Study: 80% of Grade 4s in SA can’t read

Eighty percent of Grade 4 pupils in South Africa cannot read at the appropriate level.

This was revealed by a study conducted by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which gauged the reading standards of nine-and 10-year-olds in 50 countries.

The report for last year, which was released yesterday, paints a disturbing picture of primary school reading literacy in South Africa, with no significant progress nationally since the last report in 2011.

According to the international comparative reading assessment conducted by University of Pretoria (UP) researchers at the Centre for Evaluation and Assessment (CEA), out of the countries that participated in the Grade 4 level, South Africa was placed last. The Russian Federation and Singapore were the top achievers.

The findings on this global study on reading literacy were published by the UP CEA researchers. Worldwide, more than 319000 pupil s participated in last year’s PIRLS.

At the end of 2015, the CEA tested the reading skills of 12810 Grade 4 pupils in all 11 official languages across South Africa.

The National Research Coordinator for PIRLS 2016 South Africa, Professor Sarah Howie said the result suggests that the majority of pupils cannot read well enough to succeed in subjects across the curriculum in Grade 4 and higher grades.

The acting director at CEA, Celeste Combrink, said the findings were “troubling”.

“What is troubling is that this is true across all languages in South Africa, as less than a quarter of learners overall reached the lowest international benchmark. While less than half of the learners who wrote the tests in English and Afrikaans could read, 80% of those learning in one of the other nine official languages effectively cannot read at all,” she said.

Some of the PIRLS 2016 findings indicated that:

lPupils writing in one of the nine African languages attained the lowest mean scores, which were significantly lower than those writing in Afrikaans or English. Those writing in isiXhosa and Sepedi are the most at risk;

lGrade 4 pupils in rural areas or townships have the lowest reading literacy scores, compared to other locations. — arethal@dispatch.co.za