SA pupils in literacy shocker
2007-11-29 23:20
Pretoria - Almost 80% of South African pupils do not develop basic reading skills by the time they reach Grade 5, a new international study released on Thursday has shown.
The Progress in International Reading Literacy study was conducted in 40 countries and done locally by the University of Pretoria's Centre for Evaluation and Assessment.
It shows that South African pupils achieved the lowest score compared with children in the other 39 countries.
Only 2% of SA Grade 5 pupils reached the highest international benchmark compared to 7% internationally.
The Russian Federation, Hong Kong, Singapore and Italy were among the countries whose pupils got the highest scores.
Almost 80% of SA pupils in grades 4 and 5 did not reach the lowest international benchmark in contrast to only 6% in the rest of the countries tested.
While almost half of the children tested in English and Afrikaans attained the lowest benchmark, between 86% and 96% of children writing in the other nine official languages did not manage to attain even this.
The study represents the first baseline study of reading literacy in South African primary schools, across all 11 languages.
South Africa had the largest number of pupils taking part in the study with 16 073 children in Grade 4 and 14 657 in Grade six being tested.
Lack of books at home
The study showed that early literacy activities at home were important. Good pre-literacy skills that were developed before school were related to higher achievement.
South Africa was behind in introducing more complex reading skills, whereas, internationally, the more-complex skills were introduced earlier. Where more-advanced skills were introduced in Grade 1, achievement was higher.
Few children were exposed to early-reading literacy activities with their families and less than half have books in the home.
In addition, 60% of South African primary schools did not have a library or classroom libraries.
The study also showed that parents' levels of education were strongly related to reading achievement.
- SAPA