Development of Balanced Reading in Sepedi and English of Grade 7 Limpopo Readers

Abstract

Reading in more than one language remains a debatable issue in literacy pedagogy. The present study aims to illuminates this debate by measuring, and comparing learners’ writing, resolving anaphors, and making inference on text using both Sepedi and English among grade 7 readers in three randomly selected schools in rural Limpopo. Two schools speaking the same dialect of Semmamabolo (language closer to standard variety of Sepedi) were selected randomly from Mankweng circuit. One school was conveniently selected from Tzaneen to serve as a pseudo group to measure dialectal influence for reading performance of the learners for both Semmamabolo and Selobdu dialects. The dialectal schools were compared to measure if there were differences in performance and Selobedu School served as a psedo-school, to determine the dialectical difference. The learners were tested on reading comprehension with the use of making inference test and anaphoric resolution test. A one-time series design was used to study and compare the two languages and dialect reading scores within and between subjects. The sample consisted of n=150 participants for the tests in both English and Sepedi. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) results reveal low reading levels in both the participants’ home language and English with scores of (-+ 40%) below 75% and no differential dialect performances within Sepedi. The results indicate that learners are not about the same level in their reading comprehension skills in both the languages. These results are interpreted within various theoretical frameworks on the relationship between L1 and L2 reading development.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p951