Barbara Ludman
IT doesn’t have the catchiest name or the greatest tunes, but English in Action, launched this week on Radio 2000, may well have the highest listenership in the country — among the under-eights, at any rate.
The half-hour programme of songs, drills and word games has been broadcast daily at 10.30am since Tuesday. It is being picked up initially in 1500 classrooms, most of them in farm schools or informal settlements.
At Orange Farm Primary this week, the Grade Ones were learning to say such useful phrases as “What’s your name?”, “The boy takes the bus” and “Goodbye”. They covered their faces when they heard a baby crying, laughed at a radio performer’s imitation of farmyard animals, counted up to five, stood up, sat down, clapped hands, stamped feet — and at the end of the lesson, jived to the music.
A battery-powered radio is about as high-tech as Orange Farm Primary can go at the moment. Built in the late 1980s out of asbestos board and corrugated iron, its problem at the moment is the weather: there’s not a single unbroken window in the five classroom blocks, holes gape in the walls and the ceilings, and puddles punctuate the muddy spaces between the blocks. A new school, under construction a couple of hundred metres away, should be ready by August.
Meanwhile, the pupils have roofs and desks, chalkboards and teachers and, according to Open Learning Systems Education Trust (Olset), whose project this is, a good chance to pass up their counterparts in other, more favoured schools.
A cassette version of the 130-segment English in Action series was tested in schools in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State and the Eastern Cape, on groups of children described by Olset chairman David Maepa as “living in very tough circumstances”.
It’s early days and, although the Grade Ones were well up on “good morning” and “goodbye” during the break that followed the lessons, it’s hard to tell how fluent those who have no other English will become.
But, according to Olset director Allan Karaki, Grade One students in participating schools are doing 20 percent better than their counterparts, and preliminary data for Grade Two (following a programme still only on cassette) indicates children in the programme have “caught up with their peers in urban schools, and far surpassed other children in rural comparison schools”.