To commemorate the National Book Day event under a theme ‘Gemar Membaca’ (Fond of Reading), on 17 May 2017, President Joko Widodo invited 503 children and tell them about a nation’s fairy tale titled ‘Lutung Kasarung’. It happened at the courtyard of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta. Through the story, he wanted to show the richness of stories in Indonesia in which every region has their own tales.
The Head of State also ordered Minister of Education and Culture, Muhadjir Effendy, to continue to increase the interest of Indonesian children in reading through the Indonesian stories. In this way, they hope to instill the values of life to Indonesian children especially in globalization era. ”Moral values, ethics, politeness, honesty, and courage can grow in our children because of the good stories which we are told about,” the President said.
On that event, the government also set the 17th of each month as the date to deliver free books across the country. Considering the delivery cost is more expensive than the price of the book itself, the government hopes that policy can help to improve the reading interest of the children.
The effort from the government to increase the children’ interest in reading is becoming neccesary since the interest in reading has become a big problem in Indonesia. The statistic of UNESCO shows the index of interest in reading people in Indonesia only 0.001. It means that from 1000 Indonesian only one person who has interest in reading.
The brain develops faster than any other time between the ages of zero and three. Because of this, it’s important to foster literacy during the early stages of life. If children are not stimulated, if they’re not read to, if they’re not engaged, if they’re not asked questions, their brains actually atrophy. Parents can create opportunity for it by encouraging them to read regularly, asking them to sing a song together, and engaging them in conversation – all of those ways can help to prepare the children to be incredibly successful in their school.
How Literacy Develops and Predicts Later Academic Success
In 2008, in the National Institute of Literacy report, Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel, it is stated that the foundational reading and writing skills, which has developed from birth to age five, have a clear and consistently strong relationship with later conventional literacy skills. “These six variables are not only correlated with later literacy but also maintained their predictive power even when the role of other variables, such as IQ or socioeconomic status (SES), were accounted for.” The six variable are:
- Alphabet knowledge (knowledge of the names and sounds associated withprinted letters)
- Phonological awareness (the ability to detect, manipulate, or analyze the auditory aspects of spoken language, independent of meaning)
- Rapid automatic naming of letters or digits (the ability to rapidly name a sequence of random lettersor digits)
- Writing (the ability to write letters in isolation on request)
- Phonological memory (the ability to remember spoken information for a short period of time)
An additional five early literacy skills were also correlated with at least one measure of later literacy achievement, including:
- Concepts about print (knowledge of print conventions [e.g., left–right, front–back] and concepts [book cover, author, text])
- Print knowledge (a combination of elements of alphabet knowledge, conceptsabout print, and early decoding)
- Reading readiness (usually a combination of alphabet knowledge, concepts ofprint, vocabulary, memory, and phonological awareness)
- Oral language (the ability to produce or comprehend spoken language,including vocabulary and grammar)
- Visual processing (the ability to match or discriminate visually presented symbols)
These eleven variables consistently predicted later literacy achievement for both preschoolers and kindergartners. This is in accordance with the beliefs of many parents that introducing the books to their children from an early age has a long-term positive effect on children, both to improve their language skills and make them more eager to learn to read. Based on those reasons, we can conclude that fostering literacy during the early stages of life is really important.
Source: Parenting(December 2016 edition); teacher.scholastic.com/products/face/pdf/research-compendium/early-literacy.pdf; http://www.setneg.go.id/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&lang=en&id=13856
