HOW DOES THE EARLY READING TRAJECTORY IN NGUNI LANGUAGES DIFFER WHEN WE INTERVENE OR DON’T?

1. Lilli Pretorius Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, Unisa 5 July 2019 HOW DOES THE EARLY READING TRAJECTORY IN NGUNI LANGUAGES DIFFER WHEN WE INTERVENE OR DON’T?

2. TRAJECTORYLatin trans ‘across’ + jacere ‘throw’ (first used in English in the late 17th century) The path followed by a projectile flying or an object moving under the action of given forces The reading development path of learners prompted by the action of (mainly) classroom forces

3. They've put all their eggs in one basket and it's misfired Paul Merson, Sky football pundit, of West Ham's purchase of Andy Carroll. • When you open that Pandora's box, you will find it full of Trojan horsesErnest Bevin, Labour Foreign Secretary, on the idea of a Council of Europe, 1948 • We're like the canary down the mine. We're the first people who pick up what's going on out there and what we're seeing at the moment is a boiling pot whose lid is coming offMarkos Chrysostomou, Haringey Citizens Advice Bureau, on the effects of cuts, 19 November 2012. • Out of the hat on Monday night the Home Secretary produced the rabbit, the temporary provisions Bill, as her fig leaf to cover her major U-turn Simon Hughes, Lib Dem MP, 2008.

4. GETTING IT RIGHT FROM THE START What does reading success look like? By the end of Grade 3 children are expected to be able to read fluently, with meaning and enjoyment. We need to prevent reading problems rather than try to catch up or fix up problems afterwards. A faltering initial reading trajectory creates cracks in literacy development which “in time become gaps, and finally...chasms in learning” (Johnson, 2012). We can only identify cracks and gaps if we know what reading success looks like cracks gaps chasms

5. 2016 PIRLS LITERACY BENCHMARKS: SA AND INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE

6. MAIN FEATURES OF THE ZENLIT PROJECTThree years: 2015 - 2017 • A pilot study in three provinces – KZN rural, EC urban, WC urban • 11 x 2-day workshops, teacher materials (guides and handouts), book cases and book resources, laminating machines • No lesson plans – materials to build content K and pedagogic content K • Intensive coaching - 1 coach per 4 schools • Intensive work with coaches (New Leaders Foundation) • HOD training in 2nd and 3rd year (New Leaders Foundation)

7. CORE COMPONENTS of ZENLIT ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION

8. Things teachers can control Things teachers can control LISTENING & SPEAKING Vocabulary Language Thinking skills

9. COMPONENTS OF READING COGNITIVE PROCESSES Working memory Phonological processing EXECUTIVE CONTROL Cognitive self-control Cognitive flexibility COMPREHENSION READER RESPONSE DECODING LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY Listening comprehension Vocabulary Grammar (morphology/ syntax)

10. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY SKILLED READING? Reading as a construct changes over time Reading does not represent the same cognitive processes at different points in time - what happens in the brain of a skilled Grade 3 reader is not the same as what happens in the brain of a skilled Grade 1 reader Different processes come into play at different stages of development and contribute differentially to performance as proficiency increases Ph Awareness Word reading Context Fluency Comprehension M Awareness Letter-sounds (ORF) literal inferential The importance of some processes as drivers of reading development diminish as proficiency increases and are replaced by qualitatively different processes accuracy speed automaticity metacognition

11. COMPONENTS OF DECODING DECODING VOCABULARY & COMPREHENSION Constrained skills Unconstrained skills They enable reading Lifelong development (Paris 2005) Necessary but not sufficient Early mastery critical (mid Grade 2)

12. Patterns of Literacy among US students (Reardon, Valentino & Shores 2012)

13. COMPREHENSION CRITERIA(McCormick 1995:100)

14. ORTHOGRAPHIC FEATURES OF AFRICAN LANGUAGES

15. LANGUAGE TYPOLOGYENGLISH VS AFRICAN LANGUAGES

16. PERCEPTUAL LEARNING OF THE CODE • Initially beginners cannot easily tell letters apart • Practice is necessary for habituation • Larger numbers of letters take longer to tell apart and automatize • Notion of a word is different Ndiyanithanda I love you all Ndiyayithanda I love it (e.g. a dog) Ndiyawathanda I love them (e.g. horses) • Dense print is read more slowly Ndiyahambangomso. Ndilungiselelauhambo.Kufunekandilungiselelenosana.Nalo luyahamba. Ndinetikitilohambo. (I’m going tomorrow. I’m preparing for the journey. I must also prepare the baby. She too is going. I have a ticket for the journey.)  ORF

17. VISUAL SIMILARITY/DISSIMILARITY It is easier to develop automaticity in reading when orthographies have visually dissimilar words - common amongst English words. In contrast, the complex morphology of agglutinating languages results in many letter sequences with visually similar CV patterns. Over 30 visually similar syllable sequences in Zulu (Land 2016) AndiyayithandiI don’t love it Andizokuthanda I will not love you anymore NdizakuthandaI will love you NdisezakuthandaI will still love you NdisezanithandaI will still love you all This requires attention to detail and hence more cognitive work while reading; there is loss of meaning if any of the bits within the linguistic unit are decoded inaccurately.

18. WHAT IS AUTOMATICITY IN LEARNING? • In early stages of learning a skill (e.g. decoding), new neural connections are made and conscious attention mechanisms consume working memory • Automaticity enables attention to be shifted elsewhere, e.g. comprehension • Schreiner (2003) suggests that automaticity in cognitive function frees up 90% of working memory for higher-order skills. • Automaticity develops through practice

19. Building impetus for comprehension:Creating a lift off

20. CHILDREN WHO CANNOT READ AT ALL (ZERO SCORES IN FOUNDATIONAL LITERACY)

21. THE EGRA JOURNEY in ZENLIT

22. EGRA COMPONENTS ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION

23. DEMOGRAPHICS 2017 (n=990 Zulu/Xhosa)

24. ASSESSMENT RESULTS NOT JUST SCORES: NORMAL GROWTH, BACKSLIDING AND PLATEAU EFFECTS

25. SHARING ZENLIT 2016 ASSESSMENT RESULTS Teachers and HODS sat at their school tables • How well are your learners reading in Zulu compared to the Zenlit mean results in KZN? • How can we use these results to help us pass the baton and set appropriate high standards (benchmarks)? • HODS to set up a reading and assessment plan for the year and report back (after tea)

26. SHARING ZENLIT 2016 ASSESSMENT RESULTS Teachers and HODS sat at their school tables Carefully examine the literacy results from your school and then answer the following questions.

27. RURAL/URBAN CONTROLS AND INTERVENTIONS(Nguni languages – Zulu and Xhosa)

28. CORRELATIONS between EGRA componentsNGUNI (Zulu/Xhosa) n = 988correlations** significant at the 0.01 level

29. MULTIPLE REGRESSION: What predicts WORD READING in NGUNI languages(Zulu/Xhosa) n = 988Adjusted R square = 0.59

30. MULTIPLE REGRESSION: What predicts READING COMPREHENSION in Nguni languages(Zulu/Xhosa) n = 988Adjusted R square = 0.66

31. Who’s lifting off where in Grades 1 & 2?

32. Who’s gaining fluency and comprehension?

33. Who’s lifting off where in Grade 3?

34. WHAT DOES READING SUCCESS LOOK LIKE in the NGUNI LANGUAGES? • Knowing what reading success looks can like help drive more effective classroom practices • Interventions should help build a common understanding of what reading success looks like • Schools (Principals and SMT) and teachers need a good understanding of what reading success looks like • Reading is a complex phenomenon, so success means different things at different stages of reading development • Early – and high – mastery of letter sounds is important – an easy win • But it must be coupled with text work – using letter-sounds to read words

35. SOME TAKEAWAYS • It’s important to adapt the EGRA tool to the orthographic features of the target languages • The adapted EGRA results discriminated between learners’ reading abilities in control and intervention schools • The KZN and EC results provide preliminary data for differences in reading development between rural and urban schools • The results suggest that in transparent agglutinating languages, letter sound knowledge is important for word reading • The results indicate that in transparent agglutinating languages, ORF is a strong predictor of reading comprehension. This has been confirmed by other studies in SA (Spaull, Pretorius & Mohohlwane 2018) • Given the relatively small sample sizes, these results could serve as a starting part for further research into benchmarks for letter-sound knowledge and ORF

36. THANK YOU Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe HG Wells