Our Vision
At the Emirates Literature Foundation, we recognise the impact literature and storytelling can have on both a cultural level and a more personal one, which is why we’re focused on cultivating a love of books and reading.
Our education initiatives are at the forefront of all our efforts, with the Foundation hosting various student competitions and events, each designed to practice a vital core skill, be it reading comprehension, short story, and letter writing, or poetry recitation.
Projects like Reading for Pleasure work to create an environment that helps children fall in love with books and reading in both Arabic and English. Our emphasis on including Arabic at all these key points in a child’s reading development, ensures that Arabic as a ‘mother tongue’ is supported and explored as fully as English in the region.
In this way, we’re in alignment with the United Nation’s Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all (SDG 4) and reduce inequality within and among countries (SDG 10), both of which serve as an important building block to creating informed, empathetic citizens who value and believe in sustainable development.
Our Aims
Overall, our aims for the Reading for Pleasure project lie as follows:
- To foster a lifelong love of reading in children.
- To provide a selection of books, in both Arabic and English, that are culturally and socially acceptable so that children have options to choose from.
- To work with schools to help children build regular reading habits by creating opportunities for them to read throughout the school day, including classroom libraries, story time, and weekly visits to the school library.
- To provide schools and students with access to authors, events, fairs, and festivals focused on books and authors.
- To work closely with parents to change mindsets around reading, including providing tips and techniques to help parents read to their children and creating positive reading environments at home.
- To build relationships with teachers that allow us to gain feedback over the course of the project, while also aiding them in becoming reading teachers and developing positive and enriching reading book-oriented and reading-focused habits within the school.
- To work with university research teams to gather a body of evidence that proves the impact of reading for pleasure that can be used to develop best practices and influence protocol across the UAE and wider Arab world.
- To encourage the reading of Arabic and protect it as a ‘mother tongue.’
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