The country has been given a sobering update on the state of reading in schools. Nearly 80% of children are not learning to "read for meaning" by Grade 4. This means they cannot identify and retrieve explicitly stated information from a reading comprehension passage.
This is according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), conducted in 2016 and taking in Grade 4 pupils from 293 schools. Testing was done in all 11 official languages, so most children were assessed in their first language.
The latest Pirls results show that SA’s reading achievement is the lowest among 50 countries participating in the study.
Most countries are upper-and middle-income countries — Morocco and Egypt are the only other African participants.
In Morocco, 64% of children could not read for meaning, while in Egypt the figure was 69%. In the majority of countries, less than 5% of children could not read for meaning.
SA also took part in Pirls in 2006 and 2011. The good news is that South African achievement has improved since 2006. The improvement seems to have occurred between 2006 and 2011, but this was not recognised at the time of the 2011 release because country scores were not reported on the same scale. Now, the scores for all three Pirls studies (2006, 2011 and 2016) have been reported on the same scale.
In 2006, SA took part in the study at the Grade 5 level. By 2011, the Grade 4 South African sample performed at a higher level than the Grade 5 children had done in 2006.
This improvement is consistent with the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, in which our Grade 9 mathematics and science improved between 2002 and 2011 and again in 2015. There was no significant change in reading achievement between the 2011 and 2016 assessments, suggesting the initial improvement has not been extended. This serves to highlight the urgency to tackle reading.
If children do not learn to read effectively by Grade 4, they will not cope with curriculum demands in the higher grades. Weak learning foundations, especially in reading, are arguably the main cause of dropping out of school in grades 10, 11 and 12. Indeed, some of our research tracking children over time has shown that achievement in the earlier grades is strongly predictive of reaching and passing matric.
Moreover, performance in matric strongly predicts who will access and succeed in
higher education. These educational outcomes are what drive SA’s labour market inequalities.
Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that the most sustainable way to generate social and economic transformation is to improve the teaching and learning of reading in early grades.
The big question is how to improve reading outcomes. Despite numerous initiatives undertaken by the national and provincial education departments, it would appear that reading outcomes have barely changed since 2011.
The reality is that shifting learning and teaching at scale is harder than one might think. Many interventions have a light touch or are prevented from having an effect by other constraints. For example, providing additional reading resources may be ineffective if teachers do not know how to incorporate them into their lessons.
One of the alarming results of the Pirls 2016 study is that South African boys in Grade 4 are a full grade level behind girls. This is consistent with data from the Early Grade Reading Study, in which gender gaps were apparent in Grade 1 and persisted thereafter
Against the backdrop of low economic growth and constraints to state spending, the Pirls results create an imperative that intervention programmes must be those with a proven effect on outcomes. This applies not only to government but also to private sector and nongovernment interventions.
Too often interventions are done haphazardly and without proper evaluation, leaving no effect on the knowledge base about what works.
Since 2015, the Department of Basic Education has been evaluating intervention programmes aimed at improving home language reading outcomes in Grades 1 to 3.
Known as the Early Grade Reading Study, this project has been running in 230 schools in North West province and has used a rigorous impact evaluation methodology. The project aims to provide evidence to inform future reading interventions. A number of lessons about what works are emerging.
The first Early Grade Reading Study intervention conducted meetings with parents to equip them with ways to support their child’s reading development. Unfortunately, this intervention had a negligible effect on outcomes. The main obstacle was ensuring that parents who were not sufficiently involved in their child’s education actually attended these meetings. Parent involvement is crucial in a child’s reading development, but it turns out to be very difficult to shift parent involvement.
A second intervention provided teachers with daily lesson plans aligned to the curriculum, as well as additional African language reading materials. Teachers received training using the traditional model of centralised workshops. This intervention began to shift teacher practice, but classroom implementation was weak and pupil reading improved only marginally.
A third intervention provided the same set of lesson plans and materials, but instead of centralised training, teachers received in-classroom support from specialist reading coaches once a month. This intervention was slightly more expensive than the centralised training model, but had more than twice the effect on pupil reading.
About 20% more children surpassed specific reading fluency benchmarks at the end of Grade 2 thanks to this intervention. Not only did home language reading improve but so did English achievement. This finding is in line with other research suggesting that learning to read in one’s home language facilitates better acquisition of a second language.
The coaching intervention helped boys catch up some of the way to girls. One of the alarming results of the Pirls 2016 study is that South African boys in Grade 4 are a full grade level behind girls. This is consistent with data from the Early Grade Reading Study, in which gender gaps were apparent in Grade 1 and persisted thereafter.
However, in schools that received the coaching intervention, the gender gap was smaller than in comparison schools. Research indicates that boys are more heavily affected by poor or unstructured teaching than girls. The focus in the lesson plans on opportunities for individualised attention and on structured classroom activities such as group-guided reading may have especially helped boys.
Taken together, the Early Grade Reading Study illustrates how hard it is to shift reading outcomes at a large scale, but also points to at least one successful intervention model.
The implicit theory of change behind conventional teacher
in-service training is that teachers will increase their knowledge and will then go back to their classrooms and change their practice. This may be naïve. Lesson plans provide a prompt to enact those methods the training focused on, and on-site coaching provides encouragement to ensure enactment is happening, as well as to reflect on quality and to re-implement in an improved way.
Providing coaching to foundation-phase classrooms will be resource-intensive, and we are entering a phase of figuring out how to encourage wider take-up of this intervention model.
The Pirls results emphasise the urgency of addressing early grade reading outcomes. The level of educational and economic inequality we inherit in the in the future will depend on it.
• Taylor is director of research, monitoring and evaluation at the Basic Education Department
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