English Language Teaching in its Social Context

Chapter 14J. Keith ChickSAFE-TALK: COLLUSION INAPARTHEID EDUCATIONIntroductionBackground to the studyHERE IS WIDESPREAD AGREEMENT AMONGST observers about whatT were the essential characteristics of interactions in schools for black people in SouthAfrica under the former apartheid system: highly centralised, with teachers adoptingauthoritarian roles and doing most of the talking, with few pupil initiations, and with mostof the pupil responses taking the form of group chorusing. Schlemmer and Bot (1 986: 80)report a senior African school inspector as stating that black pupils were discouraged fromasking questions or participating actively in learning and explain that it was regarded asimpolite and even insubordinate to ask questions or make suggestions in class. Thembela(1986: 41) refers to classroom practice being characterised by rote learning and teachercentredinstruction.Most observers, moreover, agree that the educational consequences of such interactionstyles were unfortunate. Schlemmer and Bot (1986) and Thembela (1 986), for example,argue that the use of such styles oppressed creativity, initiative and assertiveness. MacDonald(1 988) claims that there are aspects of metacognition and disembedded thinking crucial toadvanced learning and to effective functioning in a technological society which these stylesof interacting and learning did not promote.I became very aware of the possible negative educational consequences of theoverwhelming preference for such styles of interaction in schools for black people in SouthAfrica, through my involvement with in-service teacher education projects which had, asone of their primary objectives, the fostering of communicative approaches to the teachingof English in KwaZulu schools. (KwaZulu was a patchwork of geographical areas on theeastern seaboard of South Africa which, in terms of apartheid policy, was designated a‘homeland’ for Zulu people. At the time of the study reported here, the total population ofnative speakers of Zulu was almost seven million; they thus constituted the largest languagegroup in South Africa. Zulu speakers live in many parts of South Africa, but at that timeapproximately five million of them lived in KwaZulu.)A number of the implementors of the in-service teacher education projects complainedabout the reluctance of many of thc teachers, and even some of the students, to adopt the