Cape Town - The 300 primary school teachers who failed a Grade 3 English first additional language test last year have not been reassessed despite the Basic Education Department’s assurances that they would be retested as soon as possible.
The teachers – who were selected from 24 schools in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal – were part of a Literacy Project study conducted by the Zenex Foundation which required them to write a test designed to assess their word knowledge at five levels.
According to the research and evaluation body, most of the participants mastered the lowest tier – level one of the Grade 3 English test, which meant they were familiar with at least 2000 most frequently used English words.
The rest of the teachers, most of them from KwaZulu-Natal schools, failed to achieve this minimum standard despite having two or three letters of the missing answers supplied as clues.
The department, at the time, said it wasn’t surprised because English wasn’t the home language of many teachers.
Spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga said R1billion had been set aside for teacher training.
However, the training is yet to take place.
“We couldn’t disrupt teaching (last year) because we have to plan for the retesting of the teachers properly,” Mhlanga said on Thursday. “It’s not because we don’t take the research seriously, we do but we also can’t send teachers back to university. We do what we call on-the-job training.”
Equal Education policy and training head Leanne Jansen-Thomas said English must be improved while at university.
“The quality of an education system can’t exceed the quality of its teachers, it’s often said. It’s also been argued that if we don’t get teacher professional development right, we don’t have a hope of fixing the education system,” she said.
Jansen-Thomas said: “Teachers must urgently be capacitated according to their needs – provided with meaningful and continuous learning opportunity. As for newly trained teachers, where there is a need, the grasp of English must be improved while at university. Are universities offering enough to give a second language English speaker sufficient knowledge of the subject to explain complex concepts in the subject that they will be teaching?”
DA basic education spokesperson Gavin Davis said he would submit parliamentary questions on the matter.
Mhlanga said the department couldn’t commit to a time frame but added that it was a priority. See page 8