Thinking skills and communicative language teaching: a curriculum perspective

Second Language teaching in South Africa and concludes that many L2 teachers have resisted using this approach. This may be attributed to a misunderstanding of the basic principles of communicative language teaching (CLT), as well as to uncertainty regarding its practical application. He proposes an innovative way of implementing CLT, involving the integration of thinking skills with selected language content within a communicative framework To demonstrate this, he gives a detailed description of a language teaching module for senior secondary pupils. He then discusses the communicative nature of the activities contained in the module and points out what additional benefits this approach may offer L2 pupils. Die skrywer evalueer die impak wat die kommunikatiewe benadering op Engels tweede taalonderrig in Suid-Afrika gehad het en kom tot die gevolgtrekking dat menige tweede taalonderwysers teenstand bied teen die gebruik van die benadering. Dit kan toegeskryf word aan die feit dat daar 'n wanbegrip bestaan van die basiese beginsels van kommunikatiewe taalonderrig, asook 'n onsekerheid rakende die praktiese toepassing daarvan. Hy stel 'n innoverende uyse van aanbieding voor wat die integrasie van denkvaardighede met geselekteerde taalinhoude binne 'n kommunikatiewe raamwerk behels. Om dit te demonstreer gee hy 'n gedetailleerde beskrywing van 'n taalonderrigmodule vir senior sekondere leerlinge. Daama bespreek hy die kommunikatiewe aard van die aktiwiteite wat die module bevat en dui oak aan watter addisionele voordele hierdie benadering vir tweede taal-leerlinge inhou

Non-Fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience

Since 2010, we have witnessed an exponential increase worldwide in the number of non-fiction books for children. Not only has the number of non-fiction publications increased, the books themselves have completely changed in nature compared to the traditional children\u2019s learning books of the past. Increasingly released in the form of a picturebook non-fiction publications have recently offered and continue to offer ample space for far-reaching experimentation using a range of original, surprising and previously unthinkable ways of combining transmission of knowledge and artistic research, description of the world and a poetic approach, especially achieved by means of a well-meditated and skilfully designed visual code. This new approach invites us to reconsider non-fiction books altogether, re-examine their particular features and full potential, a potential undoubtedly wider than we were aware of when more traditional learning books were the rule, with their manner of transmitting a largely pre-defined knowledge intended to be memorized and stored in the most linear way possible. As a multimodal means of communication, the \u2018picturebook\u2019 format calls for a different, more complex, response on the part of the reader, because the very nature of the message is influenced and made more ambiguous by the presence of multiple codes. The book contains contributions by scholars from many parts of the world, all of them interested in analysing this new and extremely interesting children's publishing phenomenon