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South Africa has a history of attempts to provide school equivalent education to black adults through night schools. Suppressed in the 1950s and 1960s, they resurfaced after the 1976 Soweto revolt, and in 1996 the Constitution secured adult basic education as a right. Night schools were renamed ‘Public Adult Learning Centres (PALCs)’, and seemed poised to become a powerful delivery mechanism, but continued as inadequate night schools. In 2015 the PALC system was ostensibly transformed into a community college one, but this transformation was based on the weak foundation of inadequate PALCs. A new 2019 plan for the Community Education and Training College System includes long needed major overhauls that must be effected if adults’ right to effective and relevant education is to be finally realised. This paper offers a history of night schools and of policy shifts, and looks at the major shifts promised in the new plan.

OBJECTIVE: To obtain a snapshot of the maternal and newborn care provided by different types of maternal and child health providers in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to 1) better inform advocacy and programmatic strategies and interventions to improve the quality of those services in the region, and 2) determine the need for more rigorous study of the issues. METHODS: A rapid assessment of 83 health workers providing antepartum, intrapartum, and immediate postpartum and newborn care (within two hours of birth) in eight LAC countries was conducted in November and December of 2011. Health workers were observed by two-person expert maternal/newborn clinician teams using pretested forms based on international quality-of-care standards. A total of 105 care encounters were observed, primarily in urban, public, referral-level settings. Providers of care included obstetricians, midwives, generalist physicians, medical residents, registered nurses, auxiliary nurses, and students of medicine, midwifery, and nursing. RESULTS: Hand washing, as an indicator of quality of antepartum care, was observed in only 41% of the observed encounters. Labor management often lacked certain elements of respectful maternity care across all provider groups. Several clinical tasks of high importance in the identification and prevention of common complications of antepartum, intrapartum, and immediate postpartum/newborn care were not documented as performed during the observation periods. Providers self-reported limited competence (ability to perform to a defined level of proficiency) in manual removal of the placenta, bimanual compression of the uterus, and newborn resuscitation. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that 1) the quality of maternal and newborn care and 2) the competence of maternal and child health providers in the diverse selection of LAC countries that were studied require substantial attention.

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).

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...

This article notes that in spite of policy support for the development of a reading culture in indigenous South African languages, there is very little material that has been published, especially for readers with limited literacy skills. The article describes Learn with Echo, a Zulu and English publication written for adults with less than a complete primary education, and focuses specifically on a strategy used in this publication to stimulate enjoyment of reading and to foster the development of reading and skills. This strategy is the weekly publication of a dual language picture story based on a fictional character, a Zulu man called uMkhize. The picture story depicts his adventures and misadventures as an inhabitant of Pietermaritzburg. The article describes the response of readers to this story as an example of the comic genre, and analyses observations of new readers' engagement with this story in relation to research on the reading process and the acquisition of literacy skills. It looks...

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.

To obtain a snapshot of the maternal and newborn care provided by different types of maternal and child health providers in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to 1) better inform advocacy and programmatic strategies and interventions to improve the quality of those services in the region, and 2) determine the need for more rigorous study of the issues.A rapid assessment of 83 health workers providing antepartum, intrapartum, and immediate postpartum and newborn care (within two hours of birth) in eight LAC countries was conducted in November and December of 2011. Health workers were observed by two-person expert maternal/newborn clinician teams using pretested forms based on international quality-of-care standards. A total of 105 care encounters were observed, primarily in urban, public, referral-level settings. Providers of care included obstetricians, midwives, generalist physicians, medical residents, registered nurses, auxiliary nurses, and students of medicine, midwifery, and nursing.Hand washing, as an indicator of quality of antepartum care, was observed in only 41% of the observed encounters. Labor management often lacked certain elements of respectful maternity care across all provider groups. Several clinical tasks of high importance in the identification and prevention of common complications of antepartum, intrapartum, and immediate postpartum/newborn care were not documented as performed during the observation periods. Providers self-reported limited competence (ability to perform to a defined level of proficiency) in manual removal of the placenta, bimanual compression of the uterus, and newborn resuscitation.The findings suggest that 1) the quality of maternal and newborn care and 2) the competence of maternal and child health providers in the diverse selection of LAC countries that were studied require substantial attention.

As countries in the Western Hemisphere make progress in the implementation of health sector reform but fall short of reaching the goal set in the late 1970s of Health For All by the Year 2000, community nursing is being viewed as an important alternative for the cost-effective delivery of basic public health and clinical services to individuals, families, and the community. Through innovative approaches and replication of successful demonstration projects, community nursing can improve access to care, particularly for a country's most vulnerable and hard-to-reach groups. Examples from Belize, Chile, Venezuela, Mexico, and Honduras illustrate how community nursing, in its many forms, continues to be relevant today and why it is likely to expand as we enter the twenty-first century.

This study explored what three Intermediate Phase English First Additional Language teachers understood about reading and teaching reading, and the strategies they used to develop learners’ reading skills. Data gathered through interviews and observations of classroom practice were used to consider the extent of their readiness to achieve the aims implicit in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). It was found that these educators understand reading primarily as the oral performance of decoding text to speech, and view comprehension as a separate and restricted entity; also, limitations in their understanding of comprehension processes involved in reading impeded their readiness to implement CAPS. Shortcomings in educators’ schooling experiences, training and professional development were considered with a view to informing future teacher training and workshops. This study formed part of a university led research project which investigated well-documented indications of poor development of literacy skills in South African schools.Keywords: Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), Decoding, Interactive models of reading, Intermediate Phase (IP), Reading skills, Annual National Assessment (ANA).

Concepts of literacy campaigns provide the context for a description and evaluation of the Siyafunda Literacy Campaign in the town of Richmond, KwaZulu-Natal. Recent political events in the region are noted. The leadership provided by the mayor, the need for the involvement of community members and features of the campaign such as the I Love Reading Month, book flood, Family Book Project, the Mayor's Reading Minutes and storytelling are briefly described as are the implementation and monitoring of the project and the lessons learnt. Innovation (2003) No. 26, pp 39-42