The Eighth International Literacy & Education Research Network Conference on

SPETSES, GREECE
4-8 July 2001

Abstract:

The paper reports on a research project investigating the oral storytelling practices of 7-8 year old multilingual children in a Johannesburg primary school. The medium of instruction is English and the student body is composed of African language speakers. The stories upon which the research is based were told in both English and their respective home languages. The paper demonstrates how children use the classroom domain as a platform to recontextualise their everyday world by constructing stories "with stuff of their own thoughts and feelings" (Dyson and Genishi, 1994). Drawing on research in multiliteracies, multimodality and local storytelling practices, this research will suggest that these children drew from multiple resources in representing their world. It will be argued that the stories are symbolic-they help the children to proclaim and declare their own social locations and identities. Through their use of what I call "newsstories" the children use storytelling to pulicize everyday experiences by applying themes relating to criminality, punishment and forms of control. This genre of newsstories seem to show that in an attempt to shape and reshape their everyday lives children have taken symbolic agency by collapsing the boundaries between school, community and life experiences. The paper understands newsstories as a new orientation to classroom storytelling practices. The content of these newsstories influenced by the media tend to focus on "reality", that is, everday social and political experiences. Newsstories of this kind are told in the face of teachers trying to control the nature of stories told. The importation of these newsstories into the classroom space can therefore be interpreted as the children's desire to proclaim their "unheard" voices therefore contesting the cultures of silence which the teachers have established in relation to which genre count and are valued.

Bionote

Pinky Makoe is presently teaching in the Department of Applied English Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She holds a Masters degree in Applied Language Studies. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, literacies and language learning.

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Presentation Type
30 min. Paper

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Country
South Africa