Celebrating the Begin With Books project with our collaborators in Mali!

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Celebrating the Begin With Books project with our collaborators in Mali!

On May 31, AMALAN (Malian Language Academy) organized a dedication ceremony for the 400+ children's books created by the LiNEMA project (Digital Books for our Children in Mali), also known as Begin with Books (BWB)-Mali.

SIL LEAD was the award winner from All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development for this project and managed the project. SIL International Mali was our technical partner in Mali and working with Malian government counterparts to implement the project. The event was covered by a national TV in Mali…

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Finland, Finland, Finland – the Country Where We’d Quite Like to Be

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Finland, Finland, Finland – the Country Where We’d Quite Like to Be

Finland is a world leader in education. Where exactly the country “ranks” varies year-to-year, but there’s no mistaking that their approach has helped them become world leaders in everything from education to automated hot-pizza vending machines, as Bloom Program Director Dr. Paul Frank learned when he attended the HundrED Global Summit in Finland with other honorees late last month…

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SIL International Launches the World’s First Digital Language Divide Measurement Tool

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SIL International Launches the World’s First Digital Language Divide Measurement Tool

Innovation has been baked into the DNA of SIL International from the very start, under the leadership of its very first President, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Doctor Kenneth Lee Pike.

Dr. Pike was a celebrated and globally recognized expert in linguistics—the originator of a number of key theories and practices in linguistics. SIL International has carried Dr. Pike’s practice of championing innovation through to today, working in collaboration with the most cutting edge research and practices to create some of the very best datasets, artificial intelligence, website tools, and more that are now available to linguists across the globe…

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HAPPY DEAF AWARENESS MONTH!

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HAPPY DEAF AWARENESS MONTH!

Way back in March of 2020, we announced our selection as a winner of All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development’s (ACR GCD) Begin With Books prize. The challenge was to create cost-effective, accessible children’s books in languages that children use and understand. We proposed to bring expertise and our innovative Bloom software to a country that is new for SIL LEAD as an organization—Mali!

And then we did…

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Back to Classrooms and the Glass Half Full... or Half Empty

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Back to Classrooms and the Glass Half Full... or Half Empty

As teachers and students confined to their homes in 2020 and 2021, we thought that the solution to our frustrations would come the day we could get back into the classroom. In this, we were so naïve. Don’t misinterpret me as a negative, “half empty” person, though. This is just reality.

The latest report on learning poverty, The State of Global Learning Poverty, estimated that 57% of the world's ten-year-olds could not comprehend age-appropriate text before the pandemic…

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Language Inclusivity is Crosscutting

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Language Inclusivity is Crosscutting

On my first trip to Peru (roughly 50 years ago) I was too young to read, but I am certain that my parents read to me on the airplane. As I prepare to travel to Peru later this month with my wife, I am reminded of just how privileged I am to have grown up surrounded by books in both English and Spanish - and even a bilingual "Dr. Seuss Dictionary." My favorite books, however, were always story books in English -- the language I heard spoken most often in our home.

While accessibility and gender inclusivity in educational materials is finally receiving a lot of well-deserved attention, are books genuinely inclusive if they are not in a language that children know and understand well…?

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Why Does Language Even Matter?

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Why Does Language Even Matter?

Do you remember what it was like to take your seat on your very first day in school, bright eyed and bushy tailed—eager to please?

Imagine, if you will, that once the teacher had gotten your class settled she had turned to you and your classmates and said, “Bonvolu malfermi viajn librojn.”

Imagine she stared at you. Expectant. Waiting…

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Blooming in Bacolod City

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Blooming in Bacolod City

In June, SIL LEAD Executive Director Christof Weber had the opportunity to attend the last few days of a materials development workshop in Bacolod City, in the Philippines.

The workshop focused on developing decodable readers in the Sinugbuanong Binisaya language, for Grade 1 students in Negros Occidental as part of the USAID-funded Philippines Advancing Basic Education (ABC+) project led by RTI International…

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