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We experimentally compare two modes of in-service professional development for South African public primary school teachers. In both programs teachers received the same learning material and daily lesson plans, aligned to the official literacy curriculum. Pupils exposed to two years of the program improved their reading proficiency by 0.12 standard deviations if their teachers received centralized Training, compared to 0.24 if their teachers received in-class Coaching. Classroom observations reveal that teachers were more likely to split pupils into smaller reading groups, which enabled individualized attention and more opportunities to practice reading. Results vary by class size and baseline pupil reading proficiency. * Results reported on in this study forms part of the Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS) which was lead by the Department of Basic Education to find out how to improve early grade reading. We are grateful for useful feedback from Servaas van der Berg, David Evans, Clare Leaver, Rob Garlick, James Habyarimana, and an anonymous pair of reviewers.

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There is growing evidence of systematic underachievement of South African primary school learners in reading in English as the first additional language. There is a small but growing literature that provides insights, that is, causes, patterns and prevalence, into this phenomenon. Through a secondary analysis of a spelling component of a literacy test that was administered as an end-line assessment for a randomised control trial, this article provides new evidence for and insight into the patterns and prevalence of English language spelling errors made by Grade 4 second-language learners. The study specifically coded errors on four monosyllabic three-letter words for 2500 Grade 4 learners tested individually at the end of the second term in 2014. Three distinct linguistic error patterns were identified. The most frequent error patterns involved the incorrect use of the vowel grapheme, for example bed was spelled ‘bad’. The second pattern related to common errors associated with the transfer of linguistic, orthographic patterns from the first language (isiZulu). The final pattern suggests that between 6% and 8% of learners were struggling to make the basic phoneme–grapheme connection. This pattern, however, would need to be confirmed with oral interviews. The implications of these error patterns are discussed.

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