Entire issue.pdf


Editorial

Welcome to the �rst issue of Reading and Writing: Journal of the Reading Asso-
ciation of South Africa. !is new journal aims to bring together research, �eld 
reports, discussion pieces and critical commentary that will contribute to our 
knowledge and understandings of reading and writing and that may help us to 
better grasp the complex, dynamic and changing nature of literacy practices in 
education and in contemporary social life. !e idea for Reading and Writing 
grew out of the meetings of the Reading Association of South Africa. RASA 
started on a small scale in Cape Town in 2004 and these origins are still faintly 
discernable in the roughly Table Mountain shape of the books on RASA’s logo 
on the front cover. RASA quickly outgrew its ‘Mother City’ origins, however, 
and is now a larger national body, a"liated to the International Reading Asso-
ciation, with branches in KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Eastern Cape and Western 
Cape, and with active participation from literacy educators and researchers 
in neighbouring countries around southern Africa. One of the initial aims of 
RASA, as set out at the inaugural conference, was to promote research into all 
�elds of literacy in South Africa. !is is just one direction in RASA’s broader 
mandate to engage with teachers, educators and academics in developing and 
promoting literacy work, and in particular, contributing to the development of 
better teachers of reading and writing, in schools and throughout the system of 
educational provision. But research is the primary business of this new journal. 

!e importance of developing a sound and sustained research tradition around 
reading and writing in southern Africa hardly needs to be stressed, despite 
and probably also because of the lack of dedicated research outlets in this 
�eld. !ere is no doubt that the educational challenges around reading and 
writing and the societal issues around literacy and language are at least as big 
a concern in South Africa as elsewhere in the world and much attention has 
been drawn in recent times to how poorly large numbers of children in South 
African schools are doing on standardised literacy tests. !ere is also an adult 
literacy campaign underway in the country costing several billions of rands, 
but there is very little sight of it in research journals, let alone in newspapers 

RW&



6 Reading and writing

and little evidence at all that it is making a di#erence. Reading, writing and 
language concerns challenge universities in South Africa as they confront 
evidence of widespread failures and drop-outs amongst designated social 
groups. We are also in a situation where there is not a clear and informed 
consensus nor an informed debate amongst educators and researchers from 
varying backgrounds and disciplines as to what counts as literacy and how 
reading and writing should be taught for particular purposes. !e impacts of 
Information Communication Technologies, with screen-based, multi-media 
reading and writing, game-playing and Internet activities such as e-mailing, 
social networking and mobile phone-texting are just some areas where literacy 
practices are dynamic and changing. 

We therefore welcome the participation, both as readers and writers, of a broad 
range of practitioners and academics who are interested in exploring how 
literacy is de�ned, enacted and promoted in a range of institutional, socio-
cultural and disciplinary contexts: from early childhood literacy; early school 
literacy; middle school literacy; high school literacy; academic literacy in ter-
tiary institutions; workplace literacies; family and community literacies; digital 
literacies associated with the new communication media, technologies and 
practices; transnational and translocal literacies associated with migrants and 
mobile people in African settings and with children of migrants and refugees 
in schools; reading and writing across various kinds of multilingual settings 
including schools and workplaces; to the reading and writing practices associ-
ated with government, local government and formal as well as informal civil 
society associations. !e journal will present contributions from colleagues 
writing and researching in any of these relevant areas. We welcome papers that 
provoke debate about literacy interventions of various sorts, whether directed 
at children, adults or both; in schools, homes, workplaces and elsewhere. 
We encourage contributions from a range of di#erent disciplines and across 
disciplinary boundaries. While literacy studies have come more from some 
disciplines than others in the past, from psychology, linguistics and education, 
the growing contributions of sociologists, ethnographers, literary, cultural 
and technology theorists have broadened and enriched the �eld. In addition, 
interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches can stretch and invigorate 
our sense of what concepts and approaches are productive in our �eld.

Besides its primary commitment to publishing original, relevant, peer-
reviewed research across all sites of literacy studies, the journal can also 
provide a forum for information and exchange amongst various sectors in the 
�eld, including government and ngos, as well as contribute to the growth of 
teachers of excellence, in the long run. Individuals will not at all need to be 
members of the Reading Association of South Africa (RASA) to write for or to 
subscribe to the journal but we will not mind if the journal encourages growth 



7Editorial

in RASA membership. While the journal will be published by RASA, it will be 
run by an Editor and Editorial Board who will have an identity independent of 
RASA decision-making structures as regards content and selection. !e jour-
nal will also need to �ll a developmental role where new researchers are given 
detailed and helpful feedback from review editors that gives them support in 
their struggles to turn their e#orts into publishable research. 

We include in this issue a review of some aspects of the international PIRLS 
testing of primary-schoolchildren that happened South Africa in 2006 and is 
scheduled to run again next year; we invite discussion on this research. !e 
paper, by Surette van Staden and Sarah Howie is written by key participants 
in the South African wing of this in$uential comparative international pro-
gramme. We also include a study of an intervention at school level, by Sally 
Currin and Lilli Pretorius, which tries to make a di#erence in one school. Both 
of these papers present instances of exemplary practice of particular kinds and 
we would hope that they stimulate responses and research studies that engage 
them productively. We start with a paper that is based on Kate Parry’s key-
note address at RASA’s second national conference, outlining her innovative 
and in$uential approach to library development in rural Kenya, and the �nal 
article is by Daniel Kasule and Violet Lunga on their reseach from Botswana 
into the practice of self-editing as a strategy for academic literacy development 
at tertiary level.

We are pleased to have a report from Snoeks Desmond on the innovative 
Family Literacy Project from KwaZulu-Natal, and a short opinion piece from 
James Paul Gee, well-known internationally as a stimulating, accessible and 
innovative thinker on literacy, language and learning. 

As we welcome you to this �rst issue, we ask you to imagine what could be 
done in future issues and to participate with us in broadening and sharpening 
the scope of work presented in these pages. At a more mundane but no less 
important level, we urge you to get your institutions to subscribe to the journal, 
using the details available on the back pages. We need these subscriptions if 
the journal is to prosper.

Mastin Prinsloo