Background: Owing to the dearth of reading practices within the South African literacy landscape, many learners neither engage in productive reading habits, nor exhibit a positive attitude towards English First Additional Language (EFAL) reading. Consequently, many learners experience reading challenges, which negatively impact on their academic…

Background: Mother-tongue education in South African primary schools remains a challenge to policymakers. The situation is problematic in multilingual "lok'shin" (township) schools where the "lok'shin" lingua is not recognised as 'standard' language. This article raises the controversial possibility of positioning of…

Background: Writing is among the most important skills, and globally it has received more emphasis in literature on language teaching than reading, speaking and listening. However, a paucity of studies is observed in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in contexts where English is being taught as an additional or foreign language, as is the case in…

Despite the fact that comprehension plays an important role in the reading process, the literature in a South African context reveals that learners continue to struggle with it and teachers continue to neglect it in their teaching. The literature has further shown that teachers' neglect of comprehension in their reading lessons could be attributed…

The purpose of the study was to determine the relationship between lecturers' beliefs and the actual methods they use in teaching reading. The study, which was conducted in teacher training colleges in the Amhara Region in Ethiopia, showed quite a number of discrepancies. The findings revealed that although in many cases lecturers were aware of…

This research reports on the findings regarding the perceptions of teachers towards creating space for the use of code switching as a teaching strategy in Afrikaans learning and teaching in the isiXhosa-speaking environments of the Transkei region. The aim of this investigation was to establish whether or not code switching can be used as a…

In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis on the interpersonal function of metadiscourse features in academic texts. This means that research on writing in academic contexts began to focus on the rhetorical features, such as interactional metadiscourse, that writers use to present their voice in writing. These developments in academic…

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…

Background: There is a general outcry that too many South African Foundation Phase (Grades 1-3) teachers do not know how to teach reading and are currently teaching reading in an "ad hoc", unsystematic way. Objectives: In response to this, this study explored the Foundation Phase teachers' perceptions of their role in teaching reading.…

In a context where Foundation Phase literacy teachers' personal literacy often involves operational and technicist practices rather than creative, this paper argues that it is by exposing teachers to experiences of working with different genres of text for an extended time, in different fields, that teachers are able to imagine the possibilities…

This mixed questionnaire survey sought to determine if lecturers who learned to speak and understand Nigerian Creole before English are willing to use the language as medium of instruction. The respondents were comprised of 560 lecturers and graduate students (i.e. master's, doctoral) selected through a purposeful random sampling frame from 15…