How to teach Afrikaans successfully, using proven techniques and resources developed over many years by a foundation phase teacher

Hi, my name is Marieta Brand (Pistor)and I am a qualified Foundation Phase Teacher with more than 30 years' experience teaching learners Afrikaans as First Additional Language (FAL) at primary school level. I have a passion for teaching learners. Early on in my career I saw how learners struggled with Afrikaans and I decided that I had to make a plan to help them. I knew that the lack of Afrikaans vocabulary was a big stumbling block for learners who did not hear or speak Afrikaans at home.

I also knew that young learners aged between 7 and 9 yrs old are not really able to use an ordinary dictionary successfully and therefore I had to come up with a plan. In 2005 I woke up one morning and I just knew that the solution would be to create a picture dictionary with the Afrikaans words linked to a picture or drawing explaining the word. This way, no matter what the home language of the learner was, he or she would be able to get the Afrikaans word by finding the picture of the word they were looking for. This is how "MY AFRIKAANSE WOORDEBOEK" was born. This picture dictionary proved to be a big success and myself and a number of Foundation Phase Teachers at other primary schools in the Western Cape have been using it with great success since 2005.

The next step was to develop "MY KLANKEBOEK". The concept is to use the sounding out of words to teach learners how to read by using the method of decoding. This also proved to be of great value to help the learners pronounce the Afrikaans words correctly, but something was still missing. Learners still struggled to get the word order right when speaking or writing in Afrikaans.

So, I developed a communicative program "KOMMUNIKATIEWE PROGRAM GR 2" based on listening and speaking. How this works is as follows, the teacher will make a statement, for example, "This is a car, ... Dit is n motor, ...Wat is dit?" The learner will then repeat loudly, "Dit is n motor."  To further help the learners, I got an artist to draw 24 beautiful pictures with different themes, lots of actions and different objects. There are 5 family members visible in most of these pictures. These pictures can be used digitally or as posters in the classroom to help the learners to link the Afrikaans words to the different actions and objects. I also developed three teacher's guides one for each of grade 1, 2 and 3. These guides help the teacher to say the Afrikaans word correctly so that the learners, as a class, can then repeat after the teacher. By doing it this way no learner is being put on the spot or embarrassed. This gives the learners more confidence because the opportunity is there to hear and speak within the group.
These three resources, used in combination, help learners to master the basics of Afrikaans in the Foundation Phase. It also makes it much easier for the teacher to achieve positive results.