Ten teachers from Carriacou and Petite Martinique’s Literacy Programme are attending a Reading Reform Foundation Conference (RRF) held in London, United Kingdom. The Reading Reform Foundation of the United Kingdom is a non-profit organization that campaigns to improve the teaching of reading in the English-speaking world. It was founded by educators and researchers who are concerned about the high functional illiteracy rates among children and adults in the United Kingdom.
The team of teachers will return to Grenada to implement their skills in more effective synthetic phonics teaching methods. The team of phonics leaders, led by Gertrude Niles, Education Officer, began the program in August of 2006 with the goal of improving literacy skills in Carriacou and Petite Martinique by informing education officers and school principals about synthetic phonics and providing local teachers with additional tools for teaching reading through phonics methods.
The RRF’s mission statement states that its members are convinced that reading failure is caused by faulty instructional methods and explains that “A particular fault of these methods is that [these methods] under-emphasize the need for children to be taught the alphabetic code: the way in which individual speech-sounds (phonemes) are represented by letters and combinations of letters.”
For full article, see http://www.caribbeannetnews.com/article.php?news_id=22217
Also see http://www.rrf.org.uk/
Photo (of literacy specialist Elizabeth Nonweiler and 4 year-old students) from http://www.grenadabroadcast.com/content/view/5235/1/
