University Botswana Journals
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A STUDY TO DETERMINE THE EFFICIENT ASSESSMENT OF FOUNDATION MODULES IN BOTSWANA COLLEGES OF EDUCATION
Get PDFPrior to the admission into the Diploma in Primary Education program, the student teachers indicate their focus area by selecting two major subjects to pursue. However, in their first year these teacher trainees are required to do all subjects at that level as an introduction. These subjects are referred to as foundation modules. The modules are studied for the whole academic year and the trainees are required to pass these modules in order to proceed to year 2 where they will now focus on their areas of specialisation. At the end of the year 1, the trainees are expected to attain 50% when the module coursework mark and the examination mark are averaged. A performance graded between 40 and 49% permits the learners to take supplementary examination. If the averaged mark is below 40% the trainee is given one chance to repeat the whole year in order to attain the required score. If a learner is unable to pass after being allowed to retake, they are discontinued from the programme for one academic year and could re-apply for admission. If the trainee fails again after readmission, they are excluded from the programme and will never be given any more chance to enrol (UBAI, 2011). It has been observed that a considerable number of the student trainees do fail to complete the DPE programme due to their failure to pass foundation modules in year 1. This study sought to determine how foundation modules could be assessed so that they do not inhibit progression of learners. The findings of the study show that both lecturers and trainees are not satisfied with how foundation modules are assessed in as far as they disadvantage learners. The study recommends that there should be no examinations for foundation modules
Chegwapong: The Risk beyond Bilingualism
Get PDFIntelligibility between Chegwapong and other languages (e.g. Sebirwa) or dialects of Setswana (such as Sengwato and Setawana) remains an undeniable fact due to genetic relations between these speech forms. What raised our eyebrows is the ETHNOLOGUE’s description of Chegwapong as a vigorous (i.e. vibrant) language. We went out for a much more recent fieldwork to collect data that led to the publication of An Anthology of Chegwapong Folktales. Our three-member research team included two fluent Setswana speakers.
Contrary to the afore-mentioned inadvertent description, Chegwapong is not only undergoing the process of change, its life too is threatened by the dwindling number of its speakers. The public image of this language is generally negative; people tend to see it derogatively as a mispronounced variety of Setswana whereas it is in reality an offshoot of Sepedi/Sesotho sa Leboa (i.e. Northern Sotho, one of the Bantu languages spoken in the Republic of South Africa).
Our account in this paper is backed by our unanimous field observation that most people in the eight Tswapong villages that we were recommended to investigate based on the claim that they were the stronghold of Chegwapong turned out to be people who rather spoke Setswana with a Chegwapong accent assuming that they were speaking Chegwapong.
Should we therefore conclude that Chegwapong is nothing but a mispronounced form of Setswana? This paper attempts to answer this question with supporting evidence collected during our fieldwork
The transitioning role of Botswana fathers in breastfeeding
Get PDFAlthough infant care has traditionally been perceived as women’s work, especially when the mother was breastfeeding, fathers are becoming increasingly involved in parenting and breastfeeding support. However, there is little research regarding this transition in an African context. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of the fathers in the breastfeeding family in Botswana. The study used a descriptive qualitative design informed by grounded theory. Twenty-one breastfeeding couples from rural and urban localities were interviewed over a period of 4 months in 2010. An interview guide was used to collect data from mothers and fathers who were interviewed separately. Audio-recorded interviews were transcribed, translated and coded to describe fathers’ experiences and their roles as well as factors influencing such roles. Ethical clearance was made with relevant authorities and participants provided written consent. Father acted as provider, protector, loving and caring partner to the mother, breastfeeding supporter and direct loving baby care provider. Although all fathers valued playing a role in breastfeeding, they were sometimes constrained by traditional norms related to the care of the mother and the newborn. However, the study showed that cultural traditions were changing, and fathers were providing both physical care and emotional support to both the mother and the breastfeeding baby. Thus father’s roles in the care of their new born infants can be characterised as being in transition, as today’s parenting abandon traditional norms and values to accommodate the needs of the modern family. This study can inform health care providers about the dynamics of fathers’ participation in breastfeeding, and help them to tailor support programmes to suit the needs of breastfeeding couples in Botswana
UNDERSTANDING MOBILE LEARNING IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: APPLYING AND EXTENDING THE TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE MODEL
Get PDFThere is a proliferation of mobile technologies in developing countries whereby most students own mobile phones and other personal mobile technologies device that can offer more than sending long distance message. However schools, colleges and universities have not widely incorporated mobile devices in their teaching and learning practices. This paper explores the factors which influence students to adopt mobile technologies in education through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), an influential theory used to explore the adoption of information systems. This study introduces mobile readiness, perceived mobility value, perceived privacy and perceived trust as external variables that reflect the student’s belief in mobile learning adoption. Data collected from respondents in Botswana were tested against a modified research model using structural equation modelling. The results indicated that perceived trust, mobile readiness, perceived privacy and perceived mobility value are crucial factors influencing students to adopt mLearning technologies. The findings provide in-depth knowledge derived from a theoretical model that assists in the successful adoption of mLearning. These findings imply that it is vital to teach students on the usefulness of these mLearning technologies before actual adoption as it helps to develop a positive attitude among the students. This work informs the development of an mLearning theory that comprehensively addresses the dimensions of mLearning.Keywords: mLearning, technology education, technology acceptance model, tertiary education, structural equation modelling, mixed method strateg
SPATIAL REPRESENTATION BY BATSWANA LEARNERS OF FRENCH: ROUTE DIRECTIONS IN URBAN SPACE
Get PDFDuring the process of learning a foreign language, the learner can find him/herself confronted to new phenomena; a new culture, a new way of seeing the world, as well as a new linguistic structure. Consequently, through discourse the learner is led to construct a new referential world. Studies done by researchers such as Levinson S (1996) have shown that even in space representation, different linguistic groups do not use the same spatial frames of reference (absolute, intrinsic and relative). Setswana, like other languages such as French and English, uses all the three frames. In Tzetal, a Mayan language, the relative frame does not exist at all. This paper shows that even though Setswana language uses all the frames of spatial reference, the geographical space that Setswana-speaking learners of French are used to in Botswana and the way they manipulate space is, in most cases different from that of a native French speaker from France
ECOCRITICAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN LITERATURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN BOTSWANA
Get PDF“Conservation” is currently a buzz word the world over because of environmental crises affecting climate, wildlife, forests, oceans, and many human societies. Recently in Botswana, there were reports that more than 90 elephants were slaughtered by poachers as a result of disarming the Botswana wildlife rangers. This study is based on Anne Fine’s play The Play of Goggle Eyes which is one of the set texts for the Junior Secondary School English syllabus in Botswana. The study draws from the Revised National Policy on Education (Botswana Government, 1994) that introduced environmental education into the Botswana education system. The paper argues, using ecocriticism theory, that the play can be used to teach environmental conservation through the teaching of the English language as a subject. The paper also posits that the demands and or the aspirations of Botswana’s education system falls short of achieving its intended purpose because the teaching of environmental issues is left to the discretion of an individual teacher who may emphasise more on the “social constructivism” and “social linguistic determinism” of the text. Finally, the paper proposes classroom activities which, if foregrounded in the teaching of the text, would attribute a more experiential character to literature for instruction purposes. The paper concludes that Junior Certificate English Syllabus should be repackaged to make environmental education through literature more proactive rather than leave this vital aspect of humanity to individual teacher’s inclinations. Teachers of English too, should be empowered at colleges of education to think, see, and read the environment in every text they deal with beyond the idea of nature as a metaphor, or just a locale within which characters relate with one another
The Morphophonolgy of the Past Tense in Ciyaawo
Get PDFWhile time is a philosophical category that humans use to partition the succession of units such as hours, days, weeks, years, centuries, etc., tense is the language resource that humans use to express time reference. According to their culture, humans interpret the time phenomenon in a diversity of ways which are reflected in linguistic expression of time. This diversity explains why, according to Comrie (1985) there are languages which have three basic tenses (past, present and future), other languages have one tense (past) and the other tenses are said to be not tense (non-past). Still other languages distinguish different types of past and future in such a way that, having the tense corresponding to the present time, or the time of speech, as the reference tense, and the other tenses as those expressing events which happen before the present (past) or happen after the present (future), may distinguish recent past from remote past, or near future from distant future. In agglutinative languages, all these tense distinctions are marked in different ways in the verb structure be it segmentally or suprasegmentally.
Based on Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky 1982, 1985, Mohanan 1982, and others), the present paper aims at describing the morphophonology of the past tense in Ciyaawo, a Bantu (P21 in Guthrie 1967-71’s classification) language spoken mainly in Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania.
The paper is organized as follows. After the introduction, it presents the literature review on the topic including the theoretical frameworks adopted; then it describes the past tense markers and the ways they are affixed to the verbs of different root structures. Lastly, it presents the final remarks
More Evidence of Non-Voice Bundling in Nyungwe
Get PDFWhile Marantz (1984) was the first to present the idea supporting the assumption that external arguments are not true arguments of their verbs, as has widely been discussed in the literature (Grimshaw 1990, Parsons 1990, Koopman & Sportiche 1991, Pylkkänen 1999, for example), it was Kratzer (1996) who first developed a theory about how Marantz’s (1984) proposal can be executed in syntax.
The aim of the present paper is to discuss non-Voice bundling parameter as proposed by Pylkkänen (2008) using data from Nyungwe, a Bantu language spoken by 457.290 people in two Mozambican provinces, namely, Tete and Manica, (Sitoe and Ngunga 2000).
The study suggests that in Nyungwe Voice° and Cause° are two functional heads projected independently.
The paper is organized in four sections as follows. Section 1. Introduction; Section 2. Pylkkänen’s (2002, 2008) proposal; Section 3. Discussion of Nyungwe data; Section 4. Conclusions of the study