The event was officially launched by the Department of Basic Education in partnership with Nedbank, Monash University, Spell IT South Africa and the SABC at Sci-Bono Discovery Centre.
The national contest will feature district, provincial and national spelling contests by registered grade six learners from public and private schools across South Africa.
Last year, schools such as Florida Primary and Discovery primary schools participated in the competition.
The programme is in response to the Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality tests conducted in 2000 and 2007, which found there were no improvements amongst grade six learners’ literacy and numeracy performance between those years.
Over the seven-year period, South African pupils ranked 10th out of 14 African countries in literacy.
The National Spelling Bee contest was initiated in 2014 to assist intermediate phase learners to improve their English literacy levels.
“Since launching the first-ever national spelling bee competition aimed at promoting a love for reading, writing and spelling for grades 4 to 6 learners last year, our first national finals at the National Library of South Africa where all provinces were represented by three spellers and one chaperone last October, yielded massive excitement and buy-in from the education fraternity, parents, corporate supporters and avid learners from across South Africa,” Panyasa Lesufi, MEC for Education in Gauteng.
Spell IT provides one spelling coach to each four registered schools in a district, which train the teachers in facilitating games and quizzes that teach phonics, word and letter recognition and vocabulary acquisition to prepare competing learners.
The emphasis is on learners’ efforts, placing them at the centre of the activity while introducing a fun element to spelling words, varying in difficulty, from a list of 1000 words.
This year, provincial finals will take place from June, culminating in the national finals in October, where the national winner will receive full academic scholarship from Monash South Africa.
