Making sense of the PIRLS 2006 results for South Africa

Reading & Writing

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Making sense of the PIRLS 2006 results for South Africa
 
Creator Janks, Hilary
 
Subject — Mastery of decoding
Description Results on the PIRLS test in 2006 make it clear that South African educators need to examine the way in which they teach literacy in the Foundation phase. While the test gives a fair indication of what our children cannot do, it is less clear about what they can do. Mastery of decoding, for example, is assumed and children are tested on their ability to read lengthy texts and answer cognitively demanding questions. The test is therefore not a good indicator of whether learners can decode or not. By setting the kinds of skills demanded by PIRLS, against Freebody and Luke’s roles of the reader, this article suggests that the problem with literacy learning in our schools is that too often students do not get much beyond decoding and basic comprehension. !ey are not taught to be text ‘participants’,text ‘users’ or text ‘analysts’. Literacy interventions in schools need to prepare students to ask and answer middle and higher order questions on texts written in their home language if they are to move from learning to read to reading to learn.
 
Publisher AOSIS Publishing
 
Contributor
Date 2011-05-25
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/rw.v2i1.11
 
Source Reading & Writing; Vol 2, No 1 (2011); 27-40 2308-1422 2079-8245
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://rw.org.za/index.php/rw/article/view/11/11
 
Coverage — — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2011 Hilary Janks https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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