Background: The digital world and the concomitant changes in early childhood education have created uncertainty for teachers not knowing how to adjust their pedagogical practices of using digital play to enhance language development. Aim: This study aimed to analyse what teachers understand by digital play and how they use it for language teaching…

Background: Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) learners have unique needs, and specific pedagogies, therefore, need to be employed to support the acquisition of their essential skills. A great deal of research has been conducted on the use of music-based pedagogies to teach mathematics, life skills, civics and literacy at various levels of…

Background: In this article, an analysis is done of the out of school factors of Foundation Phase learners that could influence the proper development of these learners' language abilities. Specific reference is made to the home environment of Foundation Phase learners in rural Mpumalanga. Aim: This article aims to draw attention to the fact that…

Perinatal HIV infection is associated with delayed neurocognitive development, but less is known about children perinatally HIV-exposed but uninfected (CHEU). We compared cognitive and language outcomes in 4-6-year old CHEU versus children HIV-unexposed and uninfected (CHUU) and children living with HIV (CLHIV). We enrolled 1,581 children (77% of…

Research Findings: Community-based playgroups in low-and-middle-income countries increase access to early learning at lower cost than centers. However, evidence of effectiveness is limited. The effects of one, two, or three playgroup sessions per week on children's performance on the Early Learning Outcome Measure (ELOM) (n = 112; baseline M…

This article draws on a long term ethnographic study which explored the way the home based practices experienced by children in a marginalised community in a large South African city, Port Elizabeth, prepared them for, and supported them in, schooling. The study was informed by the field known as 'New Literacy Studies' and which draws extensively…

Late identification of children with ASD remains a concern. Due to limited research in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) such as South Africa (SA), the early management of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) should be further explored. The aim was to describe the demographic characteristics and early management of ASD that may influence…

In this article, literacy, which is conceived of as a set of cognitive skills, is juxtaposed with a sociocultural orientation that sees literacy as a set of social practices for the production of meaning. Cognitive, skills-based pedagogies treat literacy as universal, autonomous, and independent of context, whereas sociocultural literacy…

Background: Dialogic book-sharing is an interactive form of shared reading. It has been shown in high income countries (HICs) to be of significant benefit to child cognitive development. Evidence for such benefit in low and middle income countries (LMICs) is scarce, although a feasibility study of our own produced encouraging findings.…

This article draws upon our experiences of participating in a Literacy Hub in South Africa. The aim is to describe and analyse how dialogue among Grade Eight teachers in a Literacy Hub around literacy teaching practices might lead to professional development and deepen teachers' understanding of literacy practices and teaching. Interviews and…

The low rates of child literacy in South Africa are cause for considerable concern. Research from the developed world shows that parental sharing of picture books with infants and young children is beneficial for child language and cognitive development, as well as literacy skills. We conducted a pilot study to examine whether such benefits might…

From the field of developmental psycholinguistics and from conceptual development theory there is evidence that excessive linguistic "code-switching" in early school education may pose some hazards for the learning of young multilingual children. In this article the author addresses the issue, invoking post-Piagetian and neo-Vygotskian…

This paper reports on part of the first phase of a longitudinal project investigating the development of academic language in English as the Language of Teaching and Learning (LoLT) by Foundation phase learners in two different educational contexts. In the first context, the learners were all English additional language (EAL) learners taught by…

This study explored the experiences of young black African preschoolers as well as their parents' perceptions towards their mother tongue. It investigated the factors that influence black African parents to prefer English over their indigenous language. The paper also explores how aspects such as cultural and social capital affect parental choice…

Afrikaans and Sesotho are two of the 11 official languages of the Republic of South Africa. Data on the acquisition of these languages are scarce. It is interesting to compare the acquisition of the two languages because they are very different in grammatical structure. In addition, cultural differences may possibly be visible in the style of…