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

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Unlike educated members of some nationalities,most Kam intellectuals strongly support the idea ofincluding Kam language and literacy in their children’seducation so that the children gain appreciation andlove for their own language and culture as well ascompetence and literacy in the Chinese language.Leaders of the Kam community and the RongjiangEducation Office identified Zaidang village as the bestsite for the project in 1999, using two main criteria.The first was that the village should be similar to othervillages in the area so that, if successful, the projectcould confidently be replicated in neighbouringvillages. The second was that the community membersneeded to support the idea of bilingual education inKam and Chinese (Geary & Pan, 2003).As mentioned above, Zaidang is divided into two parts,an upper village (Jiasuo) and a lower village (Zaidang)that are separated by rice paddies and linked by adirt road. Therefore, the pilot project includes twoKam pre-schools and two primary schools. Currently,a new primary school is being constructed in Jiasuothat will have classrooms for grades 1 through 6. Theprimary school in Zaidang includes only grades 1 and2. Zaidang students from grades 3 to 6 walk to Jiasuoeach school day.Preparation for Kam Literacy© Rick Waggoner Zaidang village with wind-and-rain bridge© Rick Waggoner Pilot project preschool buildingThe Kam nationality uses a writing system developed by Chinese linguists in the late 1950s, but notyet officially authorized by the Government. Kam is written using roman letters and is based on hanyupinyin, a system of writing Chinese that also uses roman letters. 4 When the Kam sound is the same as orsimilar to Chinese, the same letter that is used for the sound in pinyin is used for Kam. Where Kam has asound not present in Chinese, a double letter is used. Also, a consonant symbol is used at the end of eachsyllable to mark one of nine Kam tones (see the tone examples under “Introduction to Kam Languageand Culture” above).Long and Zheng (1998) include a significant response to the testing of the Kam orthography in the mid1980s:“Numerous students, speaking from first-hand experience, were saying: “In the past westudied Chinese for many years and still were not able to record songs, write letters, or4 Roman-based writing systems are used for many languages including, for example, English, French, Spanish,Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Malaysian.[ 77 ]
do anything else with Chinese. Now we’ve studied Dong script for two or three monthsand already we can write songs. The gains from studying Chinese for several years do notmatch the gains from studying Dong for several months. The Dong script helps to furtherthe use of the mother tongue in the everyday lives of the Dong people.” (p. 211)Not only did the introduction of the Kam orthography help Kam speakers write their own language andstrengthen their own cultural heritage, Long and Zheng note that learning to write Kam helped thestudents learn Chinese.“Studying Chinese after studying Dong can make progress in Chinese extremely fast.Take for example the young lady Wu Liangmei…from Liping’s Yandong. She never beforestudied in school and was illiterate in Chinese. In 1983 she studied the Dong script forthree months in the village evening class and was able to master it. Then she was able touse the script to annotate the sounds and meanings of Chinese characters, using Dongto study Chinese. By 1985, she was able to recognize the Chinese characters in the firstvolume of the Dong textbook, more than 1,000 characters. Since her study methods weregood and her progress fast, the Liping Nationalities Commission made an exception to itsnormal rules and enrolled her as a teacher of Dong.” (p. 211)The fact that a Kam orthography already existed and had been successfully learned and used over theprevious two decades supported the idea of a Kam/Mandarin bilingual education pilot project. Projectorganizers were confident that it would be possible to develop the literature and instructional materialsneeded for an effective programme.Identification of Learning NeedsPilot project leaders identified two main learning needs for Kam children: (1) the need to acquire Kamliteracy prior to being introduced to Chinese literacy, and (2) the need to learn enough oral Chinese priorto Grade 1 in order to help them “bridge” into Chinese literacy.Because of the experiences of Kam learners described in Long and Zheng (1998) above, pilot projectleaders felt that Kam children would profit two-fold from gaining literacy in Kam. First, their Kam literacyabilities would increase their ability to acquire Chinese literacy, and through this to improve their overallschool performance. Second, they would gain and maintain a love and appreciation for Kam languageand culture. This Kam hypothesis is supported by dozens of research studies on bilingual education andsecond language learning in other parts of the world.Kam children hear very little Chinese language spoken in their homes and communities and, therefore,could understand very little of the instruction given to them in Chinese in Grade 1. When teachers askedthe Kam children to respond to them, the children were unable to speak in Chinese. This led someChinese teachers in Kam primary schools to consider the Kam children as “slow learners” and “not verybright.”Minority language children throughout the world share in this experience. Their inability to understandand speak the majority or national language is often interpreted by the majority population as anintellectual deficit that the minority children inherit, rather than what it actually is: the product of aneducation system that requires some of its students to learn in a language they do not know. The Kam[ 78 ]
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Mother Tongue-basedLiteracy Program
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Mother Tongue-based Literacy Progra
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ContentsAcronymsviPartI 1Mother Ton
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AcronymsIndiaZSSTLCPLPCEIPCLGZSSSRC
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PartI
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Mother TongueLiteracy Programmesin
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Entrenchment of the common (majorit
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Table 1: Linguistic Contexts of the
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It may be noted that there is no re
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“If we stop using our language, i
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their normal lives and communicatio
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the project ensured that community
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Also, it was important to identify
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conservation. Tharu traditional pra
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In Thailand, participation in schoo
Page 33 and 34: would there be projects to cover al
Page 35 and 36: © UNESCO/D. Riewpituk
Page 37 and 38: BackgroundBangladesh is a delta lan
Page 39 and 40: As a consequence, literacy rates am
Page 41 and 42: Orthography DevelopmentDuring early
Page 43 and 44: and discussion in the plenary, age-
Page 45 and 46: qualifications in the tribal commun
Page 47 and 48: Before opening the school, the rese
Page 49 and 50: Networking with Other Organizations
Page 51 and 52: A small baseline study was conducte
Page 53 and 54: parents of the children studying in
Page 55 and 56: Awareness Creation and Opinion Form
Page 57 and 58: Table 2: At-a-Glance Status of MT S
Page 59 and 60: Tasks for National and Internationa
Page 61 and 62: © POEYS
Page 63 and 64: BackgroundCurrent Situation of Mino
Page 65 and 66: of instruction, but the Bunong chil
Page 67 and 68: Process and Cost of Developing and
Page 69 and 70: vocabulary, containing only sounds
Page 71 and 72: Impact of the ProjectImpact on Educ
Page 73 and 74: NetworkingThe MoEYS and UNESCO have
Page 75 and 76: Komly Boek: Bilingual NFE TeacherMy
Page 77 and 78: © Norman Geary
Page 79 and 80: BackgroundThe Kam 1 of south centra
Page 81 and 82: ‘Rice feeds the body, songs feed
Page 83: (Putonghua) in education. Neverthel
Page 87 and 88: eading material in their own langua
Page 89 and 90: Kam Children SingThe singing classe
Page 91 and 92: Thus, the book-fees for a child to
Page 93 and 94: advisers to the Project since its b
Page 95 and 96: Capacity to Learn the National Lang
Page 97 and 98: they were persuaded of its value (t
Page 99 and 100: detached from the village and diffe
Page 101 and 102: © State Resource Centre Assam
Page 103 and 104: BackgroundIndia is home to a large
Page 105 and 106: In the case of adult literacy, we h
Page 107 and 108: Curriculum and Learning Materials D
Page 109 and 110: About 70 volunteer teachers were en
Page 111 and 112: The majority of the learners have c
Page 113 and 114: the regional language and finally t
Page 115 and 116: [ 108 ]© BP-PLSP
Page 117 and 118: In attempting to meet one of the go
Page 119 and 120: Indonesian Policies on Mother Tongu
Page 121 and 122: Nature and LivelihoodCommunity peop
Page 123 and 124: No. Material Time1. The Policy of S
Page 125 and 126: Networking with CommunityMembers, G
Page 127 and 128: BP-PLSP Region II has distributed a
Page 129 and 130: Impact of theProgrammeThe KFBI prog
Page 131 and 132: Phase II. Learning activities inclu
Page 133 and 134: After learning some skills, learner
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© BASE
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© BASEBackground‘If we stop usin
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een forced into bonded labor. Cultu
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cows, bulls, sheep, and goats) kept
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Most of the NFE programmes implemen
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The Key Word Approach was used whil
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how to read and write which helps t
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In short, the Tharu mother tongue l
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© ONFEC
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In 2006, Thailand celebrated an aus
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Minister of Education Chaturong Cha
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All of the NPKOM teachers have asso
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simple sentence structures and much
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Teaching Plan: Bridging to the Nati
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Impact of the ProjectImpact on Educ
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een minimal, as books developed by
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Annexes
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Annex 2: ReferencesMother Tongue Li
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Lindholm-Leary, K. 2001. Dual Langu
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