Word recognition is a major component of fluent reading and involves an interaction of language structure, orthography, and metalinguistic skills. This study examined reading strategies in isiXhosa and the transfer of these strategies to an additional language, English. IsiXhosa was chosen because of its agglutinative structure and conjunctive orthography. Data was collected at two schools which differed with regards to their language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in the first three years of schooling: isiXhosa and English respectively. Participants completed a wordand pseudo-word reading aloud task in each of two languages which hypothetically impose different cognitive demands. Skills transfer occurs to a limited extent when the language of first literacy uses a transparent orthography, but is less predictable when the language of first literacy uses an opaque orthography. We show that although there is transfer of word recognition strategies from transparent to deep orthographies, felicitous transfer is limited to sublexical strategies; infelicitous transfer also occurs when lexical strategies are transferred in problematic ways. The results support the contention that reading strategies and cognitive skills are fine tuned to particular languages. This study emphasises that literacies in different languages present readers with different structural puzzles which require language-particular suites of cognitive reading skills. Keywords: Foundation phase education; multilingual education; reading; word recognition; automaticity; isiXhosa reading

for more on the specific macro-factors which are faced by children in South Africa.Background: A large amount of evidence highlights the obvious inequalities in literacy results of South African learners. Despite this, a sound understanding of how learners approach the task of reading in the African languages is lacking.Aim: This article examines the role of the syllable, phoneme and morpheme in reading in transparent, agglutinating languages. The focus is on whether differences in the orthographies of isiXhosa and Setswana influence reading strategies through a comparative study of the interaction between metalinguistic skills and orthography.Setting: Data was collected from Grade 3 first-language and Grade 4 Setswana homelanguage learners attending no fee schools in the Eastern Cape and North West Province respectively.Methods: Learners were tested on four linguistic tasks: an open-ended decomposition task, a phonological awareness task, a morphological awareness task and an oral reading fluency task. These tasks were administered to determine the grain size unit which learners use in connected-text reading. Results:The results indicated that syllables were the dominant grain size in both isiXhosa and Setswana, with the use of morphemes as secondary grains in isiXhosa. These results are reflected in the scores of the metalinguistic tasks. Conclusion:This research contributes to an understanding of how linguistic and orthographic features of African languages need to be taken into consideration in understanding literacy development.

Background: Spelling is a vital component of literacy. This is because spelling includes multiple metalinguistic components, such as phoneme-grapheme awareness, orthographic awareness and morphophonemic knowledge. Despite this, there remains, to date, insufficient literature on spelling in the Southern Bantu languages and, more specifically, in isiXhosa.Objectives: This study explores the nature of spelling among Grade 3 isiXhosa home-language learners and provides a linguistic analysis of the types of errors produced by these learners.Method: Data were collected from 51 isiXhosa home-language learners using a carefully designed isiXhosa spelling task, which included both real and pseudowords.Results: The findings showed that grapheme complexity was a significant predictor of spelling error production in isiXhosa. Furthermore, the main error type for both real words and pseudowords was errors of omission, specifically 〈n〉 in nasal blends and 〈h〉 in aspirated digraphs.Conclusion: While the isiXhosa orthography is transparent, and thus relatively predictable in decoding, its agglutinative, conjunctive character coupled with the existence of a number of complex graphemes presents a greater challenge for spelling. This supports the need for targeted instruction of complex graphemes in isiXhosa pedagogical practice to improve encoding skills.

The current paper examines the unique contributions of phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatised naming (RAN) and morphological awareness (MA) to oral reading fluency (ORF) in isiXhosa. No published study has yet explored the individual contributions of these three cognitive-linguistic skills to reading in isiXhosa. Sixty-six grade 3 home language isiXhosa learners were assessed on these cognitive-linguistic skills. Results from a linear regression analysis showed that only RAN and MA, but not PA, were significant concurrent predictors of ORF. These results suggest that the role of PA in reading in grade 3 learners in isiXhosa may have been overestimated because other important predictors of reading have not been controlled. Our data also suggest that grade 3 isiXhosa learners may make use of the morpheme as a grain size in reading. Our study highlights the need for longitudinal research which explores the roles of PA, MA and RAN in reading development in order to inform reading pedagogy in isiXhosa and other Southern Bantu languages.

Setswana (also known as ‘Tswana’ or, more archaically, ‘Chuana’ or ‘Sechuana’) is a Bantu language (group S.30; ISO code tsn) spoken by an estimated four million people in South Africa. There are a further one million or more speakers in Botswana, where it is the dominant national language, and a smaller number of speakers in Namibia. The recordings accompanying this article were mostly produced with a 21-year-old male speaker from the area of Taung, North-West province, South Africa. Some of the accompanying recordings are of a 23-year-old female speaker from Kuruman (approximately 150 km west of Taung). The observations reported here are based on consulting with both these speakers, as well as a third speaker, from Kimberley. All three were speakers of South African Setswana varieties. For discussion of some differences between these varieties and more Northern and Eastern Setswana dialects – including those spoken in Botswana – see (Doke 1954, Cole 1955, University of Botswana 2001).