International Literacy Day Celebrations in Washington

The purpose of these celebrations – held at the magnificent US Institute for Peace Building, and the Library of Congress in Washington - was to take stock of progress over the ten years of using the Early Grade Reading Assessment tool, and of the progress in respect of the Global Book Alliance. Tessa Welch was invited to the gathering.

Penelope Bender gave an overview of the work of the Alliance to date.  The Feasibility Study for a Global Book Fund was launched at the event and Research for Development presented on the findings. Also circulated was Save the Children’s Lessons in Literacy publication, which documents evidence to support eight principles for effective literacy action.

African Storybook was invited to join the deliberations and report on its methods of content development. We also had an opportunity to demonstrate the alpha version of our great new story creation and translation tool in a story writing session facilitated by Christie Vilsack, USAID’s Senior Advisor for International Education.

The questions driving our participation were how we can contribute to the Global Book Alliance, and in particular, the proposed Global Digital Library (see the handout); and how the Global Book Alliance can support the African Storybook to be more representative of sub-Saharan Africa both in terms of its content and in terms of story use. Although there were no clear answers to these questions, the series of events was a good opportunity to meet the major players in the Global Book Alliance, and to get an overview of the USAID perspective on literacy development and assessment.

Here are my impressions and take-aways.

The overall themes of the discussions were summarised by Penelope Bender

• Assessment has changed work in literacy (the Early Grade Reading Assessment Tool has been implemented in 70 countries and 120 languages so far).
• There is greater clarity of what it takes to teach reading.

There is beginning to be the correct focus on work with children and parents BEFORE children enter primary school.

But

• There still is no evidence of sustainable coaching models.
• There are low levels of listening comprehension in mother tongue, which points to an oral language gap.
• Solutions to old issues like class size and effective ways of supporting teachers are still elusive.

What I hadn’t understood before and found surprising in the findings of the Feasibility Study for a Global Book Fund were the following:

• Part of the reason for the non-existent market for early reading books is that parents don’t like books with few words – it seems a waste of paper to them. Also it is not well understood that you need books in order to learn to read.
• Often the teaching of reading is confused with teaching language. There need to be specific methodologies for teaching reading and these are not very much in evidence. Also, there is no systematic review of the key differences between languages that can inform development of language specific methods for teaching reading.

Two presentations made a particular impression on me.
Ben Sylla, a consultant to USAID, presented a fascinating set of data vignettes of USAID programmes 2011 to 2015 in terms of 3 themes: scale, effectiveness and equity.

Scale: Although through 91 reading programmes in 40 countries, USAID has reached 37.7m children and a further 10.2m through partner projects, this is only a small proportion of the global figure of 250m children who cannot read.

Effectiveness: Analysis of 19 projects for the teaching of reading revealed that 11.4m children achieved moderate fluency. It is clear that change is taking place slowly.

Equity: The key question is, How do we both maximise the number of children achieving fluency and avoid increasing inequities? Most patterns show that at upper percentiles, there are the largest gains, whereas in the bottom percentiles, students are stuck at zero. See Learning from USAID’s experience, 2011 – 2015.

Sylvia Linan-Thompson talked about the impact of assessment on literacy instruction.

She presented four main findings from assessment of early grade reading achievement in a variety of programmes.

• Teaching language is not teaching reading.

If teachers confuse these, often children don’t learn to read at all, and substitute rote repetition of text for reading for meaning.  

• Reading needs to be taught every day.

Children need a lot of practice of the skill of reading. If learning about language is substituted for this practice, then too little time is spent on actually reading. If teachers need to teach language skills, this should be done in a separate lesson in the curriculum. Children need dedicated time for reading words on a page/screen individually or with others.  

• Explicitness matters.

A number of advances have been made explicit in the teaching of decoding skills. However, there has been little progress in teaching comprehension. Work needs to be done on focussing on teaching comprehension strategies. It is usually overlooked because comprehension happens in the head – you can’t see it. In addition, so much energy has been spent on teaching decoding, that there hasn’t been space to consider the teaching of comprehension. A complicating issue is also that teachers don’t have much reading comprehension themselves, and usually are working in a second language.

• One size does not fit all.

Although people, whatever the language they speak, move through the same stages in learning to read (from emerging pre-reader to expert reader, learning to decode, read fluently and comprehend), there are language specific differences, especially for the novice and decoding reader. For example, morphology is more important in some languages than others. Context is also important – class size is a huge variable across countries, as is the starting age of formal education.