For many children around the world, access to higher education and the labour market depends on becoming fluent in a second language. This presents a challenge to education policy: when and how in the school programme should a transition to the second language occur? While a large theoretical literature exists, empirical evidence is limited by the difficulties inherent to measuring the causal effect of language of instruction. In South Africa, the majority of children do not speak English as their first language but are required to undertake their final school-leaving examinations in English. Most schools offer mother-tongue instruction in the first three grades of school and then transition to English as the language of instruction in the fourth grade. Some schools use English as the language of instruction from the first grade. In recent years a number of schools have changed their policy, thus creating within-school, cross-grade variation in the language of instruction received in the early grades. We use longitudinal data on school characteristics including language of instruction by grade, and student test score data for the population of South African primary schools. Simple OLS estimates suggest a positive correlation between English instruction in the first three grades and English performance in grades 4, 5 and 6. After including school fixed effects, which removes the confounding effects of selection into schools with different language policies, we find that mother tongue instruction in the early grades significantly improves English acquisition, as measured in grades 4, 5 and 6. The significance of this study is twofold. Firstly, it illustrates the power of school-fixed effects to estimate causal impacts of educational interventions. Secondly, it is the first South African study (and one of a very few international studies) to bring robust empirical evidence to the policy debate around language of instruction.
The weak quality of education received by most poor children in South Africa places them in permanent disadvantage relative to those attending the mainly more affluent and better performing schools. This document draws from a large number of studies undertaken for a major project and summarises this evidence, which illustrating that low quality schools act as a poverty trap.
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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