Synthetic Phonics: An Evaluation of Pilot Training for Jolly Phonics Instructors in Nigeria

The low literacy rates and the dearth of quality education in Nigeria has given cause for reading interventions and programs to flow into the country to improve the literacy skills. These call for more investigation into the programs to ascertain their efficacy in teaching Nigerian children how to read and write effectively. This paper evaluates the impact of a three-day teacher training program in which a pre-test and post-test was employed to report data graphically. The program evaluated was based on the ‘Learning to Read’ methodology which is popularly called Jolly Phonics in Nigeria, a brand of synthetic phonics instruction, employed as an intervention by Kebbi state government under the auspices of Kebbi State Universal Basic Education Board in partnership with Universal Learning Solutions (ULS, 2015).  The value of the Synthetic Phonics instruction through the Jolly Phonics Instructors Pilot Training held in the state attempted to implement the teaching of literacy skills through the synthetic approach to all the primary schools in the state. This research-based program, Jolly Phonics, accentuates the development of phonemic awareness to advance the development of literacy skills in the early years of struggling learners.