[lg policy] Does the Ghanaian Schooling System Make Children Literate?

Fri May 13 15:46:10 UTC 2016

 Does the Ghanaian Schooling System Make Children Literate?
05/12/2016 12:00 pm ET

   - Radhika Iyengar <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radhika-iyengar> Mom,
   traveller, researcher

Northern Ghana region is well known for its rural and remote environment.
Schools are far apart and access becomes an issue, especially in the rainy
season. Despite many attempts from the District Education Officials,
teachers don’t prefer to reside in the area. They commute by public
transport from nearby cities like Bolgatanga which stretches their daily
routine to many hours. Various stakeholders came together to construct
housing facility for teachers with the community providing for their meals
at nights. Over the years, roads were constructed which made access to
schools easier. School buildings were rehabilitated to make them safer for
the students. This easy part was done in a couple of years.

However, the district officials and various stakeholders realized that due
to the universal/automatic promotion policy the children were getting
promoted to the next grade of primary school but without learning much. The
graph below shows the gravity of the issue. Ministry of Education Ghana
figures suggest that by the end of P2 (primary grade 2), the majority of
public school pupils could neither read nor make sense of text —either in a
Ghanaian language or in English. In every language, at least half, and
often more, of the pupils assessed could not read a single word correctly.

Figure 1: Letter-sound knowledge-Percentage of pupils scoring zero, by
language and region.
[image: 2016-05-12-1463058296-8597092-Figure1.png]
<http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-05-12-1463058296-8597092-Figure1.png>
Source: Ministry of Education Ghana (2014)

In fact, listening comprehension was quite low.

Figure 2: Listening comprehension-Percentage of pupils scoring zero, by
language and region.
[image: 2016-05-12-1463058360-8416764-FIGURE2.png]
<http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-05-12-1463058360-8416764-FIGURE2.png>
Source: Ministry of Education Ghana (2014)

In Bolgatanga, a multi-stakeholder committee was set-up to investigate the
reasons for children not learning. As of 2009, the language policy is to
teach up to primary P3 in local language, and then fully transition to
English by P4. English is taught as a subject since P1, but clearly
students do not learn enough language to learn information through it
(USAID, 2014). Recently, the Minister of Education has suggested removing
English as the medium of instruction in primary schools, but this policy
has yet not been implemented in all part of Ghana.

What is considered as a “local language” recognized by the school system is
also a complex issue in Ghana. There are currently 11 regional languages
that are approved as the medium of instruction in Ghanaian school system
(Bodomo, 1996). These regional languages were decided based on the
population census and the number of people speaking these languages. Each
of these eleven languages has their own dialects and/or sub-languages
spoken by specific tribes and specific geographic regions.

Buli and Mampruli are the majority languages spoken in the West Mamprusi,
Bulsa South district Mamprugu Maoduri district of Northern Ghana.
Unfortunately they don’t make the cut-off into the eleven regional
languages approved for the school system. Dagbani is the regional language
of Northern Ghan and all the textbooks are written in Dagbani. However not
all teachers are fluent in any of the three languages (2 local and 1
regional) since they are appointed from various parts of Ghana. Children
speak a different language at home and are taught in a different language
at school. With the limited hours of actual instruction time that the
student receive at school coupled with the local-regional-foreign language
complications, many generations of students have “passed” to the next grade
illiterate. The two local languages, Buli and Mampruli, are spoken widely
in the region, but they are rarely written. Ghana Institute of Linguistics
Literacy and Bible Translation http://www.gillbt.org are probably the only
organizations that work on the scripts, mainly for religious texts.

Multiple stakeholders including community led organizations, research
institutions and local Government bodies met to create supplemental
materials for early graders in language spoken at home-Buli and Mampruli.
Gillbt shared their materials and the stakeholders sat together to create
easy text starting with letters to words and simple sentences. It was a fun
and a doable task. The stakeholders participated in a workshop and created
easy to read materials using existing scripts for the language of comfort
for children at home. The methodology behind it was borrowed from cognitive
neuroscience (Abadzi, 2011), a model that is tried and tested previously in
other places like Gambia and Malawi. The workshop was also a great way of
salvaging two local languages from slowly becoming extinct. Buli text
includes characters like “Ŋ” and “Ɔ”, fonts for which are difficult to
find. The workshop produced two thick books of about 150 pages in Buli and
created plans to extend to Mampruli. The stakeholders decided to use this
text as supplemental materials in early grades to gain proficiency in their
“comfort” language first and use the language acquisition skills the learn
other languages including English a couple of years down the lane.

The two supplemental books were ultimately not used in the schools for
early graders. Many factors played a role here, first, the school
examinations will be in the regional language and not in the local dialect.
Therefore, early familiarity with the language of examination was
preferred. Second, all approved textbooks will still remain in the regional
language, however it was not the majority language of the districts. Third,
teachers were not well versed with the two local languages as they traveled
to the district to teach and lived in the cities. Fourth, using Buli and
Mampruli in the school system would mean creating stories, more text and
essentially creating all reading materials in a dialect that does not have
any pre-existing ready material. Fifth, the government mandates only using
“approved” languages from the 11 regional languages had to be adhered to.
So the supplemental materials were to remain “supplemental” and not become
“textbooks”.

Meanwhile months had gone by with another batch of illiterates ready to
move on to the next grade. The stakeholders ultimately decided again to get
on with English for early grades. Besides being unknown to the children,
English has a complex spelling system, whereas local languages are spelled
consistently. A U.K. based technique to learn English- Jolly Phonics (
http://jollylearning.co.uk/regions/ghana/) was deemed fit. English material
was available, teachers were trained in a month and a phonics-based method
was adopted to make P1-P3 (Primary grades 1 to 3) learn English. Results
are awaited.

References

Abadzi, Helen. (2013). Literacy for all in 100 days? A research-based
strategy for fast progress in low-income countries (English). Accessed from
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/docsearch/author/m93113

Bodomo, Adams (1996). On the language and development in Africa: The Case
of Ghana. Nordic Journal of African Studies 5(2): 31-51. Norwegian
University of Science and Technology, Norway. Retrieved from
http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/pdf-files/vol5num2/bodomo.pdf April 22nd 2016.

Ministry of Education, Ghana Education Service, National Education
Assessment Unit (2014). Ghana 2013 EGRA/EGMA Findings Report. (
https://www.eddataglobal.org/documents/index.cfm/Ghana%20EGRA%20EGMA%20report_wRecs_17May2014_forweb.pdf?fuseaction=throwpub&ID=569
)

USAID and Ministry of EducationGhana Education Service National Education
Assessment Unit (2014). Ghana 2013Early Grade Reading Assessment andEarly
Grade Mathematics Assessment Report of Findings

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radhika-iyengar/does-the-ghanaian-schooli_b_9928104.html

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its
members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or
sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write
directly to the original sender of any offensive message.  A copy of this
may be forwarded to this list as well.  (H. Schiffman, Moderator)

For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to
https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/
listinfo/lgpolicy-list
*******************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20160513/e91fbbda/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list