According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 2012), OERs are:

Ehlers and Conole (2010:2) assert that a key aspiration of OER developers is the improvement of educational experiences. Thille (2008) concurs that OERs should transform teaching and learning. The implementation and use of OERs enable teachers to learn new teaching strategies and develop their practice (Littlejohn & Hood 2017), and to expand their knowledge in educational innovation (Scott & Cherrez 2022:188).

As Iiyoshi and Kumar (2008:436) explain, most practical knowledge in pedagogy tends to remain implicit, because it is especially challenging to make it explicit. The use of an OER can help make tacit knowledge visible and accessible, not just to a teacher’s colleagues but also to the teacher themselves, fostering opportunities for self-reflection on effective teaching practices. By making their teaching practices visible and demonstrating the potential of OERs, teachers can transition from being mere consumers of knowledge to becoming creators of knowledge and, further, to enabling others to become knowledge creators as well (Wiley 2017:28). Therefore, one aim of designing the OER used in this study was to address epistemic inequalities through the reciprocal sharing of knowledge and practice.

The life cycle of an OER has been conceptualised in several different ways. According to Blyth and Thoms (2021), Gurell (2008) characterised this cycle as find, compose, adapt, use, and share. However, Wiley and Hilton (2018) describe the OER lifecycle as the ‘five Rs’, namely: reuse, rework, remix, redistribute, and retain. We chose to use the four Rs, developed by Hilton et al. (2010) in this study. The four Rs are: (1) reuse, which means the OER is downloaded and ready for use; (2) revise, which means the teachers adapt and modify the OER to use in their own practice; (3) remix, which means the teachers combine the OER with the resources they have; and lastly (4) redistribute, which means the teachers share it with colleagues.

According to Iiyoshi and Kumar (2008), active and meaningful interaction with OERs is central to defining open educational practices. They propose that OERs can enhance teaching and learning quality through ongoing development, innovation, and the sharing of effective pedagogical practices among teachers.

Littlejohn and Hood (2017), as well as Scott and Cherrez (2022), argue that OERs enable teachers to grow in their practice, and develop their knowledge, expertise and reflective practices (cf. Weller et al. 2015). Camilleri, Ehlers and Pawlowski (2014:12) state that ‘using OER in a way that improves learning experiences and [innovative] educational scenarios’ is a key goal. In addition, Ehlers (2011:7) explains that when engaging with OER usage, reusage, sharing and creation must lead to improved teaching approaches, ensuring the achievement of better learning outcomes. However, the active use of OERs remains insignificant. According to Blyth (2012) and Beaven (2018), there is little evidence that OERs are reused, revised, remixed, or redistributed.

Mullis et al. (2023) define reading literacy as,

The National Reading Panel (2000) defines reading as the ‘convergence of five skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension’. The RAND Reading Study Group (2002) moved away from the text as the defining factor in comprehension, arguing that comprehension is the product of the reader, the text, the activity, and the sociocultural context of the reader (Snow 2002). The ‘Simple View of Reading’ (SVR; Gough & Tunmer 1986) and ‘Reading Rope’ (Wegenhart 2015) are similar in defining reading by focusing on decoding and linguistic comprehension. Scarborough’s rope (Neuman & Dickinson 2003) presents reading as a complex skill with interconnected competencies that work towards skilled reading. The two strands, namely word recognition and language comprehension, become more and more interconnected as the learners develop as skilled readers, which Scarborough defines as fluent execution and comprehension. It has been argued that Scarborough’s Reading Rope is more accessible to teachers than the SVR, which does not provide enough guidance for teaching reading (Wegenhart 2015).

A study by Howie et al. (2012) investigated the reasons linked to poor reading performance among South African Grade 4 learners in the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Cekiso et al. (2022) states:

South Africa’s participation in the 2021 PIRLS assessment involved Grade 4 learners who were assessed across the 11 official languages. Grade 6 learners were assessed in English and Afrikaans. A total of 12 426 Grade 4 learners and 9317 Grade 6 learners were assessed. The PIRLS 2021 study (Mullis & Martin 2019) revealed very low performance levels in learners’ ability to read for meaning as they turn 10 years old. South Africa, at 288 (4.4) score points, performed significantly below the PIRLS centre point of 500, a deterioration from the 2016 results. In PIRLS 2016, 78% of Grade 4 learners could not read at the Low International Benchmark. This percentage of learners who are unable to read at the lowest international benchmark increased in PIRLS 2021 to 81% (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement 2021).

A process approach to teaching reading has been adopted in the South African curriculum (Department of Basic Education [DBE] 2011). The process comprises three distinct steps, namely pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading. The pre-reading phase is where the readers are encouraged to establish a purpose and plan for reading by orientating themselves to the text. This orientation can be done by activating prior (background) knowledge, looking at the source, author and publication date and any accompanying visual material, as well as making connections to what the reader already knows (DBE 2011). In the while-reading phase, the reader reads the text. When this reading is done in an additional language, the teacher may need to provide support by checking for understanding, providing contextual clues to assist the readers in finding meaning and encouraging the readers to use other strategies like phonics and other word attack skills. In the post-reading phase, the readers should reflect on the text and complete activities to confirm that they were able to comprehend what they have read. The reflection on the text can be done by engaging in discussion about the text, sharing one’s opinions and thoughts about the author, as well as recalling what the text was about (DBE 2011).

Research on reading has shown that ‘comprehension can be improved through explicit instruction, for example, by teaching strategies for vocabulary building, recognising text structure, activating prior knowledge, making inferences and predictions, and monitoring comprehension’ (Almasi & Hart 2011:253). Pre-reading is regarded as a critical step, as it includes activation of background knowledge that informs reading comprehension, vocabulary building, the language structures and conventions used in the text, verbal reasoning, such as inferencing, and literacy knowledge, which includes aspects such as the structure of the text.

Learners are regularly involved in reading material that requires them to use their own experiences and pre-existing knowledge structures to bring meaningful understanding (Little & Box 2011). To this end, Widdowson (1983, as cited in Ajideh 2006) proposes that there are two levels of language:

Background knowledge refers to that which a person already has, and which needs to be activated to aid the comprehension of new text. Widdowson (1983), as cited in (Ajideh 2006), states that when individuals are given new reading material, they bring both their systemic and schematic knowledge to the new text. This theory was revised by Widdowson from a language perspective and is aligned with the view of learners needing their own experiences and prior knowledge of the texts they are confronted with to aid meaningful understanding.

Extensive research on the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension has indicated high correlation coefficients between vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension (Fitri & Rifaat 2021). Additionally, Wexler (2023) points out that written text has a larger number of words, which are often more sophisticated than words used in speech. To this end, if learners are able to read with comprehension, they will have access to the larger number of sophisticated words found in written texts and, as such, increase vocabulary knowledge.

The theoretical framework of the four Rs and selections from the literature on teaching reading comprehension provided the framework for the conceptualisation and design of the OER used in this study.

The OER design was informed by Scarborough’s Reading Rope, the reading process and the practical application of steps. In the Intermediate Phase of schooling, reading focuses on comprehension. The comprehension strand in Scarborough’s Reading Rope has the following components:

On the OER, each component has content attached to it. We used a Grade 4 passage (DBE 2019:10) as an example to illustrate the possible use of the OER. The passage is a story about Why Maphula did not come to school. It is written by Maphula’s 11-year-old friend. Maphula did not go to school because a paraffin stove was knocked over, causing a fire, and the fire, brigade was called. There is a picture of the house on fire and the fire brigade. There is a ‘Before you read’ activity predicting the text and skimming the page to see what it is about. The pronouns in the text are printed in red to draw attention to them. The OER content includes an explanation of how to use the OER. Each of the five pre-reading steps has content linked to it. The activating background knowledge step includes how to use the KW [KWL] chart – what I know, what I want to know, and what I have learned – a presentation on learning and the development of long-term memory, and an explanation of Scarborough’s Reading Rope as well as the passage, Why Maphula did not come to school. The vocabulary step has teaching activities, while the language structures and conventions, verbal reasoning and literature knowledge steps contain the reading passage with annotations explaining how to use the text in the pre-reading phase. When deciding on the content, we took into consideration that the teachers’ pedagogic and content knowledge might range from novice to expert. An effort was made to create a simple OER design with intuitive steps to access the content. McAndrew (2011) points out how available content increases the likelihood that the OER will be used. Furthermore, the ‘methods and practices that enable learners, teachers and institutions to best engage with OER’ (McAndrew 2011:1) were considered.

While making the OER available to our research participants, we were further aware that their reuse, revise, remix and redistribute strategies would be determined by their individual realities and lived experiences in the classroom. We were interested in their ‘living examples of implementation’ that may make it easier to introduce these ideas to other teachers (Black & Wiliam 1998:146).

Having designed the OER, the research questions that guided the investigation of its use by teachers were as follows:

A qualitative, multiple case research design was chosen to investigate the teachers’ practical implementation of the OER in their teaching of reading. The five schools were regarded as individual case study sites, as each has its own context.

The participants in the study were 14 Grade 4–6 English home language and first additional language teachers, specifically chosen because they taught at schools involved in the researchers’ engaged scholarship project. These teachers implemented the OER in their language lessons.

The five participating schools were in three provinces: Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and Gauteng. In the Eastern Cape, the three schools were situated in rural areas and included one primary school and two combined schools, which served learners from Grade 1 through Grade 12. The school in KwaZulu-Natal was also a rural primary school. The school in Gauteng was an urban primary school.

The teaching experience of teachers varied, with nine having more than 5 years of experience and five having fewer than 5 years of experience. A summary of the sample, including details about participating schools, is provided in Table 1.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted, with two teachers interviewed through Microsoft Teams due to their unavailability when the sites were visited. The semi-structured interviews allowed the researchers to ask follow-up questions that pertained to the participants’ context. Furthermore, the questions enabled the researchers to probe the teachers’ individual experiences of implementing the OER in their classrooms. The questions focused on how the teachers accessed the OER, how they reused it, whether they adapted it in any way and used it with their own resources, and whether they shared it with their colleagues. We also aimed to establish whether the OER had impacted their teaching practices.

Inductive thematic analysis is a method of qualitative data analysis that involves identifying patterns, themes, or categories within textual data without using any pre-existing theoretical framework or coding scheme (Saldaña 2013). This approach to data analysis allowed us to be open to emergent information, as we wanted to learn from the teachers about their use of the OER. Using ATLAS.ti, a computer-aided qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), the interviews were first coded using phrases to summarise the data.

Open coding was used so that the data could be compared while allowing for emergent themes. The first coding cycle was followed by a second cycle, in which the codes were categorised based on thematic similarity (Saldaña 2003). Lastly, a third coding cycle produced five themes that led to the analyses and interpretation of the data.

These five themes emerged from the data: level of accessibility of the OER, implementation of the OER made teachers’ practice visible, implementation of the pre-reading steps, impact of the OER in the classroom, and lastly the OER as a resource and the implementation of the four Rs.

Ethical clearance to conduct research in the engaged scholarship project was obtained from UNISA’s College of Education Ethics Review Committee on 04 March 2021. The ethics clearance number is 2021/03/04/90001761/05/AM. The school principals gave their permission for the research to be conducted at their schools. The teachers signed consent forms agreeing to be interviewed and understood that they could withdraw their participation at any stage of the study.

Firstly, we wanted to determine if the teachers could access the resource and download the content. Secondly, we were interested in whether the teachers were able to understand the OER’s pre-reading steps and resources as the expectation was that the OER could be used with any reading text and reading lesson. As an open resource, the OER should be easily accessible. However, we found that accessibility was a significant obstacle for some teachers. The OER was emailed to the teachers, who mostly receive emails on their mobile phones. Most could not open the document on their phones, but it was accessible on their laptops. There was no difference between the efforts of teachers in a rural setting and the teachers in an urban setting. Their responses are presented verbatim.

Once the teachers had accessed the OER, they found it was easy to use and that they only had to try and understand it:

The teachers felt that once they understood the content, they could implement it in their lessons:

The teachers indicated that they were familiar with the reading process as well as some of the pre-reading steps. They further indicated that they had been doing it in their classrooms: ‘We were doing [it] in the past and we were familiar’. However, teachers’ tacit knowledge was made visible as they commented that the implementation of the OER made them aware of their teaching practice. While the steps may have different names or categories, the principles were the same.

The teachers further felt that while they had tacit knowledge of the pre-reading process, the OER made the implementation of the pre-reading ‘intentional’.

Teachers commented that in their previous practice, pre-reading was a rather perfunctory step, whereas with the OER, the pre-reading took on a more detailed implementation.

Teachers were asked how different it was from the usual process.

Teachers were asked: ‘And how has it affected your own practice? How did it make you more aware of what you are doing in class?’

The teachers implemented the pre-reading steps in ways that suited their class and lesson. Activation of background knowledge was the most consistently implemented strategy used by the teachers, as it was regarded as the most important element in the pre-reading step.

The teachers also explained their usual practice would have been to read the passage and ask learners about words they do not understand. The background knowledge step raised the teachers’ awareness about the activation of background knowledge and made their tacit knowledge visible.

Apart from the activation of background knowledge, the teachers used the language structure, step 3, and information and inference, which is part of verbal reasoning step 4:

With regard to step 2, vocabulary, some teachers found the vocabulary examples were too advanced for their learners:

One of the vocabulary activities was an interactive PowerPoint presentation called the ‘spinning wheel’, where pictures related to descriptions of words in the example text. The teachers and learners found it very interesting and useful. The spinning wheel and the vocabulary activity called flags were helpful to the teachers. Some also indicated that it was useful because they did not have time to create such activities themselves.

An interesting and unexpected finding was that the teachers noticed a change in the learners’ response to the activation of background knowledge. The learners became excited, and for the teachers, it was a fun experience:

Furthermore, the learners were able to engage in the reading process:

When asked: ‘So now what could you see?’ they replied:

When asked: ‘How did it change your teaching practice?’ they replied:

The teachers were asked: ‘How did the OER change your teaching?’

Teachers also noted that the pre-reading process created an inclusive classroom:

The teachers were asked: ‘How different was it from your usual practice?’

The openness of an OER means that users should be able to engage with the four Rs of the OER: reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. As reflected in the application of the pre-reading steps, especially the activation of the learners’ prior knowledge, the teachers reused the OER as is. The steps were implemented without the teachers making any changes to the resources.

The teachers were asked: ‘And how did you adapt it to make it useful?’

The teachers were asked: ‘So you implemented it as is?’

The most pertinent adaptation that some teachers made was to revise the level of vocabulary difficulty to make the text more accessible to the learners. The teachers were asked: ‘Which aspects did you find most useful?’

Most teachers remixed the OER, using it in combination with their own resources or in other subjects teach, not just language teaching. Several questions were asked about this: ‘How did you use it in combination with your own resources?’

‘How did you implement the OER in your reading lesson?’

‘How did you integrate the OER into your teaching?’

‘How did you implement the OER in your reading time?’

‘How did you share it with colleagues, if at all?’

‘Did you combine it with any other resource or practice?’

The redistribution of the OER was, however, limited. The teachers shared it in their own language departments but not with other colleagues in their schools or other schools.

A recommendation resulting from the study is that the distribution of OERs to other teachers needs to be enabled and supported. Further research will need to be conducted to establish how the use of OER’s step 3 (language structure), step 4 (verbal reasoning), and step 5 (literacy knowledge) can be optimised in the process of teachers’ use of pre-reading strategies. We assumed that all five steps would be used, but this was not the case in our study.