The Home Literacy Environment in Rural Rwanda and Its Relationship to Early Grade Reading

Abstract

The developing world faces a learning crisis, wherein children fail to master basic skills despite years of primary school attendance. The literature indicates that both in-school and at-home experiences impact children's reading development, yet most developing world studies focus on children's in-school experiences exclusively. This current study addresses this imbalance by exploring the home literacy environment in rural Rwanda and its relationship to children's reading development. The data come from 466 parent surveys and 466 child reading assessments. An exploratory factor analysis of the survey data yields 5 distinct factors of the home literacy environment: family literacy and learning at home, parental competency in literacy, reading materials, child interest in literacy, and religious-related reading activities. Multivariate regression analyses reveal that family learning, parent competency, and child interest significantly predict early grade reading achievement. Implications of these findings for the developing world's learning crisis are discussed.Children in developing countries are enrolling in primary school in record numbers, thanks to the abolition of school fees and the passage of compulsory education laws over the past quarter century. Despite the newfound, unfettered access to education, however, hundreds of millions of primary students never master basic skills like literacy (UNESCO Institute For Statistics, 2017). Developing world governments are routinely urged to rely on evidence-driven methods to address this "learning crisis" (United States Agency for International Development, 2011;World Bank, 2018b). The evidence base clearly suggests that both home and school related factors impact children's reading development (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), yet nearly all developing world research to date to address the learning crisis only examines school factors while ignoring children's homes, as evident in several reviews and meta-analyses

An exploratory analysis of divergent patterns in reading progression during a tablet-based literacy program

“…Bivariate correlations indicated that children who showed high versus low progress in reading did not differ significantly across any component that comprised the HLLE composite (i.e., presence of household reading materials, Bible, household literacy rates, radio or homework help). These findings are not in line with prior work showing positive associations between aspects of children's HLLE and reading progress (Nag et al, 2019;Friedlander, 2020) as they suggest that high and low progressing readers may come from homes with similar language and literacy supports, at least in our study community. Nonetheless, these non-significant associations between HLLE and reading progress status could also be due to limited sample power and thus should be interpreted with caution.…”

“…While most studies have investigated how the quality of HLLE relates to children's learning in developed countries, there is a growing body of research focused on the relevance of HLLE for children's literacy development in developing contexts as well (Nag et al, 2019;Friedlander, 2020;Kim et al, 2020). Recent meta-analyses (Nag et al, 2019;Kim et al, 2020) have found consistent associations between home language and literacy activities and children's literacy acquisition.…”

“…We focus on factors known to influence early literacy development according to the Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tunmer, 1986;Nation, 2019), which puts forth that reading comprehension is primarily dependent on two foundational skills: children's language comprehension and decoding. Specifically, we examine how HLLE (Sénéchal et al, 2017;Nag et al, 2019;Friedlander, 2020) and children's working memory skills predict high versus low progress in reading (Daneman and Carpenter, 1980;Engel de Abreu et al, 2014;Follmer, 2018). Findings from this exploratory study will be used to identify factors associated with non-progress in reading, thus setting the foundation for future work that will involve: (1) guiding the development and testing of strategies for improving the software to benefit all learners; and (2) informing future research to investigate a wider array of factors that can be used to develop profiles of children who are not making progress in literacy.…”

“…Since prior research has shown that multiple aspects of children's HLLE relate to literacy development (Nag et al, 2019;Friedlander, 2020), we created an HLLE composite variable that examined the overall degree to which children were exposed to a range of literacy and language supports in their home environment. We hypothesized that households in which children had more exposure to literate adults, literacy materials, a Bible, a radio and help with homework would benefit from higher exposure to literacy and language practices (Dickinson et al, 2012;Nag et al, 2019;Friedlander, 2020) and be more likely to show high compared with low progress in reading.…”

“…We also relied on parent report on a small number of items to examine measures that broadly captured whether children were exposed to different aspects of literacy and language in the home environment. Future empirical studies should instead consider capturing more detailed information on the degree to which children experience the specific language and literacy practices in their home environment that have been shown to relate to reading achievement (e.g., family learning, parent competence in literacy and child interest in literacy; Friedlander, 2020).…”