Decolonising Literacy Development through Reading to Learn Pedagogy: A Case of a Secondary School in South Africa

Abstract

Literacy development has been stifled through teaching approaches that suffocate learners in the classroom. This has been a trend the world over because of overreliance on traditional approaches to teaching literacy. The lack of progress in literacy development is manifested in the high failure and attrition rates in schools and universities. Against this background, there is a need to decolonize the way literacy development is promoted in the classroom. This research intervention employed learners’ written work, Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) curriculum documents such as textbooks, and semi structured interviews, Action Research and Reading to Learn (RtL) pedagogy to generate data. The paper illuminates the gains achieved through a teaching approach that is informed by Reading to Learn principles. As a decolonising pedagogy, the paper argues that RtL improved literacy development in a cohort of learners for three years leading up to Grade 12 in a township school in South Africa. Significant to the study is the extent to which RtL contributes significantly to the decolonisation of the formal education project. It exposes how the approved and traditional literacy practices continue to reproduce, and thus perpetuate, unequal relations in the classroom.

The findings reinforce the argument that Reading to learn pedagogy accelerates literacy development towards improved epistemological access. The pedagogy is informed by scaffolding principles birthed by Brunner and Vygotsky, genre theory (Martin, 1985: Christie, 1990) and on the functional model of language developed by Halliday (1985). Importantly, a Systemic Functional Linguistics tool designed by (Rose, 2018) as an analytical framework is used in the paper. The study employs the mixed research approach. The emerging findings demonstrate the extent to which RtL pedagogy could be said to be contributing to the decolonisation project.