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Abstract
With the demise of apartheid and the ushering in of a new political dispensation, many changes have taken place in South Africa. The field of education, which was one of the most volatile areas of concern for the apartheid regime and has been described by some academics at the University of Natal as being a miasmic morass marked by systemic crisis, has been quick to purge itself of some of its apartheid legacies (see Barasa & Mattson, 1998). For instance, to offset the harmful effects of the 'Bantu Education Act', a new school curriculum - Curriculum 2005 - was introduced. It was hoped by the education authorities that Curriculum 2005, which has its roots in Outcomes-based Education (OBE) and an accompanying pedagogy based on a constructivist methodology, will help considerably in preparing students adequately for the challenges of adulthood. Sadly, this has not been the case, hence the numerous curricula changes still taking place. This paper looks at the plight of the (English) language teacher and proposes a possible way out of the miasmic morass South African education has been plunged into.
Introduction
Many reasons have been advanced as the rationale behind the introduction of a new school curriculum in South Africa. This has led to a great deal of debate but one point of general consensus is that, to offset the harm done by the inferior Bantu Education given Blacks in the apartheid era a new school curriculum had to be introduced. We therefore begin this article by first looking at the concept 'curriculum' and what it entails. According to McArthur (1992) the term 'curriculum' can be used in two ways. In one sense, it refers to the programme of studies of an educational institution. Thus, when we talk of a school curriculum, we think of the overall functions of the school and how these functions are manifested in the distribution of subjects and activities. In this sense, the English language, which is the de facto language of instruction in many schools, has its place in the curriculum of almost all educational institutions in South Africa.
However, in a more restricted sense the term curriculum can be used to describe the substance of what is taught in a given subject. We thus...