Reading and literacy in Ghana

ONLY 2% OF PUPILS BETWEEN KG1 AND PRIMARY 2 LEARN TO READ – EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL

By: KOMI NOBERT GOODSMAN

“One of the most fascinating things that distinguishes England from Ghana is that; In England, almost every child learns how to read if they go to school, but unfortunately here in Ghana, that is not the case. But people have the idea that, the gap is relatively small; a little bit like the gap between income or state of health or mortality. But actually, it is much larger than that…”

    Those were observations of Michael Stark, a trustee and founder of EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL (EI), a UK charity education-based organization which has been leading educational reforms in England and many European countries for about twenty-five years and has now descended to some developing African countries including Ghana, where it is based for six years in the Northern region.

    According to the NGO which is now championing “Phonics-by-Phone” teacher training course across the world, their research among pupils in schools in Ghana, especially those in classes between kindergarten one and primary two has revealed that, pupils who are actually learning to read form only 2 percent of the total population of children at those stages of education in Ghana. The rest 98% do not learn to read and cannot read in any language at all – neither the local nor English language.

However, that comes against 90% of children learning to read at those same stages and ages in England.

    Clearly, there is a difference between “reading to learn” and “learning to read” per the explanations and illustrations of the organization. But essentially, the two are interdependent; a person must “learn to read” before attempting to “read to learn”, because the former enforces the latter. Pupils must first be taught to identify letters and words with their sounds before beginning to read them.

    According to the report of the research, Ghana is performing poorly even relative to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. They identified that, this poor performance is mostly due to the complexity of the language structure of Ghana. If one looks at countries like Uganda, Tanzania or Rwanda, there is a lingua franca; not a Western language but a local one which is Kishwahili and is spoken by most people including children in those countries; admittedly, there are other languages too; but in the case of Ghana, the language structure is complex: there are about eighty-one different languages spoken by substantial number of people in Ghana.

    At the southern part of Ghana which is largely dominated by the Akans; Twi is the widely spoken language, but if one climbs up north, although Twi-spokers are present there also, there are varieties of indigenous languages spoken there which are absolutely distinct in both phonetics and syntax from any language at the south.

    This has contributed to the failure of the Ghana Education Service to adopt a comprehensive approach to reading in the local language and the English language across the country at the lower primary schools which includes training teachers to know how to teach pupils to learn to read by identifying the phonics – the sound of letters and words which help the pupils to pronounce words correctly. Therefore, learning to read has become a major problem for pupils at their early ages in school.

    Indeed, poor quality of teacher training methods has also contributed to the poor outcome we are seeing. Teachers who are trained to be with the little ones must be armed with the necessary language skills. They must be fluent in the local language or the dialect spoken in the locality where they teach. But unfortunately, that is not the case. The wrong impression created that, teachers who teach at the lower level classes are less intelligent is still here with us. So whiles training them, little attention is paid to the most important skills that will make them worth their sort with their children. Emphasis on the ability to read and write well is let loose; after all, they are just going to sing, play with the children and put them to sleep.

    Many of the teachers churned out from the teacher training colleges into the basic schools, especially, the lower primary level are ill-prepared. They lack the approach to teaching literacy. Good teachers, effective teachers, manage to produce better results regardless of which curriculum materials, pedagogical approach, or reading program is selected.

    There are clear strategies that are adopted before and after reading which guides effective reading. These are previewing text, reading for a purpose, making predictions and connections, think aloud and using graphic organizers. All these skills will help our children in reading and writing not only the English language but the local ones too.

    It had been pointed out also in the research that, large classroom sizes, resulting in imbalanced pupil-teacher ratio, especially in the public schools is also another factor. This is said to be worse in the Northern region where the organization is based.

    Classrooms are crowded with fifty to sixty pupils ready to be taught in most of the public schools in the village and towns. This becomes a major problem, especially at the levels captured in the report – kg1 to primary 2; therefore teachers who supervise pupils do not have full control over their classes. Thorough supervision and monitory becomes difficult. Meanwhile, this stage is where pupils must be given best of attention.

                        THE NGO’S SOLUTIONS

    As a solution, the EI is trying hard to inject a new blood in teaching techniques in our schools.It is currently embarking on a phone teacher training course dubbed “phonics-by-phone” in the northern region. The teaching of phonics using smart phones had been practiced in England and the West by the same organization over the years and now doing same in Ghana.

    Phonics is a skill that guides you to teach children to learn to recognize the sounds that letters represent so that, they can be correctly pronounced and spelt as words in both the English language and their mother tongue. The teaching focuses on the sounds that make up the language. Anyone who is literate knows that, language is much more than letters and words written on a page. A learner must know their sounds, rhyme, rhythm and must posses the ability to reconstruct them. This concept has equally been practiced in the Western countries for the past fifty years but not in Ghana.

    It is not as if Ghana’s situation of having only 2% of pupils between kg 1 and primary 2 learning to read is irreversible. The NGO has started chalking some success here already. In 2016 alone, in a literacy program they organized, they met 12,000 children in hundred schools in fifteen districts in the Northern region of Ghana, of which they managed to move that number which has only 2% literacy to 18% – all in a single year.

    What has been their modus operandi? Its simple. They operated with mobile phones. They use audio podcast to teach teachers how to make pupils build sounds into words and remember them through rhymes, songs riddles and games which were easier to learn at their age because of their love for sounds.

    The organization is working relentlessly to spread the new technique among teachers in other parts of the country.

                              LET US TACKLE IT HERE OURSELVES

    Aside the organization’s effort to improve literacy among pupils across the country,  we as a people must also play a role to complement what they are doing in our country.

    Indeed, they are taking giant strides to correct the defects in the system.If a foreign NGO has been able to research around our problems in our backyard and found solutions to them, then we the people whose problem it is and probably might have known a lot about it can perform far better when we engage ourselves in fixing it.

    It makes one a bit uncomfortable to learn about his biggest problems from outsiders or foreigners when he claims he has taken full control over himself; holding his wall and gate together.

    Now let’s face it, the causes of the problems were laid bare: poor quality teacher training methods, poor resources, poor approach to teaching of literacy, large class sizes were among the major causes identified.

    In recent times, most of high school graduates who seek admission into the teacher training colleges do not do so because they really want to teach. They consider the training colleges because, they are relatively flexible in terms of cost.

    In fact, until the allowance system was removed by the previous government, most teacher trainees consider the allowances they received as a way of “cushioning” them throughout their stay in school. Therefore to many, the teacher training colleges were means of getting financial relief whiles in school and also a safe transit into the university. They do not choose the TTC’s over other institutions due to their desire to teach.

    It then becomes a disaster when they are rushed through the two and half period of training and posted to the basic schools where the task of foundation building requires much more than people who went to school thinking of “cushioning” themselves. It is not surprising that enrollment in to the teacher training colleges started to dwindle when the students’ allowance was removed.

    So you see, when people who do not have desire to teach in the first place were left to pass through a weak system where they were never identified and pulled out before they get to the children, what do you expect? We are bound to see the poor performances among our pupils when it comes to reading and writing.

    How many of our basic schools for example, are aware of the popular 6Ts as a guide to improving literacy among pupils at the very beginning of their education? Talk about Time, Text, Teach, Talk, Tasks and Test.

    Time; time for reading and writing versus other activity ratio, which ideally must be balanced. These makes teachers have their pupils reading and writing for as much a half of the school day.

   Texts; this involves giving pupils easy texts they could read accurately, fluently and with a strong comprehension.

    Teach; this unlike the usual teaching we know has to do with teachers offering direct, explicit demonstrations of cognitive strategies to guide pupils in reading. Teachers try to model the thinking of their pupils while they attempt to decode a word, self-monitor for understanding and summarize while reading.

    Talk; teachers try to encourage, model purposeful talk among their pupils. This talk must be problem-posing, problem-solving related curricula subjects.

    Tasks; This involves the use of longer assignments in the classroom for pupils. Pupils must work on a writing task for ten days or more. They must read whole books, complete individual and small group research projects.

    Test; this is an evaluation of the pupils’ work based on effort and improvement rather than achievements. Achievement-based grading where the best performances get the best grades does not encourage others to work hard. The higher achieving students do not have to put in much effort to rank well and the lower achieving students soon realize that, even working hard does not produce performances that compare well to those of higher achieving pupils. 

Those are some little techniques for battling the situation in which we find ourselves. This will help us improve on literacy among children in our schools.

    The Ghana Education Service (GES) must rise to task. It must work out innovative ways of training our teachers, so that, they can also become better trainers. One of those innovative ways is the use of phonics. The GES must consider the use of phonics to teach pupils in our primary schools.

    Firstly, as currently done by EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL, teachers must be trained to guide pupils in using phonics to learn how to read. Interested teachers can follow up on phonics studies on phonicsgh.mobi

    The government must also be prepared to invest heavily in improving literacy among our school children. Teachers in basic schools, especially those in less-endowed areas must be given special attention in terms of remuneration for them to carry out the herculean tasks we assign to them.

    Having only 2% of children learning to read does not augur well. Let us be reminded of President Clinton’s speech on International Literacy Day on September 8, 199; when he said “literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens”.

Image credit: Ghana Business News

MICHAEL STARK Trustee and founder of EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL