This professional development project, known as Literacy Leadership Project, enabled four Foundation Phase teachers in South Africa to implement the Guided Reading approach. Developed by American researchers Fountas and Pinnell (1996), Guided Reading helps elementary students strengthen their phonemic awareness, vocabulary, reading comprehension…

Reading is not simply an additional tool that students need at university; it constitutes the very process whereby learning occurs. Pre-service students are required to read prescribed course material which is predominantly in English. An overview of the reading literacy profiles of first-year BEd foundation phase students from diverse language…

Lifelong learning is the only way to sustain proficient learning in a rapidly changing world. Knowledge and information are exploding across the globe. We need accurate ways to facilitate the process of drawing external factual information into an internal perceptive advantage from which to interpret and argue new information. Accurate and…

Various South African and international studies indicate that the preparation of teachers to teach reading is inconsistent across universities worldwide. Teacher preparation programmes lack rigorous research-based findings as the grounding for their programme design. Recommendations of some studies point to the fact that evidence-based research…

This paper describes an intervention programme that was originally intended to support transition to English as language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in Grade 4 in a township school, using a pre- and post-test design. Because the pre-tests revealed very poor literacy levels in both Zulu home language and English, the intervention programme was…