Durban - There is no easy solution to the shocking report released this month that showed 81% of South African children can’t read for meaning in any language by the time they reach grade 4.
The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessed more than 400 000 pupils in 57 countries during the Covid-19 period. In South Africa, 12 426 Grade 4 pupils in 321 schools were assessed.
The study was conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which does large-scale research on education globally.
UKZN’s discipline coordinator and senior lecturer in Early Childhood Education in the School of Education, Dr Makie Kortjass, said: “It is critical here to also focus on the issue that reading comprehension is a complex process, which is rooted first in pupils’ ability to decode. So, pupils must have good decoding skills as a base for reading comprehension. For example, decoding includes phonological and phonemic awareness. Pupils who lack strong phonological and phonemic awareness may have difficulty decoding words accurately, which can hinder comprehension.”
She said the PIRLS results suggested that South African pupils’ difficulties with decoding and fluency impact their reading comprehension and ability to answer questions effectively. “Building strong decoding skills, fluency, and reading practice is crucial for improving comprehension outcomes. We must avoid a narrow focus on reading comprehension.”
Kortjass called for the government to commit to long-term evidence-based practices because short-term interventions often fail to yield lasting results as they may not allow the time needed for meaningful change to occur.
She suggested that the Department of Education should focus on four core areas to tackle this problem. Firstly, decreasing large class sizes to allow for more individual attention.
“(Big) class sizes also make it difficult for teachers to gather ongoing informal assessment data that can help remediate gaps.”
Secondly, reading instruction. “It’s based on a national curriculum ‒ Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) ‒ that is not aligned to the scientific evidence base on effective instructional practices for reading/science of reading (SOR) ‒ but is rather rooted in an outdated and ineffective ‘balanced literacy’ approach.”
Thirdly, she said other stakeholders, like non-government organisations, should be more involved in improving teaching, and fourthly, “there should be classroom materials that focus on building pupils’ backgrounds and general knowledge about a wide variety of topics”.
2030 Reading Panel Secretariat Professor Nic Spaull shared his view on SAFM recently. He said that despite the high percentage, a factor that had to be considered was that today’s children were almost a year behind compared with those of 2016, the last time this PIRLS assessment was conducted, largely because of the disruption caused by Covid-19.
“The problem here is that if you have children that are a year behind, they won’t catch up except if there’s an implementation of sustained, deliberate interventions like weekend and afternoon classes or holiday camps, and we’re not doing that,” Spaull said. He said there is no national plan to try and catch up on this “generational catastrophe”.
Spaull said most of the country’s current teachers were over 50 years old and had been trained under Apartheid but “never trained on how to teach reading”, leading to big deficiencies. He also said teachers today faced hard conditions, and fewer teachers were being hired in spite of increasing enrolment numbers.
The National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa) executive director Basil Manuel said: “The study found that the lowest performing pupils were found in quintiles one to three schools. These schools are no-fee paying schools and are often under-resourced and dominated by overcrowded classrooms”.
Anna Nelson, a South African primary school teacher currently teaching in Hong Kong, earned her Bachelor's degree in Early Childhood Education (Foundation Phase, Grades R to 3) and has worked with multiple primary schools in Makhanda/Grahamstown, Eastern Cape. She said the process of helping children understand was not straightforward.
“You don’t ‘do’ to get results and help children learn to comprehend what they read. It requires months of work, where learning, including storytelling (which nurtures speaking skills through discussions based on the story, giving children practice using words in spoken language and attending to their comprehension of words) takes place.”
Nelson also said parents should ask their children key questions about exactly what they had read; that way, their ability to read and understand was strengthened.
The National Department of Basic Education was contacted for comment last week and did not respond.
The Independent on Saturday