Make every-child-a-reader program gets P21 million funding support


(PRESS RELEASE)

The Department of Education has allotted someP21 million this year to finance various intervention programs that will enable every child to read at his grade level which is a very important foundation of learning.

The program called Every Child a Reader Program (ECARP) was designed to equip elementary pupils in public schools with strategic reading and writing skills to make them independent young readers and writers.

ECARP is included in the ten-point education agenda of President Aquino to ensure that the country’s public schools produce graduates who are equipped for further learning.

Education Secretary Armin Luistro said ECARP also provides an assessment tool that will help schools determine the children’s reading level as well as the reading profile of the division, regional and national levels.

“We are implementing the ECARP through three components namely Reading Recovery (RR), Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI) and Philippine Word List in English (PWLE) to ensure a comprehensive approach to child learning,” added Luistro.

Support fund for RR will go to Regions I, III, IV-Calabarzon, V, VI, XI, the National Capital Region, and the Cordillera Administrative Region to augment expenses for the implementation of RR.

RR is an early intervention provided to children who are beginning to fall behind in reading and writing to give them a chance to catch up by providing them specialized one-to-one reading assistance from a teacher trained in RR procedures.

The RR fund will be used to set up Regional Reading Recovery Centers following international guidelines as well as for teachers training including supplies and teaching materials.

Allotment will also go to the development of PWLE which also include the inventory of frequently used words in English textbooks, the field validation of word lists as well as its finalization. “Its aim is to standardize its use in the Philippine context and be used as a tool in building and assessing vocabulary development,” Luistro explained.

Meanwhile, Phil-IRI, which will also get a share from the fund, is a nationally-validated assessment tool of ECARP to measure the reading proficiency level in both English and Filipino languages of public elementary pupils. Data gathered from the assessment serve as a basis for designing appropriate intervention at the school, division, regional and national levels.