Empowering Primary School Pupils through Literacy Remediation Project in Uyo Local Government Area

Abstract

The reading failure of most public school pupils has engaged the attention of researchers and other stakeholders in the education industry for quite some time now. Efforts being made to help children to read often involve teacher training and retraining in the hope that this will impact on the pupils’ literacy development. While teacher training is commendable, the needed literacy attainment of the pupils is still not appreciable. Most of them still leave the primary school without the ability to read or write. Research has shown that teachers at that level lack knowledge of the reading process and often fail to engage the pupils in activities that promote literacy development. The result has been that these pupils leave school unable to achieve the goals of primary education. They often become dropouts. In other to empower such children for meaningful learning, reading needs to be deliberately taught to them using various activities. This study therefore reports on the activities which pupils were engaged in during the 2008 long vacation and how these enhanced their literacy development.

Key Words: Dialogic reading, Text talk, Print referencing, kit pack,
decoding skills