Early language and literacy learning in a peripheral African setting : a study of children's participation in home and school communicative and literacy practices in and around Manzini, Swaziland

Dlamini, Sikelela Moses

Early language and literacy learning in a peripheral African setting : a study of children's participation in home and school communicative and literacy practices in and around Manzini, Swaziland

Doctoral Thesis

2009

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

School of Education

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the early literacy development of four children from low-income families in and around Manzini, Swaziland. It investigated the orientations to literacy, language, and communication that children brought to school from home, vice versa, and the sorts of consequences that such traversing of sites has for the children's literacy development and schooling. It is the first study of literacy and children's literacy carried out in Swaziland from a socio-cultural perspective. The study joins a growing body of New Literacy Studies research into the social practices that shape children's early literacy learning and a smaller body of such work from Africa. I used evidence from four children's home and school literacy lives, systematically collected by means of in-depth ethnographic case studies and used an interpretive analytical frame of enquiry. This study breaks with previous research in Swaziland by detailing the situated ways that reading and writing happen in specific socio-cultural contexts.

Description

Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-256).

Keywords

Education

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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