Montego Bay, St James – Close to 200 teachers from various schools in Montego Bay were last week encouraged to switch from their traditional teaching strategies to those of New Zealander, Marie Clay, a household name on the international academic scene.

The recommendations by Eleys Larmond and Lisa Ciganek, two Florida-based educators who in 2004 identified several weaknesses in the strategies being used to teach Jamaican students to read, was executed through ‘Project Read 2006’, the third in a series of annual workshops hosted by the Ministry of Education.

Larmond, a Jamaican-born teacher who practises at the Pasco County Schools (PCS), and Ciganek, a reading specialist who also practises with PCS, conducted the five-day workshop at the Burchell Baptist Church.

Several Florida-based individuals and large local organisations like the National Commercial Bank, Air Jamaica and George Gordon/GM & Associates sponsored last week’s five-day workshop, which was conducted at the Burchell Baptist Church.

Clay, whose methodologies are decades old, rely heavily on the use of phonics, a method of teaching reading though an association between letters of the alphabet and their sounds, and phonemic awareness – the ability to recognise individual sounds within a spoken word.

The joint board of education here infused Clay’s methodologies into the curriculum of the teachers’ colleges in 2004, the same year that Larmond and Ciganek started conducting the workshops.

Larmond and Ciganek plan to return in January to train teachers in the parishes of Hanover and Westmoreland.

The strategies that teachers are now being encouraged to use represent a switch from the traditional ’round- robin’ reading methodologies in which each child in a typical class takes turns to read out loud a portion from a common prose passage.

“Instead of the round-robin approach, what we need to do is guide the children’s reading, so there must be an emphasis on the five blocks of reading, namely comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, phonemic awareness and phonics,” said Larmond.

“You start by reading (aloud) to the children. This cultivates the child’s ability to listen. Read to them. That’s what they need first,” Larmond added.

According to Larmond and Ciganek, short reading sessions should be followed up by a variety of strategies that place emphasis on the meanings of the words, their sounds and how the words look.

Books with pictures in them are invaluable in this regard.

“Do the words make sense? Do they sound right? Do they look right?…these are the questions that the child who is learning to read needs to be trained to ask him/herself,” they told the participating teachers.