Abstract
There is growing evidence of systematic underachievement of South African primary school learners in reading in English as the first additional language. There is a small but growing literature that provides insights, that is, causes, patterns and prevalence, into this phenomenon. Through a secondary analysis of a spelling component of a literacy test that was administered as an end-line assessment for a randomised control trial, this article provides new evidence for and insight into the patterns and prevalence of English language spelling errors made by Grade 4 second-language learners. The study specifically coded errors on four monosyllabic three-letter words for 2500 Grade 4 learners tested individually at the end of the second term in 2014. Three distinct linguistic error patterns were identified. The most frequent error patterns involved the incorrect use of the vowel grapheme, for example bed was spelled ‘bad’. The second pattern related to common errors associated with the transfer of linguistic, orthographic patterns from the first language (isiZulu). The final pattern suggests that between 6% and 8% of learners were struggling to make the basic phoneme–grapheme connection. This pattern, however, would need to be confirmed with oral interviews. The implications of these error patterns are discussed.
Highlights
The crisis in primary education in South Africa, as in many systems in the Global South, is well documented (Fleisch 2008; Spaull 2015)
Drawing on a secondary analysis of prevalence and patterns of misspellings on an end-line subtest conducted as part of a randomised control trial (RCT), we found a number of common-type errors
By the crime froze pots cute hurt rid shut thirty snail party bird mat try must light church each behave fun camp bed play second term of Grade 2, the South African national curriculum assumes that learners would be able to distinguish aurally between long and short vowel sounds (DBE 2015:50)
Summary
The crisis in primary education in South Africa, as in many systems in the Global South, is well documented (Fleisch 2008; Spaull 2015). A second generation of scholars began to recognise that schools as institutions play a critical role in redressing inequality These studies have focused on school and classroom factors that explain the dual problem of inequality and underachievement. The most sophisticated of these studies was the National School Effectiveness Study, which provided longitudinal data on inter-year learning gains and, more importantly, provided insights into within-school factors (Taylor, Van der Berg & Mabogoane 2013). These studies have tended to focus on management problems, such as incomplete curriculum coverage and poor management and utilisation of resources. The latest wave of studies on educational inequality has gone deeper, to explore instructional issues within the relationship between learners, teachers and resources, so as to unpack underachievement. Draper and Spaull (2015), for example, have used government achievement data to show that the underachievement in literacy is strongly correlated with poor achievement in one particular precondition for comprehension, namely oral reading fluency
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
