EDITORIAL | Our children are doomed to failure if we don’t get them to read

Eight out of 10 pupils in grade four or, to be precise, 81%, cannot read for meaning in any of the official languages. The results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), released on Tuesday, revealed our grade 4s were placed last out of 57 countries in an international reading assessment. In numbers, this means a staggering 914,000 of the 1.1-million grade 4s in 2021 could not understand what they read. South Africa’s Pirls score, which was 320 in 2016, dropped to 288 in 2021, well below the international average of 500. Singapore, Hong Kong and Russia were the top performers.

University of Stellenbosch researcher Nic Spaull, who described the latest results as a “generational catastrophe”, said a decade of progress had been lost. According to him, four provinces — the North West, Free State, Mpumalanga and Limpopo — experienced a decline of more than a year’s learning between 2016 and 2021. The Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape registered the smallest decline. While South Africa and Brazil have roughly the same GDP, Spaull said the average grade 4 child locally is 3.3 years behind their average Brazilian counterpart. At least 61% of grade 4s in Brazil could read at a basic level compared with 19% here.

Take away your children’s cellphones and other electronic devices for a certain period every day and get them to read.

Basic education minister Angie Motshekga said there was “significant disappointment within the sector” with the results, despite her department introducing many initiatives to improve reading comprehension skills among pupils. Among these was the development of an Integrated Sector Reading Plan in 2019 after extensive consultations with provinces, teacher unions and other stakeholders. Other initiatives included the Early Grade Reading Programme and the Primary School Reading Improvement Programme (PSRIP), through which additional reading materials and teacher training were provided to more schools. More than 16,000 so-called reading champions were appointed to support schools’ reading practices as part of the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative. 

According to Motshekga, the timing of the Pirls assessment in late 2021, after almost two years of disruption to schooling because of the Covid-19 pandemic, took place before the implementation of comprehensive learning recovery plans. While acknowledging South Africa had challenges in reading performance before the pandemic, she blamed the decline in the Pirls results largely on disruptions caused by it. Before the pandemic, 78% of grade 4s could not read for meaning, according to the 2016 Pirls’ results. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, as part of a move to encourage primary school pupils to read, English teachers in KwaZulu-Natal gave pupils a spelling and dictation test weekly. Pupils had to learn 20 words for the spelling test, which they were given days before. For dictation, they had to write down correctly a passage from a novel which the teacher recited on the day of the test. To motivate them to do well, some teachers pasted a star in the exercise books of pupils who got full marks, while other educators made comments such as “excellent” and “well done”. This did wonders for pupils who continuously strove to get full marks, and in the process, the test improved their vocabulary, reading and comprehension. It is not clear whether this practice still takes place, but if not, it would be worth revisiting. 

Spaull suggests anthologies of graded readers should be distributed to all children in grades 1 to 3 as most don’t have basic texts needed to learn how to read in their home language at school or at home. Wise words indeed. It is an indisputable fact that most children are not reading, which poses a huge problem for teachers. Creative ways need to be urgently found to instil a reading culture among pupils. Parents also have to play their part in getting children to read instead of “outsourcing” this weighty responsibility to educators. Getting children fired up about reading will not happen if parents and teachers are not avid readers. It would be great to introduce reading clubs at schools if they are non-existent or revive them if they are dormant. Our plea is for parents to take away their children’s cellphones and other electronic devices for a certain period every day and get them immersed in reading a novel or short story, or any other suitable material. If not, our children’s future is doomed.

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