ABSTRACT
After the end of apartheid rule in South Africa in 1994, major problems and challenges in educational delivery and achievement were acknowledged. To address these, significant conceptual work, policy changes and some practical initiatives were initiated in both non-formal and formal education domains. One of the focal areas was, and indeed remains, literacy. In particular, there was increased recognition of the urgent need to improve early/emergent literacy teaching. In this chapter, I provide the reader a sense of the significant language and literacy related challenges we face on the African continent and of the progress that has been made in South Africa for early literacy development and learning since the end of apartheid. First, I discuss some of the more significant contextual and theoretical issues influencing literacy development in Africa. In the second part of the chapter, I describe some of the research and practical interventions for early literacy that have been initiated in the post-apartheid years by the multilingual research and education organization where I work, the project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA).
