Project Report - La Trobe University

From here onwards Follow-on activities
Grade 1 student Onjag (Jemesta) Banao concentrates
on writing in her notebook.
Grade 1 teacher Kasoy (Levemay) Abaggoy (right) takes
her pupils through a lesson in Filipino. The young
children have almost as much difficulty learning the
national language as they do English, since it is not
used much in Chananaw. Instead, they predominantly
speak their own language, Chinananaw, mixed with
some Ilocano, the lingua franca across most of
Northern Luzon. The Ichananaw children enter school
only knowing a handful of English or Tagalog words, if
any at all.
As hoped, the project has opened up several
opportunities for further activities, both within
Chananaw and between the Ichananaw and others.
Towards the end of the project we were able to
identify the following areas for further work:
Taking the educational materials a step further
There is potential to develop the existing
educational materials further. For example, there is
interest within Chananaw to continue the
documentation of the tribe’s songs and stories –
this will be led by Agom (Arlene) Dawing. There is
also the possibility of documenting the melodies of
the songs we gathered as part of our project as
sheet music – Ichananaw Andrew Tollangao, who
has the musical training required to put the
melodies on paper, has expressed an interest in
doing this.
Creating Grade 1 language materials
One objective, which we only delved into
conceptually due to lack of time, was to create a
series of Grade 1 language materials tailored for
use in the Dananao Elementary School, inspired by
the approach of Dr. Gloria Baguingan’s First
Language Component Bridging Program. The
Dananao Elementary School teachers had an
opportunity to discuss with Gloria the possibility of
collaboration with her to create the materials, at
the seminar she delivered during the course of the
project. There is scope for a future project to
continue developing the language materials where
our project left off.
Developing the four-way dictionary
Due to the lack of time, we were only able to make
a start on the dictionary during the five months.
We hope to continue developing the dictionary we
have already begun over the coming years. Further
additions and revisions will be made both in
Australia by Maria and the Philippines by the
Ichananaw, with communication enabled via the
internet.