Long-term literacy training project takes off

Hyderabad: The inaugural ceremony of the Institute of Eminence (IoE) project on "long-term literacy training and its impact on cognitive functioning" was held recently at the government primary school, Seri Lingampally.

The project--sanctioned to Prof. Ramesh Kumar Mishra of Centre for Neural and Cognitive Sciences (CNCS), School of Medical Sciences, through the IoE scheme at the University of Hyderabad (UoH)--aims to administer long-term literacy training in Kannada and Telugu to illiterate participants and investigate its impact on cognitive functioning. This ambitious and challenging project involves an intensive training programme on a large number of participants (approximately 120) and a wide array of tasks for measuring cognitive functioning.

The inauguration was attended by Beri Ramchandra Yadav, president, Vikarabad district Upa-Sarpanch Association, and Seri Lingampally Corporator Ragam Nagadhar Yadav. Prof. Mishra launched the event by explaining the aims and objectives of the project and how the participants can benefit from it.

The school headmaster and social worker Narasimhan was acknowledged for efforts in recruiting participants for the study and helping with logistics. The councillor and the corporator underlined the importance of taking up such research projects with social relevance.

The research team, which will carry out the testing and training, will be headed by Vaishnavi Mohite, a third year PhD student at CNCS. Vaishnavi and team members were present. The ceremony ended with the participants registering themselves for the study. The pre-training phase of data collection will begin next week, which will be followed by the eight-month-long training programme.

Prof. Mishra, with his collaborator Dr. Falk Huettig from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (the Netherlands), has published significant work in high impact journals, such as Science Advances, on the role of literacy on cognition.

These projects were previously undertaken in Allahabad, Lucknow and Delhi and involved recording of changes in the brain activity as a function of literacy training. The current project extends the experimental approaches to bilingual illiterates from low socio-economic strata in the country for the first time.

A key novelty of the project is to examine if literacy training in two languages is more beneficial than in one. The outcome of the project has serious implications for policy-making with regards to improving literacy in the country.