A narrative enrichment programme in literacy development of Afrikaans-speaking Grade 3 learners in monolingual rural schools

Date
2016
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Stellenbosch University, Department of General Linguistics
Abstract
This study is motivated by existing information on the discontinuity between home literacy practices and school literacy expectations of learners who typically speak a local variety of their mother tongue which differs in various ways from the standardised language of learning and teaching (LoLT). In this particular case, the study refers to Afrikaans as a home language and language in education. These learners typically perform below par on standardised South African literacy tests such as the Annual National Assessment (ANA) and the Systemic Evaluation Test. They show delayed achievement of literacy milestones, higher school drop-out rates and less achievement of access to higher learning opportunities (Lahire 1995; Siegel 2007). In the present study, a two-part Narrative Enrichment Programme was introduced. The first part provided learners with an enriched reading, listening and writing environment in which they could engage with novel stories and work towards producing their own little books. The second part of the programme consisted of supporting exercises that addressed narrative structure issues that arose in the course of the first part. Specifically, exercises of picture sequencing, picture-sentence matching and an exercise called “Beginning, Middle and End” were used to assess how learners recount the various narrative components and the chronology.
Description
CITATION: Brand, I. 2016. A narrative enrichment programme in literacy development of Afrikaans-speaking Grade 3 learners in monolingual rural schools. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 49:301-316, doi:10.5842/49-0-707.
The original publication is available at http://spilplus.journals.ac.za
Keywords
Children -- Monolingual rural schools, Literacy development, Narrative Enrichment Programme -- Afrikaans speaking learners, Intentionality -- Children, Language awareness -- Children, Multimodal -- Education -- Children, UCTD
Citation
Brand, I. 2016. A narrative enrichment programme in literacy development of Afrikaans-speaking Grade 3 learners in monolingual rural schools. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 49:301-316, doi:10.5842/49-0-707