Malta has ranked 35th out of 45 countries in a study on literacy and reading skills, exposing the need to expose children to reading and books, Education Minister Evarist Bartolo said yesterday.
Carried out in April 2011 across 96 schools and involving nearly 3,600 pupils, the study revealed that Maltese schoolchildren lagged behind on basic reading skills, faring better in the English language than in Maltese.
The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is a reading and writing literacy study conducted among 10-year-old schoolchildren.
Mr Bartolo said the way Malta fared in the study was an eye-opener in view of policy decisions which had to be taken on literacy skills. He said these results showed more emphasis must be placed on the importance of reading, stressing the crucial role of parents and grandparents in exposing children to books and reading.
He said there was a clear correlation between social standing and poverty and children’s linguistic abilities.
Mr Bartolo said the study showed Malta was not dedicating enough school time to reading, with 34 fewer hours per scholastic year dedicated specifically to reading when compared to the international average.
Malta dedicated 181 hours to language instruction, 51 fewer hours than the international average.
The time dedicated to reading was 42 hours fewer than the international scholastic year average, with Malta using 104 hours over an entire scholastic year for reading.
The report recommends the presence of more books in schools, classrooms and libraries.
Mr Bartolo said the Government was working on a National Literacy Strategy, which will be unveiled in the coming weeks, together with a plan for the introduction of computer tablets.
He stressed, however, that tablets would not achieve better results in reading skills.
From a young age, he said, children must be exposed to books.
Mr Bartolo said the Government was not looking at increasing school hours to be able to fit in more reading time but stressed that more had to be done during the current school hours, especially at primary and secondary levels.
He insisted that “more of the same” was not a solution and neither was issuing a directive to schools to have compulsory reading hours with children.
“This is not a matter of issuing a directive to school teachers,” he said, adding that teachers already struggled to meet existing curriculum and syllabus requirements.
An interesting fact that comes out of the results is that children attending independent schools scored significantly higher than those attending Church schools and these, in turn, fared much better than those attending State schools.
In both Maltese and English tests, the students scored higher in tasks that required retrieving informing or making straightforward inferences rather than tasks that required interpretation or the evaluation of information.