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Developing Quality Instructional Materials in 12 Languages: Scaling up a mother-tongue based early grade reading program in a multilingual context

Thu, April 18, 11:45am to 1:15pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Atrium (Level 2), Waterfront D

Proposal

Uganda’s multilingual character makes implementation of an early grade reading program particularly demanding, not least with respect to the provision of quality instructional materials. Designed to improve children’s reading abilities, the USAID-Uganda School Health and Reading Program (SHRP) started out in 2012 with a commitment to provide student primers and teachers’ guides in 12 Ugandan languages, about a fifth of the languages acknowledged in the country’s constitution, and English. Developing and producing the materials in the first three program years required some basic steps such as establishing language boards to advise on the language content and language panels to write the materials, these elected by representatives of the speech communities. But these did not preempt the major key challenges of wooing stakeholders who despise the use of mother tongues in education and speech communities that would have rejected the dialects that the language boards selected for use in the materials. Yet, to date, the books are a major characteristic of SHRP and three scale-up projects – USAID-Uganda Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity (LARA), the GPE funded Uganda Teacher and School Effectiveness Project (UTSEP) and Build Africa’s ILEAP (Improving the Learning and Educational Attainment in Primary) – implementing EGR in government aided schools in 80% of the country’s districts.
In spite of initial resistance to the policy recommendation for mother tongue medium instruction in the 1992 White Paper on Education, and to the Thematic Curriculum which places mother-tongue medium instruction at the center, the books have not only met the purpose of supporting early grade reading instruction in Primary 1 to 4. They have also attracted the active evaluation of users who share observations about the language content and design of the materials. Besides, they have caused demand for extension of provision to government aided schools outside the reading projects as well as privately owned schools. Ministry of Education and Sports too has demonstrated keenness to understand the technical and logistical processes involved in developing and producing EGR materials. The demand for the materials and the users’ continuous evaluation of the teachers’ guides have together made the process of their revision a dynamic dialogue on making the design of the guides support more effective use by teachers and therefore more reading gains. This presentation explains why the materials are in demand among the target communities in spite of the usual rejection of the use of local language in education in Uganda. It recommends that basic education providers in multilingual contexts recognize not only the value that beneficiaries attach to their languages but also the role of speech communities in the development of early grade reading instructional materials. It illustrates the buy in signified by the people’s motivation for inclusion in the program and their evaluation of the materials, recommending the exploitation of this buy in for scaling up an early grade reading program.

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