Grade 2 Oral Tetun class

Editor’s note: As the Language on the Move team is busy preparing for the “Bridging Language Barriers” Symposium to be hosted at Macquarie University on March 16, Kerry Taylor-Leech introduces us to a mother-tongue education pilot in East Timor. Mother-tongue-based multilingual education is a key strategy for equitable access to education and Kerry explains how the pilot bridges barriers to learning faced by rural children in the global south.

Registration for the “Bridging Language Barriers” Symposium closes today but if you cannot attend in person, you can still join the conversation with our team of live-tweeters on the day. Our Twitter hashtag will be #LOTM2017. Follow @Lg_on_the_Move

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Hatudu ba malai iha ne’bé ho kámera! (Point to the foreigner with the camera!). Some thirty little faces and fingers swing round in my direction. I am at the back of a classroom observing a Grade 2 Tetun-as-a-second language lesson in a school in Lautém, East Timor. Turning observation on its head, this energetic and charismatic teacher has made use of me in his Total Physical Response (TPR) lesson. The children love it and I too am enjoying myself immensely.

Grade 1 child reading independently

The lesson is taking place in a school participating in a mother-tongue based multilingual education pilot. Known in East Timor as EMBLI (in Tetun: Edukasaun Multilingue Bazia Lian-Inan—Multilingual Education in Mother Tongues), the pilot is overseen by the Timor-Leste National Commission for UNESCO and supported by a network of agencies and organisations known as Repete 13. The lesson observation was part of several visits I was lucky enough to make to the pilot schools in 2016, accompanying EMBLI trainers on their regular monitoring tours. I’ve been visiting East Timor since 2001 for work, consultancy and research. I was making this trip to catch up with the pilot, which I have been following since its inception. I’ve also followed and been involved in the sometimes-heated public debates that preceded it.

Fataluku word recognition

In 2013 the East Timorese Ministry of Education implemented a three-year mother-tongue pilot in three districts with large communities of endogenous language speakers (Galoli in Manatuto District, Fataluku in Lautém District and Baikenu in Oecusse District). Operating from pre-primary to Grade 3 level, the pilot officially ended in 2015 but was extended for a further two years and will include Grade 4 in 2017. Now is a good time to be writing about the pilot because the first results of an Endline Survey have recently been released. Conducted by the well-known assessment specialist Dr Steve Walter, the survey compared children’s performance in EMBLI schools, government schools and Portuguese-immersion schools. Not surprisingly, the results show the benefits of learning in a language a child understands best. EMBLI children showed marked gains compared to the other children, especially in reading. While test results are only part of the picture, they are exciting for EMBLI as they provide quantitative evidence that MTB-MLE is effective. The results are particularly pleasing because the schools are located in remote areas, where children’s performance has traditionally lagged behind that of children in urban schools. One of the most conclusive pieces of evidence from the survey is that EMBLI has produced children who are independent readers by Grade 1 – a remarkable achievement considering the difficult physical conditions in which these children are expected to learn.

Fataluku reading books

EMBLI’s achievements overall in the last three years have been impressive. EMBLI has adopted the Two-Track Method for literacy teaching, advocated and adapted by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. This highly structured approach is used in many MTB-MLE programs around the world. It is based on a combination of meaning (i.e., understanding whole text) and accuracy (i.e., understanding and using word identification strategies).

The method appears to work well in low-resource settings where children come from pre-literate homes and parents cannot easily support their children’s literacy development. Despite the dilapidated conditions and lack of facilities in East Timorese public schools generally, EMBLI teachers make their classrooms welcoming places where children are exposed to attractive, colourful materials in their home language in the form of pictures, big books, activity books and readers that reflect images from their everyday life and cultural realities. Children’s own work also now brightens up the classroom walls.

Teaching aids made from local materials

In low-resource educational settings, teachers have no choice but to be creative. EMBLI teachers supplement professionally produced material with literacy and numeracy resources made from sticks and pebbles, coconut shells, palm leaves, seeds, cardboard, buttons and plastic bottles. For early writing the pre-school children often use slates, a cheap, sturdy, and easily renewable resource.

In addition to these models of sustainability, one of EMBLI’s greatest achievements in my view is its empowerment of teachers. EMBLI trainers report that since their involvement with the pilot, the teachers are happier, more confident and have a sense of agency. In this video teachers and students can be seen at work (note: the video is in the official languages, Tetun and Portuguese). The slogan on the T-shirts reads “I like learning in my mother tongue.”

The pilot teachers work in tandem with teaching assistants. Although this system is not particularly new in East Timor, previously the teaching assistant’s primary role was to keep order and this was often done by means of the stick rather than the carrot.  EMBLI has encouraged collaborative planning and team teaching as well as approaches to classroom management that respect children’s human rights.

Pre-school teacher helping a child with letter formation using a slate

EMBLI trainers make regular site visits and teachers also benefit from being able to attend mostly local workshops and seminars. Travel from the districts to Dili takes at least a full day and even to reach district centres, teachers often have to leave home before dawn and walk very long distances. EMBLI has shown that on-site teacher training is a viable and cost-effective alternative to training conducted in the capital.

EMBLI is also a model of how to build trust and sustain relationships with communities. Parents are supportive of the pilot as they are more able to interact with school and they see their children are learning to read and write. To date the EMBLI pilot has successfully put into practice three essential principles of MTB-MLE: promoting fluency in community and official languages, creating a supportive environment for literacy, and empowering teachers, learners and parents. As countries of the global South struggle to achieve effective universal primary education the EMBLI pilot provides a model of collaboration and sustainable practice. In its three-year life EMBLI has made a significant difference to children’s learning and the prospects for its future look bright. As they say in Tetun and Portuguese, Parabens! (Congratulations!)

Photos taken with permission by Kerry Taylor-Leech

An East Timorese girl speaking Bunak, Tetum, Fataluku and Portuguese (Source: Wikipedia)

A response to Alexandra Grey, “We do aid, not English”

In my experience English is often promoted by aid organisations as part of a package and served up with very little consultation of recipients and not much concern for the local language ecology or the consequences of promoting English. In East Timor, where I have done a lot of research, monolingual English-speaking aid workers often expect their local counterparts to use English and even select them on the basis of their ability to speak it. Native English-speakers have earned a reputation for insensitivity to the constitutional provisions for language and flout them regularly, e.g., by using the fact that English is a working language as a get-out clause, circulating official documents in English and making no real effort to learn the official languages. Ten years after independence, English-speakers still criticise the decision to officialise  Portuguese and Tetum. These two languages are embedded in East Timorese history, culture and national identity and yet the tedious, ethnocentric, Anglophone narrative about how foolish the Timorese were to officialise these languages persists.  In his witty and critical travelogue Beloved Land, Gordon Peake takes aim at well-meaning foreigners who don’t even trouble to learn the local language and would much rather talk to each other than to the people they are trying to help.

My study of the linguistic landscape in downtown Dili (Taylor-Leech, 2012) showed how English is increasingly visible in the commercial, urban landscape, if not yet in the official one. This process contributes to a kind of double diglossia which also reflects the growing social divide that has sprung up in the wake of the aid industry. There are already Portuguese-speaking elites, a hangover from the country’s days as a Portuguese colony but now there are also English-speaking elites with the linguistic capital to make careers in the aid industry, while those who lack the capital to break out of unemployment or low-paid jobs get little opportunity to progress.

I think aid workers need to show sensitivity to local language situations and be aware of how they can promote the hegemony of English to the detriment of local language(s) and culture. I’d go further and say that if aid workers are paid to do development aid work then that indeed is what they should do. If the outcomes of development aid projects are to outlast the lifetime of the (usually short-term) project, it seems to me doubly important that aid workers build lasting relationships and do so by endeavouring to understand the local linguaculture. Capacity-building, like teaching, is not a one-way street and should build on local skills, traditions and knowledge. How is that done effectively in a dominant foreign language? There are lots of irritations that flow from being an elite foreign worker in a poor country but they are minor compared to the humiliations that aid recipients suffer from high-handed “experts” who don’t speak their language.

When I taught English in Mozambique, Mozambicans would frequently ask me how I could help them obtain status symbols like blue jeans or luxury food items. To them people like me seemed impossibly rich, although I was not on a high salary. I would count informal English lessons as a similar sort of status symbol. And be wary that people are not befriending you for those sorts of reasons, which can lead to heartbreak and cynicism. I say get engaged in local culture and local ways of knowing. Let English take a back seat and a low profile, unless you are an English teacher but even or especially then, tread lightly and carefully though the local language ecology.

A shining example of this approach can be seen in the work of one-time Portuguese teacher and now Tetum-Portuguese interpreter and author João Paulo T. Esperança. The photo above was used as illustration in a Portuguese language course in Tetum; lessons were published weekly in the East Timorese newspaper Lia Foun (New Words). João is also the author of the Tetum version of the much loved children’s story Liurai Oan Ki’ik , known in English as The little Prince.
Taylor-Leech, Kerry (2012). Language choice as an index of identity: Linguistic landscape in Dili, Timor-Leste International Journal of Multilingualism, 9 (1), 15-34 DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2011.583654

Mother Language Day in East Timor

International Mother Language Day is celebrated annually to promote linguistic and cultural diversity. In East Timor, Mother Language Day 2011 provided the perfect opportunity to launch a new national education policy document promoting the use of children’s mother tongues in the classroom.

Let me begin with a thumbnail sketch of the language situation: The East Timorese Constitution of 2002 declares Portuguese and Tetum to be the co-official languages with Indonesian and English as working languages. The indigenous languages are declared national languages but they have no official status. The reasons for this decision lie in the colonial history of East Timor. It was a Portuguese colony for over 400 years and Indonesia occupied the territory in 1975 at the moment of decolonisation from Portugal. Hence, these two exogenous languages have well established roots in East Timor. A growing number of East Timorese also speak English, the language of tourism, trade, the United Nations and the aid industry, present in the country since the exit of the Indonesians in 1999. Tetum was originally a contact language which came to symbolise national identity during the Indonesian occupation, especially after the Indonesian colonisers banned the use of Portuguese. Beneath this layer of dominant languages adopted by the state lies a complex network of some 30 indigenous language varieties.

This is the broader linguistic context in which the new national education policy is embedded. Along with other international advisers from Australia and Europe, I was invited to provide advice on the formulation of the new policy.

Until now, East Timorese teachers have been expected to use Portuguese as the language of instruction along with Tetum as a pedagogic aide. Although Tetum is spoken widely as a first or second language, it is not known in all parts of the country. Moreover, few teachers are confident in Portuguese and it is mainly affluent, urban, middle class families that know this language. One consequence of this policy is that many children have been expected to learn in a language they do not understand or use, and they have not been achieving the desired literacy results. Grade repetition and school dropout are also alarmingly high. Literacy amongst East Timorese primary-age school children is so low that the Ministry of Education is now considering the use of local languages for teaching in pre-primary and primary schools to help children acquire the basic foundations for literacy development in their first language and to address some of the reasons for the high rate of school dropout.

The new policy direction is an exciting and brave initiative. Relatively few independent countries of the South have broken the norm of adopting the former colonial language as the medium of instruction or succeeded in breaking the vicious cycle of subtractive bilingualism and low educational achievement leading in turn to continued low literacy levels. The policy document sets out guidelines for using home languages for initial instruction with the gradual introduction of Tetum and Portuguese and the later addition of Indonesian and English while maintaining the home languages in the system for as long as possible.

In another posting here on Language on the Move, the blogger, Md. Ali Khan, passionately argues that in situations of extreme poverty and low human development it is a luxury for foreign advisors to talk of maintaining children’s first languages. I understand his scepticism about foreign advisers who promote idealistic notions in situations they themselves do not have to live, let alone educate their children. However, I believe advisers have much to offer provided they share their knowledge in an equitable, ethical way. There is increasing evidence showing that children whose first languages are well developed acquire literacy skills in both first and additional languages more easily. There is also evidence that children taught in the languages they know best develop their numeracy skills better than those who are not. This evidence is now coming from countries of the South as well as from the North. Literate and numerate citizens are better equipped to participate in the public life and the political affairs of their country. A literate population has better access to information about health, nutrition and maintaining wellbeing. When children learn in languages they know, they are more likely to remain in school and parents are often more willing to send their children to school. Strong multilingualism and literacy offer a way to break the cycle of underachievement and low education levels, offering a way out of poverty and a pathway towards active citizenship.

At the policy document launch I presented a seminar on the features and benefits of mother tongue-based multilingual education.  My main message was that by using and valorising children’s home languages and cultures in the classroom, teachers can promote social inclusion and contribute to peaceful nation building. If the policy document is passed by the Council of Ministers, the stage will be set for children to acquire early literacy in the languages of the home. East Timor took its first steps toward achieving mother tongue-based multilingual education on this historic Mother Language Day, 2011. I am proud to have played a small part in it.