Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of what we know about reading outcomes in South Africa. After an initial survey of some foundational tenets of reading research we show that while reading outcomes in South Africa improved between 2006 and 2011 they have stagnated between 2011 and 2016. The most recent PIRLS study (2016) showed that 78% of Grade 4 children cannot read for meaning in any language. There is nothing inevitable about these results. The knowledge and instructional practices required to teach children to read – as well as the resources needed to do it – are known and well understood internationally, even in high-poverty contexts. We argue that the inequalities evident in the schooling system have their roots in unequal life chances doled out at birth and consolidated through differential reading trajectories. Moving beyond the ‘comprehension iceberg’ we document what lies beneath these dire results. The majority of children have not mastered the basics of decoding in their home language in Grade 1 or 2 making reading for meaning or pleasure unlikely. We advocate an approach focusing on early reading success and ensuring that teachers know how to teach reading, that they have the materials to do so, that children have ready access to books and that reading outcomes are assessed annually.
The title Falling at the first hurdle was that of a research report by Taylor (1989) on literacy in South African schools. That we face similar challenges with similar diagnoses 30 years on is reason enough to reproduce Taylor’s incisive title, with a slight modification.
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Notes
- 1.
In kee** with official South African curriculum terminology, we use the terms Home Language and Additional Language. In the literature more broadly, these are synonymous with first language (L1) and second language (L2) learning.
- 2.
While SACMEQ has released its 2013 results and claimed they are comparable, they have not released any technical documentation or data as is standard practice in previous rounds of SACMEQ (Ross et al. 2005), and in other international assessments (see the 300+ page technical reports for TIMSS, PISA or PIRLS for example). Because there are open and unanswerable questions around their validity (Spaull 2016b), notably that the assessment instruments used and the analytical assumptions made changed between 2007 and 2013, we do not discuss the SACMEQ 2013 time trends in reading.
- 3.
A technical note of some importance is that older reports of the prePIRLS 2011 results (Howie et al. 2012; Mullis et al. 2012) use a different scale to the traditional PIRLS scale. This was because the prePIRLS assessments were not calibrated to be equated to PIRLS in 2011. This was rectified with the release of the 2016 PIRLS results where the International Association for the Evaluation of Education (IEA) retrospectively rescaled the prePIRLS scores to be comparable to the PIRLS scores. Thus while in 2011 one could not compare PIRLS-2006 and prePIRLS-2011, by 2016 one could compare PIRLS-2006, prePIRLS-2011 and PIRLS-Literacy-2016 all on the same PIRLS scale (as in Table 8.2 below). All three included nationally representative samples of Grade 4 learners who were assessed in whatever the language of learning and teaching was used in that school in Grades 1–3. (Note prePIRLS and PIRLS-Literacy are easier versions of PIRLS that use texts of approximately 400 words rather than the 800 word texts of PIRLS, although for equating purposes there are two PIRLS passages in PIRLS-Literacy and two PIRLS-Literacy passages in PIRLS (Mullis and Martin 2015, p. 28)).
- 4.
We do not report the Grade 5 results from PIRLS 2011 or PIRLS 2016 since these assessments were not administered to a nationally-representative sample of primary schools. They were only administered to English- and Afrikaans-LOLT schools in 2011 and English, Afrikaans and isiZulu-LOLT schools in 2016.
- 5.
The oft-cited 40-point figure for a year of learning is based on three Nordic countries which each assessed two consecutive grades in PIRLS; namely 3rd and 4th Grade in Sweden, and 4th and 5th Grade in Iceland and Norway. The overall differences were found to be 41 points in Sweden, 39 points in Iceland and 43 points in Norway (Rosén 2010, p. 7). The more correct 50-point figure comes from the South African PIRLS experience in 2006 where a nationally-representative sample of Grade 4 and Grade 5 learners from the same schools were assessed at the same time and on the same assessment yielding a 49-point difference (Howie et al. 2008, p. 19).
- 6.
As an aside, it is also worth noting that the improvement in performance between 2006 and 2011 is not undisputed. For example, the official PIRLS 2016 report indicates that the trend results for South Africa are only comparable between 2011 and 2016 and that between 2006 and 2011 the data is “not comparable for measuring trends to 2016, primarily due to countries improving translations or increasing population coverage” (Mullis et al. 2017: 303). In the case of South Africa this is primarily because in the PIRLS 2006 assessment, the psychometric scales and instruments were not calibrated to measure performance accurately below 300 PIRLS points (Personal Communication, Dirk Heystedt (2017)). In 2006 South Africa’s score was 253. This may be an underestimate due to motivation problems where learners become demotivated by encountering texts that are far too difficult to them. Notwithstanding the above, it is highly unlikely that the full improvement from 2006 to 2011 is accounted for by motivation problems alone rather than a real improvement in reading outcomes.
- 7.
School wealth here is calculated as the average of student asset wealth in the school. Student wealth is calculated using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) on the eight possession questions in PIRLS Literacy 2016 (PIRLS, 2018a: S1.1; 2018b: 2,7). While this is unlikely to create an accurate cardinal indicator of wealth, the purpose here is to create an ordinal ranking and this is arguably the best measure of student wealth available. Calculations on the PIRLS Low International Benchmark use the first plausible value.
- 8.
According to V-ANA (2013), 90% of fee-charging schools in the sample had English or Afrikaans as their language of assessment. In addition, given that virtually all independent schools are either English or Afrikaans medium and fee-charging, this adds a further 4–5% of learners to this group.
- 9.
Although this benchmark is derived from learning to read in English, all languages that use the Roman alphabet in their orthography should reflect fairly similar benchmarks.
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Spaull, N., Pretorius, E. (2019). Still Falling at the First Hurdle: Examining Early Grade Reading in South Africa. In: Spaull, N., Jansen, J. (eds) South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_8
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