RATIONALE

As a primary school teacher teaching History for 15 years I have observed that teachers
struggle to teach History content. They struggle to teach concepts and interpretation of the
collage in History content. Teachers find it difficult to teach History content because it’s
irrelevant to the learners and teachers because it’s a traditional History. For instance History
about 2000 years ago San and Khoikhoi.

1.4 Rationale for the study As a primary school mathematics teacher for 10 years, I observed that
teachers experienced problems when teaching fractions. When learners were given class exercises
and assessments they performed poorly in fractions. Teachers from other schools also shared similar
sentiments in this concept in Mathematics. A fraction is a concept that is part of the Grade 5
syllabus. In support of this idea, Pienaar (2014) asserts that one of the many reasons that teachers
experience problems when teaching fractions may be the way in which Mathematics as a subject is
viewed in the South African curriculum. The above situation prompted me to explore teachers’
experiences of teaching fractions in the CAPS Grade 6 Mathematics curriculum. 5 Furthermore,
teachers and researchers have typically described the teaching of fractions as a challenging area of
the Mathematics curriculum (Gabriel et al., 2012; Ashlock, 2010). Austin, Carbone and Webb (2011)
conducted a study in South Africa and the United States of America (USA) on issues that hinder
prospective primary school teachers from writing acceptable problem-posing scenarios in teaching
fractions. The participants were 44 preservice teachers. The findings showed that issues that hinder
the writing of acceptable problem scenarios are an inability to recognise that uniform units must be
used for units to be comparable, they must be the same size and shape, that standard formal units
of measurement must be used rather than informal units, and that different units of measurement
cannot be used to represent the same fractional part. Another comparative study conducted by Lin,
Becker, Bryun, Yang and Huang (2013) in Taiwan and the USA centred on pre-service teachers’
procedures in four areas of fraction operations, the differences in pre-service teachers’ conceptual
knowledge, correlation in preservice teachers’ conceptual knowledge, and procedural knowledge of
fractions. The participants were 47 pre-service teachers in Taiwan and a comparable 49 in the USA.
The findings indicated that Chinese pre-service teachers performed better in procedural knowledge
on fractions operations than the American teachers. Furthermore, the correlation in this study
showed that for both Chinese and American pre-service teachers, the relationship between
conceptual and procedural knowledge of fraction operations was weak. The above studies were
grounded on teachers’ experiences of teaching fractions using a quantitative approach. None of
them explored teachers’ experiences of teaching fractions in Grade 6 in a rural context. This shows
that there is a need for a study to be conducted through a qualitative approach using a case study.
Therefore this study is significant because its findings exposed the teaching strategies used by
teachers when teaching fractions in Grade 6 and enabled an understanding of their experiences.

In the past ten years of teaching English First Additional Language (EFAL) in a Secondary school, I
observed that teachers struggle to teach creative writing. For instance, teachers experience
problems when they teach essays, short stories, paragraphs etc. Teachers find it difficult to transfer
and or teach knowledge of creative writing. As a result, learners perform poorly in creative writing in
general. An observation has also been made that teachers continue to grapple with which pedagogy
and/or approaches to use when they teach creative writing. In short, teachers’ tasks in this regard
remain tedious. I have also shared similar sentiments with colleagues from other schools who teach
English and say that learners are not performing well in creative writing. For instance, teachers say
learners fail to express themselves in writing and demonstrate a lack of understanding of the
content that they are writing about thus leading to incoherent essays. Cheung, Tse, and Tsang (2003)
conducted a quantitative study on teachers’ practices of teaching creative writing. The study
revealed that teachers’ methods of teaching creative writing were limited. Curriculum guidelines
were found to be rigid and there was lack of support in the school system. In another study, Van
Hook (2002) found that poor writing skills led to poor performance in all school subjects in general.
Hyland (2003) also conducted a study at the University of Hong Kong on the importance of Genre
approaches to second language learners in their writing. It was revealed that teachers perceive
writing as a formal exercise that entails several drafts, extensive feedback and a delay in
improvement. A study conducted by Mansoor (2010) found that learners’ language was very weak in
composition and sentence construction, they lacked abstract thinking and cannot express
themselves in writing. Findings further reveal that this was a result of rote learning and a text-book
approach that was used in all disciplines at the University which greatly affected the creative writing
skills. According to Kim and Kim (2005) a qualitative study was conducted on students at the
University of Korea based on the teaching of creative writing. The study revealed that teachers were
facing problems when teaching creative writing to University students since they lack genre-specific
writing skills, use wrong grammatical form and need additional types of feedback. Findings indicate
that these issues hinder students’ learning to improve creative writing. 6 The studies above were
based on teachers’ experiences of teaching creative writing at Universities using both a quantitative
and qualitative approach. None of the studies explored teachers’ experiences of teaching creative
writing in grade 10 in a rural context at a high school using a case study. Therefore, it is important for
the study to be conducted on teachers’ experiences of teaching creative writing in grade 10 in a rural
context. 1.6 Significance of the study This study intends to explore the experiences of teachers when
teaching creative writing in English