Reading South Africa as an Adolescent

Abstract

Current literature from South Africa reflects some of the country’s vast cultural diversity and helps illustrate many of the challenges associated with struggles for equality, against the background of a painful and continuing history fraught with injustices. This article makes an argument for engaging with these literary texts in the secondary EFL classroom and proposes a reading of five contemporary texts featuring young adult protagonists. Taking a combined context-reader approach, it contends that such texts are not only conducive to rich cultural learning, but also to personal development at learners’ particular stages of self-formation. Involving themselves in some of South Africa’s historical, cultural, and moral complexities through literary texts offers adolescent learners a lens through which to view, reflect on, and potentially validate and consolidate some of their own multifaceted, possibly contradictory experiences, as selves-in-progress within their own diverse social contexts, and it provides language with which to do so.

Literatur im DaF-Unterricht: einige kritische Anmerkungen

“…Ihre letzte Rückkehr ins Klassenzimmer kam als Reaktion auf den funktionalen Pragmatismus, der die kommunikative Wende im Fremdsprachenunterricht in den 1970er Jahren mit sich brachte. Es scheint allerdings kein Einvernehmen darüber zu herrschen, in welchem Verhältnis die zwei Richtungen zueinander stehen -ob das Arbeiten mit Literatur als eine mögliche Erweiterung der bestehenden kompetenzorientierten Praxis aufzufassen ist (Ehlers 2010;Huneke -Steinig 2013;Merklin 2015), wo "echte" Kommunikation das oberste Ziel darstellt, oder ob es sich eher um zwei unterschiedliche Welten handelt, die sich aufgrund ihrer theoretischen Fundierungen und/oder Zielsetzung relativ schwer vereinbaren lassen (Bertocchi 2015;Bredella 2008;Dobstad -Riedner 2011;Krenn 2003;Neuhofer 2018). Beiden Sichtweisen ist immerhin gemein, dass Literatur im Fremdsprachenunterricht nicht hinreichend vertreten sei, im Hinblick auf ihre (mutmaßlichen) Vorteile wesentlich mehr Aufmerksamkeit verdiene, und nicht zuletzt bei Lernenden interkulturelle und ästhetische Kompetenzen entwickle.…”

The literary portfolio: Summative assessment of literary competences in autonomous learning environments

“…The development of the literary portfolio was triggered by the observation of my own teaching practice in the EFL classroom at a German secondary school. I became increasingly aware of a discrepancy between the great potential ascribed to learning with literature, among many others by Lazar (1993), Bredella (2008), Delanoy (2015), and Paran and Robinson (2016), and the sobering reality in the classroom, which very often leaves much of this potential untapped as assessment foregrounds those aspects of reading that are more readily operationalized and tested in standard written exams. Moreover, I grew dissatisfied with my own teaching of literature, which did not offer my students much freedom to pursue their individual (reading) interests and set their own priorities in working with literature.…”