Receptive vocabulary and early literacy skills in emergent bilingual Northern Sotho-English children

Wilsenach, Carien

doi:10.4102/rw.v6i1.77

Cited by 17 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 44 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This may be because much of the effort in learning to read in the first year of schooling is focused on developing accurate decoding skills. However, locally, Wilsenach (2015) found receptive vocabulary to be a robust predictor of early literacy development in Northern Sotho-English emergent bilingual children. Although receptive vocabulary knowledge was found to be low in both Northern Sotho and English groups of learners, it had a significant effect on early literacy skills in both languages.…”

Section: Vocabulary and Readingmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Vocabulary is also central to additional language learning, and adequate vocabularies are especially important for children for whom the FAL is also their LoLT. As prior local studies have suggested, young South African English FAL learners are struggling with vocabulary (Macdonald 1990;Sibanda 2014;Wilsenach 2015), but performance in the African HL is also a challenge (Pretorius & Mokhwesana 2009;Wilsenach 2015 The importance of vocabulary for reading achievement and for school success cannot be overstated. As this small-scale study shows, there is still much that we do not know about vocabulary development amongst South African learners.…”

Section: Concluding Thoughts and The Way Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How is their word knowledge growing? Exploring Grade 3 vocabulary in South African township schools

Pretorius

Stoffelsma

2017

SAJCE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we report on a study that examined the active and receptive English vocabulary of two different groups of Grade 3 learners in South African township schools. The groups consisted of English Home Language (HL) learners in the Western Cape and Xhosa HL and English First Additional Language (FAL) learners in the Eastern Cape. The purpose was to document their different vocabulary trajectories during Grade 3. The Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey was used to measure the active vocabulary levels of 118 learners at the beginning and the end of the school year. Another 284 learners from the same eight Grade 3 classes participated in a receptive vocabulary test at the end of the year. This test assessed their knowledge of the 60 most frequent words that occur in South Africa Grade 4 English textbooks. Results showed that although the HL learners knew almost double the number of words their English FAL peers did, both groups of learners increased their active word knowledge through the year by about 9%. Regarding their receptive vocabulary, the English FAL learners on average only knew 27% of the most frequent words at the end of their Grade 3. No significant gender differences were found. Learners in both language groups who were above their grade age had significantly lower scores than their younger peers. This confirms findings that children who start school with weak language skills tend to stay weak. Finally, initial active vocabulary knowledge was found to be a strong predictor of vocabulary development during the school year.

show abstract

Section: Vocabulary and Readingmentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Concluding Thoughts and The Way Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

How is their word knowledge growing? Exploring Grade 3 vocabulary in South African township schools

Pretorius

Stoffelsma

2017

SAJCE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In South Africa, where many school-aged learners display below average language and literacy skills (Department of Basic Education, 2014 ; Howie, et al ., 2008 ; Wilsenach, 2015 ), the dilemma of failing learners probably remains the most serious and most common problem that teachers, educational psychologists, and SLTs encounter. In this context, the accurate assessment of processing problems, particularly those related to language and literacy achievement is crucial.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…( 2004 ) are of the opinion that reading difficulties in non-clinical groups are caused by environmental factors such as poverty, inadequate education, and social factors such as the age and education of a child’s mother and the child’s position in the family. Although all of these environmental factors probably contribute to the low literacy levels of South African learners, the causal role of underdeveloped phonological processing skills and vocabulary skills (see Wilsenach, 2015 ), which are strongly associated with non-word repetition, remains unclear in the South African context.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying phonological processing deficits in Northern Sotho-speaking children: The use of non-word repetition as a language assessment tool in the South African context

Wilsenach

2016

South African Journal of Communication Disorders

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Diagnostic testing of speech/language skills in the African languages spoken in South Africa is a challenging task, as standardised language tests in the official languages of South Africa barely exist. Commercially available language tests are in English, and have been standardised in other parts of the world. Such tests are often translated into African languages, a practice that speech language therapists deem linguistically and culturally inappropriate. In response to the need for developing clinical language assessment instruments that could be used in South Africa, this article reports on data collected with a Northern Sotho non-word repetition task (NRT). Non-word repetition measures various aspects of phonological processing, including phonological working memory (PWM), and is used widely by speech language therapists, linguists, and educational psychologists in the Western world. The design of a novel Northern Sotho NRT is described, and it is argued that the task could be used successfully in the South African context to discriminate between children with weak and strong Northern Sotho phonological processing ability, regardless of the language of learning and teaching. The NRT was piloted with 120 third graders, and showed moderate to strong correlations with other measures of PWM, such as digit span and English non-word repetition. Furthermore, the task was positively associated with both word and fluent reading in Northern Sotho, and it reliably predicted reading outcomes in the tested population. Suggestions are made for improving the current version of the Northern Sotho NRT, whereafter it should be suitable to test learners from various age groups.

show abstract

“…In South Africa, Wilsenach ( 2015 ) found that receptive vocabulary size in emergent bilingual Northern Sotho–English children predicted the development of their early literacy skills. Children with a limited vocabulary not only lag behind their peers at school entry, but the gap widens as they progress through school.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning new words from an interactive electronic storybook intervention

Klop

Marais

Msindwana

et al. 2018

South African Journal of Communication Disorders

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

BackgroundChildren who enter school with limited vocabulary knowledge are at risk for reading failure. This study investigated the efficacy of an interactive e-book, implemented as a mobile application, to facilitate vocabulary learning in Grade 1 isiXhosa-speaking children (n = 65).ObjectiveThe purpose was to measure if an e-book intervention, specifically developed for use in the South African context, could facilitate the acquisition and retention of new words at different levels of lexical representation.MethodA randomised pre-test and/or post-test between-subject design was used where an experimental group that received the e-book intervention was compared to a control group before the control group received a delayed intervention. Follow-up testing was performed to measure retention of the new vocabulary after eight weeks. Mixed-model repeated-measure Analysis of Variance (ANOVAs) were used to determine differences between the participants in the experimental and control groups.ResultsThe short-term e-book intervention not only facilitated fast-mapping of new words but enabled participants to develop more robust lexical representations of the newly acquired words. Follow-up assessment showed that they retained their newly acquired word knowledge.ConclusionMultimedia technology can be used to provide explicit and embedded vocabulary training to young children at risk for academic failure. These findings are particularly relevant for South African environments where there is limited parental support and lack of educational resources to promote vocabulary learning in young children.

show abstract

Receptive vocabulary and early literacy skills in emergent bilingual Northern Sotho-English children

Cited by 17 publications

References 44 publications

How is their word knowledge growing? Exploring Grade 3 vocabulary in South African township schools

How is their word knowledge growing? Exploring Grade 3 vocabulary in South African township schools

Identifying phonological processing deficits in Northern Sotho-speaking children: The use of non-word repetition as a language assessment tool in the South African context

Learning new words from an interactive electronic storybook intervention

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About