The use of reading strategies in English Medium of Instruction Physical Sciences classrooms in the FET phase

Abstract

The South African education system has come under fire for the poor performance of learners compared to that of their global counterparts. The poor performance in Physical Sciences classrooms stems largely from the inability of learners to read with comprehension. Consequently, more emphasis is being placed on learners' abilities to read with comprehension. In an effort to assist learners and teachers, the Department of Basic Education has attempted to alleviate the anxiety with regard to reading by offering guidelines to teach English language in content classrooms. However, this is still insufficient as reading comprehension can only be achieved if a text can be broken into pieces, with each piece being analysed and understood individually and eventually linked together. To this end, the use of reading strategies becomes important. Reading strategies allow learners to deconstruct a text into more manageable pieces in order to extract meaning and ultimately to achieve understanding. This study advocates the use of reading strategies in the Physical Sciences classroom. In the Physical Sciences, learners are faced with a variety of texts like written, diagrams and chemical equations to name a few. Learners often struggle, as each text has different demands in terms of higher order thinking. Consequently, learners need to have strategies in place to assist them with the extraction of knowledge from the different texts found in the Physical Sciences. This study proposes the following reading strategies: vocabulary/word recognition, syntactical awareness, text recognition, questioning, prior knowledge, inferring, clarifying/monitoring, searching-selecting and visualising. The study focusses on the use of these strategies to aid comprehension within the Physical Sciences classroom, which ultimately allows learners to assimilate knowledge more effectively. This study is qualitative in nature and it includes observations as well as interviews of participants who teach Physical Sciences in the FET phase through medium of English. In order to triangulate the study, a document analysis of the CAPS document for Physical Sciences in the FET phase, as well as the Manual for Teaching English Across the Curriculum, was done.