Education that is accessible is key to helping improve the lives’ of disadvantaged communities in rural Africa, however for many people the reality is that they are not able to reach their full potential due to the limited language accessibility of learning materials. We hope that this new project will improve the learning ability of pupils as well as improved practice by participating teachers.
Learning a second language is a daunting task for most but imagine being taught school subjects in a language you have limited proficiency in. This is the challenge faced by many eight-year-olds in Rwanda as they are forced to make the transition from learning in their mother tongue, Kinyarwanda in the early years to English. However, a new £362,000 University of Bristol project is aiming to remove this barrier to learning through the development of innovative teacher training and new accessible textbooks for pupils. The project will address the aspect of language-related underperformance in school which has been compounded by the recent switch from French to English as the language of wider communication taught in Rwandan primary schools that has left many teachers, let alone pupils, struggling to keep up. Led by academics from the University's Graduate School of Education , the team will work with education providers and textbook publishers to create more accessible textbooks that can be understood by pupils with low-level English language proficiency and help teacher trainers to develop language-supportive teaching techniques to go alongside the textbooks. Previous studies of classroom reading in Rwanda suggest that the reading of subject textbooks is a rare occurrence - before the change of medium one study claimed that only 0.77 per cent of students in their final year of primary school could read adequately for their studies in English. This leads to poor subject comprehension and a reduced ability to demonstrate subject knowledge in written English, which then becomes a major cause of failure in examinations.
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