The Lecture Pour Tous research-practice-policy nexus for sustainable literacy

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Citizen awakenings: early grade reading sustainability for sustainable development in Senegal

Proposal

This paper presents recent empirical and applied research from Lecture Pour Tous’ efforts to generate and use an evidence base to strengthen delivery systems for sustainable early grade reading reforms in Senegal. This demonstrates how governance work can give education programming a sustainable future. With strong delivery systems, innovations have a much greater chance of continuing to grow and of being brought to scale.

To strengthen and solidify the national policy framework for early grade reading in the country, Lecture Pour Tous developed a conceptual “nexus” linking research, policy and practice. Operational research informs program activities. The results of this research feed back into practice to adapt and hone interventions, often with further study before final codification into policy. This research and policy work is done in a “faisons ensemble” approach with project specialists together with the technical directorates of the Ministry of National Education and its research arm, the Institut national d'étude et d'action pour le développement de l'éducation.

For example, research on the factors influencing teacher mobility resulted in a set of guidelines on how to manage teacher mobility in the context of a bilingual education reform. It was crucial to address this issue to make sure teachers with the appropriate language skills were available in the schools to take on the teaching in national languages – and would stay on once trained in the new approach. With assistance to the Directorate of Human Resources, these guidelines are helping to update of the teacher management database to include information on national language skills.

Furthermore, other studies are informing how languages are chosen for early grade instruction in public schools. We will present results of socio-linguistic mapping to identify the prominent languages spoken by children in each school-community, and from a new study on oral vocabulary mastery in French of students in the early grades. This research is supporting the Ministry’s efforts to stabilize its emerging bilingual education model using both French and national languages, and to update policies related to second language instruction, specifying the pace at which children by grade level will be expected to master French reading as a function of their exposure and familiarity with the language.

In a broader perspective, implementation of a new early grade reading instructional model and materials in the classroom using national languages led the Ministry to request further support on developing a National Reading Framework to synthesize all learning to define the approaches and strategies the Ministry wants to adopt to take the reading reform to scale. The framework will provide the Ministry with a consolidated, approved model for cost-effective, scalable reading instruction that meets international standards – and a guideline for harmonizing the several small-scale initiatives led by national and international NGOs and development partners.

This learning from Senegal should be of interest to those undertaking or studying large-scale reading reforms. In particular it can inform tools like USAID’s anticipated Literacy Landscape Assessment for quickly take stock of local context to inform program design and course-correct during implementation.

Authors

• Cheikh Beye, Senegalese Ministry of Education

• Sabine Kube-Barth, Cambridge Education