When a devastating report emerged stating that 81% of grade 4 pupils in South Africa cannot read for meaning in any language, I was reminded of my grade 7 to grade 9 English teacher, Mrs Lolwana. She had the unenviable task of getting all of us who were taught almost everything in isiXhosa to learn, read and speak English.
“Don’t memorise. Read for understanding,” she would say repeatedly. She must have said it at least 50 times before I finally understood what she was doing. Hers was an uphill battle.
First, my school, Phangindlela Junior Secondary School in Mqanduli in the Eastern Cape was, except for three classrooms and the staffroom, built with mud. From sub A (grade 1) to standard 4 (grade 6), there were two classes to each classroom. In summer the teachers would take turns giving their classes out in the open or under the trees.
It was not uncommon for kids to find snakes in the grass. On one occasion, a boy would have been bitten by a snake had another boy not screamed for him to run.
So mine was a really deprived school.
Second, our principal, who taught us history and geography, would make us memorise entire sections of our textbooks. This meant we spent hours cramming everything so the next day we could say out loud what was in the textbook. Many would still do badly in the exams because the questions would inevitably be confusing.
The only reason I could eventually read for understanding was a combination of Mrs Lolwana’s persistence and pure luck. My grandfather was an avid reader of the Daily Dispatch, based in East London. A small bundle would be delivered to one shop in town on most days, and my grandfather never threw his copies away.
He kept them because they had multiple post-reading uses, including serving as toilet paper. I would read the old copies and ask him, a former teacher, to explain to me what certain words meant. He eventually grew tired of it and gave me an old dictionary and taught me how to use it, including how to understand the phonetics.
This began a journey of learning that enabled me to read for understanding. By the time I got to standard 6 (grade 8), I was consistently one of the top three pupils in my class. Understanding English was important because it made both memorising and understanding every other subject easier for me.
For isiXhosa I also had an excellent teacher, Mrs Vikilahle. She encouraged us to take pride in writing isiXhosa, with idioms beautifully infused into our essays. In fact, she insisted on it.
And so I speak and write both languages in a manner that is almost too formal for some people. I am convinced that had I not been lucky enough to have a Daily Dispatch at home to read with a dictionary next to me, I would have struggled as much as some of the other kids to understand the test and exam questions.
I think I know exactly what it’s like to read and say words without understanding what they mean. But I think I was also fortunate that we grew up in an era where what I call “Xhonglish” wasn’t common. Xhonglish is when someone blends English words with isiXhosa.
For example, some people will say “ndiyatenderisha”, which means they have a business that relies on government and other tenders. People often joke about this, but what has happened is that, as I notice on social media, many people are no longer able to use words properly in sentences.
Having grown up in a village where many older people were semi-literate or illiterate, you always had to pick one language and speak it properly, otherwise you wouldn’t be understood. That was almost always isiXhosa for me.
We also had no television until long after 1994, so we were not exposed to other languages. We generally listened to Radio Transkei and Radio South Africa (now SAfm). Radio announcers (as they were called then) spoke either language properly, almost like teachers in school.
I think all of these things helped with language in general. In hindsight, I find it helpful that everything around me was geared towards proper application of language, even in informal settings.
But not being able to read for understanding also makes skills training extremely difficult.
So to get back to the current report about reading proficiency, I think it is evident that we are facing a catastrophe. This has been evident for a long time.
One of the most serious quality challenges I have faced during my career has been corporate documents that are very badly written, even by people with post-graduate qualifications. It is something that, like many others, I came to accept as normal and would simply set time aside for editing.
But not being able to read for understanding also makes skills training extremely difficult. It takes longer and sometimes results in most people meeting the minimum threshold rather than high averages or excelling in their qualifications.
Some of the same people go on to train and mentor others, and repeat the cycle. Over time, the quality of even elementary things deteriorates until we cannot achieve much as a society.
Some of the ways we can improve the quality of language aren’t popular, but are now an emergency.
The first is to retrain teachers to improve the quality of their reading and use of language. It sounds humiliating, but it really has to be done.
Secondly, we need minimum language standards for broadcasting, and to extend the mandate of public broadcasting to include producing programmes for internet platforms and in formats that our current generation of children can relate to. They are not going to read newspapers with a dictionary like we did in the 1980s.
Thirdly, we need to invest in instruments that help parents to help their children. I know it is hard for millions of parents who are trying to put food on the table, but if this work is just left to teachers, it will always be an uphill battle.
Ultimately, we will not be able to solve this issue if we do not take an all-of-society approach. If overall use of language is bad, it is not possible or easy to get the reading right, but we must try.
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