2 days ago
Children need rich, multifaceted teaching in their mother tongues to master literacy and learning
Learning literacy in mother tongues is the foundation for all learning. It makes sense for all children to begin learning in languages they are familiar with, so they can participate and engage in their learning more actively than they do when learning in unfamiliar tongues.
In SA, many children start learning to read and write in their home languages from grades 1 to 3. As the children learn to read and write, they also need to have access to nurturing experiences with storytelling, reading and writing, arts (visual and performative) and text analysis. They also need access to books, libraries and reading role models who are family members at home, in the community and at school.
Before 2025, many African language speaking learners experienced mother tongue education only in the foundation phase. When they reached grade 4, these learners had to switch to learning everything in English.
This restriction of African languages to one or two periods a day in the intermediate phase, in particular, puts limitations on language and literacy practices that should continue to take place across the curriculum. This transition to English also put limitations on the number of published books in African languages that children can access.
With the incremental implementation of mother tongue-based bilingual education starting in grade 4, African language learners will now also have access to African languages as they begin learning science and maths bilingually.
This calls for a large production of learning and teaching support materials as well as supplementary non-fiction texts written in African languages or multilingually in African languages and English. This can ensure that reading and writing take place throughout the day and across the curriculum. This will ensure the daily literacy practices that shape them into becoming literate.
The different iterations of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) results, every five years since 2006, have all pointed to poor reading performance among South African children. Though they all perform below the PIRLS benchmark, learners taking the assessment in English and Afrikaans do much better than those using African languages.
The African language-speaking learners have had fewer opportunities to read in their home languages because they have little access to a wide variety of texts and to libraries and books at home.
It is not surprising that the learners who do poorly in these assessments, even when they write in their home languages, come from working-class backgrounds, where it is more important to buy a loaf of bread than a book.
Many interventions to improve literacy in the foundation phase have been carried out, with some arguing for a simple view of reading for working-class children. This means to improve the children's reading levels, teachers should focus on teaching decoding skills well.
But there has been little appreciation for complex approaches to teaching literacy, which integrate the teaching of phonological awareness ( sound structure) with morphological awareness (understanding how words can be broken down into smaller units of meaning such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes) for African languages, teaching of reading with the teaching of writing, art (visual and performative) and storytelling for children from working-class backgrounds.
