YOUNG READERS AND WRITERS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: REALITIES, VISIONS, AND CHALLENGES

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YOUNG READERS AND WRITERS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
REALITIES, VISIONS, AND CHALLENGES

• Carole Bloch
• Project for the Study of Alternative Education in
  South Africa (PRAESA)
• University of Cape Town
• cbloch_at_humanities.uct.ac.za

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Grades 1 to 3 3 years in the mother tongue, OR
straight for English, OR something in between.
Most teachers communicate with the children,
and teach in an indigenous language they and
(most or all of) the children share.
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• Grade 4 onwards - official medium of
  instruction English
• Almost all reading materials (textbooks etc)
  English
• Children write in English
• All assessment (which is almost exclusively
  written) English

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ORAL
WRITTEN
AND
ORAL
WRITTEN
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• European influence
• Reading as a psychological perceptual activity
• Focus on relationships between sounds and
  symbols
• Readiness' industry with non- print related
  activities and materials.

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Literacy is made up of autonomous sets of skills
that can be broken down, learned and then later
applied. Held as gospel in systems staffed by
untrained or poorly trained African language
speaking teacher trainers and teachers, many of
whom lived almost exclusively in the oral mode.
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Shifts in emphasis FROM Literacy as autonomous
skills TO Literacy as social and cultural
practices
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• Emergent literacy
• Whole language
• Link between learning oral language and written
  language

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Role of stories, play and imagination in early
literacy development
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Environments for literacy

• PRINT RICH
• abundant mother tongue materials
• high status
• literacy events and practices
• whole language, emergent literacy
• family literacy

• PRINT SCARCE
• few or no mother tongue materials
• low status
• literacy as skills
• textbook teacher
• phonics, rote-learning skills
• school literacy

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Many teachers are not readers and writers.
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BECAUSE linguists and language scholars are
passionate about African languages and also
often about disecting and getting teachers to
transmit the 'correct' form of their language
AND teachers haven't been educated in their
mother tongue, teachers get trained to approach
mother tongue teaching as if it were a foreign
language.
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The focus is on how to get text books into the
hands of teachers and children, first in mother
tongue and then the ex-colonial language.
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Holding back the development of African language
childrens literature has held back developing
effective literacy teachers.
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Storybooks and other meaningful texts are
effectively discarded as supplementary
material, the luxury that we all know most
African children dont get. Our youngsters
continue to be denied opportunities to experience
richness of stories in their own languages in
print.
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MOTHER TONGUE-BASED BILINGUAL EDUCATION

• not either mother tongue or English
• but both mother tongue and English

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Battswood Biliteracy Project 1998 - 2003

• SITUATION
• Ex coloured English medium school
• Influx of Xhosa speakers
• English/Afrikaans teachers and peers
• No planning/training
• Teachers tearing hair out

• ACTION
• Raise status of Xhosa by using in print for
  simultaneous biliteracy learning
• Introduce Xhosa to English/Afrikaans children
• Xhosa and English teachers work together

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Introduce and explore pedagogies to challenge
notions such as

• children get confused if they learn to read and
  write simultaneously in their mother tongue and
  an additional language
• children should be introduced to a second
  language orally before in writing

• children need to be taught through structured
  phonics based methods
• having some mother tongue teaching means less
  English learning

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Explore using an emergent literacy approach to
enable children, most of whom are from low
literacy homes, to become motivated to want to
read and write for personally meaningful reasons.
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Creating a print-rich environment hunting for
Xhosa and English stories making own reading
materials etc
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Introducing interactive writing as a way to
stimulate writing in both languages, risk taking,
invented spellings, one-to-one nurturing.
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• By the end of grade 6 we could see
• many children communicating and expressing
  themselves through reading and writing in two
  languages
• that the development of English competence was
  not hindered
• children who were proud and confident to be
  reading and writing in Xhosa

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Free Reading in Schools ProjectFRISC

• Reading freely for enjoyment, information
• Why should children in the South not have
  literacy learning made easier for them by having
  the option of enjoying storybooks in their mother
  tongues?

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Critical issues which seem obvious

• Teachers dont see the point of reading for
  enjoyment, even in English
• Teachers need to be inspired so that they enjoy
  reading as well as children
• How to select appropriate stories for different
  ages read to children have an open-ended
  conversation etc
• What to do about the shortage of books?

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Feeling at home with literacy

• Follows Zia from home to school and back home
• Demonstrates some useful experiences, strategies
  and outcomes
• Gives trainers and teachers possibilities against
  which to consider their own situation

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At home with print, but in which languages?
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At home exploring bilingual print
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What print do you see on the way to school?
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Print on the way to school
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Start with what the children know
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Linking writing into meaning
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What to read? In which languages?
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What to read? In which languages?
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Make time to read in your mother tongue
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Make time to read in your mother tongue
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Spell for yourself to say what you want to say.
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Spell for yourself
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Bilingual and biliterate!
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Not either- or but Both- and
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Achieving confusing clarity!
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How to gain confusing clarity!
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Play makes perfect!
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Play makes perfect
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Confident and competent.
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Confident and competent
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we all need nurturing
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We all need to be nurtured
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Thank you, Ndi ya bulela, Baie dankie, Merci
Beaucoup!