Abstract The release of the last Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) report in December 2017 was a moment of public alarm in South Africa. The study tested a selection of Grade 4 children across the country in 2016 and compared their results to 50 other countries and found that “78% of Grade 4s in SA cannot read for meaning", compared with only 4% of children across the 50 countries. But there are problems with these tests and what they can tell us. Literacy and language are simplified and compacted constructs in these exercises, streamlined for administration and for measurement. While purporting to test children's individual literacy skills, such tests are more examinations of whether the children's experiences of schooling match the unexamined or unstated assumptions of the tester as to how schooling is done. They work with greatly limited constructs of both literacy and language and are neither sensitive enough nor grounded enough in actual classroom literacy practices to be of use as a basis for intervening in schools. Their construct of literacy as a unitary, portable and readily testable property of individuals and of standard languages as corresponding to the construct of children's ‘mother tongues’ are examples of state administrative strategies, or of ‘seeing like a state’, where a reductive administrative grid is placed over situated, complex communicative activity. Such simplifications are like abridged maps in that they simplify and distort what is being observed.

中文翻译：

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像国家一样看待：学校的识字和语言标准

摘要 2017 年 12 月发布的最新阅读素养研究进展 (PIRLS) 报告在南非引起了公众恐慌。该研究对 2016 年全国精选的四年级儿童进行了测试，并将他们的结果与其他 50 个国家/地区的结果进行了比较，发现“南非 78% 的四年级学生无法阅读意义”，而在 50 个国家/地区，这一比例仅为 4% . 但是这些测试有问题，它们能告诉我们什么。在这些练习中，读写和语言被简化和紧凑的结构，简化了管理和测量。这些测试虽然旨在测试儿童的个人读写能力，但更多的是检查是否孩子们的学校教育经历与测试者关于学校教育如何进行的未经审查或未说明的假设相匹配。他们使用非常有限的读写能力和语言结构，在实际课堂读写能力实践中既不够敏感，也不够扎实，无法用作干预学校的基础。他们将识字作为个人和标准语言的统一、便携和易于测试的财产，与儿童“母语”的结构相对应，是国家行政策略或“像国家一样看待”的例子，在这种情况下，简化行政网格被放置在定位的、复杂的交流活动上。这种简化就像简化的地图，因为它们简化和扭曲了所观察到的内容。