Although ANAs show language-conditioned problems in reading comprehension and
decoding ability, most South African research focuses disproportionately on (a) English
and Afrikaans and (b) macro approaches to literacy rather than formal and psycholinguistic
analyses of reading. Obviously African languages are structurally and typologically
different to English and Afrikaans; reading strategies required for the mechanics of reading
are necessarily different and should be supported by language-specific pedagogies. We
argue for research programmes that situate reading pedagogy within the language-specific
spaces defined by Linguistic approaches to understanding (a) orthography, (b) cognitive
reading skills and models and (c) indigenous, language-specific norms and resources.