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Learning in the mother tongue: Examining the learning outcomes of the South African Kha Ri Gude literacy campaign

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Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine literacy and numeracy scores of learners who participated in the South African Kha Ri Gude Literacy Campaign. Analysing the learning outcomes of the 2011 cohort of a total of 485,941 participants, the authors seek to identify variations between the learners’ achievements across the eleven official South African languages. Besides exploring the relationship between the literacy and numeracy assessment scores by language, the authors also analyse these scores against various relevant features of the learners’ profiles such as their residential type (rural village, urban township etc.), regularity of class attendance and previous school attendance, if any. They asked ten language experts who had been involved in the development of the campaign’s learner materials to rank the various languages according to their level of difficulty with regard to literacy learning and to interpret the variation in learner achievement scores across the South African languages. This interpretation demonstrates that the challenges of teaching and learning literacy and numeracy in South African languages go beyond the difficulty levels established on the basis of linguistic criteria. The authors contend that future literacy programmes will have to take existing hierarchies and inequalities among language groups into account and devise differentiated strategies to achieve parity of learning.

Résumé

Apprendre dans la langue maternelle : résultats de la campagne d’alphabétisation sud-africaine Kha Ri Gude – Cet article a pour objet d’examiner les résultats en littératie et numératie obtenus par les apprenants ayant participé à la campagne d’alphabétisation sud-africaine Kha Ri Gude. En analysant les résultats d’apprentissage obtenus par la cohorte de 2011 comptant un total de 485 941 participants, les auteures tentent de déterminer les variations des acquis des apprenants entre les 11 langues officielles en Afrique du Sud. Elles explorent le rapport entre les résultats d’évaluation en littératie et numératie ventilés par langue, et les analysent en outre en fonction de plusieurs caractéristiques significatives dans les profils des apprenants, telles que leur type d’habitat (village rural, agglomération urbaine etc.), la régularité dans leur fréquentation des cours et le cas échéant leurs antécédents scolaires. Les auteures ont prié dix experts linguistiques, auparavant impliqués dans la conception des matériels pour les participants à la campagne, de classer les langues selon leur niveau de difficulté quant à l’apprentissage de l’écrit, et d’interpréter la variation dans les résultats des apprenants en fonction des diverses langues sud-africaines. Cette interprétation démontre que les défis que posent l’enseignement et l’apprentissage de l’écrit et du calcul dans les langues sud-africaines dépassent les niveaux de difficulté établis à partir des critères linguistiques. Les auteures déclarent que les futurs programmes d’alphabétisation devront tenir compte des hiérarchies et des inégalités existantes entre les groupes linguistiques, et concevoir des stratégies différenciées en vue d’atteindre l’équité dans l’apprentissage.

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Fig. 1
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Note: The vertical axis (not labelled) represents the number of learners, starting at 0 at the bottom; the horizontal axis represents the mean scores, ranging from 0 to 100%

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Note: The vertical axis (not labelled) represents the number of learners, starting at 0 at the bottom; the horizontal axis represents the mean scores, ranging from 0 to 100%

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Notes

  1. The eleven official languages of South Africa include two colonial languages (Afrikaans and English), and nine indigenous languages (isiNdebele, siSwati, isiXhosa, isiZulu, seSotho, sePedi, seTswana, tshiVenda and xiTsonga).

  2. In a nutshell, an “additive” bilingual/multilingual approach refers to conditions where learners’ first language is valued and maintained while they are encouraged to learn a second language.

  3. Kha Ri Gude (pronounced [car-ri-goody]) is tshiVenda for “Let us learn”. The name was chosen in recognition of tshiVenda as a minority language. The programme was phased out in 2017.

  4. The Kha Ri Gude programme was designed to be the first step of the South African Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) programme, with a major focus on elementary literacy, language and numeracy. In other words, the horizon of the campaign was not just a second-chance opportunity for all persons who were excluded from formal schooling during the apartheid period (c. 1950–1993) to acquire literacy, language and numeracy skills. It also allowed learners to continue with ABET to obtain the General Education and Training Certificate (GETC) through non-formal education pathways. General Education and Training (GET) includes compulsory formal schooling up to Grade 9 and ABET.

  5. All LAPs were archived in the National Learners’ Records Database (NLRD), which was set up to “facilitate the management of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) – the first such system in the world” (Shapiro 2008, p. 1).

  6. A rich literate environment is characterised by an abundance of opportunities to practise literacy skills. This includes reading materials (posters, leaflets, newspapers, books etc.), broadcast media (radios, TVs) and information and communication technology (mobile phones, tablet and laptop computers, and access to the Internet).

  7. “Biliteracy” refers to “any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in and around writing” (Hornberger 1990, p. 213).

  8. “Phonological awareness” refers to the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. “Decoding”, in this context, refers to the application of one’s knowledge of letter-sound relationships to correctly pronounce written words.

  9. “Grapheme-phoneme knowledge” refers to the knowledge of the written symbol of a speech sound. “Word analysis” refers to the process of using the relationships between spelling and pronunciation at the letter, syllable and word levels to figure out unfamiliar words.

  10. Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading (Hock and Mellard 2005).

  11. As Helen Abadzi explains elsewhere, our “working memory”, which “spans only a few seconds … contains what is in our mind right now. Short-term memory is one of its components” (Abadzi 2016, p. 257),

  12. “Parametric variation” refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language ability.

  13. A conjunctive writing system yields only one orthographic word also corresponding to one linguistic word. The four languages in the Nguni group (isiNdebele, siSwati, isiXhosa and isiZulu), for example, have conjunctive writing systems. Orthography, together with language structure and metalinguistic skills (being aware of certain context-dependent language rules and able to apply them) have an influence on word recognition and development of reading fluency (see Probert and De Vos 2016; Taljard and Bosch 2006).

  14. In a nutshell, “phonological skills” refer to the ability to identify individual sounds in spoken language. “Morphological skills” refer to the ability to analyse word structures.

  15. The 21 examples of promising literacy initiatives – including the South African Kha Ri Gude programme – have been published on UNESCO’s Effective Literacy and Numeracy Practices Database (LitBase), see UIL (n.d.).

  16. “Linguistic typology” refers to the analysis of the differences between languages.

  17. The Organisation for African Unity (OAU) was founded in 1963. South Africa joined in 1994. In 2002, OAU became the African Union (AU). One of its ministerial-level Specialised Technical Committees is tasked to address Education, Culture and Human Resources. For more information, see https://au.int/en/au-nutshell [accessed 26 March 2019].

  18. For more information about PanSALB, see http://www.pansalb.org/index.html [accessed 26 March 2019].

  19. These codes apply the signs of SASL to the grammar of the oral languages, resulting in Signed English, Signed Afrikaans, Signed Xhosa, Signed Zulu, etc. They are not a natural form of communication among deaf people (Aarons and Reynolds 2003).

  20. The bar graph is based on figures from the 2011 campaign dataset (DBE 2011). For this article, we analysed data of an overall total of n = 485,941 learners.

  21. The campaign’s last intake was in 2016 and it formally ended in 2017.

  22. The South African national system of Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) was established in 1994. ABET level 4 is an adult education qualification which is registered at level 1 of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and comparable to grade 9 of formal general education. ABET level 1 is equivalent to grade 3 of the formal schooling system.

  23. The inclusion of these authentic reading, writing and calculating activities is consistent with New Literacy Studies (NLS; focusing on social communicative practices), an approach which argues for the practice of reading and writing to be relevant in specific situations so that the learner may obtain or communicate specific information within a specific context (see e.g. Archer 2003; Street 2003; Rogers 2006; Prinsloo and Breier 1996).

  24. The “language experience” approach is a whole language approach that promotes reading and writing through the use of personal experiences and oral language. The “whole language” approach uses strategies that show how language is a system of parts that work together to create meaning.

  25. A “phoneme” is a speech sound; a “grapheme” is the smallest unit of the writing system.

  26. “Phonic knowledge and skills” refers to understanding which letters make which sounds.

  27. An “agglutinative” language is characterised by adding several morphemes to a noun or verb to denote case, number, gender, person, etc. to make up words.

  28. We used the learners’ names for their certification and for including their records on South African Qualifications Authority’s (SAQA) National Learners’ Records Database (NLRD). All learners were given student numbers that were used for campaign records and administration.

  29. The campaign reached 4.5 million learners in the period 2008–2016. The last learners were enrolled in 2016 and the campaign formally concluded in 2017. After the first three years, the campaign had overcome initial teething problems (piloting and trouble-shooting to ensure optimal teaching and learning) and began providing more reliable data. We therefore selected 2011 as a stable year for this study, because in the latter years, the campaign was already “winding down”.

  30. While the very high number of responses influences the p-value, the non-parametric correlation coefficient of 0.7 is fairly high, indicating a medium to strong relationship strength. The correlation coefficient is not influenced by the sample size. It is recognised that the literacy and numeracy scores are mostly in the eighty per cent range, which is a limitation of the dataset to determine the correlation.

  31. They started with the finger alphabet, but had to read and comprehend in English. It was a decision taken by the Deaf Association because learners did not hear the language, but had more access to readable text.

  32. As literacy and numeracy scores by gender did not reveal significant differences (see McKay 2015, p. 394, Figs. 6 and 7), we did not include the aspect of gender in this analysis.

  33. There were 18,066 (3.7%) non-responses to the question on the regularity of learners’ attendance.

  34. All of them are academics with at least a master’s degree, are language educators and practitioners. In addition, all of them are members of their respective national language boards. With this background of expertise and experience, they were engaged as the authors of the Kha Ri Gude materials and the test items used in the Kha Ri Gude assessment instruments. In addition, the same experts were used in the development of the Department of Education school workbooks that were developed in the eleven official languages.

  35. As English was not anyone’s mother tongue in the campaign, we did not consider it in this analysis.

  36. For more details on the standardisation of South African languages, see Lafon and Webb (2008).

  37. All quotations in this section are taken either from the ten completed questionnaires returned to us, or from e-mail exchanges we had with the language experts in the context of the survey we carried out for this article.

  38. This is particularly noteworthy considering that in the 1970s, the Venda (also referred to as the Vhavenda) were among the poorest and least educated people in South Africa, whereas today they have caught up, as referred to in the quotation.

  39. The Bantu Education Act (Union of South Africa 1953) was a South African apartheid law “to provide for the transfer of the administration and control of native education from the several provincial administrations to the Government of the Union” (ibid.).

  40. The construction (in which education plays a critical role) of the value of a language is a reflection and reproduction of the socio-economic status of the people who speak it (see Alexander 2013).

  41. The South African Annual National Assessment (ANA) is a series of standardised literacy, science and mathematics tests introduced in 2011 by the Department of Basic Education with the purpose of improving the quality of formal education in South Africa.

  42. The National Senior Certificate (NSC) is the main school-leaving certificate in South Africa which students sit at the end of grade 12 (the last year of secondary school).

  43. Mark Andrew De Vos et al (2014) and Sandra Land (2015) refer to the orthographical features of agglutinating languages which use a conjoined writing system with long complex words. They argue that this mitigates against learners developing automaticity which is essential for proficient reading. They also refer to the complexities of agglutinative languages which impact on reading fluency.

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  1. Hamburg, Germany

    Ulrike Hanemann

  2. University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria, South Africa

    Veronica McKay

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  1. Ulrike Hanemann
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Hanemann, U., McKay, V. Learning in the mother tongue: Examining the learning outcomes of the South African Kha Ri Gude literacy campaign. Int Rev Educ 65, 351–387 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-019-09782-5

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