The LING Blog
MESSAGE FROM MANAGING DIRECTOR
The end of the year is a time for celebrating achievements, reflecting on things we learned, as well as making plans for next year. It was an honor to work side by side with our friends at Lexplore Sweden, Mirai Partners, KDSL Global, Lexplore UK, Lexplore Inc, and our Advisory council members where we share ideas on literacy skills, cross-cut edge and to contemplate and be thankful for all that can happen when organizations and individuals work together to build strong programs in this community. At this special time of the year, we especially want to give enormous thanks to all that made a commitment throughout this year making our programs possible and our organization stronger in the year 2020.
The COVID-19 “mess” for education is a unique one and would go down to history. Our entire educational system in Ghana and many parts of the world experienced absolute school closures and stakeholders not knowing where to start, what to do and how to tackle the already existing literacy crises in the country. We were glad to be able to go on with our planned project activities by taking the very difficult but necessary decision to procure some PPEs to help curtail the spread of the virus. This was necessary because looking at how pupil’s compatriots in USA, Europe, Australia and many other developed countries opted for remote learning while they were left here in Ghana to their faith to be in the house. What strike us most was that our young and adolescent girls in our clubs were likely to be out of school in crisis situations and face greater barriers to education and vulnerabilities such as domestic/gender-based violence when not in school or get into early marriages which expose them to child given birth to a child or being infected with sexually transmitted infections.
My 2020 highlight was an interaction I had with a young girl named Chentiwuni who was featured in one of our video interview sessions. During the Lexplore assessment, she didn’t want to be screened because she feared her colleagues would make fun of her since she could not read. But through our constant engagement with her at the club, she reads with ease. Through my chat I asked her what she wants to be after finishing school, Chentiwuni said it was her dream to be an electrical engineer to bring electricity to her home and her community. I felt short of words that a girl from such a poor home in the Bulpiela community had strong aspirations, and she said she had the idea from a story she read during the read with me series at the club session. “That’s where I got the idea”.
I am elated that our students are inspired and motivated, and I am very humble that we have 75% female representation in our clubs and our trusts that this will have a ripple effect on their lives in the community and their future family.
As we look into the coming year 2021, we would like to expand our programs into more deserving rural schools in the Nantong District and Tamale South constituency with a focus on resourcing these kids whose literacy is seriously in crises.
We are very much grateful to Lexplore and all affiliates, KDSL Global and to our advisory council members Brittany and Melanie.
Signed
Abdul-Razak Issah
Managing Director, LING Project, Ghana
LING has made a break-through in bridging Pupils Literacy Gap in Northern Ghana
On the 16th November, 2020. Our team monitored our literacy clubs to test how pupils are responding to our literacy interventions. Our monitoring shows a greater improvement on pupil’s response to our interventions. We discovered that, pupils literacy levels had increase to an appreciable level upon situating it to our earlier results from Lexplore. We were thrilled to see that pupils could read short stories and decoding words on their own. Our successes could not have been possible without the integration of Lexplore’s A I and the Eye tracker services. Putting Lexplore at the center of assessment gave us a better understanding of each individual pupil’s level of literacy. So right from the word go, we have a pictorial view of about the needs of every child.
Lexplore is an innovative rapid reading assessment. It’s powered by eye-tracking and artificial intelligence technologies. In just a couple of minutes, a teacher can obtain a student’s reading level. This unique high-tech process provides teachers with real-time data for intervention that directly correlates to a student’s reading capability.
Members of staff can use Lexplore for continuously updated placement decisions, resource allocation decisions, and progress monitoring.
Date: 16/11/2020
Launching Launching Launching
LING, in partnership with Lexplore and Mirai, is bringing a new facelift to literacy education in Ghana with the launch of Lexplore coupled with an eye tracker and an artificial intelligence to help in the assessment of pupil’s literacy levels in basic schools of northern Ghana. It is not a hidden fact that literacy is the path to progress and prosperity.
Pupils gain their understanding through reading so in a situation where there is a breakage in skills and competences on how to read implies, they have been deprived of their freedom. Haven’t conducted a study on how teachers assess pupils literacy level in Ghana with minimal progress and so as an organization (LING), we took it upon ourselves.
We attended webinar workshops on how literacy is taught elsewhere in the world and we see how transformational literacy can be when educators and pupils have access to ed/tech resources. These resources help educators to understand pupils' level of literacy in a comprehensive manner by matching it with the right literacy interventions to yield a positive results. Once facilitators were trained, the project was launched and so the process begins to determine the literacy interventions.
Date: 01/09/20
CLOSING THE LITERACY GAP CREATED BY COVID-19 IN THE YEAR 2021
The level of disruption created by covid-19 on education is unprecedented than in the last 100 years. This has undoubtedly created a huge literacy gap in pupil’s lives. The impact of covid is even felt in the economies and education of most developed countries let alone a developing country like Ghana where access to resources is a huge challenge and the few that are in supply is very scarce to acquire. As an organization that thrived and operated in the mid of covid-19, we are happy to have the Lexplore kits that supported us with the assessment of pupil’s literacy needs (levels) and provided us with the right interventions to helped bridge the gap within these excruciating times. We operated on a simple principle that ‘with access to literacy tools in the mid of the pandemic, every child has the capacity to read independently’.
The good about our story in the year 2020 is that, we trained very few educators with a skills to teach literacy and also to manage our literacy clubs and the impact was highly phenomenal since the challenges identified with the help of the device from the start could now be translated to reading short stories at the end of the project for the year 2020. We have seen the need to expand our program given the negative effect of this pandemic on pupils literacy and coupled with a recent report by the Ghana National Association of Teacher (GNAT) aired by Joy News titled ‘Inability to read at Grade 2 is disheartening – GNAT’. Children’s inability to read basic words at Grade Two is disheartening, Palham Oyiye, the National Coordinator, Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), said in Accra on Tuesday 8 September 2020, 8:42pm.
At a conference organized by the Ghana Publishers Association to celebrate the 2020 “World Literacy Day,” he said some children were unable to read simple words like ‘the’ and ‘cat’.
The Conference was on the theme: “Child Literacy as Foundation for Future Development: Strategies in the Covid-19 Crisis and beyond”.
Mr. Oyiye said a World Bank Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project revealed that the Early Grade Reading Assessment did not change between 2013 and 2015.
We are committed to open up on accommodating of ten clubs from different schools in the coming year 2021 to help close the gap of literacy in rural communities of Tamale South constituencies and Nantong district respectively
We are of the firm believe that, when a child’s literacy skills and competence is unlocked, possibilities are opened up, allowing them to choose a path for their own future. LING Project being a pace-setter in the use of the Lexplore device in Ghana enables this journey by providing the right interventions and technological support to help close the gap in literacy created by covid-19. With your donation and support we can build a generation of readers across the length of breath of rural Northern Ghana.
30/11/2020