As announced earlier this month, Khulisa and its partners released their report on early grade reading benchmarks in Tshivenḓa, one of South Africa’s official languages. In our recent blog post on the topic, Khulisa staff members in South Africa shared their own experiences with early grade reading, which provide valuable feedback on how children learn best in multiple languages.
Khulisa team member Tshandapiwa “Tshanda” Tshuma shared the experience of her teenage daughter, who grew up speaking isiNdebele at home but then initially learned to read only in English. “The language of learning and teaching at preschool was English,” said Tshanda. “She mastered English and l let her be because l thought l would disturb her English language development if l started to teach her how to read in isiNdebele.”
As time passed, Tshanda realized her daughter wasn’t able to read text messages sent to her in isiNdebele, and was missing out on important cultural references by not reading in her first language. “l realized that this would be a problem…and l had to start teaching her to read isiNdebele when she was in Grade 10,” Tshanda explained. “It was not easy at first – l made sure she mastered the sounds, then syllables followed by words, and eventually she started joining them together.”
Tshanda’s daughter now reads in both English and isiNdebele, although she still struggles with some difficult isiNdebele words. Tshanda now realizes the importance of teaching children to read in both their indigenous first languages and English – a lesson she has applied in her work as an evaluation coordinator on the Tshivenḓa benchmarking project.
For more early grade reading stories from our Khulisa staff, read the full blog post.
