Abstract

Early literacy is a key to all future learning for children in all environments, including pre-school and Early Childhood Development settings in general. However, the development of literacy has been challenging in Sub-Saharan Africa, and more specifically. Malawi. The thesis’ main argument is that to a large extent, literacy development problems at primary school level have their roots in the way children are prepared before they join formal schooling. Consequently, any effort to develop literacy skills without the appreciation of the key role pre-primary learning experiences play is bound to be less effective in addressing issues of literacy development at school and the general societal level. This case study examined the extent of provision of early literacy experiences in rural pre-schools in Malawi. To achieve this purpose. the study answered four major questions, namely: (1) What capacity do rural pre-schools have to help children to develop early literacy skills? (2) Do pre-school—community links exist between rural pre-schools and their immediate communities? If so, what influence do such links have on children’s early literacy development?(3) What learning experiences do rural pre-schools provide to facilitate children’s early literacy development? and (4) How appropriate are the learning experiences provided as far as early literacy development is concerned. The study used case study design and utilised both qualitative and quantitative methods for collecting data. These included semi-structured interviews, observations, questionnaire and checklist. The findings of the study suggest that provision of early learning experiences in the pre-school settings involved is inextricably linked to the contextual expectations of parents and guardians. Consequently, provision of early learning experiences was characterised by different layers of tensions, especially in terms of the roles of pre schools in relation to the community and national ECD policy implementation. For instance. tensions exist between pre~schools and community expectations; pre-schools and the National EC D Policy intentions; and (though beyond the scope of this study) national and international ECD expectations, where the latter tend to hugely influence the national policy intentions. The results have further shown that poverty, mainly in terms of household economic hardships threatening the survival of families, is a big issue and largely influences communities’ and children’s participation in ECD/pre-schooling in the rural areas. raising crucial questions of the extent to which many children may be benefiting from the pre-schools, given the fact that the majority of the rural communities may not take pre-schooling as a priority. In terms of provision of actual early literacy experiences, the pre-schools involved in this study provided limited quality early literacy development opportunities. Although the results have shown that some attempt to create opportunities for early literacy development was made, there were many cases in which caregivers provided such opportunities by “accident”. This suggests that children may not be benefiting much from the general early learning experiences provided, since they are not exposed to deliberately-planned early literacy experiences as is generally expected in pre-school settings. Furthermore, the results show that lack of proper guidelines and general lack of human capacity at pre-school level have implications for early literacy development, as caregivers have difficulties meaningfully manipulating the environment for children's early literacy development.

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School	: School of Education
Issued Date	: 2007

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