Literacy deficits in contemporary Nigeria: A sustainable pre-service basic reading education recipe

• In Event: Primary and early childhood research

Proposal

The reality that majority of Nigerian school children can hardly read, especially in their mother tongues, after passing out of the country’s 9-Year basic education system (including 6 years of primary school) is worrisome (Bappa-Aliyu, 2017). It is also of great concern that both the parents and the primary school teachers are seen not to be doing the needful in providing basic supports that will make learning to read achievable for those young kids at home and in school (Otunuyi, 2018) One may, therefore, be prompted to ask: What is the Nigerian government, in all its three tiers, doing to rectify these literacy deficits? At each of the three levels, teachers are produced in a hundred and sixty plus Colleges of Education across the six geo-political zones of the country; these institutions are basically saddled with the responsibility to prepare, train and produce first class professional teachers for the primary schools (National Commission for Colleges of Education, 2012). Ironically, the products of those teacher institutions were found to be deficient in delivering literacy instructions at the early grade classes. The basic truth is that the teacher educators lack fundamental literacy skills to prepare teachers for the primary schools (Barnes and Boyle, 2017). As a panacea to these literacy deficits, therefore, building the capacity of teachers at the pre-service level through acceptable universal pedagogical approaches could provide opportunity for achieving a sustainable basic reading education in Nigeria in due course.
Addressing the question raised above, the authors will present what has been done so far at the local, state and federal government levels on the promotion of literacy education in the early grade schools. Paramount among the activities to be reported are, first and foremost, the impacts of the pilot early grade reading course in four teacher education institutions and thousands of primary schools in Northern Nigeria. Through this new course, hundreds of teacher educators have been trained on EGR. Moreover, about fifty Nigerians (selected from Ministries, Departments, Agencies and Teacher Education Institutions across Nigeria) have been trained on EGR through graduate course anchored and delivered by literacy and pedagogy specialists from Florida State University (Barnes et al, 2018). Finally, the EGR scale up plan and procedure by the Nigerian Ministry of Education through the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) will be presented and shared with other stakeholders at the conference.

Authors

• Abdul K. T. Otunuyi, National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE)

• Adrienne Barnes, Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University

• NURUDEEN Adeshina LAWAL, CREATIVE ASSOCIATES INTERNATIONAL

• Muhammad Auna Yakubu, Niger State College of Education, Minna, Nigeria.

• Fatima Binta Abdullahi Faroq, Niger State College of Education, Minna, Nigeria.

• Nosiru Olajide Onibon, Michael Otedola College of Primary Education.