Abstract
This paper reports one aspect of a larger project that set out to narrow the literacy gap among Malaysia’s rural and urban children in terms of their literacy achievement. Using Perak as a case-state, this overall project scrutinises why despite the Education Ministry being the biggest recipient of the recent national budget 2020, with an estimated allocation of RM64.1billion, there are still children especially in rural schools who are unable to master the ability to read and write, even in their own mother tongue language. Through this project’s on-going work which attempts to connect the theories of literacy with actual-on-the-ground issues of children’s reading experience especially in rural schools, important matters were flagged up. This paper will highlight these matters as they are uncovered vis-à-vis the verification of “My reading experience” questionnaire which was one of the main research tools that was used for this project. Mainly, these matters were located along three aspects of literacy i.e. context, definition and language as they relate to how the questionnaire was designed. This has important implications towards how a sustainable literacy education framework can be shaped.
Highlights
UNESCO’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is considered to be a roadmap for the global community to right some wrongs
In the effort to arrive at the real situation in schools across the country, we found that there is a lack of a comprehensively designed survey tool which could gauge the reading experience and preferences of primary school children in the national and vernacular schools
Our search for literature regarding this continually showed up dated information that was no longer relevant (Abidin, Pour-Mohammadi, & Jesmin, 2011; Atan Long, 1984; Pandian, 2000; Small, 1996) or questionnaires that could not accommodate the various languages being used in Malaysian schools, both the vernacular and national
Summary
UNESCO’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is considered to be a roadmap for the global community to right some wrongs. Among the 17 SDGs, the 4th SDG focuses on Quality Education This goal is a continuous global aim at narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots, having been brought forward from the Education For All (EFA) 1990 agreement in Jomtien and the succeeding efforts in Malaysia and the rest of the developing world. In this time, the narrowing of social gap is aimed at bringing about sustainable transformation through quality living and equality sharing of opportunities across world populations. We argue that once we can understand the experience from seeing it through the children’s perspectives, we may be better positioned to appropriate the vehicles of technology
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