Development and initial validation of productive vocabulary tests for isiZulu, Siswati and English in South Africa

Abstract

Multilingualism in education is encouraged in South Africa, and children are expected to become bilingual and biliterate during the early primary grades. Much focus has been placed on measuring literacy in children’s first language, often the medium of instruction (MOI), and English, the language typically used as MOI from fourth grade. However, vocabulary development in African contexts is underexplored, owing to the cost of existing English standardized tests, and the comparatively fewer linguistically and contextually appropriate vocabulary assessments in African languages. To address this gap, we document the development of corpus-informed contextually appropriate tests of productive vocabulary in isiZulu, Siswati, and English, which were used for a project evaluation. The initial validation phase included 412 children. Both tests were reliable and were concurrently validated with reading comprehension tests in each language, and oral language skills in English. This study contributes to our understanding of the factors that affect the variation in vocabulary knowledge in an African context, including age, grade repetition, and vocabulary in the other language. Only English vocabulary was affected by the remote rural location of the school. We recommend some modifications to the tests before they are validated further in other populations.

Examining the generalisability of the simple view of reading comprehension for emergent bilinguals

“…Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) instruments used to gather the word reading and reading comprehension data are available on the Department of Basic Education website at https://www.education.gov.za/Programmes/ EarlyGradeReadingStudy.aspx or on request from the authors. The Productive Vocabulary Test isiZulu/Siswati (Wilsenach et al, 2019a) and English (Wilsenach et al, 2019b) (Henrich et al, 2010).…”

“…Table 1 presents the sample characteristics of children in the vocabulary study, as reported by Wilsenach and Schaefer (2022). The sample is similar to the main EGRS2 sample described previously.…”

“…Productive vocabulary was measured in L1 and English using the Productive Vocabulary Test (pVt) isiZulu/Siswati (Wilsenach et al, 2019a) and pVt English (Wilsenach et al, 2019b). These tests were designed to include words of decreasing frequency (discussed in Wilsenach & Schaefer, 2022). Participants were presented with a printed picture and asked a variation of ‘What is this’?…”

“…There was a total of 102 items in each test and the raw score was the number of items answered correctly before the test was discontinued. The internal reliability of the pVt isiZulu/Siswati and pVt English was α = 0.76 and α = 0.85, respectively (Wilsenach & Schaefer, 2022, p. 582).…”

A Corpus-Based List of Frequently Used Words in Sesotho

“…As a result, they perform poorly on problems involving language (Van der Walt et al, 2008). This is especially pronounced in bilingual and multilingual learners since they develop literacy simultaneously in two languages (Cockcroft, 2016;Wilsenach and Schaefer, 2022). Such learners perform more poorly than monolingual learners who get in-depth exposure to one language (Cockcroft, 2016).…”