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@humanities.uct.ac.za

All African societies are multilingual. Yet most children do not enjoy the normality of going to school in their mother tongue or a familiar language, or if they do, it is not for long.

The development of African languages in high status functions is held back by the hegemonic status of English or another ex-colonial language, brought about by colonial conquest and postcolonial language policies.

The power and status functions of language are most clearly marked in its printed form.

Negative impacts on literacy development of the dislocation of children from their mother tongues in school.

So the written language of a child’s upbringing in the school ( …) became divorced from his (sic) spoken language at home. There was often not the slightest relationship between the child’s written world, which was also the language of his schooling, and the world of his immediate environment in the family and the community.
Ngugi wa Thiong ‘o 1993:17

Use first principles: build
on what children already know and can do.

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.

•
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

ORAL
WRITTEN
ORAL
AND
WRITTEN

Consider the effects of the mindnumbing grip of colonial and apartheid education on children's language and literacy development.

European influence:
•
Reading as a psychological perceptual activity
•F ocus on relationships between sounds and symbols
• ‘Readiness' industry with non-
print related activities and materials.

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.

Shifts in emphasis
FROM:
Literacy as autonomous skills
TO:
Literacy as social and cultural practices

•
Emergent literacy
•
Whole language
•
Link between learning oral language and written language

Role of stories, play and imagination in early literacy development

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, rotelearning skills
• school literacy

Many teachers are not readers and writers.

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.

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.

Holding back the development of
African language children’s literature has held back developing effective literacy teachers.

Storybooks and other meaningful texts are effectively discarded as
‘supplementary’ material, the luxury that we all know most African children don’t get.
Our youngsters continue to be denied opportunities to experience richness of stories in their own languages in print.

MOTHER TONGUE-BASED
BILINGUAL EDUCATION not either mother tongue or English but both mother tongue and English

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

Introduce and explore pedagogies to challenge notions such as:
• children need to be taught through structured phonics based methods
• having some mother
• children get confused if they learn to read and write simultaneously in their mother tongue and an additional language tongue teaching means less English
• children should be introduced to a second learning language orally before in writing

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.

Creating a print-rich environment: hunting for Xhosa and
English stories; making own reading materials etc

Introducing interactive writing as a way to stimulate writing in both languages, risk taking, invented spellings, oneto-one nurturing.

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

Free Reading in Schools Project
FRISC
• 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?

Critical issues which seem obvious
• Teachers don’t 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?

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

At home – exploring bilingual print

Print on the way to school

Linking writing into meaning

What to read?
In which languages?

Make time to read in your mother tongue

Spell for yourself

Not either- or but
Both- and

How to gain confusing clarity!

Play makes perfect

Confident and competent

We all need to be nurtured