Ideational Analysis and Integration of African Folktale in Science, Technology, and Education

Abstract

Folktales are literary forms that reveal the soul of any society; they express its wishes, desires, hopes, and beliefs about the world. They have fictional characters and situations, mostly oral traditions, before they were written down. According to Cynthia McDaniel (1993), folktales can be used in all disciplines to convey knowledge and communicate ideas; they serve as an inherent vehicle for intergenerational communication that prepares and assigns roles and responsibilities to different generations in their communities. They are more pedagogic devices and less literary pieces. They cultivate universal values such as compassion, generosity, and honesty while disapproving of attributes such as cruelty, greed, and dishonesty. To illustrate McDaniel's claims, this paper will firstly use the ideational metafunctional framework found in Systemic Functional Linguistics, which expresses the clausal experiences and content from a grammatical perspective, coupled with syntagmatic analysis, which describes the text (folktale) in chronological order as reported by the storyteller. Secondly, the presentation will use a textual metafunctional framework that fulfills the thematic function of the clause, coupled with the paradigmatic analysis where the folkloristic text's patterns are regrouped more analytically to reveal the text's latent content, or theme. The Voyant Tool, a web-based text reading and analysis environment designed to facilitate the analysis of various text formats, was used to extract and analyze data from a Sesotho folktale to illustrate how folktales may be integrated with technology for research and educational purposes. This paper employed a descriptive research design that incorporates qualitative (content analysis) and quantitative (statistical analysis) methodologies to analyze and interpret the story. It is observed, through the Voyant tool, that the story is built out of 191 Sesotho word formations, and through the ideational analysis, that the storyteller employed more material process types than mental process types, and lastly, with the textual interpretation, indicating the value of oral literature in our daily lives as well as the significant role folktales may play in interpreting sociopolitical events in contemporary communities.