The Vula Bula African language graded reading series offer carefully structured graded texts for early and emergent readers in the form of beautifully illustrated stories, contextualised to the young reader’s inner world and life experiences. The books are short and simple, and contain predictable text to facilitate and encourage reading for enjoyment. Simple sentence structures and familiar vocabulary enable rapid reading progress. Clear and detailed illustrations help understanding.
The Vula Bula graded reading programme is unique in that each series originates from the respective indigenous South African language - as opposed to being translated from English - and is carefully designed in accordance with the natural phonic progression of that language. The Vula Bula methodological approach takes cognisance of the agglutinative and, where applicable, conjunctive nature of each African language so that the texts are based on the specific orthographical building blocks of each language. Scaffolded reading practice of this nature develop skills such as phonic awareness, word recognition, comprehension, vocabulary and fluency.