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What we become depends on what we read

Posted on
16 March 2015
Righardt le Roux is the Nal’ibali School and Public Library Co-ordinator. Best known for his entrepreneurial and innovative skills of “taking libraries to the people”, he has won a multitude of awards for his community work. He talks to us about South African Library Week and how we become maps of what we read: The theme for this year’s South African Library Week (14-21 March), Connect...
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Tessa Dowling, Senior Lecturer in African Languages in the School of Languages and Literature at the University of Cape Town, talks about the role of brands and language in the South African context: If you were an African-language speaking child growing up in South Africa, the first written words you’d see wouldn’t be ones from your own tongue. Nearly all the words on packets, street signs, billboards...
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How a book can change a life

Posted on
23 February 2015
He was perhaps 13, face shadowed under his hoodie. ‘Got any spare change?’ he asked. It was some time past 10pm in St Vincent’s emergency waiting room, where my husband was struggling to breathe with a bone caught in his throat. There were no free beds, so the doctors were attending him there, till the surgeon arrived. I gave him a little. I didn’t have much –...
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Nal’ibali collaborated with South African role models and public figures to highlight the importance of mother-tongue languages in children’s literacy development this International Mother-Tongue Day! This video emphasises the challenges faced by many young children as they engage with print and other literacy materials in unfamiliar languages on a daily basis. Local celebs such as YouTube sensation, Suzelle DIY, actress and Freshlyground lead singer, Zolani Mahola, as well as soccer players Cecil...
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Pop-up bookstores help spread Story Power

Posted on
3 February 2015
In support of our New Year’s drive to get parents to adopt reading resolutions, we held two pop-up bookstores, in Cape Town and Soweto, on 31 January. Not only were the bookstores a chance for people to choose books to take home and enjoy with their children, but also an opportunity for the Nal’ibali team to hand out Story Power Pacts - which is part of our...
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PRAESA (the research initiative behind Nal'ibali) talks about nurturing readers and writers in South Africa, and its solutions for a literate country.
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Story as meaning-making

Posted on
4 December 2014
Stories are woven so tightly into the fabric of our everyday lives that it’s easy to overlook their significance in framing how we think about ourselves and the world. They fill every part of our daily lives as we talk about events and people, read books and news reports, gossip, send text messages, listen to music, watch video clips, and catch up on a...
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It's International Translation Day, and so it is an appropriate day on which to ask: Why is literacy important? The answer is simple: We will never succeed economically, or as a society, if we are not literate. Literacy remains the key to unlocking South Africa’s success and yet both numerical and linguistic literacy continue to evade us. As a multilingual, multicultural society, social cohesion and deep learning can happen only if we create a plethora of “literacies” in...
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"Once upon a time, there was a very clever young man in a certain village. People were jealous about this. One day an old man came to visit this young clever man to ask him some difficult questions to prove his intelligence..." This Heritage Day, we asked our team and children who attend Nal’ibali reading clubs to record some of the old stories their families...
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Storyplay and moral imagination

Posted on
3 September 2014
As part of their package of support to Early Childhood Development centres, Nal’ibali Literacy Mentors recently explored the power of Storyplay – a strategy using imaginative (pretend) play as a way to support young children’s exploration and understanding of stories, people and the world around them. Following a week of training with Storyplay consultant Sara Robinson, this is what we learnt: A factor that characterises...
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