Impact of Educators’ Pedagogical Knowledge on Early Graders Academic Success: The Case of Sissala East Municipal, Ghana

Due to the critical foundational role content knowledge and a blend of content knowledge and pedagogy play in successful teaching, the idea of PCK creates a special opportunity to explore effective early language and literacy teaching from the content knowledge, knowledge of learner’s characteristics and pedagogical awareness. Knowledge in Language and literacy lays a foundation for teaching. It requires that researchers unveil the specific Language and literacy knowledge that is needed for teaching young learners.  A number of publications have identified certain knowledge and skills a teacher should possess to be effective in teaching Language and literacy (Richards 1991: Snow, Burns & Griffith 1998:  Fillmore and Snow, 2000; The National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow et al. Cunningham et al., 2004). Accordingly, Language and literacy constitute five main domains including phonological (including phonemic) awareness, letter-sound correspondence (phonics), oral comprehension and vocabulary (listening and speaking, receptive and expressive), fluency, concepts about print. This paper was guided by Shulman’s (1986) description of pedagogical content knowledge, as the key theoretical grid. This theory reveals how teachers’ knowledge of content and their PCK relate with each other to produce effective teaching. Data was collected through interviews, questionnaires and sampling methods. Results were discussed using both qualitative and quantitative analysis.