The Challenges of Teaching Reading in Uganda: Curriculum guidelines and language policy viewed from the classroom

2014

The goal of this paper is to consider the challenges which Ugandan children experience in beginning to learn to read. The paper demonstrates that there are disparities between rural government and rural private school approaches to reading and between rural and urban schools. The disparities arise from the uneven ways in which the language-in-education policy is being implemented and the variation in the nature and quality of the reading pedagogy in the early years. Ugandan children are being taught to read in different circumstances: government schools use mother tongue (MT) from Primary (P) 1 to P3 while English and MT are taught as a subject; private schools use English and teach MTs as …