Reading is critical to fulfilling individual potential and collective social development. The research is unequivocal: when children read for pleasure, it has a greater effect on their educational achievement than their family’s socio-economic status.
Reading ability and comprehension also promote social cohesion and innovation by building empathy, critical thinking and imagination.
Yet, in South Africa many children are not reading well. The most recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study showed that one in three Grade 4 pupils was unable to demonstrate basic reading skills in his or her home language.
A recent review of education quality locally indicated that 58% of 13-year-olds living in rural areas are functionally illiterate.
With such low performance in language and reading, pupils cannot read for meaning or create links between the classroom and daily life.
This is cause for concern: language competence underpins progress in learning, including mathematics.
It enables children to understand symbols and metaphor, necessary for both scientific innovation and healthy human interaction.
This loss of human potential has severe economic and social consequences.
Low literacy levels cost South Africa an estimated GDP loss of R550 billion a year, and GDP per capita would be 23% to 30% higher if all South Africans were sufficiently literate to participate in the formal economy.
Poor literacy also excludes South Africans from participating meaningfully in democracy.
While interventions to improve the quality of our schooling system are critical to turn the tide of the literacy crisis in South Africa, there are a number of things we can do now to help getour children reading – and critically, reading for joy. They are:
* Invest heavily in early language learning from birth.
Early language development is rooted in children’s interactions with parents, significant caregivers, childcare providers and peers.
Reading aloud to children in the early years is associated with language growth, early literacy and reading achievement at school.
Many parents and early childhood development practitioners, however, believe that children only need to learn to read when they start school, and do not realise that exposing children to rich language, books and stories before they can read or speak primes them to learn.
* Exponentially increase access to books and stories, especially in African languages.
Children cannot learn to read, or love to read, if they do not have access to books and stories.
The presence of books in the home has a greater influence on a child’s educational attainment than parents’ income, nationality or level of education.
We must, therefore, increase the number of books in South Africa exponentially in order to meet our needs; make low-cost storybooks available and invest most in African language stories.
* Promote and support reading for enjoyment – both inside and outside the classroom.
Reading for pleasure is often the missing ingredient in literacy development.
Extensive research confirms that self-selected reading for pleasure (where children choose what they want to read) results in profound growth in writing style and spelling.
So how do we spark this all-important motivation? Children aspire to healthy reading behaviour when they observe that it is sociallyvalued and enjoyable for adults.
That is why we need to ensure that children have adults who pay attention to them, listen to them and make them feel safe and loved.
Reading role models and constructive feedback from adults support children’s motivation to read.
* Involve more people in learningprogrammes.
Parents and teachers are critical, but they need support: in South Africa, 23% of children do not live with their mother or father, and there are often 40 or more pupils in a class.
South Africa needs an army of adults reading with children.
Involving more people in learning programmes – such as unemployed youth or Community Work Programme participants – also offers opportunities to develop skills and engage in rewarding work.
* Run a sustained national reading campaign. As social beings, our choices and behaviour are driven in large part by a search for status, identity and belonging.
Research has shown that mass media campaigns that activate positive peer pressure are more effective at changing behaviour than simply providing information or invoking fear.
Currently, only 14% of South African adults consider themselves to be active readers.
To change this, we need a national mass media campaign that makes reading “cool”, easy and fun; that gives the impression that everyone is doing it and firmly establishes a positive identity around “being a reader”.
While the government does play a critical role, society as a whole needs to get on board to ensure that every child can read well.
This includes business and civil society, publishers and the media, retirees and youth, teachers and parents.
Working together, we can rewrite the story of our children’s literacy development.
We can create a society where all children hear stories from birth, are motivated to read and enjoy reading, have access to large amounts of exciting and relevant reading material in their home languages, are supported by caring adults and, lastly, discuss books and stories with those around them.
It will take large-scale co-operation, commitment and political will, but there is a role for each of us to play.
If we make reading a top priority and converge efforts around it, we can nurture a generation of children who experience reading not as a difficult chore, but as a joyful, rewarding exploration of the world.
* Huston is portfolio manager: creative learners at DG Murray Trust. To read the full report, see http://dgmt.co.za/ lets-read/