‘Write’ stuff: Motshekga responds to poor literacy results

There has been great concern about South African pupils’ ability to read and comprehend after the poor results of the latest report on Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (Pirls) released last month.

But Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said it was not true that most pupils could not read and write at all.

READ: Reading crisis puts South Africa’s future in jeopardy

“Since the release of the report, we have embarked on a series of briefing sessions with various stakeholders to share the findings and provide insights.”

Motshekga said the magnitude of the declines relating to the pandemic did not come as a surprise.

“The results we see now in Pirls were in line with earlier findings. All of this is concerning and informs the government’s emphasis on addressing reading at the foundation phase,” she said.

READ: Less than 20% of SA’s grade 4 pupils can read for meaning, minister blames Covid

“One of the points we sought to make is that we are not competing, but merely participating to benchmark against the best in the world. It is also important to reiterate that we are one of only three African countries brave enough to participate in Pirls. We were also the only country to put forward all our official languages in the study.”

Motshekga said there was a difference between oral performance and using the information a pupil reads.

“In the Pirls study, they used an octopus story as an example. In the African languages, I don’t even know the Sesotho word for octopus. There is already a language barrier and some of the answers were not in the text.”

Chief education specialist in the department of basic education Dr Mark Chetty said the department had made good progress as an educational system before the pandemic.

“We were a system on the rise. Covid did affect our system. We lost a lot of contact and teaching time. Pirls was taken in 2021 in the midst of the pandemic as we interoperate the study and the findings.”

Chetty said at age six in Grade 1, the overall emerging literacy was recorded at 64% with the Western Cape, Northern Cape and Eastern Cape performing above the average overall emerging literacy.

North West and Limpopo were below the national average.

“Our trend score from 2016 dropped significantly from 320 to 288 points, 81% of Grade 4 and 56% of Grade 6 pupils do not reach the low benchmark of 400 points. Grade 6 pupils scored 384 points with Afrikaans pupils scoring an average of 456,” he said.

Chetty said the best-performing language was Afrikaans (387) and the lowest score was Setswana (211).

He added that girls scored higher than boys.

Democratic Alliance Gauteng shadow MEC for education, Khume Ramulifho, said it was concerning that pupils could not read to comprehend properly.

“This is mostly because the foundation phase isn’t solid,” he said.

Ramulifho said the department had failed to prioritise teacher development and many schools were overcrowded, which added to the problem.

Research and development manager at the Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy, Jenny Katz, said South Africa did not have a culture of reading.

“A recent survey by the Paper Manufacturers’ Association of South Africa found that 41% of the respondents owned 10 books or fewer.

Only two percent of children’s books published commercially in South Africa are in local African languages, in a country where 80% speak an African language at home,” she said.