Mikailu Ibrahim
Hausa is the language of most communities in Northern Nigeria. Although Nigeria’s local-language education policy encourages instruction in the mother tongue, young children were taught to read through English, despite very little English being present in their lives. I realised that, even if children were taught literacy in Hausa, they would not learn to read effectively if teaching methods remained English-centric. We developed the RANA programme, which has demonstrated the value of literacy teaching methods based on Hausa’s linguistic features.
It is now accepted that learning to read is more effective in a learner’s mother tongue, or the language used by their immediate community, than it is in a language alien to the learner’s world. Several countries that used official languages from their colonial past for teaching have now adopted policies that value learning in indigenous languages. Adopting such policies causes concern: how to establish independent pedagogical practices for learning to read in the mother tongue.
Each language has different characteristics and may need completely different teaching approaches. Often pedagogy is still centred on approaches suitable to colonial languages, making it very difficult to deliver literacy in local languages. For example, the phonics approach applicable to learning English may not be appropriate to some African languages which have linguistic features different from English. In this article, I use the terms mother tongue, local language, and community language to talk about learners’ most used language. But these terms do not always mean the same thing within policies (see Enabling Education 12 (2008) for more information).1
The syllabic approach to literacy
Paulo Freire’s concept of emancipatory pedagogy calls for culturally and linguistically responsive classroom practices to make learning easier. Using these ideas helped us to develop a plan to both change the language of literacy and establish teaching methods that fit the Hausa language. The RANA programme (Reading and Numeracy Activity) was part of the Girls’ Education Project III, funded by the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office from 2015 to 2021. RANA showed how literacy and numeracy could be taught through Hausa in mainstream and Quranic schools. We anticipated that it would not be easy to convince decision-makers that a shift in teaching methods was needed, especially as several state governments recently invested in teacher capacity building in English phonics. The RANA team produced a plan to restore a syllabic approach to Hausa literacy teaching.
Hausa teachers have traditionally taught literacy through syllable sets, such as “ka ki ko ku ke”. Many words in Hausa and other Chadic Afro-Asiatic languages follow a consonant + vowel syllable pattern, as a simple way into early literacy. Teaching starts with syllable recognition through spoken rhythms of “ba bi bo bu be”, “na ni no nu ne”, and so on. Children learn the sounds of syllable groups and connect them with written equivalents, establishing the central idea of literacy – that text contains the same meaning as speech.
The word “kaka” in Hausa (meaning “grandma”) can be read easily by combining “ka” and “ka”. In English, a lot of words with simple meaning like “grandma” contain more varied and difficult-to-recognise syllables, and create confusing relationships between the sound of spoken words and the look of written words.
English literacy, needs to be taught in several stages: identifying individual letters; identifying phonemes; linking phoneme sounds to groups of written letters; using phonemes as building blocks for syllables and short words; and combining syllables to form words. Syllabic teaching goes straight to the second-to-last step, giving learners an easier route into reading.
Re-introducing Hausa literacy without syllabic teaching would see teachers continuing to use previous English-focused methods. If Hausa had been taught using those methods, RANA’s results would probably have been lower, leading to condemnation of mother-tongue teaching before it could become established.
How RANA established syllabic teaching
A randomised test was organised in 267 schools across Kebbi and Niger States in North-West and North-Central Nigeria to compare the syllabic approach with an alphabetic method based on English. The alphabetic approach taught letter sounds as the first step, while the syllabic method started with syllable groups. The experiment was significant because it was deliberately situated within assessment practices and the development of learning materials for learners and teachers. As well as training teachers to use syllable groups, syllable chants were introduced in the order of their frequency count in the Hausa language.
We developed decodable stories and illustrations based on Hausa syllabic chants for each syllable group. A simple story repeating words made up of the focus syllables was added to Grade 2 pupil books and supported with scripted lesson plans. These included syllable flash cards used by learners to form words in fun and engaging ways.
To further adapt literacy teaching to the linguistic and cultural context, RANA used proverbs and folklore from Hausa’s abundant oral resources to develop comprehension passages for advanced literacy in Grades 3-6.
Improved learning results
When early grade reading assessments were done, a major finding was that learners getting syllabic literacy teaching showed a drastically higher rate of improvement. The test showed that the syllabic approach can shift pupils’ learning trajectory, especially when baseline reading ability is virtually non-existent. Pupils taught using the syllabic approach were 15% less likely to end the programme as a non-reader compared with those taught using the alphabetic approach. Reaching more non-readers, who make up a huge proportion of learners in Nigeria, is urgent.
Following the completion of the experiment and the encouraging learning outcomes, RANA adjusted the way it used early grade reading assessments (EGRA) to follow the syllabic approach. EGRA enumerators were given training to recognise syllabic units used by learners as ‘correct’.
All these added up to create buy-in for the RANA programme to act as a model for Hausa literacy, with unprecedented replications in related learning contexts in Nigeria. From a pilot in 200 schools in only two states in 2015, RANA is now a model for teaching literacy in Hausa in over 30,000 schools in nine states across Nigeria.
[1] https://bit.ly/eenet-ee12
Mikailu Ibrahim is an Education Adviser at the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. He was part of the technical team that implemented RANA project.
Contact: mikailu.ibrahim@fcdo.gov.uk