New approaches sought to tackle literacy rate in country

By: Patrick Beech

The Education Ministry will look into new and appropriate teaching methods which can be used to address the low literacy rate among students in the country.

Senior Education Minister, Datuk Dr Radzi Jidin said this was necessary as there were still some students who were poor at reading, despite being in secondary school.

“Perhaps, the syllable-based approach that we have been adopting is a bit difficult for students to understand. So, we are working to ensure early interventions can be done,” he said.

According to him, this was not a new issue and existed even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

He said this is a challenge for the ministry and they were looking into different approaches to address the issue.

The national literacy rate was at 94.85 per cent in 2018, which is a decline of 0.23 per cent from 2017.