While the vast majority of children in South Africa now receive formal schooling,
children living in poverty still have much less chance of learning to read and write successfully.
National and provincial assessments conducted over the past ten years show that a high
percentage of South African children are not acquiring basic literacy skills in their first three
years at school. International data indicate that even when compared with low-income countries
in Africa, South Africa compares poorly on tests of literacy.1
The reasons for this are complex
and rooted in factors that go well beyond the classroom and are relevant from the day a
child is born. But while our poorest children fail to learn to read, our education system will not
succeed in improving life chances and breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.
In trying to tackle South Africa’s persistently low literacy rates, policy-makers have tended to
focus on school quality issues, such as management and leadership, quality of teaching and
coverage of the curriculum. Strategies to tackle low literacy levels that are remedial in nature
and focus on classroom-based interventions appear to have had only limited impact. One study
found that, “with few exceptions the developmental trajectory of most children appears to
be well established at school entry. However, although it has been found that good teaching
can improve a child’s developmental trajectory, what seems to happen more commonly is that
schooling simply reinforces the emerging developmental trends and usually widens the gap
between good and poor readers.”
There is now a compelling body of evidence showing that if we are to give our poorest children
a better chance of learning to read and write successfully, the right foundations for learning must
be laid in the period before formal schooling begins. This will require a new approach which
challenges four commonly held assumptions about literacy acquisition: “literacy development
starts at school, the ‘context’ is the classroom, the ‘messenger’ is the teacher and the ‘resources’
consist of those available to the teacher in an academic context.”
It will also require a deeper
understanding of the importance of early language development to later success in literacy.
While the focus of this document is on building language for literacy, strengthening early language
has other benefits for young children. Providing children with the confidence to use language
effectively is vital for the communication skills needed for children to flourish socially and
academically. Studies have shown that vocabulary at an early age is linked to early numeracy skills.15
Early maths requires that children have the language skills to be able to express their thinking, for
example when sorting, classifying, matching or ordering. A certain level of language proficiency is
also necessary for the kind of arithmetic reasoning and problem-solving that is inherent in many
mathematics tasks, and studies suggest that in this way, early language development supports the
acquisition of early numeracy skills.