Important to learn to read and write
It should be a human right in Sweden to learn to read and write. Yet we know that there are a large number of illiterate people in Sweden, most of them are women who have immigrated to Sweden. At Livstycket about 25 percent of the participants are illiterate. Many of these people have attended SFI classes (Swedish as a foreign language) but have still not been able to assimilate the written language. In the spring of 2010 we at Livstycket decided to invest additional resources in language learning in order to change this.

This is what we did
Sixteen women took part in the project; fifteen of them had attended SFI education for between two months and four years. No one had cracked the reading code. Livstycket’s functional pedagogy works well with respect to developing already existing language skills, but when it comes to conquering a language from scratch, more is required. Consequently, we combined our functional pedagogy with the Witting method which focuses on speech sounds and the relationship between letters and sounds. If you are not capable of producing the sounds, it is difficult to learn to read and write. During the project, the participants learned to connect speech sounds to letters, words and their own stories. They also illustrated their new world of language with their own artistic creations..