Literacy Boost South Africa: Baseline Report 2012

Between May 27^th and June 7^th, 2012, 275 grade 2 students in 14 primary schools in the Nketoana and Maluti A Phofung municipalities in the Free State of South Africa participated in a reading skills and habits survey. Children in seven of these schools will receive the Literacy Boost pilot program, so this report serves as the baseline.

Literacy Boost includes teacher training, community reading activities, and age-appropriate local language material creation to support emergent literacy skills among early-grade childrens.

Skills assessed include basic concepts about print, and letter awareness through reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension in Sesotho, Isizulu and English. As part of Literacy Boost, students are periodically assessed in each of these skills through an adaptable assessment tool to inform programming and estimate program impact. This report investigates Literacy Boost schools and comparison schools for comparability, and trends in students’ reading skills and how student background and home literacy environments affect them in ways important for shaping Literacy Boost programming.