The DBE recently hosted a workshop on the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) in Pretoria to orientate the National Education Evaluation Development Unit (NEEDU) evaluators on the EGRA project that is currently being implemented in 1000 schools nationally in all the official languages. The EGRA is a diagnostic reading test that is administered orally, one learner at a time. In about 15 minutes, a teacher, through using the four main assessment components (recognition of initial sounds, word recognition, passage and reading), is able to assess the learner’s ability to perform fundamental pre-reading and reading skills.

The EGRA project was launched in 2015 in Grades 1-3 in 100 project schools per province. It has been successfully implemented and sustained in Grades 2 and 3 in 2016.  The Western Cape is implementing the EGRA in their 100 Focus School Project; the Northern Cape in 10 additional schools in each district; and the Namakwa District (Northern Cape) is implementing it in Grades 1-3 in all of its 65 primary schools.

NEEDU will implement EGRA using the DBE EGRA toolkit in the next semester during their follow-up visits to schools.  These schools were visited during 2012 and 2013 when EGRA was implemented in them, but only Grade 5 learners were assessed. The current DBE EGRA pilot is an off-shoot of one of the recommendations made in the NEEDU Report (State of Literacy Teaching in the Foundation Phase) which concludes that teachers are not able to conduct diagnostic assessments on reading and provide appropriate didactic interventions to enhance individual reading levels.

NEEDU envisages evaluating the impact of the DBE EGRA process in Grade 4 (2016 Grade 3 cohort) in 2017. Therefore, the implementation of EGRA in assessing reading proficiency levels in Grades 3 in the follow-up visits to schools nationally will hold the NEEDU evaluators in good stead to assess the impact of the DBE EGRA Pilot.

There are two main principles that underpin EGRA, firstly the complexity of the language affects how long a learner needs to acquire these skills and secondly, the development of specific assessment tools to understand which critical skills require additional reinforcement. Acquiring reading skills is a multi-phased process. Reading acquisition takes longer in some languages than others with the length of time determined by the level of correspondence between the written language or orthography (graphemes) and the spoken language (phonemes). In spite of differences in the amount of time it takes to acquire reading skills, the EGRA is based on the premise that learners of all alphabetic-based languages pass through the same phases of language learning and EGRA concentrates on the assessment of foundational skills which are letter sound knowledge, phonological awareness and enables them to engage with the printed text.

It is envisaged that EGRA will be recognised as a National Reading Diagnostic Assessment. Phase 1 implementation took place during 2015. During phase 2, the DBE is planning to expand the EGRA project to an additional 1000 schools beyond 2016.