How to remedy reading problems

THE EDITOR: The Minister of Education, Mrs Hazel Manning has promised to put a mandatory reading and writing programme in all schools. BpTT has pledged US$50,000 towards this initiative. Let us examine the flaw in this assertion of the minister. Firstly there is no reading programme which can be fully implemented under five years. Any attempt to create a programme at the ministry without the input of important stakeholders is sure to fail. What then should constitute the ideal reading programme for children in primary schools? The ideal programme should consist of the following:

•The psychology of Reading and Reading Development (language proficiencies of good readers, characteristics of poor readers, neurological studies of good and poor readers and the relationships between phonology, decoding, fluency and comprehension).

•Knowledge of Language Structure and its Application  (phonetics, phonology, morphology, orthography, semantics, syntax and text structure)

•Practical Skills of Instruction in a Comprehensive Reading Programme (consensus finding of research, concepts of print, letter recognition, phoneme awareness, decoding, word attack, spelling, fluency, vocabulary development, reading comprehension, composition)

•Assessment of Classroom Reading and Writing Skills (phoneme awareness and phonic word attack inventories, spelling inventory, use information for instructional planning and classroom grouping, use several kinds of assessment to measure change over time) Such a reading programme in school will take more than US$50,000. It is supposed to take the kind of money that the Minister of Education allocated for school repairs during the summer of 2004, that is $42 million.

We must remember every teacher must be trained to become a master teacher of reading. We are not speaking about a top-down document from the ministry with a smattering about sight words, emergent literacy and parental responsibility of teaching reading to their infants. We are also about a one or two-month course, twice a week, with the curriculum above, at the Learning Resource Centre at Couva. When we implement the course with professors from the School of Education and established professionals from the United States of America, then reading will be a problem no more in Trinidad and Tobago.

ORIO NGUMA
Fyzabad