Abstract

Communities all over the world, requires that every citizen posses reading- and writing skills. Because of that, every child has the right to get the opportunity to acquire reading- and writing skills. In this work, school has an important role to play. For a country in development, like South Africa, reading- and writing skills are keys for education and prosperity of the nation and this study aims to explain how teachers in South Africa work with children when they learn to read and write. The first part, introduces what writers and researchers have written about the subject so far. They request intentional work with children’s language development in pre-school, to prevent difficulties when they start to read and write. They recommend analytic reading methods, which are based on work with full words and sentences from the start, instead of synthetic methods which are based on work whit separate letters. I made interviews with three teachers during our visit in a black township. In the second part the opinion of these three teachers, concerning read- and write skills and their way of working with it, is being introduced. It turned out that they are working whit both analytic and synthetic methods, and the children starts learning to read and write in grade R (pre-school). The teachers were well aware of the learner’s hard social situation considering poverty, uneducated parents, and how that had an effect on the children’s opportunity to learn.

In the last part, the result is being discussed and compared to what was said by the writers and researchers.