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Aliteracy and illiteracy are a world-wide problem. However, in developing countries such as South Africa, where much of the population has no tradition of reading or reading culture, the problem is more critical.

In an attempt to address the growing problem of low levels of literacy in South Africa the Children’s Literature Research Unit (CLRU) at UNISA set up a Family Literacy Project in 2000. This was initially limited to 2 sites in Gauteng and situated in crèches. The following year we expanded to monitoring and piggybacking on a project already established in KwaZulu Natal and also established sites throughout South Africa. This was done together with an NGO, Project Literacy, whose focus was on adult literacy. It was thought that family literacy would be an ideal component for adult literacy classes as reading children’s books to preschool children would be a meaningful legitimate way for adult learners to practice their newly acquired literacy skills on an uncritical audience.

In 2003 we expanded the project to public libraries as we felt this would be more sustainable over the long term because public libraries have the resources and networks (that is books, people and venues) and are well-situated in their respective communities. They also have the advocacy potential to develop good reading habits in their potential users. Although there were some positive results it was ultimately felt that resources (from the point of view of research) would be better spent if we focussed on a project in one location. It was therefore decided that an integrated longitudinal study in one school in a deprived community be undertaken. This project deals with many facets that affect and influence reading: books, library, teaching methodology and motivation. This paper will give an overview of the evolution of the original family literacy projects into the current project outlining research results and lessons learned.

Stream: Libraries

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I have been an academic in the Department of Information Science for the past 20 years at Unisa. Unisa is a distance teaching institution with approximately 225,000 students throughout the world. Apart from teaching both at undergraduate and postgraduate level I have been actively involved in research and community projects related to children's reading and literacy throughout South Africa. I have done research in semiotic aspects of children’s reading, children’s reading interests and literacy. I have won two awards for research articles, and was selected as one of the fifteen women high achievers at Unisa.

I have worked in the field of Library and Information Science for twenty years. I started in academia and then worked in the practice for a number of years before returning to the academic world. My interests and practical experience are largely in the field of hi-tech information retrieval. However, in the past few years I have become increasingly interested in the issue of literacy, partially as a result of working at the university and seeing the falling levels of literacy in students. Currently I am working in the field of family literacy and have presented a number of papers on the project as well as published articles. The project is of especial interest to me because it is interdisciplinary (we work with the Departments of Linguistics, African Languages and English).