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Oman

Special Reading Initiatives

The Ministry of Education has adopted several initiatives to enhance literacy and spread a culture of reading among students. For example:

  • Launched in general education schools during the 2006−2007 school year, the Discover the Pleasure of Reading project aims to inform teachers about the importance of reading stories and how to teach reading in an engaging way.
  • Stories and Tales Supporting the Syllabus is a program that aims to develop teachers’ skills in creating stories and tales of their own to enrich instruction.
  • Reading Enrichment, a weekly project that has been implemented in Grades 2 to 12, allows students to choose stories or magazines to read before completing worksheet tasks.
  • Starting during the 2008–2009 school year, the Ministry began encouraging Cycle One teachers, students, and administrators to speak classical Arabic during the school day. The goal of this initiative is to narrow the proficiency gap between the spoken and written forms.
  • First piloted in four Cycle One schools during the 2006−2007 school year, the Integrated Curriculum project uses an integrated learning approach to develop students as a whole: cognitively, physically, emotionally, linguistically, and socially. It also aims to develop their literacy skills both in Arabic and in English.

Several other projects have been adopted to accomplish Oman’s mission to eradicate illiteracy. For example:

  • A regional project called No to Illiteracy offers free evening classes to adults regionally. The initiative has a specially designed syllabus for Level 1 (Grades 1 and 2) and Level 2 (Grades 3 and 4). From Grade 5 onward, learners follow the national curriculum.
  • The Committee of Improvement of Lingual Performance’s “I Read and Think” project is concerned with developing the reading skills of students who are experiencing learning difficulties.
  • Some regional educational administrations and schools have organized open days for reading and reading contests. Others have collaborated with the Muscat International Book Fair administration to organize visits to the book fair to enable students to buy books under the supervision of their teachers.