A Genre-based analysis of Intermediate Phase English Home Language textbooks

Abstract

In South Africa the variety of languages in use requires of the department of education that a balance be struck between the potential this presents for enhancing multilingual practice, and the effort required for uplifting learners’ literacy levels and linguistic competence. This makes being an English Home Language teacher in South Africa a daunting task. Studies have shown that many in-service teachers have difficulty implementing the curriculum and its underlying approaches to language teaching, notably the text-based approach. If the stipulations of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) are to be realized, it therefore seems pertinent that Learner-Teacher support materials (LTSMs) be investigated. As textbooks constitute a crucial aspect of these LTSMs, my enquiry is aimed at analysing the genre-based approach of the Intermediate Phase (IP) (Grades 4-6) as it is presented in the Pearson Platinum English Home Language textbook series. The purpose of the study is thus to gain an understanding of how textbooks contribute to the teaching and learning of English Home Language as school subject in the IP. The study focuses on one textbook per IP Grade and sets out to determine how texts are organised and named. The intention is to explore the alignment between the language features promulgated by the CAPS curriculum, and set text types. My thesis covers the extent to which textbook activities are sequenced according to the stages of the Teaching and Learning (curriculum) Cycle, and actually implement a text-based approach that helps learners to respond competently to tasks within a Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. The literature review outlines the main language teaching and learning approaches which underpin the curriculum of all language subjects in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), namely the text-based and communicative approaches. My analysis is based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework and outlines the stages of the teaching and learning cycle. I investigate how this cycle is used to implement a genre-based approach with a focus on teaching the information report and explanation genres. This qualitative study involves data selection processes guided by the objectives, and a deductive document analysis. As it is a relatively small study, its findings are not intended to create generalisations, but rather to shed light on how a communicative/text-based approach may be better applied in textbook production. I believe that through this approach, teachers have the opportunity to foster greater access to and control of the ‘genres of power’, in other words, factual genres and text types. The findings suggest that the text-based and communicative approaches are superficially applied by CAPS, and subsequently in a similar way in the materials developed for textbooks. Key findings include terminological instability in CAPS insofar as descriptions of text types are concerned, a misalignment between the language features and text types to be studied, and the absence of scaffolded teaching and learning so crucial to implementing a text-based communicative approach in the curriculum cycle.