By Lufuno Masindi
PIRLS report reveals underlying challenges The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is a major international assessment conducted every five years since 2001 by the IEA to measure reading comprehension of fourth-grade students. It serves as a global standard to monitor trends in reading literacy, focusing on reading for experience and to acquire information.
In SA “Reading for Meaning’ is a national challenge, research reveals some 80% of learners in Grade 4 can’t read for meaning in their mother-tongue. Until recently, the DoE has insisted that teaching change to English in Grade 4, exacerbating the challenge. Interestingly, international research reveals that when teaching takes place in the mother-tongue with English as a second language children end up speaking both more fluently.
According to a four-year study conducted by Gadra Education in partnership with Rhodes University, aided by trained fourth-year B.Ed students, have pioneered a way forward.
Kelly Long, Gadra’s primary education programme manager involved in conducting the Grade 4 reading for comprehension study. Photo:Lufuno Masindi
While the results show that Makhanda is outperforming national benchmarks, Kelly Long, Gadra’s primary education programme manager, cautions that the findings reveal persistent challenges. “We need to face it — language is an issue, and we’re letting our children down.”
According to Long, the fact that the study has been reliably replicated for four consecutive years indicates that the data-collection and analysis methods are valid and the results trustworthy. They now have a large data set to understand trends.
Drawing on a dataset of over 4 000 learners tested across all 25 of Makhanda’s primary schools, the study confirms the town is well above the national average. Makhanda’s four-year results show between 37% and 45% of Grade 4 learners able to read for meaning — more than double the national rate.
Though heartening, Long points out that there is a long way to go until equity is achieved. The research showed learners in private and quintile five schools averaged around 90% ability to read for meaning, compared to quantile three schools averaged between 31% and 52% In South Africa, the school quintile system is a poverty-ranking mechanism used by the government to allocate funding, ranking schools from 1 (poorest 20%) to 5 (least poor 20%) based on community income, unemployment, and literacy rates.
The language of teaching and learning further highlights these disparities. “We have 22% of our learners learning in isiXhosa who can read for meaning by grade 4, compared to 52% of children going to English quintile three schools,” Long asserted.
Analysing four years of data, isiXhosa LOLT (Language of Learning and Teaching) schools show comprehension clustered in the low-to-mid twenties, while English LOLT schools show substantially higher achievement across all four cohorts. “Our children learning in isiXhosa are not doing as well as those learning in English from grade 1, even for children speaking isiXhosa at home,” Long said.
“What it’s showing us is that we have a responsibility to develop African languages properly,” Long said. She critiqued rushed programmes where complex terms like “photosynthesis” are reduced to lazy adaptations — not true linguistic growth.
Fluency metrics underscore the dysfunction: isiXhosa learners can speed through 60 words per minute yet still fail to grasp meaning. “They’re barking at the text without understanding,” Long said.
For Makhanda’s educators and communities, this is a call to build on strengths while tackling inequities head-on and raises the importance mentioned above of teaching taking place in the mother-tongue with English as a second language, particularly for schools in the lower quintiles.
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