Anyone who can, including teachers, parents and caregivers, should read to children, says Gabriel Kelly, head of research, impact and innovation at Nalibari.
Speaking at a World Reading Day event hosted by Nalibali and the City of Cape Town, she said reading to children helps them learn to read independently and “adopt reading as a way of life.” He said it was helpful.
According to a 2021 study by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Survey (PIRLS), more than 80% of South African fourth graders are unable to read with meaning.
Around 200 learners from grades R, 4 and 5 gathered in the park on Wednesday to celebrate World Reading Day.
People from various organizations, authors and even Stormers players read aloud to the children. The schools involved include Essenhout Primary School in southern Delft, Mamre Primary School in Atlantis, Vukani Primary School in Philippi and Nkullekweni Primary School in Wala Sedena.
Aloenisha Philander, a fifth and seventh grade teacher at Mamre Elementary School, says some of the seventh grade learners don't even know the alphabet. “I don’t know how they got through such a high performance,” she says.
Philander said many of the learners and schools who participated in the event come from areas struggling with poverty and gang violence, which have a huge impact on their ability to learn. Events like this are helpful because learners are more interested when someone else reads the story, she says. I don't understand even if I read it myself.
Cape Town Mayor Jordyn Hill-Lewis said many of the problems faced by South African learners could be solved “with the simple act of reading every day”.
He said the city is trying to help through the many public libraries available throughout the city.
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article as long as you credit the author and GroundUp and do not change the text. Please include a link to the original article.
We have placed a hidden pixel on the article so that we can count the traffic to the republisher. All analysis tools reside only on our servers. We do not provide logs to third parties. Logs will be deleted after two weeks. We do not use information that identifies IP addresses except to count regional traffic. We are only interested in counting hits, but not tracking user. If you republish, do not remove hidden pixels.