Esikhisini is an R-7 school in the Pretoria area outside of Johannesburg. Its language of instruction is Zulu. I cannot say enough wonderful things about our two days at Esikhisini, especially about the R teachers I observed and the students I met and worked with. Nothing will ever erase the memory of two dozen children joyously mobbing me to touch my tattoos to “make sure they were real.” Truth be told, the entire administration, the teachers, and the student body enveloped us in warmth. They were my favorite school.
While I won’t have time to address all the experiences I had at Esikhisini here today, I’d like speak to one specific experience as a means of highlighting my own learning there. It’s an experience that I continue to mull over; and it’s one I suspect I will continue mulling over for some time to come. On day two of our visit, we worked on abbreviated versions of the CRSTP with sixth and seventh grade students. During that process, I noticed that three of my eighth grade students were having difficulty following English conversation. It turns out that these students had immigrated from French-speaking African countries. They were having difficulty following conversation in English because they were French-speaking students being asked to learn English through a second language (Zulu) that they had not yet mastered. From the principal, I learned that they had no French language support; from the students themselves (with whom I henceforth spoke in French), I learned that while they had support in Zulu, they were not proficient enough to use it as a base for English acquisition. I was profoundly affected by the relief I saw on these students' faces when they realized they could communicate with me in French as a means of completing their project in English. Several things strike me here, but the one I’m most interested in is how French language support (inclusive of the type of translanguaging that Dr. Makalela spoke to in his article and presentation) might provide linguistic scaffolding and acquisition advantages as well as potential identity-related benefits. But to do that the school would need French-speaking teachers and resources (neither of which, according to the principal, it has). Also of note here is that it was the CRSTP that clued me in to this linguistic challenge as it was through answering the culture and language questions that I learned the students were immigrants from French-speaking African nations. If that isn’t indicative of the CRSTP’s usefulness, I don’t know what else is.
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AuthorI'm Kelly. I teach English as a Second Language, business English, and writing. I eat poems for dinner. Archives
January 2019
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