Xitsonga Caps Document Grade 4-6

[Ena Marklund]

Thedocument outlines the curriculum and assessment policy statement for English Home Language in grades 7-9 in South Africa. It discusses the background and aims of the national curriculum, time allocation for subjects, and content and assessment requirements for English Home Language, including teaching plans and examples of assessment tasks. The document provides guidance for teaching English Home Language in the senior phase of the South African school system.Read less

Copyright: 2022. The Author(s). Licensee: AOSIS.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution,and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Background: Developing reading skills depends on how learners are taught to read in the classroom. Previous research showed that academic achievement is strongly affected by pedagogical content knowledge and lack of appropriate professional development.

Methods: An exploratory mixed methods research design was used, where quantitative and qualitative methods were used for data collection and analysis. Five teachers who teach reading in Grade 1 classrooms were observed. Seventy-five Grade 1 learners were assessed twice (March and September 2018) in Xitsonga as the home language and as the first additional language using the early grade reading assessment toolkit.

Results: The quantitative results showed an improvement in scores from baseline to endline; however, this was not good enough, given that performance in all the reading measures was low and very slow, reflecting inadequate mastery of foundational reading skills by the end of Grade 1. The qualitative findings provided some insights into how this comes about. Although teachers made efforts to implement reading methodologies in line with the national curriculum, they showed lack of understanding of how early reading develops and how each of the reading activities contributes to different aspects of this development.

This article draws on the findings of a doctoral study that sought to examine early reading development in Xitsonga in South Africa. The study has contributed by adding interesting data to African reading research, investigating how learners performed in the early reading measures of the early grade reading assessment (EGRA) toolkit. Firstly, it unpacks the social cognitive learning theory (SCLT) underpinning this study and reviews literature demonstrating the link between learner achievement and classroom practices. Secondly, it outlines some of the factors considered barriers to the successful teaching of early reading. It then describes the methodologies used in the study. Lastly, it presents the quantitative and qualitative findings and discussions. It then concludes by providing recommendations for improving early reading instructions.

This step involves performing and practising the behaviour that has been observed. For example, children may observe the teacher reading the story aloud with expression and intonation during shared reading or read-aloud activities. Afterwards, they can try to enact what they had observed from a good role model.

This step involves motivating learners to become interested in imitating the modelled behaviour. Learners are motivated to imitate the observed behaviour if they are positively rewarded. However, if the behaviour is followed by punishment, they are likely to avoid that behaviour.

Children must receive quality education to prepare them to cope with reading to learn as they proceed to higher grades. However, several pedagogic issues, including, inter alia, pedagogic content knowledge (PCK), curriculum knowledge, limited opportunities for writing and lost learning time (Hoadley 2013) have been identified as barriers to effective teaching of early reading.

Reading in the FP classroom comes before independent writing and spelling. However, teachers need to create opportunities for the learners to experiment with writing because it helps them practise crucial learning skills such as integrating new information or reframing their knowledge in logical structures (Department of Basic Education 2019). Hence, right from the Grade 1 classroom, learners should be given ample time to do written work. As per the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) recommendations, handwriting and writing activities are allocated 15 min per day for 3 days in all FP classrooms. This involves giving learners written work after using designated letter sounds and conducting shared reading with the teacher. The importance of providing learners with adequate opportunities for writing was demonstrated by childhood education researchers who revealed significant associations between elementary-school writing skill development and overall academic performance (Dinehart & Manfra 2013; Grissmer et al. 2010; Son & Meisels 2006).

Having discussed the theoretical framework underpinning this study, the relationship between classroom practices, learner achievement and some of the factors which are considered barriers to the successful teaching of early reading, the focus now shifts to what prompted the writing of this article, namely the link between learner performance and what is happening in the Grade 1 classroom during early reading lessons. For this reason, learner performance in baseline and endline is examined to see if it reflects adequate mastery of foundational skills by the end of the year, and thereafter, reading is integrated with what was observed in the Grade 1 classroom to see if there is a link. The following research questions are posed:

An exploratory mixed methods research design was adopted in this study, where quantitative (testing of early grade reading skills) and qualitative (classroom observations) methods were used for data collection and analysis. According to Mary, Malina-Hanne and Nrreklit (2011), it is advantageous to use both approaches because they create more robust research outcomes than either method individually.

The participants in this study were 75 Grade 1 learners aged between 6 and 8 years and five Grade 1 teachers (referred to as T1-T5) from five different schools (referred to as Schools A-E) in Mopani district of the Limpopo province in South Africa. Four of the five schools were classified as quintile 21 and had Xitsonga as the language of learning and teaching (LoLT), and one school which was classified as quintile 4 used Xitsonga as the first additional language (the language other than the home language). The learners in these schools were fairly homogeneous, with most of them from homes where parents per school were Tsonga home language speakers (63% quintile 2, 80% quintile 4) or where one parent per school quintile was a Xitsonga home language speaker. Most of the non-Xitsonga speaking learners were in quintile 2 schools rather than the quintile 4 school.

Of all the learners assessed (n = 75) in March, three learners were not tested in September as they were either absent on the day of testing or had transferred to another school, bringing the attrition rate of learners to 4% from March to September (Table 1). Schulz and Grimes (2002) argued that a loss of 5% or lower is not a concern. Thus, the attrition rate in this study is acceptable in terms of ensuring internal validity.

A lesson observation instrument reflecting the realities and demands of the FP CAPS and prepared by Zenlit Intervention (2016) was used to gather data during the Grade 1 literacy lessons. The lesson observation schedule was divided into the following sections: Section A covered details of school visits. Section B comprised lesson observations, including decoding activities (e.g. PA, phonics, WR and ORF) and reading activities [shared reading (SR), group guided reading (GGR), independent or paired reading and read-alouds]. At the end of the lesson observation, there was provision for general comments on decoding and reading activities and the comments on the reading process.

As indicated earlier, the reading assessment for the quantitative aspect was administered to learners in Term 1 (baseline) and again in Term 3 (endline). Learners were tested in a quiet classroom, one-on-one, and they sat opposite the researcher. It took approximately 12 min to assess each learner. They felt a little nervous before the test. The researcher established a good rapport with them and explained what would happen during the assessment to put them at ease. Examples for each task were given beforehand to ensure that learners had initial practice time before attempting the main task and followed the instructions accordingly. If the learner could not read anything or got six items incorrect consecutively, they were asked to stop and move to the next task.

For the qualitative component, classroom observations were gathered once in March 2018. Observations were administered after break from 10:00 to 12:30 (and lasted about 1 h per class). The observation schedule, a digital camera and a video recorder were used throughout the observation period.

The data were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative data were collected and recorded systematically and entered into a computer database of the SPSS programme. Descriptive and inferential statistics in SPSS (IBM SPSS Statistics Version 25) were used to analyse learner performance on various reading measures. However, only descriptive statistics will be used for the purpose of this manuscript. The themes for classroom observation were drawn from the already grouped themes of the classroom observation schedule prepared by Zenlit intervention (2016).

Table 2 shows the baseline and endline statistics. The results are presented in terms of the mean (M), the percentage of zero scores per task and a composite score (CS) comprising the mean derived from all five measures of EGRA.

Performance at baseline across the reading measures was very low. The composite score showed improvement from baseline to endline; however, LSK was the only aspect that showed better improvement than others. The proportion of learners who could not manipulate sounds or read out of context and in context words increased from baseline to endline. Although there was a decline of zero scores for the ORC subtask from baseline to endline, many learners were still unable to answer basic questions about the text that they had read.

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