Developing Early Grade Reading Materials in 11 Languages: Learning in Ghana

Group Submission Type: Panel Session

Proposal

After a rapid pivot of the project objectives, to align with the USAID Early Grade Reading strategy, the USAID Partnership for Education: Learning (Learning) project has worked with the Ministry of Education in Ghana and the Ghana Education Service (MOE/GES) to develop a reading program in less than a year that follows a single set of pupil learning outcomes, while being responsive to the needs of teachers and pupils in each of the 11 different Ghanaian languages of instruction. The materials developed in this first phase serves Kindergarten and Primary 1 pupils from 100 districts in Ghana and will be followed by material development for Primary 2. This work was the product of an extraordinary, sustained South-North collaboration between teams of Ghanaian and international linguists, Ghanaian and American reading education and teaching experts, with the bulk of writing achieved by 23 teams comprised of more than 100 Ghanaian writers. Throughout, the process was executed with guidance and expertise from the MOE/GES. In this presentation, members of the Learning team will describe how the project rapidly nested itself within the policies and practical realities of Ghana’s educational context and conducted reading-focused research to fill the gaps in linguistic knowledge, the outcomes of which had impacts on program design. The team will describe innovations in management of large-scale reading material development in terms of balancing unique language needs within a standard pedagogical program, pushing the limits of prevalent technologies to manage quality control, and targeted research on the writing process that aided in a redefinition of teams and workflow making it possible to scale the production of materials in multiple languages simultaneously.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Global Literacy

Chair

• Emily Miksic, FHI 360

Individual Presentations

• Implementing an early grade reading program aligned to the national language policy in education: The government perspective - Felicia Boakye-Yiadom, Ministry of Education, Ghana

• Language analysis and early-grade reading programs in little-written languages: Really useful linguistics! - Barbara Trudell, SIL Africa

• Unified intervention design for 11 languages: Bridging systems and innovations - Mackenzie Matthews, FHI 360

• Managing the process of writing in 11 languages: Planning for quality and efficiency - Emily Miksic, FHI 360

Discussant

• Sandy Oleksy-Ojikutu, US Agency for International Development (USAID)