UNESCO promotes mobilizing scientific knowledge for sustainable development. Global illiteracy and the urgent need to improve quality of education are topics that effect on cross-cutting development themes ranging from supporting democracy to creating sustainable energy sources.

Improvement of literacy levels and quality in education cannot happen without collaborative, interdisciplinary academic research on interconnectedness of language, literacy and learning. Interaction of language and reading acquisition is still poorly understood and scientific knowledge of this theme is urgently needed in multilingual African countries.

We believe improvement of education quality and learning outcomes depends on not just collaboration with wide range of academic fields but also with artists in literature, audiovisual art and game programming. Scientific solutions and evidence-based practices need to be created but we also need to seek new ways to distribute the knowledge and learning opportunities globally to all learners.

We wish to invite to Global Literacy Working Group presentations from students and researchers from all fields of academic research who seek answers to following questions:

• How to promote use of mother tongue in literacy instruction?
• How to ensure that children gain sufficient literacy skills for life in a modern multilingual African society?
• How to help teachers, teacher training institutions, teaching material designers and education policy makers to benefit from scientific research and evidence-based solutions for learning?
• How to create cost-effective mobile internet-based services for the education sector development?

Global Literacy Working Group is part of FinCEAL CCI seminar 2014

Deadline for submission is 15.09.2014.  For more information, please see the call for papers.