About 10 years ago, I was asked to assess the lessons learned in a primary school improvement programme in an Asian country. At the first school, I asked to meet their best student. An-11-year-old girl was brought forward. I asked her to read from her textbook, and was astounded to see her silently sounding out each word before she would voice it. She was reading at less than 20 words per minute – too slow to comprehend what she was reading. By comparison, the average seven-year-old in the US reads at about 60 words per minute by the end of the school year.
For the last five years, development agencies have been looking more deeply into reading skills, testing students in the first three years of primary school in less developed countries. The findings are grim. For example, in one African country, only 5% of 8-9 year olds were found to read at or above 60 words per minute. At this rate, after three years of school, 10% of the class would be reading slower but able to answer at least one simple comprehension question, and 20% would be able to read but unable to answer any comprehension questions. A woeful 65% would be unable to read a single word.
So what should effective reading programmes look like? According to the best available empirical evidence, students should learn to read first in a language they speak and understand well, with instruction based on the current evidence-based theory of how children acquire and improve reading skills. Rigorous research shows that children can learn to read well when instruction helps them to understand that their oral language is made up of a specific set of individual sounds, and they develop the ability to sound out written words and eventually read common words without needing to sound them out. They can then be helped to build a large oral vocabulary, learn to read with speed and accuracy and in a natural voice and, ideally, learn skills that will continue to improve their reading. Unfortunately, getting effective instruction to happen on a national scale is proving difficult.
There are several aspects to this problem, such as the fact that in some developing countries, some children come to school unable to speak or understand the language of instruction, which is, in some countries, not the language used at home but instead a dominant indigenous language, such as Hindi or Swahili, or a European language, such as English or French. First grade students may only speak their mother tongue or another local language spoken by most people in their community. The choice of a language of instruction is a decision influenced by politics, government policy, cultural norms, parental expectation, and many other factors – rather than effective pedagogy.
On top of this, many teachers have never actually been trained to teach reading, and so they teach the way they were taught. Often they rely on helping children memorise text passages. I’ve seen children read a whole paragraph aloud, but when I point to a specific word in the same passage, they cannot read it. Helping teachers change their approach to instruction takes time – in part because, like all adults, change usually occurs in small increments. Teacher and student absences, along with a host of other factors, lead to children spending very little time in direct instruction – in some countries as little as 35 hours a year.
Finally, any reader knows that learning to read is not just about what happens in the classroom. Beyond instruction, children must read thousands of pages of text to become good readers. Many children in developing countries, however, have very little access to books or magazines that are written at their level and are interesting to children their age.
The development community is mounting a large effort to address the weaknesses outlined above, but these are problems that will take decades to solve. We should accomplish this task, but I feel that, just as importantly, we should also be giving every out-of-school child, youth, and adult a second chance to learn to read. I still think about the fifth-grade girl who read for me all those years ago. She had probably come to class every day the school was open, paid attention during class, volunteered to read out loud, and done everything the teacher asked her to do, but five years of poor teaching left her reading too slowly to use reading as a tool for learning.
This is not fair. She deserves a second chance, even though she is now in her 20s. Perhaps she is even the mother of a child about to enter school – poised right now at the beginning of this immeasurably important learning journey.
John Comings is a senior technical consultant for World Education, an NGO based in Boston, MA USA
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