Research on reading in African languages is particularly pertinent in South Africa now, inview of the poor reading performance in many South African schools. This paper is basedon a study of competent adult readers of isiZulu that analysed what its orthography (the wayit is written) requires of readers. As an agglutinative language with a conjoined writingsystem, isiZulu carries meaning not only in separate words, but also in morphemes thatcluster together, forming long complex words. Eye tracking data shows that competentreaders of isiZulu move their eyes across text in saccades (shifts of the point of focus) thatare short in comparison with the saccades of efficient reading of English. It also shows thatreaders of isiZulu fixate on points of text for longer periods than do readers of English.The study links eye movement data to information gained from a stimulated recall process,to discover strategies consciously used by competent readers of isiZulu. Some of thesestrategies, such as visualisation, are common to efficient readers of all languages, whileothers might be peculiar to agglutinating and/or tonal languages. These strategies informsuggestions for the development of effective reading skills in isiZulu.The key argument of the paper is that the orthography of isiZulu has features that requireattention by teachers of reading if their learners are to benefit from the advantages thatreading in their first language should bring
