Investigating the Comprehension Iceberg: Developing empirical benchmarks for early grade reading in agglutinating African language
References
Spaull, N. Pretorius, E., and Mohohlwane, N. 2018. Investigating the Comprehension Iceberg: Developing empirical benchmarks
for early grade reading in agglutinating African languages. RESEP Working Paper Series No. WP01/2018. Stellenbosch: University of Stellenbosch
Additional Info
Report on an assessment survey using an adaptation of the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA)with 785 Grade 3 learners across three languages (Northern Sotho, Tsonga and Zulu) that showed that there were large differences in reading results on fluency, accuracy and oral comprehension between languages with conjunctive and disjunctive orthographies. Te results suggest that there are minimum words correct per minute (wcpm) rates for each language, below which it is virtually impossible to read for meaning - 52-66 wcpm for Northern Sotho, 39-48 wcpm for Tsonga nad 20-32 wcpm for Zulu. The authors argue that there is a strong need for empirical language-specific norms and benchmarks for African languages.
