Teacher Preparedness to Utilize Emergent Literacy for Teaching Initial Literacy in Selected Schools of Mansa District

Effective teaching of initial literacy in Grade 1 demands more of the teacher’s attention to pupils’ emergent literacy skills and consideration of how they learn. The emergent literacy skills children acquire lay a firm foundation for their learning to read and write in the conventional sense. Some of the skills that children develop under emergent literacy include phonological awareness and phonological sensitivity, which give children the ability to hear, recognize, manipulate and distinguish the sounds of the language they have acquired. These are key language skills which teachers will need to utilize in their teaching of reading and writing skills to Grade 1 learners in the classroom. A study was carried out whose purpose was to investigate whether primary school teachers in Mansa District utilized emergent literacy skills in their teaching of conventional reading and writing skills to the learners in Grade 1 considering the fact that emergent literacy lays a firm and solid foundation for continuous development of the literacy skills. The study was a descriptive survey and qualitative in nature since it required the researcher to describe the state of affairs as found and observed in their natural setting in the research sites. The qualitative methods of data collection and analysis were used. The sample for this study comprised 62 Grade 1 teachers and 3,594 Grade 1 primary school pupils. Only those schools teaching initial literacy in the local familiar language using the Breakthrough to Literacy (BTL) methodology were targeted for this research. The findings indicated that: (1) Teachers lacked knowledge about emergent literacy and did not know how useful it was for continuous literacy development among the children. (2) Most of the teachers ignored pupils’ prior literacy knowledge and considered their learners as complete illiterates who knew nothing about literacy skills. (3) Teachers never designed extra teaching and learning materials for teaching literacy. Rather, they relied on the New Breakthrough to Literacy (NBTL) kit materials. (4) The class sizes were large and meaningful scaffolding was lacking in most of the classes. This study concluded that the Ministry of Education in Zambia should consider emergent literacy as the foundation for conventional literacy development in Grade 1. One recommendation was that teachers should be equipped with knowledge of emergent literacy through deliberate training. They need to understand and appreciate emergent literacy as an essential body of knowledge to be utilized for successful conventional literacy development among Grade 1 learners.