Focus on reading to fix education
Pupils who learn to read fluently in their home language do much better at a later stage
There has been progress i n t h e p e r f o r ma n c e o f schools — more children go to school, more black learners matriculate and achieve university exemptions, and schools are deracialised. But in most respects the picture remains bleak — almost half of children never reach matric, learners repeat classes despite limits on repetition, many drop out of school at 15 or 16, and all international and local tests point to extremely weak learning outcomes.
Against this background, government, researchers and others have been trying to determine what goes wrong in our schools and what can be done to improve the situation. Next week, the research group on socioeconomic policy at Stellenbosch University’s department of economics is releasing two reports, Identifying Binding Constraints in Education and Laying Firm Foundations: Getting Reading Right, that try to provide some answers. They are based on studies by a team of researchers working with the department of basic education.
The idea behind identifying binding constraints follows an approach used by Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard’s Centre for International Development and professor of the practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government, and others. Not all the many problems in education can be tackled at once, so the focus should be on those that bind most. For instance, if many teachers are not in class teaching when they should be, efforts to improve teacher subject knowledge will not have much effect. Before dealing with teachers’ inadequate knowledge (the nonbinding constraint), we would first need to deal with the binding constraint — teachers not being there to teach their classes. The binding constraints approach helps us to assess priority. Binding constraints need attention first.
At the launch of the reports on Tuesday next week in Stellenbosch, we will discuss four binding constraints. Together, these and others have led to weak educational outcomes, and one is particularly disconcerting because it also acts as a constraint to further educational progress. That outcome — the fifth constraint — is the failure of children to read fluently and with meaning in their home language at the end of the foundation phase (grade 3). This central finding links the two reports.
The first three years at school are largely the period in which children learn to read. From then on it is largely about reading to learn. Progress in all other subjects depends on being able to read fluently and with comprehension. Those who cannot read properly are even more disadvantaged if they also have to switch to English in grade 4, as happens in most of our schools.
Thus our main recommendation to the department of basic education is to set a priority early grade reading goal: that all learners must read fluently and with comprehension by the end of grade 3. This would reprioritise what gets done in classrooms and ensures district officials give more attention to monitoring and support in the foundation phase. The data shows that officials currently prioritise high schools for visits because of the emphasis on matric results.
Our research provides new information that explains the weak educational performance of children. The following findings with regard to reading give an indication of the contribution such research can make to policy discussions.
• About 70% of all children learn in an African language in the first few grades. Most switch to English in grade 4 but because some switch earlier and others later, Stephen Taylor and Marisa von Fintel found that persevering with learning in a child’s home language improves learning outcomes, even in English. The reason is children find it easier to tran- sition into literacy in a second language if they are first literate in their home language.
• Kim Draper and Nic Spaull undertook the first analysis of large-scale oral reading fluency in English using data gathered by the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit. Oral reading fluency is the ability to read text quickly, accurately and with meaningful expression. They found that the English oral reading fluency of grade 5 rural learners is as low as that of grade 2 second-language learners in Florida in the United States. As many as 41% were considered to be nonreaders in English, reading so slowly that they could not understand what they were reading, and 11% could not read a single English word.
• A startling new finding by Surette van Staden was that the disadvantage of learning in a second language was much reduced if that language was related to the child’s home language, in other words part of the same language group. For example, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Siswati and Xitsonga are Nguni languages, and Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana are Sotho languages. A child who speaks an Nguni language at home was less disadvantaged if the school’s foundation phase language was another Nguni language rather than an unrelated one. This has implications in multilingual contexts such as Gauteng. Where it is impractical for foundation-phase children to attend a school teaching in their home language, it appears preferable that they at least attend a school of the same language group.
• Annika Bergbauer found that some factors not often considered seemed strongly associated with better performance. Children whose parents regularly checked their homework, are supportive of children reading at home, and whose teachers reported that they closely followed the curriculum were performing about two years ahead of their peers in grade 4.