiency, only 15 (48%) students reported full proficiency in Afrikaans listening skills, 12 (39%) students reported that they felt they had good Afrikaans listening skills and 4 (13%) students felt they had satisfactory Afrikaans listening skills. Self- reported proficiency levels appeared to drop off for Afrikaans as the skill became more cognitively demanding with only 10 (32%) students reporting full proficiency in Afrikaans speaking skills; 8 (26%) students reported that they felt they were good at Afrikaans speaking skills and 13 (42%) students felt that their Afrikaans speaking skills were satisfactory or less. With regards to Afrikaans reading skills, 11 (35%) students reported full proficiency, 12 (39%) students felt their Afrikaans reading skills were good and 8 (26%) students felt their Afrikaans reading skills were satisfactory or less. Less students reported full proficiency in Afrikaans writing skills with only 8 (26%) students reporting full proficiency, 7 (23%) students reporting good Afrikaans writing skills and 16 (52%) students reporting that their Afrikaans writing skills were satisfactory or less. Again, this is an English Home Language class so the above would be expected for Afrikaans second language learners.
133 When pairing students’ self-reported English academic writing skills with pre-intervention essay scores, students who rated their English writing skills as very good (5/5) scored an average of 72%. Whilst this is a good average score, I feel that this may be better suited to the ‘good’ category and not ‘very good’ category. This may explain levels of motivation where most students from this class did not feel they needed to participate and as a result, did not feel motivated to put in the effort. Although only 4 students rated their English writing skills as ‘good’ as opposed to the 25 students who rated their English writing skills as ‘very good’, these 4 students had a higher pre-intervention essay score of 74%. Of the 2 students that felt their English writing skills were satisfactory, the average pre-intervention score was 70%, initially indicating a lack of confidence in actual writing abilities when in fact, these students’ writing abilities were actually good. In offering an explanation for the latter finding, one of the 2 students appeared to be an overly high achiever which would explain the categorisation of a mark of 70% as adequate instead of very good. The second student was an Afrikaans home language student and perhaps his essay writing performance was usually scored higher in his/her home language, which would explain some form of criticality with his English performance.