According to the organisers, standard French literacy education in Guinea has focused on recitation and memorisation rather than reading and writing for understanding or for pleasure. The FQEL project is an attempt to incorporate Guinea’s rich tradition of storytelling and song into literacy education and encourage students to read and write French for fun.

The project uses several key strategies. First, they train and encourage teachers to use song and story in their lessons. They have trained teachers to produce big books out of recycled flour sacks to introduce children to books and how they work. According to the organisers, due to a lack of books and print materials in Guinea, Guinean children often start school unfamiliar with the conventions of written texts. These big books, often decorated with colourful cloth, are designed to allow children to learn about books – that they have a top and bottom, that reading moves from left to write, that sentences begin with a capital and end with a period, etc – in a fun and engaging way.

The project has also produced 24 storybooks in varying degrees of complexity and vocabulary use. The books tell stories about Guinean life, and according to the organisers, children reading these books were, for the first time, reading about their own lives in French.


FQEL also has a radio component that teachers can use in their lessons so that children are able to hear people other than their teacher speaking French. The programmes include conversations between young characters and are designed to get children talking to each other in French. They also include songs which, according to FQEL staff, have proven very popular among the children, given Guinea’s rich musical tradition. Organisers say the programmes have been effective in developing oral comprehension and production skills, and for introducing basic French vocabulary.

Education, Children, Literacy

According to organisers, the FQEL Project has reached over 6,000 schools and one million children and has introduced many new literacy materials. EDC launched another project called LINKS that builds on the FQEL project while incorporating a research component that focuses on reading instruction. EDC is working with the Ministry of Education to find out about teacher's beliefs related to how children read and why they believe that children are not developing the reading skills they need to become autonomous readers. The organisers suspect that teachers’ beliefs are in conflict with the new methods and materials FQEL has introduced. Anecdotal evidence suggests that teachers place a great deal of emphasis on memorisation rather than negotiating meaning and researchers have found that while children in some classrooms can recite the new FQEL texts by heart, they cannot identify or read individual words pointed out to them.