Is Language Boring? Last, but Critical.

This is the second half of a two part story about a USAID Uganda School Health and Reading Program  materials development workshop, written by SIL LEAD consultant, Agatha J. van Ginkel. You can find part one on our blog. And ‘like’ SIL LEAD on facebook to get notifications about new stories and continued updates about the USAID School Health and Reading Program.

While we have been developing the materials for grade 4 for the local language, the English team has been upstairs developing the materials for grade 4 English. Grade 4 is a transition year for the children. They will switch from having their local language as the medium of instruction to having  English as the language of instruction. The team realises that the children will still find that very difficult. There are so many words for the children to learn. The team is pondering, “Which words are keywords that need to be included in the materials for grade 4?” Luckily, in grade 4 English as a subject is on the schedule seven times during a week, so the children will have plenty of time. 

On a daily basis the Local language team and the English team discuss together how they can link the two languages. How can English make use of what has been learned in the Local Language first? Making use of what is known is called the ‘interdependence theory’ — what is learned in the first language will transfer to the new language once the learners have sufficient knowledge of the language. 

Another way this transition is facilitated is by integrating some key English vocabulary in the local language books. All the page headers are in English. Each new concept introduced in week 1, practised in week 2, and applied in week 3 is also given its English name in week 3. So, once the children are familiar with the concept in their local language, they learn the English word for it. That will make it easier to make the transition: They know the concept in their local language, they know the label for it in English, and now they can use it in English as well. (This assumes, of course,  that they have sufficient vocabulary to express themselves in English.) 

While everyone is writing, drawing and thinking, the typists keyboard all the outputs. They type away, typing both in languages they know and ones they do not know. While the typists seem to be the last people on the book development chain, their role is crucial. Their work gives the teams feedback about whether sufficient, too much, or too little content was written. The typists transcribe all the lessons directly into the book design program Bloom. It has been developed and set up in such a way that with a little training, they can design the books. 

Materials development for grade 4 is a dynamic process with many different parts. Excitement is in the room as stories are prepared, lesson are written, and illustrations are drawn. Facilitating this process is exciting and challenging at the same time. Days like today are good days—days in which I think I have the best job ever! 

You can read more about the USAID School Health and Reading Program here. 

Is Language Boring?

This is the first in a two part story about a USAID Uganda School Health and Reading Program materials development workshop in Uganda written by SIL LEAD consultant, Agatha J. van Ginkel. “Like” SIL LEAD on facebook to get notifications about part two.

Looking at their gestures, it is absolutely not boring! It is not boring to think and talk about grammar of your mother tongue. Imagine the enthusiasm in a room where new stories and teaching materials are being created for the heart language of a community that has never had the opportunity to learn in this way before. This is a look at several different aspects of a materials development workshop that are a part of the USAID Uganda School Health and Reading Program. 

Our Ugandan linguist is working with the Ugandan language specialists of two languages to select which morpheme to focus on for advanced blending and segmenting exercises.

A morpheme is the smallest, meaningful part of a word. And these grammar exercises divide words like “unbeatable” into its morphemes, “un-beat-able”so that the meaning can be gleaned from the parts of the whole.

The linguists and language specialists work the whole day together to think through their languages. They need to get the right information to help the learners in grade 4 develop advanced skills for reading fluency. 

In the earlier years or primary school, the children learn to blend and segment simple words into syllables. In grade two, they also learn to recognise the most frequent morphemes of the language for quick word recognition, but after grade two this is a skill that needs to continue to develop. This is especially important in languages that like to cluster many morphemes around the root of the word. 

As the linguistics and language specialists wrestle with grammar, the illustrators are scratching their heads. They were used to drawing large illustrations with many details that showed real life situations. Rather than drawing an illustration of 2 by 4 inches, they have to draw two illustrations that are much smaller. They were thinking and thinking how to do so. In the end, they decided to draw within the small square of the provided box to make sure that their illustration will fit into the space available.

In the student book for grade 4, the illustrations have a different role than previous materials developed for grades 1-3. The illustrations help students predict what the text is going to be about. The smaller illustrations challenge the students to get their information from the text rather than the illustration. 

Competing for Books

Photo: Kerry Bradshaw, VSO volunteer, Uganda 

It is hard to imagine, from an American experience, schools or communities without books and libraries for children. But it is a reality for many language communities and schools in other parts of the world, including the schools involved in USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Program (SHRP) project in Uganda.

Photo: Kerry Bradshaw, VSO volunteer, Uganda 

In March the project held a Reading Competition in the Gumba district. Twenty-seven schools came together to celebrate reading in the local language and to engage the community in encouraging students’ reading. This event was organized to boost interest among children and parents in education and mother tongue literacy.

The participants each received a stack of exercise books and pack of pencils for their classrooms. But as a volunteer Kerry observed, “We had spare A4 photocopies of the paragraph that children read and there was a bit of a scramble to get these to take home—such is the lack of any books or reading material in most children's homes.”

Photo: Kerry Bradshaw, VSO volunteer, Uganda 

Books, when readily available, can easily be taken for granted. But they are a powerful tool for building imagination and self-esteem. As Ms Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO has said, “Literacy is the door to knowledge, essential to individual self-esteem and empowerment. Books, in all forms, play an essential role…”

This reading competition not only brought a community together to celebrate reading and provide books, but it was appreciated by the District Education Officers who are now encouraging schools to organize more of these, in classes, to build confidence among learners and provide creative outlets for them to practice their reading skills. The event is also helpful for the teachers to evaluate their students. Charity Baguma, the event organizer, reported that the event “communicated that some children still had fear of talking in front of the groups, others couldn't read a word; while other schools were putting books to excellent use, and this was evident in the reading skills of their learners.

Photo: Kerry Bradshaw, VSO volunteer, Uganda 

Photo: Kerry Bradshaw, VSO volunteer, Uganda 

On this occasion of World Book and Copyright Day, an annual event organized by UNESCO, take time to appreciate the many different worlds, experiences and people that are available through words crafted to fuel imaginations and impart knowledge. Encourage your children to read and appreciate books in a new way because it is a privilege. Our goal is to help more language communities to have this same access to books through the support of projects like SHRP.

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• World Book and Copyright Day 
  
• USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Program 

Bloom is a Contest Finalist

SIL LEAD Literacy Specialist Prossy Nannyombi working with Michael Ongora on editing the Lebacoli grade 2 teacher's guide in Bloom software.

We are pleased to announce that Bloom has been chosen as one of three finalists in the All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) Enabling Writers prize contest. As a finalist in this software competition, Bloom will be provided to field projects in three countries for testing. The feedback from these users will be critical input to the selection of the grand prize winner.

It has been an exciting time for SIL LEAD to see firsthand how innovative, “low-tech” solutions can be leveraged to serve local language communities around the world. Most recently, we've seen 12 language communities in Uganda benefit from Bloom software through the USAID/Uganda  School Health and Reading Program. Using Bloom has made it easier for these communities to take ownership of the materials development and editing process for student books and teachers’ guides in Grades 1–4.

A new companion to Bloom desktop software is the Bloom library. There are already more than 150  books in the library that can be downloaded and adapted to local languages. When you develop new books in Bloom, you can upload them to the library for others to use. The library contains not only storybooks but also materials that creatively teach health, math, environment, science and many other topics. One example, The Leopard and the Tortoise, is a story about nutrition. Visit the Bloom library to see all the books.

We look forward to improving Bloom more as we receive feedback from the contest and from Bloom users worldwide

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Bloom News: 

• All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) Enabling Writers Contest

• USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Program

• Bloom being used in Papua New Guinea

• Bloom at the Peace Corp Africa Literacy Workshop in Jinja, Uganda

Unintentional messages in materials development

Materials development and gender issues

By Agatha J. van Ginkel, Ph.D.

…child care is much more than breastfeeding and rather than having another illustration of a breastfeeding woman…they could have an illustration of a father washing a child…

The other day I was sitting next to the Gender and Inclusion Specialist who is part of the materials development team in the project I’m working in. The quote above is one example of the ways that gender bias permeated the initial drafts of the lessons. I realised again how crucial her role was in the materials development process.

There are many issues to consider when developing materials; besides thinking about the methodology, the pedagogy, and language-related issues, there are also gender issues that need to be considered. Textbooks communicate a world view that may give messages to girls and women that they are not as important as boys and men, that they are second class citizens.

While most countries and communities want to communicate that men and women, boys and girls are equally important and not hierarchically different—one lower than the other—it takes great effort to communicate this in instructional materials. Let’s take the instructions to students, for example. In many languages there are grammatical male and female markers on words, students-male and students-female. There is no neutral term that would include both of them. And as you might have observed in the sentences above, I followed the ‘normal’ way in which we present gender: male first, then female. It is a very natural way of writing, but it implicitly communicates that male comes first, then female. And when a language has gender markers on words, most of the time lesson writers will write the male word first and then the female one in instructions to students. In gender-sensitive materials, the two forms are alternated. That case is easy to address.

More complex to deal with are culturally-ingrained practices that favour males. In many cultures, it is not unusual for men to ‘steal a bride’. They can just go to a village and snatch a girl from the road, take her somewhere, marry her and then settle the issue with the family. One can influence students’ thinking about this cultural practice by addressing it in stories and having good discussions with them.

But there is more to it: Often the everyday words used to express cultural practices are gender-bound. Let’s again look at marriage. In many languages there are two words for marriage, one related to the lady and one related to the man. Often it is the case that the lady is ‘taken’ while the man ‘takes’. How does one change this, as there is often not a neutral word in the language indicating marriage? In one of the languages we are working with, the writers thought about this for quite some time and then agreed that the phase after the wedding is ‘living together’. Rather than using the traditional words for marriage they decided to say that the lady and man mutually agreed to live together.

When developing educational materials, even (or perhaps it would be better to say especially) reading and writing methodologies are not neutral. They always convey an underlying world view. It is important to be aware of this and work with a language community regarding how they can encourage gender equality. Let’s not unintentionally give girls the message that they are second class citizens or let boys believe that they are superior to girls.

Using Bloom in Jinja, Uganda

SIL LEAD is proud to see Bloom being spread to new users! Paul Frank and John Hatton were recently invited to participate in a Peace Corps Africa Literacy Workshop. They shared Bloom with Peace Corps Staff and Volunteers from eight African countries so that they can encourage people to write books in their own languages. Here's some feedback from Camille Aragon, Peace Corps Literacy Specialist: 

"On behalf of our team at the Peace Corps, I wanted to extend sincere thanks to both of you for joining us in Jinja for the Africa Literacy Workshop and making the Bloom software available to the participants.

"Your presence there certainly generated a lot of excitement about the potential Bloom has to impact the work that volunteers and staff are doing to promote literacy and I also got the sense that many of the participants felt a deep sense of pride in being able to write stories in their communities’ mother-tongue languages.

"I can definitely see the benefits of Bloom being used in the Peace Corps as multi-fold: as a means for supporting literacy programming, giving volunteers another avenue for connecting to their communities, and using the software to supplement PCVs’ language training, to name a few.

"Again, thank you for collaborating with us on this workshop and for your contributions and participation in Jinja. We look forward to working with you again in the future!"

One of the developers of Bloom, John Hatton, looks on as workshop participants utilize Bloom at the Peace Corps Africa Literacy Workshop.

SIL LEAD looks forward to additional ways that it can connect Bloom to communities and communities to their languages. For more information about Bloom, check out our recent Bloom blog post. 

You can also visit the Bloom website: www.bloomlibrary.org

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Happy International Literacy Day 2014!

September 8 marks the celebration of International Literacy Day with this year’s theme being “Literacy and Sustainable Development.”

Literacy has the power to bring permanent change to people’s lives; it changes the way people think about their personal goals, participate in their communities, and contribute to the development of society. SIL LEAD is proud to see and participate in work that contributes to increased literacy particularly among speakers of lesser-known languages. 

Photo: Robert Waliaula - SIL LEAD

Much of the literacy work has been accomplished by teachers themselves who are working with SIL LEAD under USAID’s flagship education program in Uganda, the USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Program implemented by RTI International, to discover more effective ways to teach young students to read and write. In June, a number of early grade teachers met at the National Curriculum Development center in Kampala, Uganda to develop learning and reading materials for first grade children in five different languages spoken in Uganda. This project is funded by the United States Agency for International Development and aims to improve early grade reading and health education for Ugandan students.

The teachers worked alongside SIL LEAD technical experts to develop teachers’ guides and primers, which will be used by local primary schools in areas where the different languages are spoken. Throughout the process of developing materials, teachers showed commitment and determination and were eager to complete these meaningful literacy tools. They expressed excitement about the books they were writing for children of their own communities, which have the power to transform the classroom for both teachers and young learners. They understood the critical importance of how these learning materials will help students read and write by the completion of first grade, which is not common among children of marginalized language groups. 

One literacy worker, Maddelene, explains her experience of participating in this project: 

Photo: Robert Waliaula - SIL LEAD

“I have been a teacher for fourteen years now... During these years, I have been teaching in the best way I know how using the limited resources available. By covering the curriculum and testing children, I thought that our children were learning. It’s true that some were learning but a majority of them faced obstacles and acquired writing and reading competencies later than they should have. Reasons for this include lack of emphasis on mother tongue instruction while children came to school not knowing any other language but their local languages. The other reasons that contribute to the mentioned problem are the inadequate reading and teaching resources in local languages and the lack of training for teachers on how to teach in local languages. 

Coming to the materials development workshop has opened my eyes and I can now point out things that need improvement to enable our children to be able to read and write at an early stage. While developing materials for our children, I have learnt how to write stories and how to teach reading and writing. These skills are not currently being taught and could be one of the reasons why children are leaving lower grades without basic reading and numeracy skills. I am excited with the materials we are currently developing. I believe that when they finally reach schools, they will transform the way our children are learning.”

Today SIL LEAD celebrates International Literacy Day alongside teachers like Maddelene who are working to provide younger generations with the keys to sustainable development through the transformational power of literacy.

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