New research has highlighted both the depth of the problem with child literacy in South African schools – and pathways to solutions. We’ve all seen the headlines about how our 10-year-olds can’t read for meaning and how poorly South Africa’s children do compared with those in other countries. But we need to move forward and set reasonable targets so we can clearly see why we have this problem and what can be done to change it, said Dr Nompumelelo Nyathi-Mohohlwane, the director: reading in the Department of Basic Education (DBE).
She was speaking at the first Funda Uphumelele National Survey (Funs), which measures the reading ability of children in grades 1 to 3. We need to understand what’s below the tip of the iceberg, is the analogy she uses. That’s what the Department of Basic eEducation has been doing for the past seven years.
Teams of linguists and data analysts have painstakingly researched the skills and markers that show how children learn to read in each of the 11 official languages. This helped to establish reading benchmarks for each of the foundation phase grades. Then the department conducted a survey, which assessed 27,838 learners in 710 public schools across all the provinces and in all 11 languages, and measured the percentage of children who reach the critical reading benchmarks by the end of grades 1, 2 and 3.
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The results were released in November, and they are far from fun. Only about one in three children – an alarmingly low statistic – reached minimum benchmarks for reading set for each of the grades in their home language. This means that “a staggering two million children are not at the minimum required reading level in the foundation phase”, a 2030 Reading Panel summary states.
Worse than that, 15% of children could not read a single word by the end of Grade 3. That means that in a classroom of 40 children, there could be six who cannot read. These results are shocking, but they shouldn’t really surprise us given previous surveys like the Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (Pirls), which assesses Grade 4 reading comprehension, and the South African Systemic Evaluation (Sase), which assesses Grade 3s.
What’s different this time, though, is that it is possible to identify which parts of reading are not successful. There are now clear measurable benchmarks for reading in 11 languages and each grade that include skills that can be taught using proven methods. In grades 1, 2 and 3, which is when children are taught how to read, they can attend a school where they are taught in their home language, but many of them don’t.
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