Inaugural Report of the

2014

Seven Steps to Reading

DISCLAIMER

This product is made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under Cooperative Agreement AID-386-A-13-00006. The contents of this report are the sole responsibility of Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS) and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.

Introduction to READ Alliance

This report inaugurates the READ Alliance, a new approach to development partnership that will bring together the social and private sectors in innovative and imaginative ways. The READ Alliance is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS). The READ Alliance invites its members and partners to adopt an innovation-driven approach to strengthen the reading skills of primary school age children in India. To address the challenge of weak reading abilities, it is vital to first define and understand its contours. To this end, the report identifies seven critical challenge areas, each of which must be addressed to achieve the goal of India's children reading with proficiency and comprehension. This analysis gives this report its name, “Seven Steps to Reading.” We hope current and future READ Alliance partners will span the public and private sectors and that each will bring all of their experience, expertise, innovation, social commitment, and creativity to address and overcome each of these seven challenges. What we may not be able to achieve alone, we will surely be able to accomplish together.

Developments in Primary Education

India has always been a heterogeneous society, with varying degrees of access to education and literary cultures. Education has always featured as an important parameter of social development and welfare in India, and has been an important issue for the government as reflected, for exam-ple, in the Constitution of India and the National Policy on Education. Throughout the last decade and a half, the focus on primary education has intensified and there have been ongoing efforts to expand and standardize processes for access to primary education in the country.

In 2000, the Indian government recommitted itself to achieving the goal of universal primary education by 2015, in accordance with the Millennium Development Goals outlined by the United Nations. Since then, the government has instituted a number of programs and policies leading the country towards this goal. The National Curricular Framework of 2005, the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya Scheme, the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, and the National Program for Education of Girls at Elementary Level (NPEGEL) are just some of the initiatives that have significantly transformed the education system. In 2001-02, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) was launched. SSA is the Government of India’s flagship educational initiative intended to universalize access to and improve the quality of elementary education for all children in the 6-14 age group through diverse inputs and processes. The framework of the SSA included appointment and trainings of teachers, motivating parents and students through the provision of incentives such as scholarships, uniforms and textbooks, construction of additional classrooms, the provision of toilets, drinking water facilities and so on. Most importantly, the SSA program revealed the need for a comprehensive and all-inclusive approach to education, thus acting as a catalyst for the enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) in 2009. Further strengthening India’s commitment to achieving universal primary education, the Government of India instituted the RTE Act in 2009. The RTE Act aims to bring equitable, quality education to all children, entitling every child between 6-14 years of age to free and compulsory elementary education as a fundamental right. RTE has come to represent the government’s commitment and responsibility towards achieving universal primary education throughout the country.

In the wake of these developments, the primary education scenario in India has witnessed considerable improvements in access to and quality of primary education, with primary school enrollment higher than ever before. However, there are indications of challenges in learning, and specifically in reading, among children for whose benefit these programs and frameworks are intended.

School Enrolment, School Dropouts

According to the District Information System for Education (DISE) data of 2009, school enrollment in primary education is at 98 percent. The eighth All India Education Survey (AIES) by NCERT for 2002-09 also shows that the enrolment of girls in primary education has increased. However, the same data shows that the average dropout rate at the primary school level is 25 percent, with grade five, a crucial grade in determining the outcome of primary education, exhibiting the highest percentage of dropouts at 15.9 percent. In this context, the education of girls is more likely to be negatively impacted as girls are more likely to drop out of school than boys.

Learning Outcomes of Children in Primary Education

In addition to this, recent surveys such as the Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) of 2013 and the National Achievement Survey (NAS) conducted in 2010, show alarm-ingly low levels of scholastic achievement among children. The ASER report surveyed children between the ages of 5-16 in rural India to assess their reading abilities and found that 47.3 percent of the children were unable to recognize letters, 32.3 percent were able to recognize letters but not able to form words from them, and 12.6 percent could recognize words but were unable to string them together to form sentences or paragraphs. Similarly, the NAS survey assessed children studying in grade five for literacy and numeracy skills. In their testing of language skills, they found that close to 40 percent of students were unable to gather information from a given table about a particular event or incident. Two-thirds of the students assessed were unable to identify the main theme of a passage used for testing and evaluate its title. These results point towards systemic challenges in the area of primary education that impact reading abilities, and ultimately learning in children. Certain factors, necessary conditions for learning, must be in place to ensure that children, whether in school or out of school, are able to access effective reading instruction and gain reading abilities.

Sources:DISE data on school dropouts, 2009ASER 2013

School dropout rate by grade (in percentage)

Grade I

Grade II

Grade III

Grade IV

Grade V

Unable to recognize letters

Unable to form words from letters

Unable to form sentences from words

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20

Reading abilities of children(in percentage)

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

47.3

12.6

32.3

10.4

7.2

6.7

6.5

15.9

For a child, acquiring reading abilities consists of a series of processes and component skills, which is a fluid, continuous process. Reading proficiency is achieved not as a series of defined levels, but more as a continuum of learning. According to emergent literacy theory, a child's literacy development begins long before she or he begins to read or write in the conventional sense. During the early reading stages, the child begins to understand concepts of print, such as directionality of text and flipping of pages, through exposure to reading material and by observing reading behaviors in her or his immediate environment. The develop-ment of oral language skills, through communicating with peers and adults and by being exposed to conversations and interactions, takes place parallel to the understanding of print. These developments enable the child to grasp the idea that sounds or speech can also be represented as written symbols or letters. Eventually, these early reading skills translate into more conventional reading. The child starts relating particular sounds to letters of the alphabet, stringing together letters to form words, and eventually creating sentences and paragraphs. The understanding of language syntax and semantics takes place at the stage of basic reading. These developments require skilled guidance, carefully selected teaching and learning materials, and an environment that supports the different learning levels of the children. As the reader gains fluency, she or he is able to derive more nuanced meaning from the text and to draw meanings which at times go beyond the literal meaning of the text. It is important, at this stage, to enable and support the child in viewing the text from different perspectives, and to provide access to reading material on a range of subjects. This is essential for her or him to derive pleasure from reading as well as knowledge. Fluency, comprehension, and motivation are intrinsically related aspects of reading necessary for ensuring higher reading proficiency in children. These relate not only to the ability of a child to read, but also to her or his interest in reading. The goal of reading interventions should be to create a culture of reading and not just literate citizens. For this, it is essential to look at reading not only as a necessary literacy skill, but as an act providing emotional involvement, knowl-edge, and growth for the individual and her or his community.

Interactions Necessary for Developing Reading Proficiencies

Looking at reading from the perspective of the child, we realize that the child requires certain necessary interactions to develop her or his ability to read and to enjoy reading. For the purpose of this research, we define the ‘system’ with regards to early reading as including frameworks (such as policies and programs) which define primary education, the skills to be acquired by a child, the interactions that are neces-sary for this learning, and the socio-economic, linguistic and cultural realities that impact all of the above.

Gaps in these learning interactions, caused by deficiencies in the overarching system as defined above, negatively impact the child’s ability and motivation to read. In order to address the grand challenge of early reading, we must identify the necessary learning interactions and the system deficiencies that impact these interactions, and build our solutions in order to address these deficiencies.

Stages of Reading Proficiency

Semantics deals with the meaning components of language, both at the level of individual units and at the higher levels that combine these units. Thus, part of linguistic knowledge involves learning the individual meanings of words (or vocabulary) as well as the meaning of larger segments such as sentences and discourse structures (e.g., narratives and expositions).

Automatically reading familiar texts

Concept of print

Background knowledge of the language

Word-Sound -Symbol association

Early Reading or Pre Reading

Stage of Reading Pro�ceincy

Milestone Explication of necessity

Basic Reading Phonemic awareness and character recognition

Learning to assemble characters into words and awareness of the alphabetic principle

A common behavioral and visual logic underlies reading as an activity: one starts a book from one side or the other, and reads in a single direction, all of which requires cueing and orientation. A child begins to understand these when exposed to reading materail early in life.

Using background knowledge to support and understand what is being read becomes an important part of the child's higher reading abilities.

In acquiring higher reading skills, the child is expected to be able to read more than one meaning of the text, or look at the text from multiple perspectives. This is also essential for the child to build perspectives of her own, paving the path for reading to translate into knowledge.

The most basic technical elements of reading have to do with character recognition, decoding and encoding letters to form words and then sentences.

Knowledge of the alphabetic principle refers to an understanding that spoken words are made up of phonemes and that those phonemes can be represented in text as letters or groups of letter knowledge

All languages have rules regarding how words can be combined to form sentences, and an understanding of the implicit rules of sentence structure and phrasing is essential to achieving reading with comprehension.

A child needs to understand that a spoken sound can be represented as a symbol or a written word.

Knowing how the everyday world works, both in terms of content and procedures, is a crucial component of language comprehension. Background knowledge helps the child understand the structure of language.

Pro�icient Reading

Independent Reading

Letter Knowledge

Syntax Awareness and learning to assemble words into sentences

Semantics and importance to word meaning

Correlate prior and strategic knowledge

Formulationof knowledge from reading on a higher level of abstraction

Critically analyse the viewpoint of others and construct own

Think critically about read material

Seven Steps to Reading

There is a lack of importance given to the teaching of reading in schools. This is reflected in the lack of a dedicated reading program in teacher training as well as the paltry amount of time dedicated to language teaching in schools. In schools, teacher student interaction, important for acquisition of basic and proficient reading skills, is impacted by various issues such as a high pupil teacher ratio and teacher responsi-bilities including managing multi-grade classrooms. Also, schools are often focused on completing prescribed syllabi, leaving little room to focus on the disparateskill levels and needs of children.

In early years of life, the child needs tobe raised in a nurturing, stimulatingand caring environment.

The child needs access and exposureto and demonstration of reading andstimulating visual materials includingbooks, electronic media and environmental print during the early language

The child needs to receive skilledguidance within a supportive, encour-aging environment to developbasic reading skills ranging fromphonemic association to syntacticalawareness, semantics, and comprehension.

The quality of childcare and stimulation in the early yearsdirectly affects the child's imagination, curiosity, and languageprocessing skills. Early intervention, especially for children fromdisadvantaged backgrounds, is essential to address earlyreading deficiencies.

Illiteracy among adults is a factor that contributes to the poor development of basic literacy concepts among preschool age children. Children from economically weaker households do not have access to pre-primary schooling, which impacts their language and reading skills during formal schooling. Outside the home, communities lack resources such as libraries or media centers for introducingchildren and parents to early concepts of literacy. The problem of finding appropri-ate literacy materials in the community or the general environment of the child becomes more acute in hard to reach and remote areas.

Parental illiteracy combined with socioeconomic deprivation result in parents being unable to provide a caring, nurturing environment to the young child. For poorer parents, access to childcare facilities is limited to state run creches and Anganwadi centers, which are inadequate in number. For children who do have access tochildcare facilities, the quality of care is inadequate. Anganwadi centers and creches focus more on child health care, and not on the cognitive and linguistic development of the child.

At the pre-reading stage, the child requires access to visuallystimulating literacy material as well as examples of readingdemonstrated by adults. These allow a child to intuitivelyunderstand concepts of print such as directionality of script,holding a book, visual representation of sounds, and so on. Theliteracy levels of relevant others such as parents, especiallymothers, has a direct impact on the literacy and academicperformance of the child.

Developing proficiency in the oral and aural aspects of a language is an organic, natural process, unlike acquiring basic reading skills in the language. For a child to acquire basic reading skills that allow her or him to string together characters, words and ultimately sentences to create meaning from text, she or he requires careful, skilled guidance and a supportive, encouraging environment.

Necessary Learning Interaction Explication of Necessity System Conditions

Core literacy and reading skills will be lost if they are notreinforced continuously over several years of a reader's earlychildhood. Seen in the context of school dropouts and out ofschool children, this poses a challenge in the retention anddevelopment of reading skills.

Certain populations of children, such as street children, working children, and girls, are less likely to be enrolled in formal schools. There are few provisions for non-formal schooling or reading programs for children who are not in school. Bridge programs exist for children who are dropouts or long term absentees, but these are few in number and often insufficient to prepare the child to return to her or his age-appropriate grade.

Literacy skills already acquired by thechild need to be reinforced throughpractice and continued learning.

The child requires instruction andopportunity to engage in deeperinterpretations of read materialincluding literary, analytical and logicalinterpretations of the text.

The child at the stages of basic andproficient reading, needs access to avariety of stimulating texts on varioussubjects and in a range of formats.

Tapping into the child's prior knowledge is essential for him orher to go beyond literal interpretations of the text. This alsoallows the child to build a sense of identity and confidence,promoting individual interpretations of read material. However,teachers do not often explain the meaning of the text, whichresults in stunted reading comprehension skills.

A child at the basic and proficient reading stages requires accessto a variety of stimulating reading materials in a range of formats and subjects. This helps the child build interest as well as fluency in reading, eventually leading her or him to view reading as a cognitively pleasurable activity, and not just a skill.

To develop reading as a skill and as a behavior, especiallyamong children from disadvantaged and oral culture communi-ties, children need to have access to peers and family members who indulge in and encourage reading and other literary activities. Social interactions around reading can eventually translate into a culture of reading.

Given the proportion of illiterate adults in the country, there is a dire need for community-based reading and language resources and programs that promote adult and child reading. There is also insufficient immediate incentive for parents from lower income households to encourage children to read rather than to contribute to economic and domestic requirements.

High student-teacher ratio and varying levels of skills in the same classroom negatively impact the teacher-student interaction. In most classrooms, teacher-student interaction is unidirectional, with children not encouraged to develop and express their interpretations of the read material beyond the requirements of the syllabus. Children are rarely encouraged to understand read material beyond what is required as answers to textbook questions. Relating texts to the sociocultural interactions of the child does not take place, limiting the child's motivation and ability to achieve deeper interpretation of texts and involvement in reading.

Making extra-curricular reading material such as books, computers, etc., available to children and encouraging them to access it is uncommon in schools as well as community spaces including homes.

It is essential for the child to haveaccess to and participate in a commu-nity of reading, either through her orhis peer group or across generations.

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Areas of Focus for READ Alliance

To address the challenge of reading, it is essential to under-stand the problem and define it in a manner that leads us to pointed, targeted solutions. The seven steps identified in this report depict an analysis of the challenges as well as the directions that must be travelled towards in order to construct effective solutions. Addressing the deficiencies in these seven learning interactions will allow us to tackle different aspects of this multi-pronged challenge.

Collaboration, Innovation and Technology

Given the nature of challenges in the early reading sector, it becomes necessary to look at the larger picture in our search for solutions that are far-reaching and promise lasting impact. These interventions can be brought about by bringing together knowledge and expertise from diverse areas and relating it to the challenge of early reading. An understanding of the social, political, and cognitive frame-works that impact reading abilities in children is crucial since it is through these lenses that we can develop and scale innovations that impact these frameworks. Looking at innovation as a means, not an end, as a process and not only as a tool, is important - a process that brings together and positively impacts stakeholders at all levels of the early reading ecology.

It is also important that we take into account the ways in which society and its attributes are due to change with time, so as to ensure that the solutions that we create are not temporal in nature. A child born today has a good chance of living to see the 22nd century. We have a responsibility to this child to not only provide a quality basic education, but also to provide it in a manner that allows her or him to participate in an exciting period of global change and continuous innovation. We therefore encourage the educa-tion sector to consider the full gamut of innovations includ-ing existing and novel technologies; business or organiza-tional models; operational or production processes; or products or services that lead to substantial improvements in executing against development challenges. In combination with some of the more traditional approaches, innovation can produce learning outcomes more effectively, more cheaply, more sustainably, and reach more beneficiaries (especially those in hard to reach areas or from socio-economically deprived communities) in a shorter period of time.

Developing content in multiple formats, a careful considera-tion of existing and easily accessible media such as the internet and information and communication technologies (ICT), engaging with socio-political systems such as govern-ments and communities, and a cultural understanding of the beneficiaries is essential to ensuring that the interventions we suggest for early reading have optimum reach and impact. It is important that the interventions that we design are centered around the stakeholders in primary education, primarily the child, and after her or him, the parents, the community, the teachers and the school. Given the wide range of demographics, culture and languages in the country, our solutions will have to bear the twofold responsi-bility of being context relevant, as well as being applicable to a wide range of conditions.

Early Grade Reading Innovation Challenge

The Alliance acknowledges reading as a fundamental step to learning and emphasizes the role of text and comprehension in daily life. In our analysis, we have identified seven key challenges that impact a child’s ability and motivation to read.

Through our call for proposals, we now seek to discover, develop and scale solutions aimed at solving this deeply rooted, endemic problem. The READ Alliance encourages the adoption of innovation-driven, user-centric approaches to strengthen the reading skills of Indian children. We invite individuals and organizations to join us in creating such solutions. For more information, please look up www.cks.in/read-alliance.

www.cks.in/read-alliance

READ AllianceVihara Innovation CampusD 57, 100 ft roadChhattarpur EnclaveNew Delhi 110074