Basilan State College

Graduate Studies
Master of Arts in Teaching
English

EDE 204
Teaching of Reading, Applying
Remedial Measures and Literacy
Appreciation in Bilingual Context
Early Reading
Instruction
in Niger
RICKY C. SEDILLO JR., LPT
Presentor
Overview of curricular documents: reading instruction
curriculum in Niger in Grade 1,Grade 2 and Grade
3.
 Following the comprehensive review of the
education system conducted during the three
phases of the Ten-Year Education Development
Plan (Programme Décennal de Développement
de l’Education, PDDE) between 2003-2013,
Niger moved strongly towards curricular reform
centred on a situation-based approach (Approche
Par les Situations, APS).
 This goal, of this important reform, is to
raise the quality of education in the
fundamental disciplines (namely reading,
in accordance with the principles
outlined in the curriculum orientation
framework document of May 2012;
Cadre d’Orientation du Curriculum,
COC) and is to be implemented in the
framework of the Education and Training
Sector Programme (2014-2024).
Writing
 In Grade 1, the programme does not prescribe
writing lessons as such. It suggests working on
‘pre-writing exercises to develop discrimination,
visual memory and the aptitude for symbolic
representation’.
 In Grade 2, written expression is introduced
during the second quarter (through small,
progressive exercises).
 It is then from Grade 3 that the two types of
targeted writing (i.e. expository texts and literary
texts) are included in the programme.
The objective is stated as follows:
 Working from the theme of the week...teach
the children to elaborate texts (narration or
dialogue) using simple sentences constructed
with what they have learned that week.
In national languages, the objective is somewhat
differently stated as:
 Teaching the child to easily write a text using
all forms of letters (block, cursive) and upper
case.
Sensory and psychomotor exercises
 The above-mentioned curricular document states
that ‘along with language, sensory and
psychomotor exercises are essential to the
preparation of reading and writing etc.’.
 It recommends that when proposing these
exercises, teachers should take into account ‘what
is immediately available to children in their
everyday lives’.
 Concerning other disciplines, one of the objectives
that stands out relates to the configuration of
French: The acquisition of a good visual memory.
Spelling
 As French spelling is not transparent (the
relationship between graphemes and
phonemes is far from one-to-one), it is highly
advisable to draw upon a wide range of
competencies acquired in other areas of
French and especially ‘in language (exact
distinction of sounds, even when new);
reading (knowledge of the various spellings of
a sound); grammar (syntactic rules), etc.’
One’s attention is draw in particular to the following competence
(expressed here in terms of an objective), which is linked to
reading:
 Mastering the main spellings of a sound in relation to the
context, which requires good hearing and pronunciation.
 In Grade 1/Grade 2, the ‘teacher must encourage all methods
to embed the image of the word in the students’ minds:
careful copying, correct reading, comparison of words.’
 In Grade 3, during the spelling lessons, it is recommended to
conduct a ‘systematic study of the phoneme and its written
forms, the phoneme and its grammatical categories, the
phoneme and lexical acquisition...’
Language
Language is one of the preliminary lessons required
to prepare reading. The stated goal here is:
 To study the words and simple structures the child
needs to communicate.
It should be noted that in addition to the emphasis
on communication (for which the main focus is on
word use, the variety and flexibility of
combinations rather than on the number of words),
it is also recommended that teachers work on
correct pronunciation (sounds and intonations).
Reading in French
 ‘Understanding meaning through the eyes, that is to say
discovering, organizing and interpreting the sense of
what is written.’
 With language, reading is presented as one of the
essential disciplines of basic education.
 According to the general objective prescribed from
Grade 1, school is tasked with an ambitious project
where reading is concerned, namely that of ‘giving each
student a desire to read, an ability to read and a love of
reading that will stay with them their whole lives’
 One of the main objectives of primary school is to
prepare children for adult reading.
 Textbooks and Reading Guides
 The PEP advocates a very open approach
(synonymous with a variety of sources) for all
French teaching in the selection of facts,
situations, texts and documents.
 ‘One method cannot be imposed on all. Common
sense and current developments in pedagogy
argue in favour of an active, lively and practical
method: a mixed method grounded in a whole-
word approach’
 The PEP simply presents an outline of what must be taught
(in French or in the national language), leaving it to the
manuals and guides to operationalize the official instructions.
 Thus, in Grade 1, for example, it is recommended that
reading instruction be ‘based on language acquisitions and the
study of key words that started in week 5, as, strictly
speaking, learning to read will not commence until week 9’
 For Grade 2, the only indication given is that of
‘systematically repeating the Grade 1 programme on the basis
of one sound per day’
 In Grade 3, it is recommended to start with revision (thus
indicating the importance accorded to this activity over the
years of study) so as to ‘enable the child to master the
mechanics of reading’
Manuals and guides: French (second language) reading
manuals in traditional school: historical overview
 As one may imagine, the review of the methods used to
teach French in Niger closely follows the history of
schooling in Niger through the various reforms that
have punctuated its development.
 One must keep in mind in this regard that, as a former
French colony, in the aftermath of independence,
Niger’s sole language of instruction was French, which
was not the first language of any Nigerien child.
 French was and remains taught as a second language in
Niger. The methods of teaching French differ from one
period to another.
The first generation of manuals in French
 Mamadou et Bineta was intended for initiation
levels, namely Grade 1 and Grade 2. As for
Mamadou et Bineta sont devenus grands, it was
geared towards ‘the middle and upper levels of
primary schools in Black Africa’, which
corresponds to Grades 5 and 6.
 The syllabary, Mamadou et Bineta, contains 88
pages and is divided into 62 lessons covering the
fundamentals of reading for the initial grades. It
presents a weekly breakdown of reading lessons
(pages 9-10) as well as advice to the teachers with
Grade 2 students.
 Mamadou et Bineta sont devenus grands is
412 pages long. In the first pages (p. 3-7), the
authors provide guidelines explaining their
pedagogical method to teachers.
 As for Mamadou et Bineta sont devenus
grands, it should be noted that this manual is
designed for Grade 5 and 6 students.
 The lessons here all involve areas of
knowledge of the workings of the French
language, including grammar, vocabulary and
spelling.
The second generation of French manuals
 In the second generation of manuals, there is still a search for books that
match the culture and concerns of the education authorities. After several
meetings on these issues, Niger, like many countries in Francophone West
Africa, adopted new reading materials, in this case La famille Boda (The
Boda Family) and Afrique mon Afrique (Africa My Africa) in the early
70s.

 These textbooks applied the whole-word method in the younger classes

(Grades 1-3). This involved the creation of labels as a pre-reading
activity; the child was sometimes presented with a two-sided label
(signifier/signified). In this approach, the students start from the sentence,
which is segmented into words; subsequently they segment from word to
syllable and from syllable to letter, to then work on the letter to be
studied.
Written culture
 Each page features illustrations of scenes drawn
from the learner’s socio-cultural environment, as
well as various images (for instance in the Grade
3 textbook) representing an example of writing or
an authentic document.
 The first lessons are set aside to familiarize
students with their textbook: teachers are asked
to do a series of seven pre-reading sessions with
students, over the course of one week, to help
them discover their textbook and understand its
logic.
 The first session is organized around an exercise
called ‘Examining the book and the pages’.
The students are asked to progressively analyse
‘the cover’ along with the back cover.
The idea is to have the students describe what
they see.
This exercise focuses on the spatial structure of
the book, having the learner identify subdivisions
(left page, right page, top of the page, bottom of
the page, etc.) in various combinations.
 The second session, entitled ‘Examining the first
image and the bubbles’, is linked to the first.
When learners spatially locate the object defined
by the teacher, they are then asked to describe it
freely.
Then the focus turns to the image containing the
bubbles.
 The idea is to get learners to understand the
mechanics of the speech bubbles: the teacher
draws the characters and then the bubbles, taking
care to properly direct the tail of the bubble into
the mouth of the speaker.
 In the third session, the students are asked to focus
on ‘identifying the two lines of dialogue’.
As previously, the teacher uses questions and
answers to assist the identification.
This exercise appeals to the learners’ capacity for
analysis, requiring them to identify the lines of
dialogue, to say whom they belong to and make
out the number of words in a line of dialogue.
The work on lines of dialogue is also an
opportunity to introduce punctuation signs and the
meaning they can convey.
 The organization of the lessons around ‘icons and
instructions’ is the essential focus of the fourth
session.
The students learn how to identify and understand
the instructions they will be very frequently
receiving with regard to the following activities:
‘you read, you practise, you write.’
This is also an opportunity for the teacher to
present the signs of the book (circle, star, cross,
etc.), which learners will be using very frequently
when answering questions according to the
Martinière method.
 The fifth, sixth and seventh sessions mainly
consist of revision exercises to more solidly
establish the studied concepts and to prepare the
study of sounds that will come after this week of
textbook familiarization.
Teaching the code
 The guide proposes an approach to studying a sound over
seven sessions.
 The purpose of the first session is to ‘identify the sound
aurally’.
 The second session proposes to have the students ‘discover
the spelling of the sound’ by reading dialogues and words
placed in boxes.
 The third session is devoted to the first written exercise.
 The fifth session proposes an exercise B, presented as
being a bit harder than the previous one.
 The sixth session is then devoted to a general revision.
 The seventh session aims to ‘consolidate acquisitions’.
Comprehension of texts and writing
 In terms of the texts, the textbook designers start from short, simple sentence
structures and work up to more complex structures (Noun Group + Verb Group;
Noun Group 1 + Verb Group + Noun Group 2; etc.).
 In Grade 1, there is a frequent use of dialogues. Indeed, the study of the sound is
always triggered by a dialogue contained in the framed illustration (on the left
page). To complement the illustration, the authors propose a text (on the right
page) for each unit. Two textual typologies are prevalent in the majority of the
extracts: narrative texts (fairy tales, adventure stories, etc.) and expository texts
(biographies, news items, testimonies, etc.).
 Nearly exactly the same principle applies in Grade 2, the only difference being
that in addition to the extracts used in Grade 1, a few poems, songs and riddles are
included.
 From Grade 3, the learning unit ceases to be organized around sound and is
configured around ‘speech acts’, which in fact take the form of texts. Through this
new configuration, the authors draw on a wide range of texts in the two types of
writing (prescribed the by official documents) that, the teaching of the discipline is
supposed to target, that is to say, ‘expository texts (instructions, letters, articles,
etc.) and literary texts (stories, poems, fiction, etc.)’
 In general, the teaching of the code is designed in
such a way as to get learners to ‘recognize the
spelling being studied...words are segmented so
that the child can distinguish the letters’.
 The learning process therefore starts with the
discovery and sounding out of words, before
work on phoneme-grapheme correspondence.
Progression
 A general progression over three stages is foreseen in Grade
1:
 A pre-reading period that lasts for four weeks. This period
comprises sensory and graphic exercises that are
considered as essential before tackling reading instruction
in the right conditions.
 A period of global acquisitions that lasts five weeks and
that consists of acquiring a word as a whole, learning to
read and write it without trying to segment it, that is to say
without showing students that is composed of sounds and
letters.
 The study of the forms that sounds take in writing, which
begins in January and lasts until the end of the school year.
 For the progression between Grade 1 and Grade
2, according to the textbook designers, sounds
are selected while taking into account
pronunciation issues and difficulties writing
graphemes.

 In Grade 3, a progression guided by sounds is

abandoned in favour of one guided by speech
activities.
Reading and writing instruction in NECS schools
 Niger Education and Community Strengthening
(NECS), is a complex programme with several
components, one of which concerns accelerated
reading instruction (apprentissage rapide de la
lecture, ARL) in the early grades of primary school.
 The others concern deworming children, promoting
education for girls, building or rebuilding wells, and
providing literacy instruction for parents with a view
to them taking ownership of educational activities
within their community.
This is the pedagogical approach it uses:
Step 1: Revision.
Step 2: Phonemic awareness (recognizing
sounds).
Step 3: Phonetics (sound of the letter).
Step 4: Reading decodable words (slow and fast
reading of words).
Step 5: Sight words to be memorized.
Step 6: Reading comprehension.
Step 7: Expressive reading.
ELAN reading and writing programme
 This guide is designed to improve students’ reading and writing skills
in a national language/French bilingual context, while developing their
abilities to communicate with ease orally and in writing in both
languages, during the first three years of primary school.
 It has two main parts.
 The first focuses on the basic principles of reading and writing
from a bilingual or multilingual perspective, the explanation of the
recommended method, the types of tools to use and a reference
glossary listing the concepts employed.
 The second part provides indicators of competencies in reading and
writing, the domains of competency and corresponding resources, a
timeline of the chronological process of learning in both languages
and examples of activities related to the domains of competency
and resources. It acts a kind of handbook for the teacher and the
designer of teaching materials based on the ELAN approach.
 The general principles of reading and writing instruction were
identified as:
 Bilingualism.
 Understanding the links between the two languages so as to teach
them better.
 Facilitating the transfer to French.
 Use of games.
 Guided reading.
 Guided writing.
 The reading method was based on:
 Identifying words.
 Decoding new words.
 Separating sounds into boxes.
 Finding little words that are known inside bigger words.
 Separating words into syllables.
 Games and the international phonetic alphabet.
 Teacher and Supervisor Training
Initial training of student teachers
 Teacher training is conducted in the Écoles
Normales d’Instituteurs (hereinafter ENI).
Niger now has seven ENI, located in the
regions of Agadez, Diffa, Dosso, Maradi,
Tahoua, Tillaberi and Zinder.
 The ENI training courses last one or two years
depending on the admission profiles of the
student teachers (hereinafter ST).
 For French, the teaching of each module (language,
reading, writing, written expression, recitation,
grammar/ conjugation/spelling, everyday/theoretical
or meta vocabulary) breaks down into four phases,
namely:
An exploratory phase (gathering representations);
A basic learning phase;
An integration/training phase;
A transfer phase.
Continuing training of primary teachers
 According to an administrative logic, CT is organized into a series of
units going from smallest to largest.
 The smallest unit is the school, where continuing training takes
place in what is called a ‘Mini Pedagogical Activity Cell’ (or Mini-
CAPED). The Mini-CAPED is run by the school principal who
must organize it regularly in order to set up a practical framework
for the exchange of practices and peer-to-peer training in the school.
 The next unit up is that of the Inspectorate, which is the educational
unit that oversees several educational sectors. An inspectorate is
headed by an inspector and his or her deputy. The established norm
is to have one inspectorate for a maximum of 144 teachers. As
advisers, inspectors also supervise teachers in the field.
 Finally, above the inspectorate, there is the Regional Directorate,
even though this unit does not intervene directly in the field. These
regional directorates are run by regional directors who establish the
regional education and training plans.
 Supervisor training
 Principals
The principals are involved in the supervision of
their co-workers and organize Mini-CAPED.
However, no specific basic training is provided to
prepare them for their responsibilities as principals.
Therefore, they must learn their new role of
educational supervisors by practising in the field.
Ten years ago, an initiative funded by the African
Development Fund (ADF) trained a large majority
of the principals appointed at that time. The
persons who have been appointed since then
(including teachers with no initial training) have
not received any specific training.
 Educational Advisers
Advisers receive initial training at the École Normale
Supérieure (hereinafter ENS). To be admitted,
candidates must be primary school teachers with at
least three years’ professional experience and must
pass the ENS entrance exam. The training lasts for
two years, at the end of which students are awarded
the educational adviser basic education diploma one.
 School Inspectors
School inspectors are trained at the ENS. Only
educational advisers with three years’ professional
experience may apply. Admission is granted on a
competition basis. The training lasts one year (soon to
be two years).
 ENI lecturers or supervisors
There are two supervisor profiles at the ENI: they
can either be educational advisers or inspectors; or
they can hold a Bachelor’s degree in educational
sciences or a Master’s degree in language –
French, linguistics, psychology, sociology or
Arabic. Given that there is no training available
for these supervisors, it is the Educational Units
(hereinafter EU) within each ENI that act as the
ultimate place of training, within the TU in which
they operate.
 Thank you
for
lending your
ears