Teaching and Assessing Independent Reading Skills in Multilingual African Countries

Learning literacy in a familiar language: comparing reading and comprehension competence in Bemba in two contrasting settings in Northern Zambia

“…The second objective was similar but related to comprehension-how good were Namwanga-speaking learners at reading comprehension after four years of instruction through Bemba as a familiar language and how did this compare to Bemba-speaking children at the same level? These two questions are related in that reading fluency is highly correlated with reading comprehension (Schroeder 2013). We follow Kuhn et al's (2010) characterisation of reading fluency and how it relates to reading comprehension: Fluency combines accuracy, automaticity, and oral reading prosody, which, taken together, facilitate the reader's construction of meaning.…”

“…The other important consideration for reading and another reason why literacy-learning strategies developed in the north are less applicable to the south, at least in sub-Saharan Africa, is differences between orthographies and other linguistic features like phonology and morphology. For example, the difference between shallow and deep orthographies significantly affects how reading is taught and should be taken into consideration (Schroeder 2013;Mwansa 2017). Shallow orthographies are those where there are consistent correspondences between letters and the sounds they represent in the language.…”

Examining the bilingual phonological processing and reader profiles for (non)readers of three consistent orthographies: evidence from South Africa

“…Since the developing readers in this sample also did not read at a level that would support reading comprehension and obtained significantly lower scores in phoneme awareness than basic readers in both languages, it seems that readers in these and similar languages would benefit from a reading pedagogy that includes systematic synthetic phonics instruction using grapheme-phoneme subunits. Current estimations in South Africa are that instruction at the phoneme level is not crucial, since the Southern African Bantu languages are syllable timed, and since syllable awareness develops more intuitively in young children (Schroeder, 2013). Correspondences between graphemes and phonemes are typically taught through syllables, meaning that /b/ would be taught via rote learning of syllables such as ba, be, bi, bo, bu (De Vos et al, 2015).…”

Fixing the Broken Promise of Education for All: Findings from the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children

“…Despite UNESCO's call for mother tongue education back in the 1950s (UNESCO, 1953), there has been relatively little coordination among the responses from donors. 23 Scrutiny of early reading failure has led to support for initial literacy in children's home languages, with data from early grade reading assessments (Schroeder, 2013) supporting the development of improved reading approaches that integrate the language children speak at home, but such programmes tend to be temporary measures rather than systematic approaches. non-dominant languages to improve the quality and provision of basic education as a means to reduce drop-out and make education more attractive for outof-school children.…”