We propose to develop an eLearning platform "Mastery Reading" free of access for improving the reading and writing skills of pupils, while improving their memory. When schools closed all over Europe last spring, online teaching became a challenge for most teachers and pupils who weren’t prepared for such experience. One of the biggest consequences is that Covid definitely boosted the digital skills of teachers, or at least their motivation to make IT enter their teacher’s world. They might not yet know how to make their student use IT to learn, but they are aware that they will need it. Ease of use seems to be a key for effective ICT usage among teachers. There is an urgent need for efficient, easy-to-use and complete IT tools to support the teachers in this change, the momentum needs to be ceased. Because IT tools can definitely support an individual approach to each pupils’ needs and transform a teacher into a learning coach. Because online teaching will be needed again during lockdown or within open classes. With this project, we decided to focus on literacy skills as it’s the key to all other subjects. During the last decades we faced thousands of students with low academic performance because of poor reading skills. When you have a hard time understanding the meaning of a text, you will have a hard time in all topics: science, literacy, history,.. even math. The #1 focus of this project is: how to improve the motivation and empowerment of kids and teenager learners when they are working home for days, with the remote help of their teacher and some support from their parents? How can the Neuro Linguistic Pedagogy (NLP) help the teachers to be more available to the learners needing more support in literacy skills? We propose to address both questions in one eLearning platform dedicated to literacy skills. Our second focus is to ease the task of the teacher who sometimes struggles with the setup of digital tools. We propose content to make the platform ready to use and ease of use. The third ambition of the system is to be helpful in the classroom too, and help teachers to increase motivation and empowerment in the class. It means that the platform needs features to help teachers with face-to-face class management. The main result of the project will be the eLearning platform dedicated to literacy: "Mastery Reading'. It will be structured in different categories managing the whole scope of literacy skills needed by the pupils: - writing spelling & memory training - reading fluency - reading understanding Both pupils and teachers will be impacted by the results of the project, being involved at the beginning of the development of the platform that will be tested in different primary and secondary classes. Pupils will benefit from the teaching material and we anticipate a positive increase in their literacy skills in reading, spelling, writing and comprehension. We also anticipate a development of their capacity in using an IT device without external help while their autonomy in facing the school tasks is reinforced. Better mastering the teaching language will increase their self-confidence in their capacity of learning other subjects. We also ambition to reinforce the memorisation strategy of the students targeting the literacy skills that will also be useful to perform in the other school subjects. The impact on the adults involved in this project, mainly French language teachers and speech therapists/school coaches at the beginning, can be described in the following terms: implementation of innovative pedagogy (NLP) supported by a ready-to-use IT solution, better comprehension of the NLP pedagogy in the day-to-day school tasks, better anticipation of distance teaching schemes, better capacity of answering each pupil’s difficulties in literacy skills, acquisition of improved pedagogical innovation skills. Impact on the teachers will also include: improved confidence in teaching in heterogeneous classes (different levels, dys-, poor mastering of the teaching language, etc.), contribution to the whole school improvement. In conclusion, the Mastery Reading platform is an IT tool developed by school stakeholders for pupils, teachers and all relevant people wishing to find a whole solutions to support the children in their literacy challenges.
We created a free software for strengthening reading: lire.cool. While countless “alphabet” reading introduction software exist, the offer for older students is quite narrower. While reading is the number 1 skills problem reported by hundreds of teachers we have met these last few years, the common remedy seemed to be … private tutoring. Lire.cool trains pupils in 2 areas: fluency and understanding. For fluency, users read out loud and an engine colors the words well pronounced. We also propose an activity to remember words (lexical registry) and improve speed (and spelling). For understanding, we train users to visualize the meaning of sentences. Then through larger texts, we pay attention to elements of understanding. It offers a gamified user experience with levels and tests to pass them, but it is sober and welcomed by older students. We based the activities and content on the latest didactic research in the field, including Neuro Linguistic Programming, and have written a book on the subject to support the software. The software currently only works for French. Other languages would be a significant development effort: pronunciation engine and content.
Can 12 year old pupils read ? How fast ? How much do they understand from their reading ? Teachers' feeling is confirmed by research: kids read less, it lowers their ability to read. In the classroom, a poor reader is more dependent on the teacher’s voice. Increased reading skills means more learning autonomy. But the teacher of a 12 years old pupil is usually not trained nor equipped to teach elements of reading that are typically taught to 5-7 years old. For example in French, the word “papa” (dad) is easy to read for poor readers. But some basic words such as “chien” (dog) are very complex to read: no letter is pronounced individually, and “ien” is an exception to be known by heart. Kids with a rich vocabulary guess many words' pronunciation from the story context. But many low income kids don’t speak their teacher language at home (e.g. French) and while they understand it orally, reading is very problematic. Once a kid can read a text fluently, another problem arises: is the text's meaning understood? Many teachers complain for example that students don’t understand statements and questions well. Many students also have a hard time understanding narrative and informative texts in many EU countries as shown by PIRLS studies.