General News
A language education expert, Prof. Foluso Okebukola, has urged stakeholders in the education sector to help in promoting reading culture and good literacy practices among Nigerians.
Okebukola said this while delivering the 70th Inaugural Lecture of the Lagos State University (LASU), Ojo on Wednesday .
The theme of the lecture was: “Lights Dawns on Literacy, illiteracy, Illiteracy and E-Literacy”.
She said that promotion of reading culture and good literacy practices could be achieved through the process of reading and literacy education at all levels.
Others included literacy curriculum, new technology and communication networks, she said.
She urged stakeholders to rise up to the challenge to ensure that all citizens of Nigeria at both individual and formal education levels become functional readers.
“This will have a domino effect on the literacy rate of Nigeria which now stands at less than 60 per cent,” Okebukola said.
According to her, education is a process of updating the knowledge and skills of the individual for the purpose of making that individual useful to himself or herself and to the community.
Tags: Don urges education stakeholders to promote reading culture among Nigerians“While literary education is worthy of attention because it is the bedrock for national development, lowers poverty level and elevates the living standards of Nigerians.
“The demand of modernisation are such that they must involve the dissemination of the various modernising agents among different classes in the society,” Okebukola said.
She said that the indigenous language or the mother tongue were the dominant language of communication in Nigeria.
“A gap is therefore created when a child leaves home for school and discovers a radical difference in school from what transpired at home, especially in the language of communication.
“According to UNESCO (2016), school language is one of the greatest barriers to quality education in the majority of developing and middle-income countries,” Okebukola said.
She said that language was a vehicle of thinking that helped children to understand whatever knowledge were been imparted to them.
“No matter the type of literacy such as information, technological, scientific, legal and a gamut of others, language is the backbone of any literacy endeavour,” Okebukola said. (NAN)
-Oct 2, 2019 @18:28 GMT |
