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This article argues that we have lost the plot in South African reading education. To find it, we need to move beyond the predominant mode of reading as oral performance, where the emphasis is on accuracy and pronunciation, to reading as comprehension of meaning in text. While reading research in South Africa has been conducted mainly in school contexts, this case study is of a school and Adult Basic Education and Training Centre in a rural KwaZulu-Natal community near Pietermaritzburg. It found that an oratorical approach to reading dominated in both settings. It suggests that developing the way in which teachers understand the teaching of reading and transforming the teaching practices of those who teach as they were taught in the education system of the apartheid era are key to improving the teaching of reading.

This exploratory study aims to extend our understanding of reading in isiZulu, the most widely spoken indigenous language in Southern Africa, by exploring measurable aspects of eye movement patterns of a group of competent adult readers of isiZulu. In doing so, the study offers an exploration of the particular demands that Zulu orthography makes on readers, and offers a tentative profile of the reading processes currently exhibited by proficient adult readers of isiZulu. The study indicates that with an average reading speed of 815 lines per minute (lpm), isiZulu text takes more time to read than text in other alphabetic languages for which data is available. Relative to other languages, readers showed short saccades (4.05 letters) long durations of fixation (0.3 seconds) and more frequent regressions over spans of text (an average of 1 regression every 24 letters).

Automaticity, or instant recognition of combinations of letters as units of language, is essential for proficient reading in any language. The article explores automaticity amongst competent adult first-language readers of isiZulu, and the factors associated with it or its opposite - active decoding. Whilst the transparent spelling patterns of isiZulu aid learner readers, some of its orthographical features may militate against their gaining automaticity. These features are agglutination; a conjoined writing system; comparatively long, complex words; and a high rate of recurring strings of particular letters. This implies that optimal strategies for teaching reading in orthographically opaque languages such as English should not be assumed to apply to languages with dissimilar orthographies.Keywords: Orthography; Eye movement; Reading; isiZulu

We know that competent readers of text in all languages move through text with speed and ease, confident that they can tell what the writer has written. We also know that incompetent readers in all languages move hesitantly through text, rereading words and lines, stalling at particular points, and, often with good reason, are not confident that they can discover what the writer says. What is not clear from this apparent similarity of reading patterns across languages is whether the minute processes that cohere to produce the activity of reading are similar across languages and orthographies, or whether this similarity is superficial, and elements of established patterns of reading performance differ with different orthographies. These minute processes and their implications for learning to read and for teaching reading skills, and for ways to measure competence in reading, are the subject of unresolved debate. While studies have been done of differences in observable physical reading patterns be...

Research on reading in African languages is particularly pertinent in South Africa now, in view of the poor reading performance in many South African schools. This paper is based on a study of competent adult readers of isiZulu that analysed what its orthography (the way it is written) requires of readers. As an agglutinative language with a conjoined writing system, isiZulu carries meaning not only in separate words, but also in morphemes that cluster together, forming long complex words. Eye tracking data shows that competent readers of isiZulu move their eyes across text in saccades (shifts of the point of focus) that are short in comparison with the saccades of efficient reading of English. It also shows that readers of isiZulu fixate on points of text for longer periods than do readers of English. The study links eye movement data to information gained from a stimulated recall process, to discover strategies consciously used by competent readers of isiZulu. Some of these strategies, such as visualisation, are common to efficient readers of all languages, while others might be peculiar to agglutinating and/or tonal languages. These strategies inform suggestions for the development of effective reading skills in isiZulu. The key argument of the paper is that the orthography of isiZulu has features that require attention by teachers of reading if their learners are to benefit from the advantages that reading in their first language should bring.