Investigating strategies to improve reading levels of learners in an Eastern Cape community

Literacy does not develop in a vacuum. Reading is taught and learnt within a social context. The school and teachers are a central part of this context, Pretorius and Machet (2003). The purpose of this study was to investigate the strategies to improve reading in an Eastern Cape community. To realise this aim, I first looked for strategies that are currently used by teachers. Then I focussed on additional strategies that could be of use in improving reading levels. This study observed the practices and accessed perceptions of teachers in two primary schools regarding literacy accomplishments in order to come up with relevant strategies to improve reading levels. My study is a qualitative case study focussed on Foundation and Intermediate Phase literacy. The two schools used in this study have different language policies. The one uses English as the language of learning and teaching and the other school uses isiXhosa. The home language of most of the learners in both schools is isiXhosa. I observed and interviewed teachers to get deeper understanding of the problem in the two schools. The Four Resources Model of Freebody and Luke (1990) proved to be a strategy that could be used to support the development of reading from the early years and on into the high school years. This model was found to articulate well with the official school literacy curriculum. In-school reading strategies could be well supplemented by assisting learners to engage with the four roles of Code Breaker, Text Participant, Text User and Text Analyst. In my investigation I found out that there is a problem in our schools in both home and additional language contexts. There is a great need for both in-school and out-of-school strategies to improve the situation. An Asset Mapping strategy revealed the range of existing and potential strategies available to a particular Eastern Cape community to raise reading levels and thereby improve learning