Abstract
This article draws on a long term ethnographic study which explored the way the home based practices experienced by children in a marginalised community in a large South African city, Port Elizabeth, prepared them for, and supported them in, schooling. The study was informed by the field known as ‘New Literacy Studies’ and which draws extensively on the likes of Heath (1983) and Street (1984). It acknowledges that individuals have the power to exercise agency in the context of structural and cultural constraints but shows how, in this particular community, poverty and geography and the educational backgrounds of caregivers impacted on their best efforts to contribute to their children’s development.
Highlights
International tests of literacy such as the Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) consistently identify the poor reading performance of learners in South African schools
The outcome of the 2016 study, for example, positioned South Africa as last amongst the fifty countries taking part (Howie, Combrinck, Roux, Tshele, Mokoena, & Palane, 2016) and showed that a staggering 78% of South African learners were unable to read for meaning in any language, including their home language, by the end of their fourth year of formal schooling (Howie, Combrinck, Roux, Tshele, Mokoena, McLeod & Palane, 2017)
By drawing on ethnographic research, Street (1984) was able to make a distinction between understandings of literacy: the autonomous model and the ideological model
Summary
International tests of literacy such as the Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) consistently identify the poor reading performance of learners in South African schools. The socio-cultural context will impact on the kinds of texts to which readers are exposed and will shape the way they engage with them effectively creating their reading “identities” (O’Shea et al, 2019) All this means that, depending on their home contexts, some children will be introduced to, and supported in, mastering literacies privileged in schooling whilst others will not (Gee, 2015; Stroud & Prinsloo, 2015). Research (see, for example, Gee 2015) shows that many children arrive in school having been exposed to literacies that do not match those that are valued in formal educational settings For these children, learning to read and write involves much more than the technicalities involved in reading and writing since they need to begin to understand values attached to certain kinds of texts and ways of engaging with them.
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