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Research into classroom practices in South Africa has highlighted various disjunctures between the conceptions of language and literacy evident in the CAPS curriculum documents, teachers' pedagogical approaches, and the multilingual reality of classrooms in South Africa. This research study asks whether the current promotion of digital technologies in classrooms, so evident in both South Africa and in the world at large, might be in danger of similar disjunctures. The study explores teachers' conceptions of language and literacy across English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa in the Grade 4 classrooms of two schools in the Hout Bay area, examining how these play out in their accounts of their daily teaching practice and whether and how they facilitate the successful integration of digital technology into language lessons. The study draws on Blommaert's ‘artefactual ideology of language' (2008), combined with the concepts of an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1984) and language ideologies (McKinney, 2016), as well as Durrant and Green's (2000) digital literacy theoretical frameworks. While teachers are exhorted to promote the use of technology in their lessons and the rhetoric of the “the fourth industrial revolution” adds to the pressures, there are many factors involved in the uptake of technology in schools - perhaps the most important being the existing practices and ideologies of the teacher themselves. The study focuses specifically on six Grade 4 teachers' accounts of their conceptions and practices in relation to the CAPS curriculum, in order to analyse how teachers manage the much higher language and literacy levels of the curriculum specifications when learners move from Foundation Phase (Grades R-3) to Intermediate Phase (Grade 4-6) in language and literacy lessons, and also on how their uses of technology align or not with the specifications in the curriculum. Despite both schools being positive towards technology, it was soon apparent that CAPS specifications and teachers' conceptions of language and literacy (which leant towards the artefactual ideology of language and literacy) did not align easily with the kinds of tasks and assessments that are called for in using digital technologies (which lean towards agentic and critical engagements with texts). In addition, despite most of the teachers being highly critical of the CAPS curriculum, the study found that most of the teachers do stick closely to the CAPS specifications in both the Home Language and Additional Language classes and that these perceptions, combined with existing ideologies present in CAPS curriculum documents, are influencing their teaching practices and approach to using technology in their lessons. |
