Abstract
The study aimed to explore the factors that influence reading comprehension in a multilingual classroom. It also aimed to explore the pedagogical knowledge of teachers that promotes reading with comprehension in multilingual classrooms. I was motivated to do this study since the majority of the children I used to teach before the study began could not speak isiZulu at home or school, resulting in the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) of the school being their second, third or even fourth language. This is an ongoing challenge in most South African public schools: children are learning in a language that they do not understand, making it difficult for them to communicate with their teacher and peers in the school LoLT.
The research methodology for this study was a qualitative study. The suitable research design was the case study because my focus was on trying to make sense of and interpret teachers’ experiences in multilingual classrooms. To accomplish this, I interviewed teachers and observed them in their classrooms. I used the qualitative content analysis (inductive) method to analyse the data, coding the necessary information and categorising the codes using mind maps. I then used the categories to identify themes, which led me to discover the main finding: oral language proficiency and its development impacts reading with comprehension in multilingual foundation phase classrooms where isiZulu is the LoLT. Furthermore, teachers were aware of the practices and methods that they needed to use in their multilingual classroom in order to support and encourage learners to improve their comprehension; nevertheless, they were not intentional or consistent in executing them.
I recommend that public schools provide more opportunities for teachers to receive multilingual teaching practice training so that they can learn to be intentional about developing multilingual children's oral language acquisition and reading comprehension skills; the emphasis should be on using multilingual teaching methods rather than the monolingual methods that are currently in use.