Abstract
South Africa is a multicultural country with 11 official languages. The majority of school learners have an African language as home language. Up to their third grade the learners' home language is the language of learning and teaching (LOLT). From Grade 4 onwards the LOLT switches to English which has a significant effect on learners' performance and poses great challenges to both the learners and their teachers. Many teachers lack proficiency in English and their lack of proficiency in both basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) negatively affects learner performance. At PATT38 we reported on a pilot project in South Africa which was supposed to start started in January 2020., The aim was to improve technology teachers' awareness and pedagogical knowledge about cognitive academic language in technology education. This will be done by adapting the existing STaalvaardig online environment in Flanders to scaffold junior high school technology teachers' CALP. Because of the Covid 19 pandemic restrictions that were introduced in March 2020 the project could only start at the beginning of 2021. However, we do not know what the CALP needs of English second language (ESL) technology teachers are when teaching the national technology curriculum, i.e. the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). The purpose of this paper, as part of the aforementioned pilot study project, was to establish the CALP needs of ESL technology teachers when teaching the CAPS. A quantitative research approach was followed. The sample consisted of nine grade 8 and ten grade 9 ESL technology teachers in five junior high schools where mainly ESL learners are being taught technology in English. The main curriculum topics for each grade were identified by analysing the CAPS for the two applicable grades of junior high school. These topics were included in questionnaires for each term of the year, and the teachers had to rank the applicable topics according to the difficulty to teach in English. The rankings were analysed, and the main finding shows that the participants found concepts relating to graphic communication (Engineering graphics/technical drawing) the most difficult to teach in English across the four terms. Key Words: Technology education, Language of learning and teaching (LOLT), English second language (ESL), Cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP).