The communicative competence in English of Afrikaans-speaking teacher trainees at Afrikaans medium teachers' training colleges, with regard to entrance and terminal assessment standards

Bibliography: leaves 211-214.This dissertation studies the communicative competence in English of Afrikaans-speaking teacher trainees at Afrikaans medium teachers' training colleges with regard to entrance and terminal assessment standards. The literature survey indicates that since 1938 no tests to establish teacher trainee communicative competence in English have been conducted. The literature survey describes the concepts communicative competence and bilingualism. It establishes that for an Afrikaans-speaking person to be communicatively competent in English s/he needs to be bilingual, but that in the R.S.A. with a strongly entrenched (legally and politically) system of monolingual education for Whites there is no system of meaningful bilingual education which will produce the kind of bilingual teachers as required by educational statutes. Through norm-referenced testing groups of first- and final-year Afrikaans-speaking teachers' training college students have been compared to English-speaking Standard V, Vll and X pupils. The average performance of both groups of teacher trainees is comparable to that of the average English-speaking Standard V. Through a questionnaire individual teacher trainees have indicated their bilingual support system. The data have been quantified in order to provide a bilingualism index. This index correlates positively with the results obtained in the norm-referenced test. From the norm-referenced test fifteen candidates from each of the first- and final-year student groups have been elicited. They represent the top, middle and bottom five for each particular group. These candidates have sat for a multi-mode criterion referenced test. Only the top five in each group have attained an acceptable degree of communicative competence. One can thus assume that at most, approximately only one third of the teacher trainees have an acceptable degree of communicative competence in English which will enable them to teach English as a second language. Conclusion: the entrance and terminal assessment standards regarding the communicative competence in English of Afrikaans-speaking teacher trainees at Afrikaans medium teachers' training colleges are too low