Country Director of Young Educators Foundation, Eugenia Techie-Menson has announced that despite the challenges faced in the organisation of the 11th edition of the Spelling Bee, the competition will still hold as existing sponsors have promised to give them the needed support.
Speaking at the launch of the competition, she said it’s been difficult convincing partners in education and the corporate world that the programme has more impact on the lives of participating children than what happens in the classroom.
She also entreated parents to speak their dialect with their children at home and not just depend on language teachers in school to teach them as speaking the language frequently will help them understand it much better.
“As parents, if we’re not speaking the language with them, we are turning them into what I call ‘mono-linguals’. All they do is speak a form of English and that’s it so that even when they actually meet an English person there’s a problem in communication”.
The second lady of Ghana, Samira Bawumia who launched the competition said the theme chosen for the competition, ‘the relevance of the mother tongue in literacy’ was appropriate as one’s mother tongue is vital for the development of sound and effective communication.
She commended Young Educators Foundation and USAID for organising the first Spelling Bee competition in Dagbani in a period that social media and smartphones are taking over people’s lives
She said, “we are now always together but we always far away” adding that “the sad truth is that today we are saddled with constant distractions. It this era of shorthands and autocorrect features on our smartphones a lot of our literary skills have been eroded”.
“We celebrate the Young Educators Foundation for your resilience in advancing education and literacy in Ghana by running other programmes … regardless of the difficulties, you may have faced in your journey”, she added.
