| Sumario: | This paper explores possible factors contributing to the South African literacy crisis. Using Appraisal analysis and Don's (2016) invocation spectrum, this study tracks the role of invoked meaning in the theoretical taxonomies informing reading comprehension in South Africa and in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement governing teaching/assessing at the Grade 4 (10-year-old) level. Similarly, instantiations of invoked meaning in a teacher-selected comprehension text, its associated questions, and learners' responses to them are investigated. The analysis reveals significant disjuncts between policy and practice, particularly in the treatment of invoked meaning and how it is assessed. An overreliance on literal meaning in the comprehension activity further exacerbates matters, providing teachers and learners with a false sense of reading comprehension success, prompting the need for alternative ways of doing reading comprehension in classrooms.
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