While the importance of learning to read in mother-tongue is widely acknowledged in the international development discourse, reading acquisition in African languages remains under-researched and under-theorized. These are morphologically rich agglutinating languages with transparent orthographies, so reading research findings derived from English, a partially analytic Germanic language with an opaque orthography, may not be directly relevant to early reading in African languages. a review of reading research on African languages reveals slowly emerging investigations of the inter-relationships between phonological and morphological processes, oral reading fluency (ORF) and comprehension. While ORF has been extensively studied among home-language English students (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2006; Fuchs et al., 2001) there are few studies that directly assess this relationship in African languages. Most studies involve small numbers of participants, for instance, 54 Sepedi readers (Makalela & Fakude, 2014) and 52 Xhosa readers (Diemer; 2015) in South Africa. The only large scale study to date involves 1541 students in Kiswahili in Kenya (Piper & Zuilkowski, 2015).
This paucity presents a problem since the way we teach early grade reading (and the differential emphases on sub-components of reading) may differ based on language typology and structure. While the links between ORF and comprehension in English are well documented and well understood (Pinnel et al., 1995; Spear-Swerling, 2006; Fuchs et al. (2001), this is not the case in African languages. It is reasonable to ask whether this relationship may be different in agglutinating Nguni languages that have a conjunctive transparent orthography (such as isiZulu) and agglutinating Sotho languages that have a disjunctive transparent orthography (such as Sepedi). The agglutinating Xitsonga language has a partially disjunctive transparent orthography.
In this study we assessed the oral reading fluency and comprehension of 785 Grade 3 learners from 61 primary schools in South Africa. At least 10 students were assessed per school with each student being assessed in both their home-language (L1) and in English (L2). In total, there were 514 isiZulu students (42 schools), 143 Sepedi students (9 schools) and 128 Xitsonga students (10 schools) in the sample. These schools were all situated in township and rural areas in three South African provinces (KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Limpopo) with purposive sampling aiming to select 30 higher-performing schools and 30 lower performing schools. The paper will present a quantitative analysis of the relationships between ORF and comprehension in the different languages and the links between L1 (African language) ORF and L2 (English) ORF. The implications for research on African languages and early reading instruction are also discussed.
