Nasira Habib

Recently a comment was made about Khoj methodology that it didn’t follow the alphabetic order in teaching literacy and it was a problem that needed to be rectified. This statement prompted me to raise the following questions:

• Is there a logic in following the alphabetic order to teach literacy?
• Does this order yield sequential milestones in learning? Is a child able to write certain words and sentences after learning a given number of letters in the alphabetic order? For instance, can they make any given number of words after learning from ا to ث ہ or from ج to خ?
• Is learning is at a faster pace if the letters of alphabet are first abstractly learnt?

The answer to all the above questions is an emphatic no.

There is no logic in following the sequence of letters of alphabet in teaching and learning literacy. In fact, three to twelve months’ of the learners’ precious time is lost in the mechanical learning of how to write the full and independent shapes of the letters without getting any sense of how words could be made using those letters.

On the other hand, if words are picked from the learners’ reality, phonemic awareness is built around those words, phonic understanding is developed and learners are guided to generate new words through segmenting and blending they can learn not only how to read and write the very first key word but are able to generate ten to fifteen words in a span of ten to fifteen days.

The word کِتاب has just four phonemes and shuffling the sounds with representative written shapes can yield ten to fifteen new words. When another key word is introduced and the new phonemes included are combined with the phonemes of the previous key word the possibility of generating new words is multiplied – words which are easy to understand and which belong to learners’ own reality. For instance, using four phonemes of the word کِتاب  and three new phonemes introduced through the word میلا generate another twenty five words. Learners generate new words changing the sequence of flash cards carrying written representations of phonemes, not letters. The exercise uses their conceptual understanding of phonemes and graphemes and words are generated through a process of exploration by trial and error. The exercise reinforces the learners’ understanding of how words are formed, read and written. With every new key word, a new milestone in literacy is achieved. In the meantime, learners get to know how to write sentences putting the previously generated words in a certain sequence. The learners are constantly engaged in thinking, exploring and problem solving which results in the ownership of learning and the whole process becomes joyful and creative. And the learning is endless. In three to six months the task of reading and writing is accomplished.

Alphabet is a randomly fixed order of letters with a certain name assigned to each. It serves no great purpose in a literacy class to first force the learners to spend months of their time to memorize the names of the letters of alphabet only. After months of boredom and monotony, the learners still need to know what could be the possible role of these letters in learning the skills of reading and writing. On the contrary, word based learning and teaching informed of phonemic awareness mimics nature and the natural readiness of a child to learn a language, which is further developed into phonic understanding. Learners can have the list of the letters of the alphabet at the end of the literacy program.