Mrs Biola Adimula, the Chairperson, Women and Child Watch Initiatives (WOCWI) on Monday, promised to improve the vocabulary of students in Kwara through organising spelling bee competitions.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Adimula made the promise at the grand finale of Great Kwara Spelling Bee Competition, comprising 400 contestants from secondary schools across the 16 local government areas of the state.
She said that the performance of public schools in the competition had improved to 30 per cent since the inception of the programme in 2010.
“The good news is that 50 per cent of students have qualified to contest today because of the spelling bee competition,” she said.
She said that the competition would instill the art of reading in students, adding that the competition would also help to improve the students’ spellings, attain higher scores in essays and other tests in English language.
Adimula decried the advent of modern technologies, which she claimed had developed cunning strategies in coining short forms in SMS messages.
This trend, she said, had made students who could not decipher such SMS messages, import their usage into the school curriculum and unfortunately into examinations.
Mrs Omolewa Ahmed, Kwara Governor’s wife, who spoke at the occasion, said her pet project, Life Empowerment Anchors Hope (LEAH) charity, had partnered with WOCWI to promote the competition.
Ahmed, represented by Mrs Bukola Akinloye, the Head Administrator of Leah, said that the state government had sponsored 10 finalists of the 2012 competition to international trips.
Earlier in his goodwill message, Prof. AbdulGaniyu Ambali, the Vice-Chancellor, University of Ilorin, commended the initiative.
He said that English speaking and writing was the basic instrument of communication which students must be equipped with.
