"Beaming children's faces are my reward for this..."

Across Zambia, students in lower primary grades (first through fourth) are struggling to catch up from the closures due to COVID-19. But even before the pandemic, more than half of students in grades three to five struggled to read basic words. While the reasons for this are systemic and multi-fold, and schools supported by Impact Network have been shown to perform better than other community schools, we continue to pilot new programs to help our most marginalized populations catch-up.

One of the ways we are aiming to do this is through a phonics pilot being piloted at two schools this term. We are looking more at a method pioneered by Ursula Rickli. Rickli taught primary school in Switzerland for 32 years and later became a lecturer at the University of Teacher Education FHNW. Parallel to teaching, she developed various teaching materials on the topic of learning to read and write.

In 1973, she first came across phonetic charts – essentially speech movement pictures that showed the way the mouth moved to make certain sounds. Fascinated by the approach, she started using them right away and found that she was able to help first grade students to read and write, relying exclusively on mouth charts. After five weeks, she added the matching letter to the mouth chart and after only ten weeks of school, all of her students could read stories with letters. The quick success in reading gave them the self-confidence to stay motivated and keep reading new stories.

Word of her method spread and she was commissioned to develop a reading and writing teaching aid. The teaching aid received international attention and she received the "Worlddidac Award" for this method. The success was also scientifically proven. Research has shown that intensive phonetic training is very important in order to learn to read and write. In addition, the method encourages clear pronunciation, differentiates similar sounds, fosters reading comprehension from the beginning, and has helped students with learning disabilities as well.

While the teaching aid was initially developed for primary school students who learn German, it was expanded for refugees who came with all sorts of languages to Switzerland. Later, she expanded the learning aids to other languages, including Italian and Fulfulde. Cinyanja is now the ninth language for which these charts now exist and we are excited to pilot them for the first time!

It’s interesting to note that this method cannot be used for all languages – the prerequisite is that the words are as phonetically accurate as possible. That is, the words have to be pronounced as they are written. Since English and French words are not pronounced the same as they are written, the method does not work in these two languages.

Asking Ursula Rickli about what drives her to dedicate her whole life to education, she said, “Reading and writing is a technique that must be made accessible to everyone. As an author of teaching materials, I can contribute to this. That is why I develop learning materials so that as many children in this world as possible can learn to read and write. Beaming children's faces are my reward for this.”

With great anticipation, the method was introduced last week during three days of training. Teachers and School Support Officers from Kalowe and Mnyaula, as well as the academic management team, practiced imitating mouth positions, pronouncing sounds, and reading and writing words with mouth charts. Now we are curious to see how the method influences teaching, how the students perceive it and what its impact is on literacy performances.

-Isabelle