![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
In this article I argue that insufficient attention is paid to the explicit teaching of comprehension in South African literacy policies and practices. Like elsewhere, governments reinforce the existing curriculum gap by trying to solve the achievement gap in early literacy. I substantiate my claim through a critical analysis of a report commissioned by the South African government and written by the National Education and Evaluation Unit (NEEDU). At an analytical level there is a logical problem with NEEDU's recommendations about early literacy – there is a mismatch between the solutions and the problems it tries to solve. Unlike government responses to South Africa's very poor results in national and international literacy tests, I claim that the findings of these tests point to the urgent need to teach higher-order questioning skills to teachers explicitly from preschool onwards. By referencing national and international research evidence of an approach to teaching and learning called Philosophy with Children (P4C), I argue that the inclusion of philosophical thinking in early childhood literacy education could help teach the ‘full literacy’ as recommended by the NEEDU report.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my colleague Dr Clare Verbeek for her helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
1. See: http://www.education.gov.za/Home/MinisterLaunchesNeedu/tabid/620/Default.aspx (accessed June 21, 2013).
2. The foundation phase in South Africa covers formal schooling from Grade R to Grade 3 (five- to eight-years-old).
3. Literacy learning is profoundly influenced by other factors such as poverty, bullying, teaching resources, the underdevelopment of African languages in print, the choice of English as medium of instruction over and above learners' home language and limited reading and writing cultural practices in many African home and community settings (Alexander and Bloch Citation2010).
4. See Appendix for the International Benchmarks for Reading.
5. Of course it does not follow that therefore African language speakers were not included, because parents in the foundation phase often prefer their children to be taught through the medium of English, rather than through their home language. More than half of Grade 5 learners were tested in their second language (Howie et al., Citation2012, 115), which makes assessing complicated for teachers who are often not fully competent in English.
6. The concept ‘teachers' in this article is more generic than teachers working in schools and includes practitioners working in early education childhood centres who are not qualified teachers.
7. In particular for English as a First Additional Language (FAL), using contemporary picture books whereby image and words create a complex interdependent web of meaning are preferable as the artwork offers unique opportunities for children to make meaning by drawing on their own life experiences and prior knowledge. The ambiguity in these texts frees children to speculate, develop vocabulary and play with the meanings of the text without fear of getting it wrong, because multiple readings are possible. See: Haynes and Murris (Citation2012).
8. For an interesting discussion see File (Citation2012, 34–38), and for suggestions to give up the ‘fictionalised dreams' of ‘the ideal teacher, the ideal child and the ideal curriculum’ see: File, Basler Wisneski, and Mueller (Citation2012, 205).
9. For an overview of post-developmentalism in relation to pedagogy, see: Brooker and Edwards (Citation2010). For an alternative post-developmental approach to comprehension and reasoning in the early years, see: Haynes and Murris (Citation2012).
10. See: http://www.southafrica.info/about/democracy/constitution.htm#.U3gy9vmSySo (accessed May 18, 2014).
11. See Murris Citation2012 for a discussion about the difference between the two.
12. Karin Brodie (Citation2007) distinguishes between ‘test’ and ‘authentic’ questions. The former try to find out what the learner knows, while the latter are questions without pre-specified answers.
13. The focus of this article is not on the reluctance or inability of teacher educators, either pre-service or in-service and lecturers' reluctance to model higher-order questioning skills themselves. See instead: Haynes and Murris (Citation2011) and Murris (Citation2013, Citation2014).
14. See, for example, Helen Zille. Accessed June 22, 2013. http://www.placesuncovered.co.za.
15. See the common I.R.E structure below.
16. See, for example, http://www.education.gov.za/Curriculum/AnnualNationalAssessment/2013ANAExemplarsGrade3/tabid/893/Default.aspx
17. The IRE framework was identified about 30 years ago (Brodie Citation2007). The basic structure has the following sequence: Teachers initiate by asking a question, a learner responds by giving an answer and the teacher evaluates the answer (e.g. by saying ‘good girl’).
18. How you can change literacy practices for the explicit teaching of deep reading of texts, I have explored elsewhere (Murris Citation2014).
19. Second-order questions are questions that put into question the validity of assumptions in the question itself.
20. This could be a higher-order question asked by the teacher in the context of a Grade R English Home Language text about soccer. See: http://www.education.gov.za/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=fsxEyzquXkY%3d&tabid=893&mid=2536
21. Although one can hold the view that one can never escape one's own situatedness and particular perspective (Fricker Citation2009), one should not commit to the extreme position of epistemological relativism, that is the incoherent idea that ‘no arguments or standards have probative force beyond the bounds of the communities that endorse them’ as it implies that it is possible to have a ‘perspectiveless perspective’ (Siegel Citation2011). Teaching children that any reason will do when justifying their beliefs, gives the wrong idea about knowledge, truth and meaning.
22. Which is not the same as saying that all answers are equally valid (epistemological relativism). The strength of the answers lies in the reasons that justifies them.
23. See footnote 17.
24. A collaboration between the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) and the D G Murray Trust, all based in Cape Town.
25. With Sara Stanley's approach to P4C in the early years at centre stage. You can see her in action during this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeveNmuEQcU. The implementation of P4C in Southern Africa is supported through a free network: www.mindboggles.org.za.