IaplicatioDS / 175
forced upon them with their limited competence, often covered up by
authoritarian attitudes? How can teachers appreciate the cognitive and
linguistic competence of their pupils on entry to school, if it is the
school that is supposed to develop such competence? How can they ever
value the contribution of the LI, often an oral-only language, to cogni-
tive development and to the learning of the L2, if their function is to
make children literate in L2? And if families are such good places to
learn, why bother with schools and εch∞l failure'9 These themes have been
touched on in various parts of the study and particularly in 2.2. and 4.5.
The position of teachers is structurally ambiguous, and the contradictions
are likely to come to the surface when the relationship between school
and the community, local and national, is focused on. In a sense, the
whole historical and sociological transition from tradition to modernity,
from old to new, from regressive to progressive (see page 75) is
reproduced in the classroom, and personalized in the teacher, who in turn
is expected to bezand act asχthe competent mediator. Unlike other African
countries, Mozambique could not rely on an emerging African middle class
as a reservoir on which to draw for the teaching profession, partly
because of its colonial legacy, and partly because of a deliberate
Government choice to encourage the training of youngsters from workers'
and peasants' families: for example, more than half of my students at the
Faculty of Education's Teacher Training College had Illiterate parents,
and only a quarter of them had parents who were educated beyond Grade 4.
This type of young University student Is himself caught between two
worlds, bridged just over one generation.
The contradiction between 'given' and 'new' in sociological terms is
reflected in linguistic theory:
It is a rather old idea that was originally formulated by the
Prague School of linguists to embody a discourse-sensitive version
of the subject-predicate distinction. In their functional view, a
subject (or topic) is that which is shared In the consciousness
(or Intersubjectlvity, to use the more fashionable term) of
speaker and listener. A predicate is that which Introduces
something new, a comment upon the topic or subject that is in
joint consciousness. The given in discourse is the unstressed, the
unmarked, the easily pronominalized, the background. The new is