Abstract
Children learning to read and write in rural areas in Southern Africa perform poorly compared to children in urban schools. The poor results of rural schools in national assessments of reading literacy are explained by the deficits of rural areas: poverty, under-resourced schools and under-qualified teachers. Children in rural areas are frequently not exposed to home literacy practices, which prepare them for formal literacy learning at school. Whilst acknowledging the impact of rural poverty on children’s performance, this article explores a role-playing game amongst pre-school and school-going children of rural villages that enabled some children to become successful learners. Focusing on affect, I analyse the way in which the game motivated these children and suggest some of the benefits that promoting this practice may have for teaching and learning in rural areas. The continued underperformance of children in rural schools makes a compelling case for investigating ways of promoting learning and reading in rural homes.
Highlights
Zhang (2006:583), reviewing the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) findings for 2000, shows that rural children lag behind their counterparts in cities
This is confirmed by other large scale studies, for example, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) reports that ‘Almost half of the Grade 4 learners came from schools in remote rural areas and achieved more than 100 points less than their urban peers’ (Howie, Van Staden, Tshele, Dowse & Zimmerman 2012:xvii)
This study shows that young children in remote, under-resourced areas have access to pleasurable experiences with texts that set them on a lifelong quest for learning
Summary
Zhang (2006:583), reviewing the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) findings for 2000, shows that rural children lag behind their counterparts in cities. This is confirmed by other large scale studies, for example, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) reports that ‘Almost half of the Grade 4 learners came from schools in remote rural areas and achieved more than 100 points less than their urban peers’ (Howie, Van Staden, Tshele, Dowse & Zimmerman 2012:xvii). Statistics South Africa (2014:33) reports that 68.8% of South Africans who live in poverty are in rural areas
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