Bridging the gap in Brazilian literacy: Kalulu phonics provides gains in 1st grade reading

Abstract

A significant portion of Brazilian students fail to meet basic reading standards. The 2017 National Common Curricular Base (NCCB) marked a pivotal effort by the government to prioritize recognizing phonics in early reading instruction. However, the NCCB lacked clear directives for implementation, resulting in limited adoption in classrooms where teachers were accustomed to constructivist approaches to literacy. To address this shortcoming, we adapted the open-source Kalulu phonics method to vBrazilian Portuguese and tested its effectiveness as a supplementary learning workstation during classroom reading instruction. The Kalulu method is available at kalulu.excellolab.org. 184 Brazilian children (97 girls) from 1st year participated, aged 6 to 8 years (M = 6.59, SD = 0.50). Five schools were assigned randomly to the Kalulu intervention group or a “business-as-usual” con- trol group, and evaluated two times in 2022. Kalulu group showed significant progress, reading an average of 4.9 more words per minute compared to control classes. Improvements were also observed in phoneme verbal fluency and a memory task. Given the strong scientific support for phonics and our encouraging results, we urge Brazil's educational leaders, teachers, and parents to advocate for increased phonics instruction as part of early literacy methods. Explicit phonics instruction, like the Kalulu method, could provide essential help for overcoming the country's ongoing literacy challenges.