Doctoral Degrees (Afrikaans and Dutch)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Afrikaans and Dutch) by Author "Binneman, Arne"

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    ’n Genregebaseerde benadering tot die ontwikkeling van skryfvaardighede in Afrikaans as tweede taal op universiteitsvlak
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Binneman, Arne; Adendorff, E. M.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Afrikaans and Dutch.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Degree programs offered by universities prepare students for their target professions. The preparation includes enabling students to effectively cope with the texts that form part of their target contexts. It often happens that students first need to be prepared to function effectively within the university context even before they can be prepared for their target professions. Within the South African context, students who are second language speakers of Afrikaans often come from parts of South Africa where Afrikaans is the minority language. Therefore, the classroom in which they receive their school education is at times not fully equipped with sufficient Afrikaans input. When these students arrive at an Afrikaans university, they are in a more difficult situation than their classmates who are native speakers and who have sufficient access to appropriate Afrikaans inputs. In this dissertation, I propose the genre-based approach from the systemic functional linguistic perspective for the development of writing skills in Afrikaans as a second language. Three research questions are examined. Firstly, research has been conducted into the nature and characteristics of texts from the response genre, which form part of an Afrikaans as a second language writing course. The second aspect researched is how the analysis of the latter texts can be used in an Afrikaans language acquisition module to develop second language writing skills. Thirdly, the concept of affordances was involved in order to identify language affordances within the context of a course for Afrikaans as a second language. Regarding the methodology, model texts from the response genre are analysed using a custom genre-analytical questionnaire (based on the functional language model) as well as by textual analysis. Each of the texts are analysed with reference to the context, the ideational meta function, the interpersonal meta function and the textual meta function. The genre-analytical questionnaire – updated from Paltridge (2001) – is adapted to focus on each of the latter aspects. The questionnaire is supplemented by a textual analysis focusing on, inter alia, the nature of the sentences and the types of processes present. Conclusions on the nature of each of the subgenres of responses (reviews, character analyses and thematic interpretations) are made following the genre analyses. I argue that the deductions from the genre-analytical questionnaire as well as the textual analyses can be adapted for use in the second language classroom for development of second language writing skills. Thus, the genre-analytical questionnaire has been further adapted to serve as a practical classroom worksheet. Another argument presented in this dissertation is that the teaching and learning cycle (the practical application of the genre-based approach) allows space for lecturers to assist students in the awareness of language affordances. The assumption that awareness of language affordances leads to higher motivation with regard to the development of writing skills is examined in the dissertation. I find that multilingual students potentially possess more affordances and that lecturers can facilitate students with regard to goal setting for writing skills development. I also find that students need to be made aware of the usability and relevance of all classroom activities, and that sufficient opportunity should be given to second language students to practice and develop their skills. The research undertaken for this dissertation is of the first in which the systemic functional linguistic view of the genre-based approach is applied to Afrikaans as a second language. Furthermore, this study links the three research areas of the genre-based approach, second language writing skills and affordances – something that has not been done before in the field of Afrikaans as a second language.