Abstract:

The literacy education in South Africa (SA) is worsening. SA children are performing poorly against their African counterparts in international tests. According to Spaull [1] the results on the 2021 PIRLS revealed that in 2021 81% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any language. This number increased from 78% in 2016. Between 2006 and 2016 the percentage of children that could not read declined from 87% (2006) to 82% (2011) to 78% (2016), but has now increased back to 81% [1], which has wiped out a decade of slow progress and has taken the country back to 2011 low levels of achievement. Lastly, SA had the lowest average Grade 4 test score of all participating countries [1]. An obvious choice of research area in attempting to discover causes for this dismal state of affairs is to find out what is happening in terms of learning and teaching every day in the classrooms of our schools [2]. A practical entry point for this is the teaching practices of our teachers, particularly those directly related to reading development of our school children. This study sought to contribute to our understanding of what happens in the reading classroom by exploring 1 Grade 4 teachers’ beliefs, perceptions and approach when developing her learners’ reading skills. Data for this study were collected through observations and interviews and were analysed using thematic analysis. It was found that, whilst this teacher sincerely endeavored to develop her learners’ reading skills and was very willing to develop her own teaching practice, a gap in her understanding of the requirements of the policy statement and training existed. Thus, she was unable to take her learners meaningfully through the stages of the reading process and instead used the process as a checklist. Conclusions reached from this study is that a need for teacher training is needed to enable them to effectively use the policy document and implement each stage of the reading process effectively.

Keywords:

Reading, reading process, interactive approach, language development.