“Students want to come to school and want to read”

By Siriphone Siriphongphanh
Senior Officer
Communications & Development
Room to Read in Laos

Seeing students happy to come to school, observing them using their free time to pick out their favorite books in the school reading corners — this is what brings Ms. Bouakham joy. She is a Grade 2 teacher, fluent in Lao as well as the Hmong and Khmu dialects, at a small school with only five classrooms for Grades 1 to 5, located on a steep hillside in Luang Prabang Province, Laos.

Lao is the national language of Laos, and it can be difficult to teach for Ms. Bouakham. The students are from diverse ethnic groups, including Hmong, Khmu and Tai Lao, all speaking different dialects. Most of the children in Ms. Bouakham’s class did not attend pre-primary school, as the school does not have a pre-primary classroom, and many parents are low-income farmers who do not have the means to send their children to early childhood education programs. As a result, many students start school without foundational Lao language skills.

Reading Lao-language storybooks aloud is one of the ways Ms. Bouakham helps build stronger literacy skills for her multilingual students, especially those learning Lao for the first time. During a training with Room to Read, she was encouraged to translate words from local dialects into Lao while reading aloud, helping students better understand the meaning of the stories — and bolster their interest in reading and learning.

Ms. Bouakham shared, “This is a big change from before, when many struggled to understand the storybooks and, as a result, often felt bored and sleepy in class. Literacy development has therefore brought new excitement to early grade learning, especially in Grade 1 and Grade 2 classrooms in my school.”

Since the introduction of Room to Read’s reading corner — a classroom library and friendly reading area filled with a wide variety of Lao language books — and the educator training on reading corner activities, the classroom atmosphere has transformed. Students are more joyful and engaged as they listen to stories read aloud with expressive tones and gestures, and translated vocabulary, sparking greater curiosity and filling the classroom with lively buzz and laughter.

Ms. Bouakham applies the techniques she learned from the training every day: “I use read-aloud techniques, adjusting my storytelling approach according to the illustrations to capture the students' attention, and translating when necessary. It makes the students feel excited and more interested in following the story.”

The most visible successes are the reading habits that are gradually becoming part of the students’ lives. During break time, students rush to the reading corner of the classroom. “Even though some of the children are still quite young and cannot read fluently yet, they are happy just to open the books, look at the pictures and choose the ones they like,” Ms. Bouakham says with pride.

Mr. Soukee, the school principal, added with praise: “I am delighted that Room to Read has come to promote reading in our school. Seeing our students able to read and write with increasing skill, many becoming top students, is the pride of every teacher who has shared knowledge with them.”

Today, Phousangkham Primary School is not just a place for lessons. It is a place where children of all ethnicities truly, as Ms. Bouakham put it,  “want to come to school and want to read.”

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