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

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 ]