Wayne Hugo

Emerging moral orientations amongst primary school children in the province of KwaZulu-Natal

This paper seeks to contribute to current research on variations within moral orientations of children initially pointed to by Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. The study is unique in that it has not been possible to locate studies in the South African context that have examined the moral logic children bring to their judgements of violent and potentially violent events. Data was obtained from a group of children ranging in age from 9-13 years, 12 girls and 18 boys enrolled at an urban primary school in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The participants in the study come from diverse language, racial, religious, and ethnic groups. High levels of crime and violence are prevalent in the working class communities in which the children live. They were requested to reflect upon two scenarios depicting real life dilemmas, and then engage in moral judgements and decision making in response to probing questions put to them in interviews. Results revealed that, contrary to Gilligans view, across age and gender the child...

Adolescent literacies: Chatting and learning across different planes of composition

This paper discusses a comparative analysis of seven adolescent girls’ texts. Four text types were analysed: an instant message; a Facebook message; an email and an appraisal. The texts are linked by the theme of their composition, which is to review a film. The aims of the study were to explore the multisemiotic composition of the texts and to uncover patterns in discourse structure, and register along a continuum from informal to formal semiotic patterning. A further purpose of the analysis was to attempt to account for how ICTs function as a network of contextual variables that shape text negotiation. The context for the study is a South African state-controlled secondary school in which one of the researchers (Adrienne) taught English. The texts constitute one component of the data set, which also included literate life history dialogue journals; semi-structured interviews; and a questionnaire. The data was analysed using multiliteracies, Systemic Functional Linguistics and an experimental process ont...