Two teachers from the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) have all but revolutionised student reading habits in 10 HCT campuses across the country. Abu Dhabi Men's College's Lead Faculty Academic Coordinator Josephine Clark Kennedy along with Independent Learning Coordinator Peter Waters recently won the HCT's Nikai award for innovation in teaching for their project I-Read.
Innovative teaching
The pair developed their software centred on five themes, with hours of independent, directed online study to help students increase their English reading, writing, listening, vocabulary and spelling skills.
Campus Notes briefly sampled I-Read and although for a native English speaker the exercises may seem quite basic, it is apparent that I-Read addresses the development of core graduate skills such as technology, communication and information literacy alongside the honing of critical and creative thinking. It incorporates visual and auditory exercises based on relevant topics of interest such as sports for charity, cars and status and health and happiness.
Inspired by a survey conducted by the Next Page Foundation, which reported that the average person in the Arab world reads just six minutes a year, Kennedy and Waters spent three years developing a way to "improve student's reading skills and make them really want to read," said Kennedy.
Waters said that "exciting" students with technology "makes them interested in the topics," contributing to the software's success. I-Read has now been incorporated in the curriculum at HCT men's and women's campuses across the nation.
Kennedy and Waters said the sleepless nights, working weekends and holidays were driven by the knowledge that students needed a way to get interested "so they can learn to love reading," said Kennedy. "And know that there is so much to learn about the world and about themselves, if they just read."
Back to basics
Educational consultant at the Human Relations Institute and psycho-linguistics expert Grace Chami-Sather believes "the rise of technology and internet lingo has generated terrible reading, writing and literacy development in our communities".
"Our youth cannot speak or write properly," she said, basing her opinion on observing students at many universities across the UAE. Chami-Sather has seen students writing words backwards, unable to link alphabetical letters or string together "three or four coherent sentences in English or Arabic".
Chami-Sather accounts the "illiteracy" to a lack of practice reading and writing like the "days when we used to really write". She said the act of physically holding a book and following words with your eyes is extremely important for a person's coordination and motor skills development. She said the same applies to physically spelling out words with a pen and paper.
Chami-Sather said youth's dependency on software to correct mistakes such as spelling, with options to "fix all" simply with the touch of a button, is only adding to their misinformation.
She said part of the problem could be due to the fact that universities do not encourage students to read full chapters and discuss topics in depth "because they are under pressure to finish a certain curriculum".
Addressing the extensive use of search engines such as Google, she said "all they do is search for a key word".
She added: "They are very clever at it. But by having such good search engines they don't read the text anymore."
What students say
Campus Notes met many students who fall into the category of the stereotypical non-reading youth who openly agree to the importance of reading, but contradict themselves by admitting to seldom reading a book.
Middlesex University Dubai student Jaimish Damani said he reads magazines such as the National Geographic along with newspapers, to build his general knowledge. More interestingly, he said he often reads the atlas and dictionaries. "I just have a profound interest in semantics... for some reason I have an interest in words; it's a bit of a freaky thing," he said.
Abu Dhabi Men's College (ADMC) civil engineering student Mohammad Fareed said HCT's I-Read has helped him substantially with his English language development. Fareed said it is evident that his peers shy away from reading, as the average Emirati youth chooses to play a computer game over reading a newspaper. He said it might be due to the fact that they encounter reading problems. "They have not been taught or made to "love reading from childhood".
Nadia Wazir who attends the University of Wollongong in Dubai said she does not read much on the internet as she feels the information is "vague". In contrast to a large number of her peers, Wazir said she mostly depends on library resources when it comes to research for university coursework.
