By Albert Futukpor
Tolon (N/R), July 14, GNA – World Education, an NGO, has started the pilot use of an educational technology to support former out-of-school girls to strengthen their English language proficiency using Google’s Read Along App.
A total of 65 girls, who underwent the Complementary Basic Education (CBE) programme under the Strategic Approaches to Girls’ Education project, and are currently pupils of Gburimani Ahmadiyya Primary School, Kpana Presby Primary School, and Nyankpala D/A Primary School in the Tolon District of the Northern Region, are benefiting from the pilot project.
Each day, the girls, supported by trained mentor teachers, practice for 15 minutes outside of school hours using educational tablets with an installed Google Read Along App, which provides stories aligned to their reading levels.
The Google Read Along App has over 1,000 stories in four readability levels in multiple languages, allowing children to play decoding, word recognition games, and read stories.
The App works completely offline and has no distracting advertisements or in-app purchases and leveraging Google’s text-to-speech recognition and artificial Intelligence, children practice reading while an online reading buddy ‘Diya’ provides immediate feedback and models fluency and pronunciation where needed.
The children are given rewards when they complete their daily exercises and progress to more difficult books.
Mr Stephen Konde, a Representative of World Education in the Northern Region, who visited the schools to monitor the girls as they practiced reading using the App, said the initiative became necessary because it was observed that the girls, after the CBE, faced challenges transitioning to school, because to the language of instruction in grade three and higher, was English.
Mr Konde said “So far, we have done one and a half months, and we have been doing an assessment to ascertain the progress that has been made.
“We realised that girls, who were at the word level or letter level, have moved to word level. If somebody could say ‘A,’ it means the person is now able to pronounce a word, and if somebody was at that level of word, the person is now able to read a sentence. So, some have made progress.”
He said “Our plan is that if we get a good evaluation at the end of this three-month project, and we are fortunate to get funding, then we can look at the Tolon as a district to scale it up at that level. Then maybe after that we can look at how do we get it to the entire nation.”
Alhaji Alhassan Sumani, the Tolon District Director of Education, lauded the project saying it had come at an opportune time when they were trying to improve the reading skills of children in the area.
“So, it is highly welcome because it will help us ensure that the young ones get the fundamentals to be able to read and improve upon instructions,” he said.
Mr Adam Aziz, the Head Teacher of the Nyankpala D/A Primary School, said the initiative, saying it was helping the learners to read well. “For two months now, we have seen some form of improvement amongst the learners in terms of reading.”
Adamu Sulemana, one of the beneficiary girls, who is a pupil of Nyankpala D/A Primary School, said the App was a great support for her as she had seen improvement in her reading abilities.
GNA