Outlines (often referred to as diagrams, concept maps, frames, knowledge maps, diagrams, and graphic organizers) are visual representations of the overall rhetorical structure of a text. Detailed outlines note the ideas contained within a text, and how these ideas relate to each other. Outlining in the RRJ can incorporate the metacognitive strategies of deciding the [...]
Roxanne ends the analysis of her three personal stories by commenting on her experience of writing them during the course. I have come to leam how to continuously identify problems in my teaching beliefs and practice and… to reflect always on my past learning/ teaching experiences and think of how I can make the needed [...]
In this section, I illustrate the three story levels by presenting extracts from Roxanne’s story constructed during our narrative inquiry exemplar in South Africa. Roxanne taught English at primary and high schools in a west African country (where she was born) before moving to another country in southern Africa where she taught English at university [...]
In an essay entitled ‘Grammar, and nonsense, and learning’, Widdowson wrote: grammar is not a constraining imposition but a liberating force: it frees us from a dependency on context and a purely lexical categorization of reality. Given that many learners—and teachers—tend to view grammar as a set of restrictions on what is allowed and disallowed [...]
The above examples illustrate how grammar is used to indicate differences in ‘notional meaning’ (Batstone 1995)—that is differences in semantic categories, such as time, duration, frequency, defmiteness, etc. The liberating power which grammar gives us—to transcend the limitations of lexis and context in the communication of meaning—is also deployed in expressing attitudinal meanings, such as [...]
From the foregoing discussion, I propose that an approach to teaching grammar as a liberating force should include the following three elements: 1. Learner choice Given that the deployment of grammar in communication invariably involves the speaker or writer in making a free and conscious choice (notwithstanding the fact that having chosen a particular grammatical [...]
As a result of earlier Western colonial expansion and the colonial powers’ imposition of borders which often respected neither cultural nor linguistic realities, post-colonial nation states particularly in Africa – have highly heterogeneous populations. Often, these nations have established a multilingual language policy, which promotes several languages as national or official languages or as media [...]
According to Webb & Kembo Sure (2000:47), Kenya has a population of approximately 24 million and is home to 42 languages, which largely correspond to the 40 ethnic groups plus Kiswahili and English. Several of these languages have a sizeable number of speakers, for example Kikuyu (spoken by 20% of the population), Dholuo (spoken by [...]
Sheng emerged in the Eastern suburbs of Nairobi, probably in Kaloleni or Kibera (Mazrui, 1995:174), approximately forty years ago (Abdulaziz & Osinde, 1997:47). It has been described as slang or code-switching (Mazrui, 1995), as a pidgin (Githiora, 2002 and Shitemi, 2002, but see Abdulaziz & Osinde, 1997, who reject this view) and as a youth [...]
First, there is the issue of’ real’ English. At the end of Chapter 5 the authors address the concerns of those such as Jenkins (2007) that challenge the supremacy of the native speaker, and advocate the need to develop English as lingua franca (ELF) models for ELT curriculum development. O’Keefe, McCarthy, and Carter argue, ‘It [...]