Silent Reading: A Case of Sustained Silent Reading in a Western Cape Grade 5 Classroom
"Well-developed Reading and Viewing skills are central to successful learning across the curriculum" (Department of Basic Education, 2011: 10). Previous sociocultural research as well as the South African Department of Basic Education has shown the importance of reading- both in terms of achievement and general student well-being. However, the South African curriculum seems to provide little in the way of detailing how to foster a culture of reading in schools and what this reading should look like. As a result, I became interested in schools in the Western Cape area that seemed to have a good reading culture to see what they did to foster reading. It became clear that such schools made the move to incorporating reading for pleasure into the school day and curriculum. One of the ways was through daily Sustained Silent Reading periods (SSR-periods). Cattus Primary, a primary school in an affluent Western Cape suburb, had both a strong reading culture and held daily SSR-periods and it became the site of the case study. The case study focused on one class of Grade five students, their teacher and the librarian in a Western Cape suburban school who were observed, interviewed and (in the case of the students) given a questionnaire to determine what happened during the mandatory, daily SSR-periods. The focus, during observation and interviews, was on how SSR was enacted, the participants' sentiments regarding reading, how their actions contradicted or supported these sentiments and finally the role of the library with reference to the SSR-periods. Observing and analysing through the lens of the sociocultural perspective and new literacy studies (NLS) of literacy events, I discovered that although SSR-periods were being held, literacy events like the SSR-periods are not reducible to observable parts of literacy because "they also involve values, attitudes, feelings and social relationships" (Barton, 2006: 7-8). I discovered that identity performance, attitudes towards reading as well as the teacher's involvement played a major role in the SSR-periods success and more so the reader/student's motivation to read during these periods. Furthermore, the library played a crucial role in school reading culture and could be used as a supplementary to the SSRperiod, or as a third space (Moje et al 2004).
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations