Mother Tongue-based Literacy Programmes: Case Studies of Good ...

simple sentence structures and much repetition, printed on portfolio-sized paper for group readingexercises) and “small books” for individual reading. Information that had been collected for the culturalcalendar provided themes for many stories.Materials produced at this workshop included:•••“Big Books” (6)“word card sets” (6--based on key words from “Big Books”)“small books” (10)In addition, the teachers received lesson planning forms for recording their daily lesson plans. The formsinclude short summaries of activities included in the “Story Track” (reading and writing meaningfultexts) and the “Primer Track” (reading and writing letters, syllables and words) components of the Multi-Strategy Approach.All of the materials were used in CLC classes immediately after production.© ONFECInitial ResultsBy the end of 2003, the teachers reported positiveresponses on the part of both parents and children.Older children, who already had learned to read Thai,were able to master the Pwo Karen orthographyquickly, and many of them began writing their ownstories, some of which were later incorporated intothe curriculum.ONFEC presented their initial results at the November2003 “Conference on Language Development,Language Revitalization and Multilingual Educationin Minority Communities in Asia” (sponsored byUNESCO Bangkok, Mahidol University, and SILInternational). The presentation and a display of theproject attracted the attention of several high-rankingThai Ministry of Education officials, while providingencouragement for the Northern Pwo Karen teachersand students who attended the conference.Expanding Project LearningMaterials (2004)To maintain the positive momentum of Stage 1,UNESCO provided a second grant to ONFEC tocontinue developing NPKOM through 2004. All involved agreed on the need to develop more classroommaterials, and additional workshops for both teachers and advanced students were organized inFebruary, April and June 2004. The corpus of learning materials during Stage 2 thus expanded to includethe following:[ 152 ]