RAN­DALL SUMAIRS­INGH

Do you know how many adults in T&T are not able to read this ar­ti­cle? I am sure that the fig­ure would sur­prise you. The fact is that, for many dif­fer­ent rea­sons, a lot of adults strug­gle with read­ing and writ­ing.

The Adult Lit­er­a­cy Tu­tors As­so­ci­a­tion (AL­TA) is the on­ly in­sti­tu­tion in T&T that of­fers a com­pre­hen­sive lit­er­a­cy pro­gramme for adults. Since 1992 AL­TA has been achiev­ing im­prove­ment in adult lit­er­a­cy. Any­one over the age of 16 is el­i­gi­ble to par­tic­i­pate in the lit­er­a­cy pro­gramme.

An in­spir­ing sto­ry

The nat­ur­al way of things is-as a child you learn and as an adult you ap­ply what you've learnt. In the case of many peo­ple, how­ev­er, they just didn't have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to learn Eng­lish in school. For ex­am­ple, one 86-year-old un­named AL­TA stu­dent moved with his fa­ther to work at their coun­try-side farm when he was just a boy. Ask this man any­thing about veg­e­ta­tion or cat­tle, even ask him math­e­mat­i­cal ques­tions and more and he will eas­i­ly pro­duce an­swers-but he can­not read. Now, as an old re­tired man, he just wants to read his bible and AL­TA is help­ing him.

How is it done?

Ac­cord­ing to one of AL­TA's vol­un­teer tu­tors, they are trained to un­der­stand what their stu­dents are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing. Teach­ing adults wouldn't be quite the same as teach­ing chil­dren how to read. There­fore tu­tors go through a six-week au­dit­ing process, in which they ob­serve AL­TA class­es. That pe­ri­od isn't the train­ing, it is just for the tu­tor to see how hard the job can be and to de­ter­mine if they still want to do it. Af­ter­ward, they at­tend six class­es in which they are taught how to teach and what their stu­dents see when they look at a piece of lit­er­a­ture. The pro­gramme us­es Paula Lu­cie-Smith's stud­ies in tu­tor­ing dyslex­ic stu­dents, to teach il­lit­er­ates. There are four lev­els of the AL­TA Pro­gramme. The Be­gin­ner lev­el is for those who have trou­ble recog­nis­ing the let­ters of the al­pha­bet. Then, there are lev­els one, two and three-lev­el three be­ing sim­i­lar to the school-leav­ing (diplo­ma) lev­el.

A teacher and his stu­dent

"The biggest mis­take that peo­ple make, is equat­ing the abil­i­ty to read and write with in­tel­li­gence. Read­ing and writ­ing is a code. Writ­ing is cre­at­ing the code, while read­ing is de­cod­ing it," said one tu­tor, who pre­ferred to re­main anony­mous. He claims that tu­tor­ing for AL­TA is the most self­less thing he has ever done, ex­plain­ing, "That 'eu­re­ka' mo­ment when you find a way to make your stu­dent un­der­stand is price­less." In stark dif­fer­ence to the 86-year-old stu­dent, an­oth­er stu­dent, Michelle, 44, said that it was long af­ter grad­u­at­ing from high school that she be­gan hav­ing lit­er­a­cy prob­lems. Af­ter go­ing through a de­pres­sion, she went from com­put­er-like mem­o­ry, to very lit­tle mem­o­ry. She was di­ag­nosed as bipo­lar and de­vel­oped prob­lems with ad­vanced read­ing, writ­ing and spelling. "AL­TA makes me feel like I'm con­tin­u­ing my ed­u­ca­tion. I'm re­al­ly proud to be do­ing it." she said. She said she al­ways en­joyed tech­ni­cal draw­ing and ar­chi­tec­ture and dreamed of one day com­plet­ing a de­gree in that field. Prompt­ly af­ter com­plet­ing the AL­TA pro­gramme, she in­tends to do ex­act­ly that. AL­TA hosts pro­grammes across the Caribbean, in­clud­ing is­lands like St Vin­cent, An­tigua and Grena­da, and in­tends to ex­pand.

MORE?IN­FO: Do not be ashamed or em­bar­rassed. If you have any is­sue pre­vent­ing you from un­der­stand­ing lit­er­a­ture, or if you know any­one that is il­lit­er­ate and would like to learn-con­tact 624-AL­TA (2582) or email them at al­ta­pos@al­ta-tt.org. Reg­is­tra­tion has al­ready be­gun.