The language background of children referred to the remedial teacher for language teaching : a socio-didactic study of a selected sample of children in Indian Schools in Natal.
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Date
1984
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Abstract
This study seeks to throw light on the language background
of fifty-nine primary school children in schools for
Indian South Africans in the Durban area of Natal. The
schools were all under the control of the Department of
Internal Affairs. At some time before February 1982,
each child had been referred to the remedial teacher
employed at his school, and had subsequently received
help in language, specifically reading, for at least
the period from February 1982 - November 1983. Even
after that time, the children were not considered able
to achieve satisfactorily in the "normal" class without
further help.
Data were initially collected by remedial teachers who
interviewed the adult considered most significant in
the child's life, using scheduled interviews. In
addition they collected information from the child and
the school and filled in personal questionnaires.
After the first school term of 1984, Diploma in Specialise
Education (Remedial Education) students at the University
of Durban-Westville visited the homes of twenty children
in the study and tape-recorded unstructured interviews
with the adults. Three of these tapes are used in
this text.
The data collected is used to show that despite the
poverty many families experience, the reason for the
child's language difficulties is caused less by lack of
material possessions than by parental ignorance of how
best they can encourage language development and help
close the gap between the spoken language of home and
both the spoken and written language the children meet
in school.
The inefficiency of questionnaires as research tools
became increasingly apparent as the project progressed,
and that there is a real need for a thorough qualitative
investigation into the language background of pupils-in-need
is clear.
Description
Thesis (M.Ed) - University of Durban-Westville, 1984.
Keywords
Indians--Education--Natal., Language arts--Remedial teaching., Remedial teaching., Theses--Education.