University Botswana Journals
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INVESTIGATING UNIVERSITY OF GHANA STUDENTS’ BELIEFS AND ATTITUDES ABOUT SPANISH AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND THEIR EFFECTS ON MOTIVATION
Get PDFThis study presents the results of an anonymous online questionnaire on the impact of language beliefs and attitudes on students’ motivation to learn Spanish and Russian as foreign languages at the university level. Participants of the study included 64 students of Spanish and 45 students of Russian. The findings of the study reveal that the participants have mainly positive beliefs and attitudes towards their language courses despite the apparent challenges they face in the study of these European languages. This contradicts the popular belief that students in Ghanaian universities will find these courses irrelevant in the African context. Additionally, the majority of participants had extrinsic motivations for the study of the respective languages and a significant number of them felt less motivated to study certain subjects; namely, literature and civilization
Exploring and Understanding Child Labour and Children’s Rights in the Context of the African Social Value System in Zimbabwe
Get PDFThe paper is concerned with accommodation under the 2013 Constitution of Zimbabwe and other related statutes of the complex interrelationship between protection against child labour, as a human right, and the expectation under Zimbabwe’s cultural norms and values that children, as part of their upbringing, should work within the family set up. The paper notes that the 2013 Constitution gives primacy to human rights. Notwithstanding affirmation in the Constitution of every person’s right to culture, cultural norms and values that contradict human rights must give way. The paper also observes that the Constitution does not prohibit all forms of child labour. Children may work at home, but it is for other statutes such as the Childrens’s Act, Labour Act and the Criminal Law Codification and Reform Act to elaborate on how children may be made to work in households without infringing their rights, such as the right to be protected from economic and sexual exploitation, from child labour and from maltreatment
Sandy Grant, Botswana: Choice and Opportunity: A Memoir 1963-2018
Get PDFSandy Grant’s Memoir is a remarkable historical document. It weaves together a rich tapestry of ordinarypeople and happenings over half a century in the corner of Botswana occupied mainly by the Bakgatla. Itis a humble story told with good humour and eloquence. It does not honour the lives of famous men andwomen, nor for the most part are the events recorded memorable. Yet the book does an extraordinarilygood job of recording local social history -what local people did, what they said, and what happenedto them. He pays almost no attention to the bigger events taking place in Gaborone except where it hasimmediate impact in the Kgatleng. Over the past half century Gaborone has been developing at breakneckspeed, while Mochudi remains a relatively sleepy backwater
The High Cost of Early Adulthood for Adolescent Mothers: A Call for Reorientation of Social Norms in Eswatini
Get PDFCases of teenage pregnancies are most acute in developing nations. UNFPA (2018) reports that 20 000 girls below the age of 18 give birth every day, and they miss opportunities for personal development. Furthermore, they experience social rejection because they have contravened cultural norms by falling pregnant before marriage. Many girls pay even a higher price as latest research reveals that pregnancy and childbirth are now a leading cause of death for females at the ages of 15-19 in developing countries, as about 70 000 die each year (UNFPA 2018). Premised on broader sociological and feminist analysis of social norms, the paper argues that socialisation in patriarchal spaces train women to fit into an already prescribed society from which they draw their identity. They learn to understand themselves in terms of patriarchal super-ordination and subordination of being in the centre or being on the margin. Contravening social norms has lifetime repercussions, which include loss of the socially constructed identity. Teenage mothers therefore have a high price to pay for falling pregnant before marriage. The paper further calls for the reorientation of both injunctive and descriptive norms so that they become accommodative and self-empowering to young women
Enviromental Moral Degeneration and Regeneration: Towards Setswana Ecological Biblical Hermeneutics
Get PDFThe paper explores Setswana and biblical moral teachings on the environment as well as their functions in the preservation of the Earth. It will also look at how contemporary profit-oriented relationships with the Earth constitute moral degeneration. Lastly, the paper will discuss how some Setswana perspective on the environment can constitute Earth friendly ways of reading the Bible for the revitalization of the Earth community as a whole. This paper demonstrated that in reading the Biblical narrative of Genesis 8:20, 9:17 God was not making a covenant only with men but rather God was making a covenant with the Earth using Noah as a representative of the whole creation. Consequently, Setswana Ecological biblical hermeneutics used in this paper offers an Earth friendly perspective of reading the Bible
PERSPECTIVES ABOUT THE IMPACT OF CLASS SIZE ON STUDENT ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE
Get PDFIn Botswana there has been growing public outcry about decline in student achievement at all levels of the country’s basic education system. The government and some concerned members of the public such as teachers and parents have put blame on large class size for the negative effect on student academic achievement. This literature study which explored scholars’ views, insights and perspectives from diverse contexts, reveals no conclusive agreement about the effect of large or small class size on student achievement. What emerges are diverse perspectives, with some strongly stating that class size certainly has an effect on achievement, while others argue that although there is a relationship between class size and student achievement, other factors such as teacher training, professional and quality development, availability of instructional resources, and learners social and economic background, could combine together to have an adverse effect on classroom instruction. Based on the diverse perspectives derived from analysis of the literature, this study makes some recommendations for consideration by policy makers, educators, curriculum developers and other relevant stakeholders with intention to investigate potential factors that could affect student achievement
AN INVESTIGATION ON HOW SCHOOL LIBRARIES SUPPORT STUDENTS WITH READING DIFFICULTIES: THE CASE OF KANYE JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS
Get PDFThis study sought to investigate how school libraries support students with reading difficulties and focusses on junior secondary schools in Kanye. The study is informed by Gibson’s Critical Library Service Categories Framework on library policies, facilities, services and staff training needs. The research uses both qualitative and quantitative methods for dual benefit. Participants of the study consisted of school managers, teacher librarians and students with reading difficulties. Purposive sampling was used to select school managers and teacher librarians while census sampling was used for the 133 students with reading difficulties. Observation, survey, document analysis and interview techniques were used as data collection tools. The study established that students with reading difficulties were not helped adequately and that schools lack policies for dealing with such students. Based on the salient findings, the study makes recommendations pertaining to how school libraries can enhance their support for students with reading difficulties
THE DEVASTATING PROCESS OF IDENTITY LOSS IN BOTSWANA
Get PDFMany foreigners, who are not familiar with Botswana, assume that the country is monolingual, as they equate the name of the country with the main ethnic group, namely, Batswana. But Botswana is a typical multilingual country, with no less than 30 languages, most of which are highly diverse in form, structure and lexicon. This misconception of Botswana’s linguistic and cultural reality, both locally and internationally, has given rise to several devastating consequences. This article examines the devastating process of identity loss of the marginalized minority language groups of Botswana. The article identifies the main killer factors and proposes ways of alleviating the situation. The Lamy-Pool Identity Loss Model is evoked to determine the fate of the helpless languages. The study is based mainly on secondary data obtained from several sociolinguistic surveys carried out on the minority languages of Botswana. The findings of the study show the seriousness of ethnic identity loss and how it is affecting the whole country.