Language and Literacy resources

A major study conducted in the late 1980s into the nature of the language and learning difficulties experienced by Grade Five learners when the medium of instruction changed from mother tongue to English.

Changing how literacy is taught: evidence on synthetic phonics

This is an evaluation study of the national change in education policy in England that saw a refocusing of teaching of reading around synthetic phonics. This was a low cost intervention that went through a pilot and then a national rollout. The study shows in particular how this change helped narrow the gap between disadvantaged and other learners.

Achieving the Vision. The Final Research Report of the West Dunbartonshire Literacy Initiative

Final report of a successful project, begun in 1997, to effectively eradicate functional illiteracy among young people through a multiple-component intervention in 58 pre- and primary schools. About 3 000 children entering the schools were baseline assessed annually as were 3 000 older pupils. One main study and four supporting studies were done. In the main study, comparison of cohorts showed year-on-year gains on all tests and across all age groups, with sustained post-intervention gains in later years. In each of the four supporting studies gains were found for the experimentals, pointing to benefits in the use of synthetic versus traditional phonics, in changing attitudes to reading, in making declarations of future reading achievement and in the use of intensive individual support.

Dialects matter: The influence of dialects and code-switching on the literacy and numeracy achievements of isiXhosa Grade 1 learners in the Western Cap

A study of the influence of different dialects and code-switching on the literacy and numeracy achievements of isiXhosa Grade 1 learners in the Western Cape which found that many teachers did not use the standardised isiXhosa though they believed that dialects should not be used in the classroom. Many teachers had little or no knowledge about how to teach early reading in isiXhosa and use dialects as an aid. Learners who speak a dialect different from the standardised one start at a significant disadvantage. The authors argue for the standardisation of African languages, teacher training and development and better resource allocation and development of appropriate texts.

Submission dealing with reading from Nic Spaull to the State President’s Roundtable on Strategies for long-term prosperity

A South African research study that argues for the importance of letter-sound knowledge in the earliest stages of children learning to read and in particular for children who come from poor socio-economic family backgrounds. She examines an intervention that focused on the teaching of letter-sound knowledge to pre-school children in the context of building language skills, emergent literacy and understanding print. She suggests that there is an urgent need for quality teacher training programmes for teachers of pre-school children.

Teaching early reading in Africa – with African Storybook

Produced by Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) on the Open University's OpenLearn platform, this free introductory course supports an active teaching approach. The course material can be studied online or downloaded.

The Primary Teacher Education (PrimTEd) Project: How did we get to the literacy standards?

Presentation made at the PrimTEd Annual National Dialogue on 17 October 2019 at Kempton Park. The presentation outlines the situation in the development of reading among school children and how PrimTEd set out to develop literacy knowledge and practice standards.

Reading instruction and phonics: theory and practice for teachers

A clear and detailed guide to teaching English literacy through a synthetic phonics approach. Provides a detailed sequence of instruction.

Elegant research study which found that the proportion of the three components of fluent reading are 62% phonic decoding, 16% whole (high frequency) word recognition, and 22% contextual clues. Each reading process always contributes the same number of words per minute, regardless of whether the other processes are operating.

Looks at the whether objects are recognized by parts or as wholes and looks specifically at word recognition, finding that a word is unreadable unless its letters are separately identifiable and that we never in fact learn to see a word as a whole feature. Our identification of a word is mediated by independent detection of components that are a letter or less.

A study showing that the brains of illiterates are consistently more right-lateralized than with literates and that, therefore, literacy influences the functional hemispheric balance in reading and verbal working memory-related regions of the brain. The brains of literates have greater white matter densities suggesting that literacy has an influence on large-scale brain connectivity.

Pitfalls and possibilities in literacy research. A review of South African literacy studies, 2004-2018

This article evaluates South African research from two annotated bibliographies on reading in African languages at home language level (2004–2017) and South African research on teaching reading in English as a first additional language (2007–2018). It also aims to provide guidelines for addressing the weaknesses in this research. While this article is not intended to be a comprehensive guide, it would be useful to supervisors, postgraduate students and early career researchers currently undertaking, or planning to undertake, literacy research and to writing for publication.

Supporting transition or playing catch-up in Grade 4? Implications for standards in education and training

Description of an intervention programme designed to support the transition to English as the medium of instruction in Grade 4 in a township school, using a pre- and post-test design. Because the pre-tests revealed very poor literacy levels in both Zulu home language and English, the intervention programme was modified in an attempt to fast-track the learners to literacy levels more appropriate to their grade. The paper briefly considers some of the reasons for the initial poor literacy performance and provides a model for literacy development in high-poverty contexts in order to minimise the need to play catch-up in the Intermediate Phase.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the data from a range of official sources that have been used to enumerate the number of people who can be described as totally or functionally illiterate and estimates whether illiteracy in South Africa can be reduced in the foreseeable future

Detailed paper on the experiments showing the phonic basis of reading.

Popular article on their research showing the phonic basis of reading.

Reading in African languages - an Annotated Bibliography

This annotated bibliography was compiled by Professor Lilli Pretorius of UNISA as part of the Primary Teacher Education Project (PrimTEd). It gives a summary account of research that has been done on reading in African languages from 2004 to 2017, more specifically on languages belonging mainly to the family of Southern African Bantu languages. It comprises over 40 annotated entries, mainly research articles from accredited journals, chapters from books and postgraduate dissertations or theses, and also lists several other sources closely related to reading in the African languages. Originally compiled in 2017, it is designed in such a way that new entries can be added to it as new research emerges, and it will be regularly updated.

Laying firm foundations: getting reading right

Final Report to the ZENEX Foundation on poor student performance in Foundation Phase literacy and numeracy which includes policy recommendations

Learning to read and reading to learn

Succinct description of the data on early reading in South Africa with five policy recommendations

The DBE’s workbooks as a curriculum tool

A brief evaluation of the Department of Basic Education’s workbooks which found them a welcome intervention that was well aligned to the key CAPS content areas and are a useful practice tool which could also be used for monitoring student progress. It did however find that they were not an effective tool for assessment.

Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Foundation Phase: a concept note

Provides a detailed outline of a potential Foundation Phase teacher training course on how to teach reading. After providing some information on the state of reading in South Africa and the need for the proposed course, the Concept Note outlines (1) what such a course should entail as far as content is concerned, (2) how the course should be structured, delivered (modality) and assessed, (3) how it could be accredited, and (4) how it should be evaluated.

This article argues that we have lost the plot in South African reading education. To find it, we need to move beyond the predominant mode of reading as oral performance, where the emphasis is on accuracy and pronunciation, to reading as comprehension of meaning in text. While reading research in South Africa has been conducted mainly in school contexts, this case study is of a school and Adult Basic Education and Training Centre in a rural KwaZulu-Natal community near Pietermaritzburg. It found that an oratorical approach to reading dominated in both settings. It suggests that developing the way in which teachers understand the teaching of reading and transforming the teaching practices of those who teach as they were taught in the education system of the apartheid era are key to improving the teaching of reading.

The Salzburg Statement for a Multilingual World

This statement, made by the participants in the Salzburg Global Seminar’s session on Springboard for Talent: Language Learning and Integration in a Globalized World (12–17 December 2017), calls for policies that value and uphold multilingualism and language rights. It has been translated into all South African official languages.

Putting reading in Northern Sotho on track in the early years: Changing resources, expectations and practices in a high poverty school

Groundbreaking study of a grade 1 reading intervention in a high poverty school over a four year period that found that improvements in reading in the African languages are dependent on changes in instructional practices in classrooms.

Springboard for Talent: Language Learning and Integration in a Globalized World

The Salzburg Global Seminar convened the session Springboard for Talent: Language Learning and Integration in a Globalized World in Salzburg, Austria, in December 2017. The five-day session resulted in the Salzburg Statement for a Multilingual World, which has since been translated into more than 50 languages. Together, the more than 40 representatives from policy, academia, civil society and business, representing over 25 countries looked specifically at language policy through the lenses of social justice and social cohesion; the relationship between multilingualism and dynamic and entrepreneurial societies; the role of language policy in achieving the fourth Sustainable Development Goal for quality education; and the evolving role of technology in this field.

A seven year study of the effects of synthetic phonics teaching on reading and spelling attainment

The report of a groundbreaking, seven-year research trial that was a powerful influence on the British government adopting systematic phonics as the best foundation for teaching children to read at primary school. The study involved dividing around 300 Primary aged children into three groups. One group was taught via the synthetic phonics method, one by a standard analytic phonics programme, and the third by an analytics phonics programme which included systematic phonemic awareness teaching without reference to print. The outcomes of the study proved overwhelmingly that the synthetic phonics approach is more effective than the analytic phonics approach. At the end of the programme, the synthetic phonics-taught group were reading and spelling seven months ahead of their expected level. It has also proven to help close the gender gap with boys’ word reading accelerating. The synthetic phonics method as implemented in the study involved, right from the start of school, children learning a small number of letter sounds and using that knowledge right away to sound and blend the letters to find out how to pronounce unfamiliar words. They then rapidly learnt more letter sounds and continued to use the strategy. The study found that these children had much better reading and phonological awareness skills than those taught either by analytic phonics, or by analytic phonics plus phonological awareness.

Six key study units on reading developed by SIRP

Presentation made to a PrimTEd seminar in February 2020 outlines the six units being developed in 2020 which will be made available in Sesotho and IsiZulu.