TEACHING THE ENGLISH FIRST ADDITIONAL LANGUAGE AS A LINGUA FRANCA TO CULTURALLY DIVERSE LEARNERS IN A SOUTH AFRICAN SCHOOL

Pressured into learning by rote, learners appear to fail to benefit on the joys and delights of literacy, such as initiating discussions with the teacher in class, developing critical or analytical attitudes to items around them and discovering the inter-connectedness of texts that might have been gained through reading. Since several teachers appeared to be uncertain about making their learners’ needs a focus of instruction, poetry in this study, proved to be an answer. This study focussed on how the English First Additional Language can be taught as a Lingua Franca to culturally diverse learners through a literacy process view at Devos Malan’s high school learners in King Williams Town, in the Province of the Eastern Cape in South Africa. The study employed Atwell’s Reading Workshop to collect data. The study is qualitative and interpretive. This study proposed to concentrate on three remedies of the reading workshop: Reading a book of choice with time to read in class in a chosen school; intrinsic motivation; a literacy process view and environment/ecology and; reading and sharing poetry. Foucault’s Critical Discourse Analysis as a theoretical framework, informed this study. The study revealed a need to weigh each text-making against what the social relations with an audience are, what resources there are for making the text, what devices are going to be used, and how these fit with what is to be taught, taking into account the characteristics of the audience.