The University of Pretoria and the READ Education Trust have joined hands in a ground-breaking reading and translanguaging project. Over the next year, Professor Funke Omidire and Dr Joyce West are coordinating the project alongside Drs Roux, Combrinck, Genis, and members of the CEA, such as Mr Mokoena and Mr Tshele, who will all contribute to the success of the project.

Reading is an essential skill that needs to be developed in the Foundation Phase. However, the latest PIRLS results showed a decline in our learners’ reading skills, with 81% being unable to read for meaning. Reading for meaning is the ultimate goal of the teaching of reading. However, reading comprehension is a complex skill to develop as fundamental reading skills such as phonological awareness, decoding, word recognition, and reading fluency need to be in place. The purpose of developing reading skills in the Foundation Phase is to ensure that learners can ‘read to learn’ in the successive phases.

Major contributors to the reading challenges of South African children are the emphasis on using subtractive and immersion strategies for developing English reading skills, a lack of understanding as to how multilingual learners develop their reading skills, and a paucity of multilingual reading material. The University of Pretoria and the READ Education Trust will thus be conducting an intervention pilot study in Gauteng schools, where translanguaging and the science of reading (SoR) will be used as pedagogically sound approaches to teaching reading in English to multilingual learners. A major focus of the project will be on developing learners’ knowledge of English phonics to increase their decoding skills and, as a result, improve their reading fluency and reading comprehension.

The SoR and translanguaging will serve as the theoretical framework for this project. The SoR is a body of scientific knowledge regarding the most effective teaching methods for young children. It emphasises the systematic, sequential, and explicit teaching of reading skills, such as phonics. The SoR aligns with reading research on African languages, as both highlight the importance of considering the orthography of a language (i.e., opaque vs transparent) and developing learners’ phonological processing, phonemic skills, and phonics knowledge. As this project’s focus will be on developing multilingual learners’ English reading skills, translanguaging, which views the development of language as a single linguistic repertoire, will view all the languages a learner speaks as resources rather than hurdles.

The team working on this project are passionate about the teaching of reading and promoting multilingualism. They are excited about this project as they are aware of the urgent need for quality reading education in the Foundation Phase. They also advocate for the use of translanguaging as they believe it can make a vast difference in developing Foundation Phase learners’ reading skills. Keep an eye open for further developments. These are exciting times!