Portia October currently leads the Funda Wande Western Cape Intervention. She is a literacy specialist who has worked as a literacy coach in schools and in the Foundation Phase advisory services of the Western Cape Education Department. Her work includes training, capacitating, and coaching subject advisors and departmental heads to become expert instructional leaders. She is passionate about impacting literacy in South Africa to improve the reading levels of all learners.
Session Description
“Effective Early Mother Tongue Literacy Instruction in African Languages: A Curriculum Design and Research Collaboration across Continents and Institutions”
The work of Funda Wande, an NGO located in Cape Town, South Africa, is on prioritizing, thinking through and testing interventions that will lead to all children learning to read for meaning and to calculate with confidence by age 10 by 2030.
The Funda Wande instructional design and assessment teams have developed research-based early literacy curricula (Foundation Phase through Grade 3) in the mother tongues of isiXhosa, Sepedi, and Afrikaans. These curricula have been implemented in schools in the Eastern Cape, the Western Cape, and Limpopo and evaluated using RCT design. The Funda Wande team has collaborated with the Literacy and Languages faculty at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Dr. Pamela Mason and Dr. Catherine Snow, on research-based early literacy curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher support through coaching. Their study of the Grade 1 and 2 curriculum resulted in modifications to address 1) the expansion of vocabulary and rich use of language, (2) increasing the opportunities for practicing handwriting and (3) including assessments with a variety of cognitive levels.
In this session we will present the design principles of mother tongue instruction, the modifications in the teaching materials and monitoring, and the results of the RCT. We will discuss the cross linguistic challenges of designing mother tongue instruction and the support provided to Foundation Phase teachers to effectively implement mother tongue instruction. Challenges to the effective learning and teaching of early literacy, such as low resourced schools, learner attendance, and teacher preparation and on-going professional learning, will be interrogated.