Re-envisioning the Ghanaian ecolinguistic landscape: local illustration and literacy

Abstract

Technological innovation is only as powerful as the willingness of the people of a particular place to embrace it. Ghana’s multilingual landscape has recently been repositioned as a source for early childhood literacy development in order to enfranchise more children in public education. One of the innovative technologies in this new multilingual program is local illustration. The purpose of this short report is to highlight the role of Ghanaian illustration in early childhood mother tongue reading and writing instruction. The report will show how local visual literacy has the potential to motivate young learners to read and write in their mother tongue, as well as the official language of Ghana, English.

Keywords:

• bilingual education
• literacy
• illustration
• Ghanaian education
• multiliteracy
• ecolinguistic pedagogy
• NALAP