Reading crisis: it’s not just the learners

SOUTH African learners consistently struggle with reading comprehension, performing poorly in both international and local assessments. A significant issue is that 81% of Grade 4 learners (aged 9 or 10) are unable to read for meaning: they can decode words, but do not necessarily understand them. While this problem has received considerable attention, no clear explanation has emerged.

- TRACY KITCHEN

In my recent PhD thesis, I considered a crucial, but often overlooked, piece of the puzzle - the curriculum policy. My research sought to uncover and understand the gaps and contradictions in reading comprehension, especially between policy and practice, in a Grade 4 classroom.

This research revealed a difference between curriculum policy and practice, and between what learners seemed to have understood and what they actually understood in a routine reading comprehension task.

My main findings were that:

Grade 4 learners were being asked overly simple, literal questions about what they were reading, despite the text being more complex than expected.

The kinds of questions that learners should be asked (as indicated in the curriculum policy) were different from what they were being asked.

This gap led to learners seeming to be more successful at reading comprehension than they actually were.

Pinpointing the gaps between what the policy says and how reading comprehension is actually taught at this crucial stage of development (Grade 4) could pave the way for more effective interventions.

South African teachers are expected to base their reading comprehension instruction and assessment on the guidelines provided by the 2012 Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement. The policy outlines specific cognitive skill levels - essentially, ways of thinking and understanding - that learners should master for each reading task. These levels are drawn from Barrett’s 1956 Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension, an international guideline. It's based on the popular Bloom's Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension, which categorises reading comprehension according to varying skill levels.

According to Barrett's Taxonomy, reading comprehension involves five progressively complex levels: