29/3/2017 0 Comments Can we read, or can't we?On 6 January, we were alerted to the “low literacy rate” in Fiji, although we had been told six months earlier that the level of literacy and numeracy was growing. On March 28, we discover that literacy is not improving quickly enough across the Pacific region, particularly compared to numeracy. Depending on where you look for your statistics, Fiji has a literacy rate somewhere between 33.6% and 96%. Why so many different stories?
Some of the figures may actually result from misinterpretations of the data. I believe that the figure 33.6% comes from the Education for All 2015 National Review (Fiji), which states, using 2011 figures, that 33.6% of schools are above the national average in the national Year 8 literacy assessment, and this figure does not represent the number of individuals who are considered literate. However, a more common issue is that different people test literacy in different ways. So census questions tend to ask people to report on their own literacy levels (which they are likely to over-estimate), while school literacy tests intend to check how well children can actually read and write. Another source of confusion is that we tend to use the word ‘literacy’ to mean several different things – do we mean an ability to read and write in any language, or do we really mean the ability to use written English to participate actively in the school curriculum? It may be that some children are literate in one language, but being tested in another. So it’s not particularly useful to argue about the different interpretations of different literacy assessments if those assessments were asking completely different questions in the first place. What is more useful is to focus on the literacy outcomes that we value, and then ensure that teachers, curriculum developers and assessment specialists are all interested in the same outcomes. As an educational linguist, I would always hope that literacy in the vernacular is the priority in the early years. It is obvious that teaching children to read and write in a language that they hardly hear spoken around them makes the task much harder. Literacy (in its narrowest sense of reading and writing) involves understanding the relationship between the letters on the page and the sounds that they represent, but it also requires understanding the relationship between those sounds and the things to which they refer in the world around us. So you can teach a child to sound out that ‘d’ - ‘o’ - ‘g’ spells ‘dog’ but, unless she already knows that the animal running along the road is called ‘dog’ (rather than ‘koli’ for example), she will still have no idea what the symbols on the page are doing there. It is not really surprising in this kind of situation if we find school-age children who are unable to master reading and writing. Unfortunately, literacy outcomes at school are often defined in terms of English only. Of course English is an important language in Fiji and, with good English teaching, we can achieve high levels of proficiency in this language. However, we cannot build new languages on top of a weak foundation. The recently published UNESCO Global Monitoring Report ‘If you don’t understand, how can you learn?’ makes clear that the only way to build a strong literacy foundation is to teach children through the vernacular language (mother tongue / home language) for at least 6 to 8 years. Meanwhile, they show evidence that we can also introduce a second language as a separate subject and achieve high levels of proficiency in this language. If we follow this evidence, we can start to focus our attention on strong literacy and good English, rather than settling for the doomed compromise of uncertain literacy through English.
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