A three days literacy leader’s forum for education authorities throughout the country which started on Monday this week ended on Wednesday in Honiara.
According Literacy Education Adviser Dr. Marie Quinn the Literacy Leader’s Forum was aimed at bringing all the education authorities together to talk about what they have been doing so far with literacy with the teachers in their respective schools.
She said, all the education authorities in Solomon Islands will be shifting to a new way of teaching literacy very soon.
“This year the ministry is thinking of how to do literacy better because we know that the test results aren’t very good,” she said.
She said as part of their work, what they have been doing is setting up training for teachers through their education authorities
“We have been building materials, encouraging teachers to try new things, rewriting the English syllabus and coming up with this literacy statement which give a lot of background on what we are basing on,” she said.
So rather than just coming up with a new idea out of the air, she said they’ve been thinking about what teaching approach suits Solomon Islands context with relevant materials.
“We analyse why is that there is a problem in teaching literacy, we also thinking of the conditions of Solomon Islands and try to come up with solutions that will really help teachers of grade one, two and three to change the way they do literacy” she added.
“The big thing now is to change the way we teach literacy for example, not make all children to read out load together because that has very little value for reading and literacy but come up with another approaches that will provide effective literacy learning instead.”
By Biriau Wilson Saeni
