Citizen Literacy came about through years of experience creating Adult Literacy resources for students with very basic of literacy abilities.

I started because I had a student in my class who couldn’t read or write, and I didn’t know where to begin to teach her what she needed to learn.

I came upon Phonics methods whilst teaching Family Literacy in two primary schools in the Gorbals in Glasgow and knew that teaching reading and writing to adults using a structured system of phonics could work with my students.

I started to merge my new- found Phonics knowledge with my existing Adult Literacy and ESOL teaching and after many iterations I created ‘City Phonics’ - a two hours per week, 36 weeks programme. It used a structured approach to teaching adults how to read and write using synthetic phonics, basic grammar, punctuation, spelling and building an alphabet awareness.

I tested and re-tested the resources with my ALN and Supported Learning students as well as some of my ESOL Literacy students, following along the lines of the social practice suggested by the educationalist Paulo Freire

The course takes a structured approach of groups of four lessons, followed by a formative assessment repeated throughout 36-week course. This suited all my students and me as it evidenced their skills or indeed lack of ability and helped to create a programme where they could master their skills before moving on.

This approach aligns closely with some of Benjamin Bloom’s famous 2 Sigma Problem findings. Bloom found that dramatic student improvement could be achieved by using mastery learning methods (learners cannot progress until they have mastered a learning step) combined with 1-2-1 tutoring. The 1-2-1 tutoring, although ideal, was found to be just too expensive to implement at scale in public education systems, but Bloom speculated that technology might help fill this gap in the future – which we have with the app.

I eventually met up with a Learning Technologist, John Casey, who immediately recognised that the structure of City Phonics leant itself very well to creating a smartphone app and we created some early prototypes. The potential of this work was recognised by the UfI VocTech Trust and NESTA who have funded Citizen Literacy (our new name) to create a free app to teach adults how to read and write. The new team includes some of the UK’s leading Adult Literacy specialists, Learning Technologists and Digital maestros with a growing list of partners that include City of Glasgow College, Scottish Union Learn, Micro-phonics Ltd., ReachWill Ltd., Claire Collins Consultancy Ltd., and TRT Ltd.

A prototype of the app was launched in October 2020 and was very well received and the extensive feedback we received from tutors, students and their advocates helped mould our next version of the first five lessons which will be launched as the Citizen Literacy App in both the App Store and Games Store very soon.

The app offers many learning opportunities for students:

• It is free and collects no personal data.
• Students can work on it on their own, at their own pace.
• Students receive instant feedback on their work
• The app uses online virtual tutors to provide learner instructions and feedback (using Amazon text to voice services)
• The learners can interact with the app using all the usual touchscreen actions plus the app uses voice recognition and handwriting recognition to assess learning
• There are supporting videos for each activity which reduces the need for text
• It can be used on Android and Apple Smartphones
• They can revisit each activity as many times as they wish, until they feel they are ready to progress.
• Did I mention it was free? ;-)

Alongside the app and supporting videos on a You Tube channel, new classroom-based courses with tutor notes, tutor training and all necessary classroom resources and student workbook are being created. These will be available in 2021. These resources will include a Handbook for tutors and a Workbook for each student to save on preparation time for staff but also so that students have something tangible to take to class and review when necessary and to see how the classroom activities and the app activities link together.
Please note that students can work their way through the app autonomously without attending a class, but they would need an initial introduction to the app by a Union Learning Rep, friend or colleague.

In the future we hope to work with vocational specialists to create Adult Literacy resources to as address specific work – based reading and writing issues such as in the health and social care, construction and ancillary fields.