Special Reading Initiatives

In addition to teaching students to speak and read the mother tongue as part of a basic literacy program, children attending public or private schools in Macao have been taught foreign languages such as English and Portuguese. Following Macao’s reunification with the Peopleʼs Republic of China, kindergarten, primary, and secondary schooling for all children have been more formally organized, children have received a more standard education, and Chinese has been taught to most students. Since 2004, the Macao SAR government has launched initiatives to promote reading across the curriculum, to cultivate lifelong reading habits in students and to generate interest among them.³²

To more strategically support the development of nontertiary education, the Education Development Fund was established by the government in 2007. The fund aims to support and promote the carrying out of various developmental education plans and activities in nontertiary education more effectively to ensure the stability and development of education resources investment. The School Development Plan is a subsidy component of the Education Development Fund aimed at supporting nonprofit private schools in Macao. Schools are encouraged to apply for resources to develop students’ reading interests by organizing school-based language learning and reading activities. These activities aim to cultivate students’ independent and critical thinking, as well as reading and speaking skills. They also provide opportunities for students to use Putonghua, Portuguese, and English inside and outside school through a range of diverse language activities.³³

The Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (Direcção dos Serviços de Educação e Juventude, or DSEJ) has aimed to nurture students’ reading habits through the School-Based Language and Reading Activities project, which offers subsidies for promoting reading activities in schools and installing equipment to encourage students to read both for pleasure and information. To create a positive reading environment and stimulate students’ creative thinking, schools are encouraged to strengthen the collaboration among reading promotion staff and school teachers to promote extracurricular reading activities. Schools also are encouraged to research various methods of reading promotion and share their successful experiences with other schools.³⁴

To alleviate teachers’ nonteaching workload, the government has introduced the Special Duty Personnel Subsidy Programme. Starting in the 2008–2009 academic year, the scheme has subsidized schools to recruit extra staff to boost standards in key areas of the curriculum, including that of reading promotion. Support staff members must possess a higher diploma or above in subjects relating to language and literature and library information access. To enrich the professional knowledge of reading promotion staff, the DSEJ collaborates with higher education institutions to organize training courses every year. Through various training activities, reading promotion staff can be equipped with higher professional competence in terms of reading theory, curriculum and assessment, teaching of reading inside and outside the classroom, good practice, and application of literacy prowess. Reading promotion staff have received help in improving the impact of their efforts, and support teachers have been trained to provide diverse reading activities for students.³⁵

The job duties of the above personnel are as follows:

In accordance with the school’s teaching objectives, to assist in the development of strategies for reading standards promotion in the school
To design an appropriate reading promotion plan for the school and coordinate various reading activities
To expose students to different styles of writing through organizing various types of activities, to create an atmosphere of enjoyable reading in the school, and to help establish students’ reading confidence and good reading habits
To cooperate with teachers of various subjects to cultivate students’ reading, writing, understanding of concepts, analytic skills, and judgment, and to enhance their reading literacy
To cooperate with the DESJ in implementing the overall reading promotion plan and syllabus
To help the school formulate a book purchase policy and coordinate the demand of books used by various subject teachers across the curriculum
To assist in the management of the school library

The Special Evaluation of the Reading of Secondary and Primary Students in Macao was conducted by the University of Hong Kong. Commissioned by the DSEJ in 2011, the evaluation program, through collecting the information about reading promotion in primary and secondary schools in Macao, aimed to assess the effectiveness and difficulties of policies and made recommendations. This comprehensive review set out to evaluate the Chinese reading literacy and achievement of Primary 4 (Grade 4), Primary 6 (Grade 6) and Senior Secondary 3 (Grade 12) students in Macao. For the evaluation of Primary 4 students’ reading attainment, the study employed the PIRLS framework and instrumentation to ascertain objectively the achievement of Macao students compared to international literacy standards. The review has provided a broad picture of reading literacy and served as a reference for the administration and schools when planning for measures that will promote reading.^36,37