Proficient reader, aspiring writer and increased love for reading are some of the words used by Samoan teachers to describe students who participated in the Phonics project.
Prior to the project implementation in 2023 across 10 schools in Samoa, these students faced educational challenges as they attained low literacy levels in their national literacy tests. This low achievement was also confirmed by the Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA) results.
So how did the Phonics project help boost students’ literacy scores?
Talofa! My name is Doreen Tuala, the Pacific Community’s (SPC) Curriculum and Assessment Lead, and I will be sharing with you everything that you need to know about Samoa’s Systematic Synthetic Phonics project.
Phonics is a method of teaching reading skills by correlating the sound with a symbol of an alphabet of a particular language. SPC together with Samoa’s Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC), literacy experts from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), Educators International and experts from the region collaborated to design Samoa’s Phonics project.
The project design focussed on strengthening the role of teachers in facilitating learning between themselves and the learners in the early years of the learner’s language acquisition period. This meant that the project included teacher training on how to teach reading and understanding in the Samoan language using phonics.
Read more about Samoa’s phonics activities, here.
In August 2024, after more than a year of implementation of the phonics project in Samoa, several positive outcomes were noted.
In addition to student assessment showing positive impacts of the phonics project teachers have also responded optimistically about the initiative.
Most of the new graduate teachers responded in their evaluation that they can now confidently use diacritical marks in their writing as well as when teaching distinct indigenous sounds. Diacritics are a fundamental part of the Samoan language as they determine the pronunciation of the majority of its written and spoken words.
Teachers were also appreciative of the detailed assessment reports that they had received after each assessment. They were particularly impressed with the individual student reports where they could identify areas of strengths and weaknesses for each child. Some teachers have included these reports in their students’ portfolios which they also share with parents during their parent-teacher interviews.
At the ministry level, MEC officials utilised this opportunity to upskill themselves with the phonics approach in teaching literacy. SPC conducted a training with MEC officials focussing on the 7-part phonics approach, development of comprehension passages and assessment tools, lessons observations and monitoring of project implementation.
As part of this project, a number of literacy resources were created and shared with MEC, for example a list of guiding words for each of the 32 sounds in the Samoan alphabet, sentence strips, reading and listening comprehension passages, and questions for each passage, poems, and songs.
Through this project, SPC also developed the Phonics App which is a web-based application to support teachers and MEC officials to access resources as well as assessment information. The App provides customised reports for individual students, classes and schools, and can be accessed by those who are provided with role-based access.
While SPC’s Phonics project in Samoa is now complete, MEC has included phonics activities in their 2024/2025 workplan. MEC aims to implement the phonics approach in more schools across Samoa in the coming months.
From SPC’s side, we will continue to provide support for Samoa’s efforts in sustaining the achievements of the phonics project especially in the area of data analysis and reporting in 2025 and at the same time train local staff to take on the lead role.
After seeing Samoa’s literacy improvements through phonics, we would encourage more countries to adopt the phonics approach to improve the literacy achievements of Pacific students and teachers across our Blue Pacific continent.
For more information, please contact Sonal Aujla, Communications and Visibility Officer at SPC | [email protected]
