About Us
Jan and his wife, Beulah Stander, currently reside in Pretoria (Tshwane), Gauteng, South Africa. They have four children. Jan has taught in two secondary schools In Gauteng, and especially at Afrikaans Hoër Seunskool (Afrikaans Secondary Boys School), it being one of the most prestigious schools in South Africa.
Jan has a passion for proper language usage. He loves to see mistakes being corrected, especially if the learner can do it himself. As a teacher,
one of the greatest concerns to Jan was that pupils would make the same language mistakes over and over again, from test to test. When considering an answer to a language question, pupils would go on the ‘sound’ of an answer, rather than being grammatically correct. Fact is, for a learner of English as an additional language, the framework (or basis) to work from in order to figure out which answer will be correct to a given question, is rather confusing to most pupils.
That is why Jan set out to establish a framework which is workable even in a test setting. This framework works on the basic three verb columns (verb groups) found in the English language. Thus the framework is not hard to relate to and can easily be applied once the student has mastered it. Results of some pupils have sky-rocketed since teaching the T4E model.
A root problem encountered by Jan was that because of the way learners are taught in schools, they believe that the 1st verb column stands for the Present tense, the 2nd for the Past and therefore the 3rd must be for the Future, which is absolutely incorrect. He struggled to change the way they think. He found that he had to literally start from the beginning, laying a new foundation.
Another problem to overcome is the deficit in the understanding of language because of the shortfall in formal language teaching in South African schools. This is caused by the ‘communicative’ approach to teaching language in South Africa. The intention is not to criticize this approach, but it definitely leaves pupils with huge gaps in their knowledge with regards to language. This is unquestionably a matter that has to be attended to urgently in South Africa, seeing that many articles have appeared in newspapers over the last 5 years in which it is stated that learners getting to high schools can't read or write properly.
T4E
In the e-book T4E, you will find a solution to an age-old problem: teaching or studying tenses effectively. Tenses do not only comprise of the names of the tenses - past, perfect and future - it entail how to change a sentence into a question or negative; which question tag to add to a sentence; to change a sentence into a passive and active voice; how to report what someone else had said - reported speech; finally how to express the probability for something to happen - 'if sentences'.
A master of tenses will correctly combine the verbs, auxiliary verbs (helping verbs) and time words, thus providing and conveying the needed context. Eventually, this is what tenses are all about: conveying and providing relevant context.
In this book, you will find supplements which go beyond the scope of tenses. He touches on the Articulation of specific difficult sounds in English. Singulars and Plurals are dealt with in another supplement, and then he shares 5 steps to follow for the effective analysis of any poem.
Jan can be contacted for training conferences in which he deals with the teaching of English tenses according to the T4E model he has developed.
Printed book on T4E
Besides the e-book, a printed version of T4E will also be available soon. Contact us for orders.