

A description and appraisal of a reading comprehension programme that was aimed at Grade 6 learners and teachers and implemented in different ways in two high-poverty primary schools where reading levels were very low. The results of the comprehension programme for the learners' reading abilities in their home language, Northern Sotho, and in English are reported and lessons learned identified.
Essentially a study of the initial stages of the rise of synthetic phonics as the preferred approach to teaching reading in the United Kingdom. It is useful because it gives an account of the Clackmannanshire study of 1992/93 and other studies that provided the crucial empirical evidence that synthetic phonics was far superior to the analytic phonics/whole language approach and, crucially, worked well with both advantaged and disadvantaged children.
A paper describes the core elements that we have found to improve early grade literacy instruction and learner outcomes: the approach to teaching, the availability of quality, relevant learner materials, the effective use of instructional time, the use of formative assessment to guide instruction, and provision of instruction in the most effective language. This paper focuses on the acquisition of literacy in alphabetic and alphasyllabic languages in the early primary years (most typically, academic levels 1 through 3) and the kinds of exposures, instruction, and support learners need to become fully literate. These are the elements of a literacy program that can be taught, that should be present in teaching and learning materials and in teacher trainings, and that relate specifically to what happens in a classroom.
A paper describes the core elements that we have found to improve early grade literacy instruction and learner outcomes: the approach to teaching, the availability of quality, relevant learner materials, the effective use of instructional time, the use of formative assessment to guide instruction, and provision of instruction in the most effective language. This paper focuses on the acquisition of literacy in alphabetic and alphasyllabic languages in the early primary years (most typically, academic levels 1 through 3) and the kinds of exposures, instruction, and support learners need to become fully literate. These are the elements of a literacy program that can be taught, that should be present in teaching and learning materials and in teacher trainings, and that relate specifically to what happens in a classroom.
Discusses the disputes internationally and in Australia on how reading is taught and raises the important issue of the lack of impact of research on teaching practice.
A summary of a key chapter on literacy acquisition from Helena Abadzi’s well known book.
Short paper arguing that failure to learn reading is the primary reason for repetition in the early grades. Students cannot learn from books until they can read fluently, and they may even be unable to solve verbal problems written in maths books. Abadzi argues that by by the end of grade 1 students should be able to read very common words, albeit haltingly. By the end of grade 2 at the latest, students should be reading simple texts fluently, at a rate of at least 60 words per minute.
This annotated bibliography was compiled by Claire Biesman-Simons and Kerryn Dixon with Elizabeth Pretorius as part of the Primary Teacher Education Project (PrimTEd). It gives a summary account of South African research that has been done on reading in English as a First Additional Language from 2007 to 2021. It comprises a set of annotated entries, mainly research articles from accredited journals and also lists several other sources closely related to reading in EFAL. Originally compiled in 2018 and 2019 and then revised in 2021, it is designed in such a way that new entries can be added to it as new research emerges.
This literature review records that learning to read reinforces and modifies certain fundamental abilities, such as verbal and visual memory, phonological awareness, and visuospatial and visuomotor skills and that that literacy and education influence the pathways used by the brain for problem-solving. It includes an interesting finding that learning to read in adulthood is a process supported by different brain structures from the ones used when learning occurs at the usual age in childhood.
The article provides a useful examination of the distinction between science and pseudoscience, outlines the characteristics of good educational research and exposes that much educational thinking, including much special education, exhibits the core values of pseudoscience. It provides some interesting examples from Australia in the field of reading instruction.
An exceedingly thorough and comprehensive up to date review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children’s earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. Phonics is highlighted as central to learning in a writing system such as English but other research is reviewed on what else children need to learn to become expert readers. Consideration is also given to how these findings might be translated into effective classroom practice.
Study showing that literate people have a different functional organization of the human brain and that learning the visual representation of language (and the rules for matching phonemes and graphemes) develops new language processing possibilities.
To inform the work of the Primary Teacher Education Project the Literacy Working Group conducted an audit of language and literacy teacher education at ten South African universities in the 2017 to 2018. In addition an analysis was made of the Bachelor of Education modules taught in sixteen universities. The final report was compiled by Professor Yvonne Reed of the University of the Witwatersrand.
Full version of an article published in a condensed form by The Conversation on 26 February 2018 as "South Africa’s reading crisis is a cognitive catastrophe".
Excellent overview of research and practice in South African literacy education in schools. It also looks at current state and NGO programme and project interventions and makes a number of recommendations for research, development and action.
The ITERP project – a collaboration between the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), the Department of Basic Education (DBE), the Education Deans' Forum, and JET Education Services – was to gather up-to-date information on the state of initial teacher education (ITE) in South Africa and to examine the extent to which the ITE programmes offered by universities are adequately preparing teachers to teach in South African schools.
A study of the relationship between pre-service teachers’ conceptions of children and of picture books in the context of little material on picture books in curricula for teacher education.
CITE-TEL is a web-based resource, the Critical, Interactive, Transparent & Evolving literature review in Initial Teacher Education in Literacy, hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. It seeks to list the research literature that is focused on initial teacher preparation in literacy and provides a forum for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to engage with this growing body of research.
A large scale study of the influence of the home and community literacy environments in Asia and Africa that found that a modest but consistent relationship between students’ home literacy environments and reading scores, and a strong relationship between reading gains and participation in community reading activities.
This research study sought to examine the results of three interventions to improve teachers’ instructional practice – one with block training twice a year (which included provision of scripted lesson plans, materials and training), another with the same block training and ongoing support from a reading coach, and a third involving parents. The intervention with reading coaches was found to be a critical component in the persistence of gains.
Proceedings on this first national conference on family literacy in South Africa has some excellent papers that look into the near invisible world of family literacy practices and explore the developing communities of practice of educators engaged in family literacy projects.
The study looks at teacher instructional practice, learner performance outcomes, and intervention process design. It was designed to help develop an instructional toolkit for Grades R to 3 in the Eastern Cape context. The report concludes with an identification and of the binding constraints in the system and presents proposals for key interventions that could contribute to the transformation of foundation phase instructional practice on a wider system scale.
Popular article from the United States of America that argues that, thought scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught, many educators and teacher educators do not known the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As as a result, millions of children are set up to fail.
Article noting the contradiction between empirical research evidence backed up by the constitutional support for mother-tongue instruction with the current education system’s failure to teach students to read and write and its prioritization of English.
A brief survey of North American teaching of reading research.
Presentation made to a PrimTEd seminar in February 2020 illustrating some of the differences and similarities in the orthography, phonics and syntax between the Nguni, Sotho and English languages that are important for teachers to have knowledge of when they are teaching languages.
Presentation made to a PrimTEd seminar in February 2020 that outlines the Molteno Institute’s work on graded readers basic on the phonics of South African languages as well as briefly describing other resources (ZENEX, EGRS 2 and the Department of Basic Education’s new National Framework for the Teaching of Reading in African Languages in the Foundation Phase).
These draft standards were prepared by members of the Consolidated Literacy Working Group of the Primary Teacher Education Project (PrimTEd). These have been discussed within the group, examined at a national consultation, and revised accordingly. They are now open for a further consultation and it must be emphasized that they are draft standards, standards are only truly such when they are recognized by the appropriate authority or authorities. They are standards that apply specifically to initial language and literacy teacher education with a specific focus on: • Developing new graduate teachers’ ability to teach literacy in African languages as home or additional languages, with a special focus on reading and writing; • English as a First Additional language with a special focus on reading and writing; and on using English as the medium of instruction across the curriculum • Developing new graduate teachers’ ability to teach literacy in English as a home or first additional language in multilingual contexts.
Critique of whole language and balanced literacy approaches to teaching reading. Has a rich set of URLs to useful sources.
A commentary on the evidence coming out of evidence-based practices in early reading instruction and intervention in low- and middle income countries In Africa, Asia and Latin America.
A description and appraisal of a reading comprehension programme that was aimed at Grade 6 learners and teachers and implemented in different ways in two high-poverty primary schools where reading levels were very low. The results of the comprehension programme for the learners' reading abilities in their home language, Northern Sotho, and in English are reported and lessons learned identified.
Essentially a study of the initial stages of the rise of synthetic phonics as the preferred approach to teaching reading in the United Kingdom. It is useful because it gives an account of the Clackmannanshire study of 1992/93 and other studies that provided the crucial empirical evidence that synthetic phonics was far superior to the analytic phonics/whole language approach and, crucially, worked well with both advantaged and disadvantaged children.
A paper describes the core elements that we have found to improve early grade literacy instruction and learner outcomes: the approach to teaching, the availability of quality, relevant learner materials, the effective use of instructional time, the use of formative assessment to guide instruction, and provision of instruction in the most effective language. This paper focuses on the acquisition of literacy in alphabetic and alphasyllabic languages in the early primary years (most typically, academic levels 1 through 3) and the kinds of exposures, instruction, and support learners need to become fully literate. These are the elements of a literacy program that can be taught, that should be present in teaching and learning materials and in teacher trainings, and that relate specifically to what happens in a classroom.
A paper describes the core elements that we have found to improve early grade literacy instruction and learner outcomes: the approach to teaching, the availability of quality, relevant learner materials, the effective use of instructional time, the use of formative assessment to guide instruction, and provision of instruction in the most effective language. This paper focuses on the acquisition of literacy in alphabetic and alphasyllabic languages in the early primary years (most typically, academic levels 1 through 3) and the kinds of exposures, instruction, and support learners need to become fully literate. These are the elements of a literacy program that can be taught, that should be present in teaching and learning materials and in teacher trainings, and that relate specifically to what happens in a classroom.
Discusses the disputes internationally and in Australia on how reading is taught and raises the important issue of the lack of impact of research on teaching practice.
A summary of a key chapter on literacy acquisition from Helena Abadzi’s well known book.
Abadzi argues that reading depends on the speed of visual recognition and capacity of short term memory. To understand a sentence, the mind must read it fast enough to capture it within the limits of the short-term memory. This means that children must attain a minimum speed of fairly accurate reading to understand a passage. Learning to read involves “tricking” the brain into perceiving groups of letters as coherent words. This is achieved most efficiently by pairing small units consistently with sounds rather than learning entire words. To link the letters with sounds, explicit and extensive practice is needed; the more complex the spelling of a language, the more practice is necessary. All students should attain reading speeds of 45– 60 words per minute by the end of grade 2 and 120–150 words per minute for grades 6–8.
Short paper arguing that failure to learn reading is the primary reason for repetition in the early grades. Students cannot learn from books until they can read fluently, and they may even be unable to solve verbal problems written in maths books. Abadzi argues that by by the end of grade 1 students should be able to read very common words, albeit haltingly. By the end of grade 2 at the latest, students should be reading simple texts fluently, at a rate of at least 60 words per minute.
This annotated bibliography was compiled by Claire Biesman-Simons and Kerryn Dixon with Elizabeth Pretorius as part of the Primary Teacher Education Project (PrimTEd). It gives a summary account of South African research that has been done on reading in English as a First Additional Language from 2007 to 2021. It comprises a set of annotated entries, mainly research articles from accredited journals and also lists several other sources closely related to reading in EFAL. Originally compiled in 2018 and 2019 and then revised in 2021, it is designed in such a way that new entries can be added to it as new research emerges.
This literature review records that learning to read reinforces and modifies certain fundamental abilities, such as verbal and visual memory, phonological awareness, and visuospatial and visuomotor skills and that that literacy and education influence the pathways used by the brain for problem-solving. It includes an interesting finding that learning to read in adulthood is a process supported by different brain structures from the ones used when learning occurs at the usual age in childhood.
The article provides a useful examination of the distinction between science and pseudoscience, outlines the characteristics of good educational research and exposes that much educational thinking, including much special education, exhibits the core values of pseudoscience. It provides some interesting examples from Australia in the field of reading instruction.
An exceedingly thorough and comprehensive up to date review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children’s earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. Phonics is highlighted as central to learning in a writing system such as English but other research is reviewed on what else children need to learn to become expert readers. Consideration is also given to how these findings might be translated into effective classroom practice.
Study showing that literate people have a different functional organization of the human brain and that learning the visual representation of language (and the rules for matching phonemes and graphemes) develops new language processing possibilities.
To inform the work of the Primary Teacher Education Project the Literacy Working Group conducted an audit of language and literacy teacher education at ten South African universities in the 2017 to 2018. In addition an analysis was made of the Bachelor of Education modules taught in sixteen universities. The final report was compiled by Professor Yvonne Reed of the University of the Witwatersrand.
Full version of an article published in a condensed form by The Conversation on 26 February 2018 as "South Africa’s reading crisis is a cognitive catastrophe".
Excellent overview of research and practice in South African literacy education in schools. It also looks at current state and NGO programme and project interventions and makes a number of recommendations for research, development and action.
The ITERP project – a collaboration between the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), the Department of Basic Education (DBE), the Education Deans' Forum, and JET Education Services – was to gather up-to-date information on the state of initial teacher education (ITE) in South Africa and to examine the extent to which the ITE programmes offered by universities are adequately preparing teachers to teach in South African schools.
A study of the relationship between pre-service teachers’ conceptions of children and of picture books in the context of little material on picture books in curricula for teacher education.
CITE-TEL is a web-based resource, the Critical, Interactive, Transparent & Evolving literature review in Initial Teacher Education in Literacy, hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. It seeks to list the research literature that is focused on initial teacher preparation in literacy and provides a forum for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to engage with this growing body of research.
In this article a descriptive ‘account-of’ an unsuccessful mathematics lesson is followed by detailed analysis , which drew on theory and literature and provides an example of a South African teacher-researcher’s self-study on disruptive learner behaviour in her Foundation Phase mathematics class. It shows is useful at the practitioner level, in which it details how increasingly critical layers of pedagogic reflection can be used to transform mathematics teaching, and via this route, to improve access to mathematical learning in a challenging context. At the research and policy levels, the findings question the separation of attention to mathematics and learner behaviour, rather than addressing the two in combination.
Report on research undertaken to improve learners’ understanding of and attainment in multiplicative reasoning when solving context-based problems. The research site was a suburban school serving a predominantly historically disadvantaged learner population, and involved teachers and learners from three classes in each of Grades 1–3. A 4-week intervention piloted the use of context-based problems and array images to encourage learners to model (through pictures and diagrams) the problem situations, with the models produced used both to support problem solving and to support understanding of the multiplicative structures of the contexts. The findings of this study demonstrate that young learners can be helped to better understand and improve their attainment in multiplicative reasoning,
Presentation to the Initial Teacher Education Hackathon on the ongoing work of the PrimTEd 2 EFAL and Maths Assessments in the B.Ed.
Report of the work conducted by the Assessment Working Group of PrimTEd to design a common assessment in mathematics for higher education institutions use with their with Bachelor of Education student intakes. The assessment instrument is an online test of 90 minutes, consisting of 50 items on different mathematics concepts pertaining to foundation and intermediate phase school mathematics for teaching. The authors, analysed the performance of the 2017 pilot testing with first year students from two universities, and the 2018 national assessment from seven higher education institutions. The results revelaed similar patterns of performance. As the test was set at the level of mathematics at which the students are expected to teach, it is concerning that the majority of students (71%) were not able to obtain more than 60%. This brings into question the assumptions made about the mathematics skills and competencies that entrants into the B.Ed programme bring with them into tertiary education.
Report of the work conducted by the Assessment Working Group of PrimTEd to design a common assessment in mathematics for higher education institutions use with their with Bachelor of Education student intakes. The assessment instrument is an online test of 90 minutes, consisting of 50 items on different mathematics concepts pertaining to foundation and intermediate phase school mathematics for teaching. The authors, analysed the performance of the 2017 pilot testing with first year students from two universities, and the 2018 national assessment from seven higher education institutions. The results revelaed similar patterns of performance. As the test was set at the level of mathematics at which the students are expected to teach, it is concerning that the majority of students (71%) were not able to obtain more than 60%. This brings into question the assumptions made about the mathematics skills and competencies that entrants into the B.Ed programme bring with them into tertiary education.
Presentation to the Initial Teacher Education Hackathon on the ongoing work of the PrimTEd 2 EFAL and Maths Assessments in the B.Ed.
Report of the work conducted by the Assessment Working Group of PrimTEd to design a common assessment in mathematics for higher education institutions use with their with Bachelor of Education student intakes. The assessment instrument is an online test of 90 minutes, consisting of 50 items on different mathematics concepts pertaining to foundation and intermediate phase school mathematics for teaching. The authors, analysed the performance of the 2017 pilot testing with first year students from two universities, and the 2018 national assessment from seven higher education institutions. The results revelaed similar patterns of performance. As the test was set at the level of mathematics at which the students are expected to teach, it is concerning that the majority of students (71%) were not able to obtain more than 60%. This brings into question the assumptions made about the mathematics skills and competencies that entrants into the B.Ed programme bring with them into tertiary education.
Report of the work conducted by the Assessment Working Group of PrimTEd to design a common assessment in mathematics for higher education institutions use with their with Bachelor of Education student intakes. The assessment instrument is an online test of 90 minutes, consisting of 50 items on different mathematics concepts pertaining to foundation and intermediate phase school mathematics for teaching. The authors, analysed the performance of the 2017 pilot testing with first year students from two universities, and the 2018 national assessment from seven higher education institutions. The results revelaed similar patterns of performance. As the test was set at the level of mathematics at which the students are expected to teach, it is concerning that the majority of students (71%) were not able to obtain more than 60%. This brings into question the assumptions made about the mathematics skills and competencies that entrants into the B.Ed programme bring with them into tertiary education.
Report on research undertaken to improve learners’ understanding of and attainment in multiplicative reasoning when solving context-based problems. The research site was a suburban school serving a predominantly historically disadvantaged learner population, and involved teachers and learners from three classes in each of Grades 1–3. A 4-week intervention piloted the use of context-based problems and array images to encourage learners to model (through pictures and diagrams) the problem situations, with the models produced used both to support problem solving and to support understanding of the multiplicative structures of the contexts. The findings of this study demonstrate that young learners can be helped to better understand and improve their attainment in multiplicative reasoning,
In this article a descriptive ‘account-of’ an unsuccessful mathematics lesson is followed by detailed analysis , which drew on theory and literature and provides an example of a South African teacher-researcher’s self-study on disruptive learner behaviour in her Foundation Phase mathematics class. It shows is useful at the practitioner level, in which it details how increasingly critical layers of pedagogic reflection can be used to transform mathematics teaching, and via this route, to improve access to mathematical learning in a challenging context. At the research and policy levels, the findings question the separation of attention to mathematics and learner behaviour, rather than addressing the two in combination.
NRF-Statement-Predatory.pdf
— 1.5 MB