Improving first and second language reading skills of ethnic minority primary school children by supplying teachers and students with early grade, bilingual educational materials
Project Name
Development of Bilingual Literacy in Minority Schools in Georgia
Location Implemented
Georgia
Technology Used
Hardware
Competition Entered
Grant Competition 2011
Reading Skill Targeted
Foundational, Reading
Status
Winner
The Challenge
Literacy in mother tongue language (Armenian and Azerbaijani) and bi-literacy (Georgian) remain critical issue in Georgian ethnic minority schools. The gaps identified include lack of appropriate materials and bilingual teachers. Approximately one-third of students report that they are not engaged in reading activities at home, more than half of Georgian language teachers reported they lacked effective reading materials and two-thirds of first language teachers lacked instructional guides to teach reading.
The Big Idea
The project provided teachers and students with teaching and learning materials including the development of a Georgian e-Book package consisting of 80 phonetic, 117 serial, and 220 leveled ebooks; software that adjusts reading levels; a trilingual dictionary of 2,000 of the most frequent lexical units; an e-module for organizing words in accordance with their frequency of use; and a dictionary e-platform that translates Georgian words into Armenian and Azerbaijani alongside child-friendly illustrations.
Results
Built the literacy and bi-literacy instruction capacity of 432 teachers in 216 minority primary schools and improved the reading skills in first (Armenian and Azerbaijani) and second languages (Georgian) of 30,000 ethnic minority primary school children.
Blogs and Media
Research and Resources
Center For Civil Integration / Shalva Tabatadze
The Center for Civil Integration and Inter-Ethnic Relations share their ACR GCD-funded innovation to improve teacher training and provide e-books to children in Georgia.
