With her Book Club, talk show host Oprah Winfrey has used the relatively new technology of television to revive literature. Despite the odds against her--selecting hard-to-read, quirky books by generally unknown authors--Winfrey has successfully created women's spaces for the 1990s, not so different from the American women's social clubs from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the French salons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study will show how Oprah's Book Club allows readers, especially women, to use the psychological processes of transference and transactional reading by using fictional literature from the Book Club to discuss sensitive areas of their lives.

This study offers an account of reading clubs as a literacy intervention in a grade 8 English class at a former ‘Coloured’ high school in South Africa. Using Margaret Archer’s social realist methodology, it examines different practices of ‘reading’ used by learners in talking and writing about text. Archer’s analytical dualism and morphogenetic model provided an explanatory framework for this study. Analytical dualism allows for the separation of the parts (structural and cultural elements) from the people (the grade 8 learners) so as to analyse the interplay between structure and culture. The morphogenetic model recognises that antecedent structures predate this, and any study but that through the exercise of agency, morphogenesis, in the form of structural elaboration or morphostasis in the form of continuity, may occur. This study used a New Literacies perspective based on an ideological model of literacy which recognises many different literacies, in addition to dominant school literacies. Learners’ talk about books as well as personal journal writing provided an insight into what cultural mechanisms and powers children bring to the reading of novels. Understandings of discourses as well as of Gee’s (1990; 2008) construct of Discourse provided a framework for examining learners’ identities and shifts as readers. The data in this study, which is presented through a series of vignettes, found that grade 8 learners use many different experiences and draw on different discourses when making sense of texts. Through the separation of the structural and cultural components, this research could explore how reading clubs as structures enabled learners to access different discourses from the domain of culture. Through the process and engagement in the reading clubs, following Gee (2000b), learners were attributed affinity, discoursal and institutional identities as readers. It was found, in the course of the study, that providing a safe space, scaffolding, multiple opportunities to practice and a variety of reading material, helped learners to access and appropriate dominant literacies. In addition, learners need a repertoire of literacy practices to draw from as successful reading needs flexibility and adaptability. Reading and writing inform each other and through gradual induction into literary writing, learners began to appropriate and approximate dominant literacy practices. Following others who have contributed to the field of New Literacy Studies (Heath, 1983; Street, 1984; Gee 1990; Prinsloo & Breier, 1996), this study would suggest that literacies of traditionally underserved communities should not be considered in deficit terms. Instead these need to be understood as resources for negotiating meaning making and as tools or mechanisms to access dominant discourse practices. In addition the resilience and competition from Discourses of popular culture need to be recognised and developed as tools to access school literacies.

A thesis submitted to the School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts In Applied Language Education and Literacy Studies , Johannesburg 2016 / Using English as a medium of instruction or the Language of Learning and Teaching (LoLT) can be a very difficult task especially if the children do not speak the language and are multilingual. It affects reading, writing and oral language skills. This study seeks to examine the impact of exposing underperforming grade 8 and 9 learners of English to a Literacy Club. The study is a follow up of the study that was done in 2013. The main difference between the current study and the previous study is that, participants in the first study were already readers and volunteered to join the Literacy Club. Although school rules were relaxed, only English was used to discuss the read texts. In the current study, because I was working with weak readers, learners who have been identified as at risk of failing and had all been invited to join the Literacy Club as a form of language enrichment programme, the participants will be allowed to use all the linguistic skills at their disposal for both discussion of texts and reflecting in their journals. This is based on the premise that being multilingual should not be viewed as a barrier but a resource for learning. Underpinned by the socio-cultural approach to learning and drawing intensively from different theoretical views of language learning and learning to read, a case of 16 learners in grade 8 and 9 participated in this study. The study adopted a qualitative approach where a number of methods were used for the purposes of data collection. The study discovered that Literacy Clubs are a good vehicle to impart reading skills as they motivate learners to read. Literacy Clubs also have a positive impact on attainment in language tests. The study also discovered that allowing learners to use all the linguistic repertoires available to them boosts their confidence to talk about the literature they have read and improves the quality of their discussions. The study recommended that reading should be allocated time within normal school hours for each grade, children should be given an opportunity to write reading journals which should be marked and commented on by the teacher to encourage free writing and develop writing skills, the context of the school should be considered when deciding on the language policy to adopt and lastly but most importantly, translanguaging should be seriously considered as a pedagogical tool when teaching a second language. / MT 2018

This study is part of a larger research programme that seeks to contribute towards an understanding of South Africa's complex literacy landscape and formulate strategies that may address these particularly in the Foundation Phase. It is a case study of one public primary school in Grahamstown where isiXhosa is used as a medium of instruction until Grade 3, after which the medium of instruction changes to English. This transition is not helped by the little reading that happens in the language at the FP. The learners under study are Grade 3 isiXhosa first language speakers, learning English as a First Additional Language (FAL) with limited exposure to the language. Through a qualitative participatory action research process, the study investigated the extent to which a reading club in general and a responsive reading programme in particular, might develop learners' English vocabulary at this particular school. The value of reading clubs as a vehicle for second language learning as well as the importance of considering learner needs in the development of the reading programme are key contributions this study makes. The study draws on social constructivism as a theoretical framework based on the principle that learning is a social acitvity. Vygotsky (1978) states that language learning (LL) takes place through interactions in meaningful events, rather that through isolated language activities. The process is seen as holistic, that is, each mode of language supoorts and enhances overall language development. Furthermore, LL develops in relation to the context in which it is used, that is, it develops according to the situation, the topic under discussion and the relationship betwwen participants. Language also develops through active engagement of the learners. The role of the teacher or a more competent other is then seen as that of a facilitator in a learning context in which learners are viewed as equally capable of contributing to their learning through learning from and with each other (Holt and Willard-Holt, 2000). Vygotsky's theory of social interaction has been influential in highlighting the important role of social and cultural contexts in extending children's learning. The preliminary results of this study point toward the importance of the learning environment, particularly an informal environment in second language development. The results also highlight the need for learners (a) to be provided with opportunities to engage with meaningful and authentic texts, (b) to be allowed to make their own book choices, (c) to participate in large group, small group and individual activities to enable them to engage with a variety of texts, and (d) to confront vocabulary in a variety of ways through multiple texts and genres.