THE national target is to achieve 100 per cent literacy by 2020, but what type of literacy are we looking at?
Students are becoming more digital literate than print literate, replacing their books with the computer, and this is cause for concern.Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia's School of Language Studies and Linguistics lecturer, Dr Radha Nambiar, said: "We may be projecting false literacy. Children search online for project material and things to read, but do they understand what they are reading?"Radha said some mothers enrolled their children in smart reader schools because they thought reading fast meant reading good."Most fast readers are just identifying and memorising words. That is why they can flip pages so quickly.
"But they don't understand what they are reading. So, what is the point in reading? "This same reading style is then taken to primary school and university."Children need to be creative and critical in their thinking and this can only be done if they understand what they are reading."Unfortunately, most comprehension texts in schools teach children how to answer questions based on what they read and not what they understand. "This is not the right reading technique. Children should be asking, 'What is the passage trying to tell me?'"She said when conducting surveys at schools, students claimed they read books through reading programmes. But they were just taking the synopsis at the back of the book and using that to fill their worksheet.Primary school teachers, Radha said, should stop asking students to type and print school projects. "What are they learning that way? Students should understand their project work, not just look for pretty pictures online and then copy and paste chunks of text."When I give my students projects, the first thing they ask, 'How many pages?' I tell them it depends on how much they want to know."We know that reading is the gateway to knowledge, but we have to read correctly and not just for the sake of reading."
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Students are becoming more digital literate than print literate, replacing their books with the computer, and this is cause for concern.Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia's School of Language Studies and Linguistics lecturer, Dr Radha Nambiar, said: "We may be projecting false literacy. Children search online for project material and things to read, but do they understand what they are reading?"Radha said some mothers enrolled their children in smart reader schools because they thought reading fast meant reading good."Most fast readers are just identifying and memorising words. That is why they can flip pages so quickly.
"But they don't understand what they are reading. So, what is the point in reading? "This same reading style is then taken to primary school and university."Children need to be creative and critical in their thinking and this can only be done if they understand what they are reading."Unfortunately, most comprehension texts in schools teach children how to answer questions based on what they read and not what they understand. "This is not the right reading technique. Children should be asking, 'What is the passage trying to tell me?'"She said when conducting surveys at schools, students claimed they read books through reading programmes. But they were just taking the synopsis at the back of the book and using that to fill their worksheet.Primary school teachers, Radha said, should stop asking students to type and print school projects. "What are they learning that way? Students should understand their project work, not just look for pretty pictures online and then copy and paste chunks of text."When I give my students projects, the first thing they ask, 'How many pages?' I tell them it depends on how much they want to know."We know that reading is the gateway to knowledge, but we have to read correctly and not just for the sake of reading."
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