TEACHING AN AFRICAN LANGUAGE TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS: SOME THOUGHTS

Abstract

In South Africa today we are experiencing an unprecedented interest in the learning/teaching of African languages as third or additional languages in the White community. Unfortunately this welcome development found those whose responsibility it is to teach these languages unprepared. This paper seeks to put forward, in a tentative and inexhaustive manner, some of the immediate problems that will face a teacher of an African language as an L3…Ln. Obviously there exists a need to articulate in precise terms the aims and objectives of the exercise and to determine the best ways of achieving those aims and objectives. In addition, we believe that in general, this examination will lead to third language teaching in South Africa becoming the highly specialised field that it already is elsewhere in the world.