This report describes ongoing research on reading in African languages. It draws mainly on contributions from two British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) ‘Language in Africa’ (LiA) Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings: the LiA SIG strand at BAAL 2013 and the seminar on Reading Methodologies in African Languages held at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in January 2014. This report will only cover contributions that focused on reading research and practice.
It is now widely known that African children seriously under-achieve on most national and international benchmarking tests for both literacy and numeracy (Howie et al. Reference Howie, Van Staden, Tshele, Dowse and Zimmerman2012). Researchers question how far this is due to many children learning through an unfamiliar ex-colonial language and how far it is due to traditional attitudes, pedagogic practices and lack of resources. In addition, research into the psychological processes of learning to speak and read a language with a very different structure from English could shed more light on this issue. Effective reading methodologies for English, for example, may not necessarily be effective for learning to read an African language, specifically those from the Southern Bantu grouping. It was out of such a concern that the BAAL ‘Language in Africa’ SIG focused on research into reading practices for the two meetings from which the ensuing contributions were selected. The contributions have been organised under two main themes: reading processes and pedagogic interventions. They will be preceded by a brief description of the keynote address which set the tone for the January 2014 seminar. By way of conclusion, the report will consider the way forward in terms of the reflections and recommendations presented in the plenary session at the end of the January 2014 seminar.
Wildsmith-Cromarty (Reference Wildsmith-Cromarty2014) set the tone for the seminar by providing an overview of the current debates in the field. She distinguished between two major areas of focus in reading and literacy research: a psycholinguistic perspective, which focuses on reading as an individual, cognitive process where mastery of the structure of language and the mechanics of reading are important, and a sociocultural perspective, where literacy is perceived as a set of social practices and reading as a social, often collective, experience. It was pointed out that very little research has been carried out on reading in African languages in terms of the psycholinguistic processes involved, e.g. phonemic awareness, word recognition, syntactic parsing, semantic encoding, text and discourse comprehension, and reading fluency. The same applies to research on literacy as a social practice in relation to African languages with a focus on literate behaviour, which would include ‘survival’ literacy, exposure to environmental print, digital and media literacy, and available resources for extensive reading. The presentation then moved to the implications for reading pedagogy based on the different perspectives, such as the teaching of phonics and vocabulary development, the whole word approach and bi-literacy approaches where early reading books are presented in two or even three languages. Research in African educational contexts has tended to reveal the teachers’ lack of ownership of the instructional process as teaching methods are often applied to reading in the ex-colonial language first, after which the same methods are applied to reading in African languages. This led to the key question to be addressed by the seminar: if the reading process is different for learners reading in an African language that is structurally different from many European languages, including English, how should instructional techniques be adapted to cater for this? Could the solution lie in a mixed-methods approach, which would then have serious implications for teacher training in Africa?
1. Research into reading processes
The following contributions examine findings from eye-tracking research in African languages and explore the possible effects of orthographic features and differences on reading processes. Their position is that, given the agglutinative nature and transparent orthography of most languages within the proto-Bantu group, we cannot assume that processes and norms for reading will be the same as those for other languages, especially English. A further distinction is made between Bantu languages with a conjunctive orthography (the Nguni cluster) and those with a disjunctive orthography (the Sotho cluster). Pretorius (Reference Pretorius2014) maintains that the implications of such orthographic differences for teaching and early reading development have not yet been systematically investigated. Her research focused on reading development at Foundation level in Zulu, Northern Sotho and English, whilst Land (Reference Land2014) focused on the reading behaviour of competent adult speakers of Zulu. One of Land's main findings was that, relative to readers of other languages, adult readers of Zulu revealed shorter saccades, a higher number of longer fixations and regressions. These patterns seem to suggest the processing of small grain units of text which may take longer to read. This could be caused by the agglutinative nature of text in Zulu and the conjunctive orthography which results in very long and morphologically complex words which could affect automaticity. This, coupled with the lack of tonal marking for meaning, would make reading in an African language a slower process than in a language like English.
2. Pedagogic interventions
The research presented in this section deals with various approaches to developing reading skills in the African languages and the implications of this for teacher training. Baleeta & Islei's (Reference Baleeta and Islei2013) study investigated the teaching of literacy in Ugandan primary schools. Although the curriculum emphasises the use of local languages as languages of instruction for years 1–3, national assessments have revealed that pupils in year 3 are still not reading with fluency and comprehension. A baseline survey revealed strong demand for refresher courses in literacy for lower primary teachers in the locality of Kabarole District. The researchers worked with the Education Office, local training college and university, and experienced year 1 teachers from seven schools. Using classroom observation, discussions with key players, and workshops which included representatives from those institutions, they found that the Curriculum and Teacher's Guide offered teachers very little guidance on the teaching of literacy through the local Bantu language. The guide, written in English, and with a bias towards learning English, recommended the whole word approach with only minor reference to phonic and syllabic methods. In the classrooms there was some use of a syllabic method, but teachers were not able to integrate it well with the new curriculum. At the workshops it emerged that teachers themselves had learned through a syllabic method ‘Alifu’ which seems better suited to the structure of their language. Clearly, pedagogic knowledge and practice had been lost. The teachers tried out revised syllabic methods in their classrooms, providing further knowledge for the researchers to work with. Although teachers learned the basic syllabic method easily, they seemed less convinced about the need to enrich it with activities to practise sounds, and to link it with reading whole texts. The researchers found that lack of research into local languages had resulted in a curriculum which lacked coherence in relation to the literacy needs of the pupils. A participatory approach to the revision of the curriculum including linguists, teacher educators, inspectors, and practising teachers could lead to a more appropriate Teachers’ Guide as well as more appropriate teacher training. A further finding was that teachers’ lack of confidence with teaching oral English and phonics was inhibiting literacy in English.
Kiso (Reference Kiso2014) described a literacy approach for a teacher training project in Malawi, which was based on the phonological and grammatical units and rules of Chichewa, which in this case, was not necessarily the first language of the pupils. However, the approach took into account the phonological and grammatical differences between the pupils’ first language and Chichewa. The researchers used games which facilitated active learning and guided discovery to address challenges such as pupils’ inability to adequately represent word boundaries or certain phonemes in writing because of lack of salience. Using a participatory approach which included local teacher trainers and teachers, a handbook for teacher training was designed which points to the issue of locally designed materials for local contexts. Smyth (Reference Smyth2014) reported on a bilingual reading project in Swaziland. She argued that children learn inappropriate ways of reading (i.e. decoding of phonemes and words as opposed to the construction of meaning) if their first experience of reading is in a ‘foreign’ language, i.e. English. She introduced a reading intervention, Asifundzeni, which worked with illustrated ‘Big Books’ in both SiSwati and English as a way of focusing on meaning. The findings from her research show that regular exposure to books and repeated reading of the same text facilitate comprehension.
Westbrook (Reference Westbrook2014) addressed the challenges involved in providing appropriate teacher training for African contexts. She problematised the emphasis on phonics teaching by donors and national assessments of early reading, stressing that the teaching of phonics requires adequate resources, teachers specialised in reading processes, and a systematic approach. Her research revealed that many tutors in initial teacher education lacked primary school teaching experience, were not qualified to teach early reading, and did not fully understand phonics. This situation led to rote learning and memorisation rather than deriving meaning from text. Teachers would teach set sequences with very little diagnosis of pupils’ actual difficulties and they tended to practise syllable creation through letter combinations and merely labelling pictures with words, rather than practising the sounds of the letters and reading stories. Decoding tended to take precedence over comprehension, which was not an integral part of the reading process during the first three years. Westbrook thus argued for a more balanced approach as both phonics and word level techniques are appropriate for languages with transparent orthographies. In Bantu languages, the syllable is a more meaningful starting point for early reading, with a gradual building up of multisyllabic root words plus their affixations. This, she argued, would prepare the way for the reading and comprehension of continuous text. She concluded that teacher educators in African contexts needed to focus on ways in which to teach systematic phonics, chunking and comprehension.
The research discussed above yields the following points for reflection and for future research in this area:
• Reading methodologies for the African languages need to consist of a balanced approach, taking into account the structure of the language and its orthography.
• Phonics instruction requires specific training and teaching skills; otherwise, it will relapse into a mechanical linking of sounds and rote learning.
• Teachers need to be trained for teaching meaning so that reading with comprehension is encouraged. Reading of continuous text facilitates this process.
• It is important to teach reading in the first language before teaching it in a second as this would facilitate comprehension, especially in contexts where an unfamiliar ex-colonial language is the dominant medium of instruction.
• More appropriate materials are needed for teaching early reading skills. These should be designed for specific local contexts with the participation of teachers.
• Task-focused reading assessments may be better predictors of reading rate and reading proficiency, especially for adults.
• Reading development and proficiency depends on regular exposure, abundant reading materials, and practice.
• Bilingual approaches to reading, where an ex-colonial language is the medium of instruction, facilitate the construction of meaning and are therefore better predictors of eventual proficiency.
