Heikki Lyytinen, UNESCO Chair on Inclusive Literacy Learning to All & Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology (emeritus), University of Jyväskylä
Abstract
Agenda 2063 of the African Union illustrates ways African countries plan to proceed towards sustainable development goals. The development of central institutions forms an essential foundation. Involved are creating opportunities to mobilize financial resources, the elevation of food safety and productivity based on small businesses, and health-related readiness related to early deaths, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other infections. A requirement for success in the mentioned plans comprises gender equity and better adaptation to climate change. All these plans are based on the knowledge of the inhabitants that require elevation of the quality of schooling. Learning in school requires full literacy of the countries’ people. Helping them inclusively reach full literacy is the central starting point and the purpose of my team’s efforts to support Sub-Saharan countries in achieving their goals. We believe relevant technology has just become available to help all children of poor countries acquire full literacy. Below, we explain how we are working toward this goal.
Full Literacy as a Path to Sustainable Development
Full literacy and readiness to learn via reading are our goals with my African colleagues. The bottleneck until now has been the lack of realistic ways to do it. But new technology is just now reaching the required level to allow breakthroughs needed to make it realistic. Today, most African families have readily available infra, including Android phones, and many also have an opportunity to use the internet. Using these devices to train reading skills offline makes progress realistic in urban areas and rural Africa. We have already demonstrated that illiterate rural Zambian children and adults in Katete can learn full literacy and acquire skills to use artificial intelligence bots to collect almost limitless knowledge for learning. Adults can collect exciting reading for children who have not had any leisure reading, which could naturally guide them to full literacy. Thus, the home literacy environment has been elevated to be sufficient for the natural further development of literacy skills. In our demonstration, knowledge collected using artificial intelligence bots guaranteed food safety (Nshimbi, Louleli & Lyytinen, in press, available from comprehensiongame.com), which worked as an example of the fact that the goals of not only reaching full literacy but also the sustainable development goals in Africa soon become realistic using the tools we have developed. This paper aims to describe the tools and who can be trained using them.
26% of the world’s illiterates live in Sub-Saharan Africa. In West Africa, almost every second is illiterate. A large majority of inhabitants, e.g., in the most densely populated African countries such as Nigeria, have not been able to master even the basic reading skills of any of the more than 600 languages spoken in the country. Full literacy is a rarity.
Too many are not receiving even an elementary school education, not only because of a lack of appropriate schools or teachers but also because children leave school when it is available. Thus, people have to find other ways to learn the necessary knowledge to guarantee food safety and survival. This is especially important to people most in need of help, the rural people, who face the most challenging problems due to climate change. Happily, it looks like these problems can also be tackled, as we have shown in rural Zambia.
Today, about 70 % of homes in Sub-Saharan Africa have a kind of Android phone, which is good enough to serve as a tool for using our enjoyable digital training environments to train themselves to full literacy. Earlier, we developed GraphoGame (GG), which is used by millions of children in nearly 20 countries, but now we have found that it is insufficient for learning from schoolbooks. It reliably trains readiness to sound out written language but fails to help reach full literacy for learning by reading. Our newest training tools purport to train to full literacy from the beginning and do it language independently. These are described in detail in comprehensiongame.com, and research articles are available there as well. Here, we summarize the key information on how they work in Africa.
New tools are needed, especially because insufficient instruction from African schools does not guarantee learning basic reading skills, i.e. readiness to sound out text. New tools are required to elevate the home language environment to sufficiently support guiding children to full literacy. When we add the opportunity to use artificial intelligence bots, these can also offer interesting reading and almost limitless knowledge of reading.
Until now, learning from schoolbooks has not proceeded optimally. An essential reason is that children do not have exciting books they can read. Reading itself leads naturally to full literacy. Materials that would be interesting enough for children at the most appropriate age have not been available in many countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Acquisition of full literacy is becoming increasingly compromised even in the developed world because boys prefer leisure reading less and less commonly. In the developed world, the situation of adults has reached a reasonable level, as shown by recent results from PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies), which documented that today’s Finnish adults have full literacy at the top among OECD countries. On the other hand, PISA results from younger Finnish learners have, however, shown a fall among boys during the last two assessments below the mean of OECD countries. This most likely results from a reduction in interest in leisure reading among younger generations in recent years, which also is related to declining school learning, as shown by the recent results of the Finnish Education Evaluation Centre.
Our tools are available and open to accepting whatever knowledge content is available. Thus, they are helpful for different ages and interest groups. Content can be implemented in any language with almost no limits on scalability.
Summary of our plans of using the tools training full literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa
Today, our team covers several African experts trained to PhD level by me. The African headquarters of this operation is in Lusaka and is called the Centre for Advancement of Literacy and Skills in School (CALSS). I stay mainly in Finland and am connected via the Internet to other team members (but the new Nigerian member is in Finland and guides local operations in Nigeria via distance). CALSS is led by one of those PhDs, Christopher Yalukanda. He worked in a leading position at the teacher union of Zambian early grade schools and then as research director in the Ministry of Education of Zambia. Most of our collaborative operations will be implemented first in Zambia to develop a working model that can be followed in other Sub-Saharan African countries.
The other central team members are now from Ethiopia and Nigeria. Thus, we have members from a representative variety of countries in which children face different challenges to overcome on their way to becoming trained and reaching full literacy in English, which is our final goal.
The literacy situation in Zambia (with a population of 21.7 million inhabitants) is exceptionally challenging. According to World Bank statistics, more than 98% of Zambian children cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text by age 10. The gender gap is large; literacy is much lower among females. The rural-urban divide is very clear; only urban children have an opportunity to reach full literacy today. Therefore, our training operations focus primarily on rural areas.
Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa with a diverse population exceeding 105 million people. Only 10% of 10-year-olds have age-appropriate literacy. One reason is that it is home to approximately 90 distinct ethnic and linguistic groups, each contributing to the rich cultural tapestry of the nation. Many of these languages are utilized as the primary medium of instruction in schools from Grades 1 to 6. At the same time, English is taught as a subject from the first grade onward and becomes the medium of instruction starting in Grade 7.
Notably, nearly 40 percent of Ethiopia’s population is under age 15, with an additional 30 percent falling within the 15 to 29 age brackets. As Ethiopia continues its development journey, equipping its youthful workforce with essential literacy skills is crucial. This preparation is integral to achieving the country’s objective of becoming a middle-income nation by 2025.
Although mechanical reading skills are, according to USAID’s 2018 Early Grade Reading Assessment report, higher, when 40 percent of students in Grades 2 and 3 can read satisfactorily, defined as 20-25 words per minute, considerable lack of interesting reading materials compromises the acquisition of full literacy. Also, the inadequate support for teachers and a weak environmental support system have contributed to many students failing to acquire the foundational literacy skills necessary for further learning and advancement beyond primary education. This is evident in Ethiopia’s low secondary school enrollment rate of just 16 percent.
Furthermore, there are significant geographic and socio-economic disparities in literacy achievement among Ethiopian children. A large majority of those affected are children from rural areas and socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and girls achieving less well than boys. Rural children face the greatest challenges in accessing quality education and literacy development.
Our Ethiopian team member has already reached a professor position. He is helping us implement our tools to teach English reading skills from the beginning because Zambia has decided to return and start teaching English from the first grade. This has been due to parental preferences and a lack of resources to print school books in as many languages as they have used in early-grade teaching. But it will be a big challenge where all means must be used. We are optimistic that our digital training environments can be elaborated to help Zambians efficiently work as models to others. The opportunity to elevate the knowledge level of inhabitants of Sub-Saharan countries would be opened most efficiently if they could learn to use artificial bots to access the almost limitless knowledge such bots can offer. This may be translated shortly into their widely spoken local languages, although initially based on writing in different languages.
The population of Nigeria is about 235 million. Literacy instruction practices in Nigeria have emphasized starting from the local languages (as has recently been the case in Zambia and Ethiopia). Still, it is challenging in Nigeria due to the number of languages (>600) children speak there. The only realistic way to help people learn knowledge in Nigeria is to train them to have full literacy in English (their official language) or French. For that, our main Nigerian team member is now in Finland to guide pilots in Nigeria via the net under our guidance. The work with Ethiopian and Zambian teams has already become habitual. My collaboration with Zambians has lasted for more than 30 years.
Although my earlier collaboration has also covered other countries such as Kenya, Namibia, and Tanzania, I have chosen Zambia, Ethiopia, and Nigeria to be a representative group for identifying all the needs people of the other Sub-Saharan countries may have so that we can elaborate on the procedures to work optimally for all there. In Zambia and Ethiopia, we have optimally profiled main collaborators. Nigerian members are new, but the country is optimal for revealing the most challenging needs due to its massive variety of languages and cultures.
About our digital tools designed for training full literacy
Our present main goal is to concentrate on elaborating the tools to be good enough to instruct full literacy to children and adults living in rural African areas without reading skills. We believe this is a realistic goal because we already documented it in our study – as mentioned above – in rural Zambia among initially illiterate learners. In that study, we used a local language, Cinyanca, while the goal is to extend our training to full literacy in English due to today’s plan of the Zambian government. This will be a great challenge requiring us to develop a new learning method at the top of the two earlier ones. This newest tool will model a picture-word dictionary, starting from familial words such as names of animals and moving to use the local language words after children have learned to read their home language.
Training children to read their home language is obligatory to succeed in instructing them to read a new language such as English, especially if they are not exposed to speaking English, which is seldom the case in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. The first step will be to use our tool, Tale Reader. It is designed to start their career towards full literacy of English in Zambia by introducing reading skills of their home language already before school by offering children stories to be listened to. At the same time as listening to it, they see the text that is under reading synchronized with hearing its reading at the word level. This purports to develop a more optimal way of reading instruction to reach the reading goal from the beginning.
Instead of concentrating on sounding language (central to traditional reading instruction), it prefers to move learners’ attention to the search for meaning from the beginning of their reading instruction. This is especially important in transparent writing environments, where children can quickly learn basic reading skills without paying attention to the meaning of the text.
Tale Reader replaces the unrealistically achievable goal of offering rural children exciting reading material in Africa. Thus, it will have multiple effects while instructing full literacy to them.
Comprehensiongame.com pages illustrate the tools and their theoretical and empirical bases in articles and presentations that are available there. Here’s a quick review of the main features of these training tools.
Based on the goal of training all in need globally to learn knowledge by reading and to attend written language critically, we have designed and validated our primary digital tool, Comprehension Game, whose qualities are listed below:
- Offline functionality
- Compatibility with mobile devices (Android app or Web interface)
- AI-powered content delivery in local languages (language independence)
- Dynamic assessment and real-time adaptation
- Possibility to implement local curriculum content for learning
- Gamified approach for increased engagement as an option
- Suitability for both children and adults
- Promotion of critical thinking and media literacy
- Quality checking of the content via artificial intelligence
- Potential for offering the most helpful possible content for learning everywhere
- Cost-effectiveness
- Almost unlimited scalability
This ranking prioritizes accessibility, language support, and adaptability as the most crucial factors for global reach and effectiveness in knowledge acquisition through reading. The offline functionality and compatibility with older devices ensure the widest possible access, especially in rural and underprivileged areas. The AI-powered content delivery in local languages addresses the critical issue of language barriers in global education. The dynamic assessment feature ensures that the learning experience is tailored to individual needs, maximizing effectiveness. While still important, the remaining features support these core functionalities in achieving the goal of global knowledge acquisition through reading.
Each of the mentioned qualities requires a detailed description to make these understandable to all. Before going to the qualities, it is important to understand that even relatively short written content covering one page of the original text can be implemented to guide the learner to acquire the primary strategic skill needed to comprehend the text. The paramount need is to learn that not all words or sentences have the same value. To learn to understand texts or stories that s/he comprehends in spoken form, one has to become able to identify the sentences carrying their key messages. This results from the limited capacity of the human working memory needed for comprehension and learning.
The offline functionality means that most properties of the training tools can be made available without a real-time connection to the net. This requires the content to be small enough to work within the device’s memory limit. Naturally, the optimality of using some of the qualities increases as a function of the size of the material implemented.
Our tools are compatible with a wide range of devices, making them accessible to the majority of users. They can be used on Android smartphones and tablets via a dedicated Android app or through a web interface, which is also available for computers running macOS, Windows, or Linux operating systems or any other system capable of running a modern browser. The growing affordability of Android smartphones—now commonly priced below 100 dollars—has made them accessible to most families in Sub-Saharan Africa, increasing the potential reach of these tools. This flexibility ensures that users can access the tools on mobile devices or computers, depending on their preferences and available resources.
Language independence and the openness to implementing the tools to run in almost all languages by using AI-powered or manual content translation is possible. The local teachers or parents can be guided to create appropriate content. The methods via which this (everything that requires visual or auditory information) can be made (using the content management system called Creator) is implemented for learning via a game format, simultaneously demonstrating how the ComprehensionGame works to the adults implementing the content.
Applying a dynamic assessment procedure for learning is an ideal way to train, because at the same time it assesses what is still to be learned by probing the readiness of the learner concerning the content one has to acquire. All the tools are implemented to use dynamic assessment mode as well as possible. This saves time for the learner and guarantees that everything is learned before the training ends—this also ensures that everybody gets what they need. Only the time fulfilling the needs varies between individuals, but all can save time because only the time each learner needs is used for their training.
A central feature of this dynamic assessment is that the training can be tailored to individuals whose readiness to acquire full literacy may vary widely. Thus, it adapts the training to children who have serious problems in acquiring full literacy, as well as to learners who are already very efficient readers, although they could still benefit from the training.
The possibility of implementing local curriculum content for learning is a nice way to reach several goals at the same time. Using curriculum content as training, one knows that the background knowledge needed for comprehension has been learned. The main goal of training reading comprehension is, at the same time, lessons of the current learning in the school learned optimally, which means that everyone remembers essentials from the lesson (if the teacher can follow our guidelines well enough).
One of the options available for all users of the Comprehension Game is gamified learning. Via it, the training of the skills/contents targeted for them to master is applied via a gamified form of the tool. For children, this may be a more exciting and, thus, engaging way to learn than the more direct version that many adults may prefer. One reason this tool was designed for training reading comprehension is related to the increasing time children play video games instead of reading; they may prefer gamified learning of lessons.
Both Comprehension Game and Tale Reader are open for the use of visual (Tale Reader also auditory), primarily written content, which can be made for children or adults. Already now, there is a lot of such content for both. The stage children benefit most from the Comprehension Game is 2.-3. grades, but it can optimize reading skills if used for up to 15 years (i.e. to the PISA age). However, the visible use of adults, especially fathers, may be an efficient motivator for boys to use it. In the present version of the game, the relatively deep-diving content, such as knowledge illustrating climate change, may interest adults.
The Comprehension Game is designed to be a simple form where the key knowledge of whatever text is given as sentences, which the user has to judge as true or choose as not being true. Thus, it tries to motivate the users to learn a critical attitude when facing information given to them. The learning session ends when all judgments are chosen correctly. This mainly requires some repetition, which helps store the information. Learners can get rid of typical misunderstandings if the expert who implements the sentences knows common wrong beliefs/false news people face.
New technology offers a significant opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI) to check the quality of content (which, however, has to be checked also using a human brain). AI also offers an interesting way to summarize the varying content of the same issue found in the writings of different authors of school books.
Originally, these tools were built for African children who did not have an opportunity to learn to comprehend what they read because they did not have materials for leisure reading, which is the natural way to learn to follow the red line of the text. Therefore, the Comprehension Game can offer this and whatever helpful content inclusively for learning everywhere, e.g., from curricula meant for children of the same age who have developed in another country. Also, the best teachers have an opportunity to show what the most effective way is to formulate the content for children to learn content that they need in their lives. Thus, it is possible to test the quality of the implementation of the content by using the most appropriate criterion, i.e. children’s learning, as the measure of the quality of the formulation of the learning content. And this is also a feature that the game can quantify.
The distribution of learning material via devices available to all may be the most cost-effective way to instruct (or “work as a teacher”) because there is no limit on the number/size of materials or the number of users. Translation of content to users of different languages is greatly simplified. When the mobile device works as a teacher, learners do not require any unique space (school) to be schooled.
Mobile training tools contain unlimited scalability. Whatever content can be distributed anywhere and anytime for as long as needed.
Conclusive remarks
Possibly, the most essential message told above is that it is now wholly realistic to reach the goal of training children of poor countries to achieve full literacy. This is due to the status of new technology, which also makes it cheap to reach. All the other sustainable development goals are open to reaching only by first reaching the 4. SDG. For that, we can now use our digital training tools, which work in any language environment due to the soon-achievable goal of AI to make it possible. It is time to start preparing to apply to AI. However, many conditions have to be met before that, although all of these are realistically achievable if we can empirically elaborate and validate exemplary countries for which we have chosen Zambia and Nigeria. In Zambia, we have already empirically validated ways to overcome the most challenging problem: how to train fully illiterate children in rural areas where no one can instruct them to acquire even basic reading skills. But we still have to show that they can learn full literacy of English. For that, we have started testing our training tools in Ethiopia, where we have a local expert on reading instruction defined for rural children.
The final challenge is distributing the training opportunity to all in need. The most convenient way could be to motivate local mobile operator(s) to help us. This may require some reward to them so they can make it without costs to themselves, although their acceptance of the social responsibility they feel may make this less costly.
If we can solve the problem in Nigeria, with its children speaking more than 600 languages, we can most likely solve it everywhere.
Our set of digital tools, capable of running on devices owned even by most families in rural Africa, offer an efficient path to reach full literacy. Due to the tools language independence, they can also realistically be elaborated to work for most, if not all, children, including children who live in poor countries. Surprisingly, they are now also needed in developed countries due to the changing reading habits compromising the acquisition of full literacy. Additionally, our tools are open to being elaborated on to train numeracy skills as efficiently as they train literacy once.
