Literacy kick-off

Last week we started with our 2 week literacy kick-off. We’re preparing the primers and readers that will make up the Kovol literacy program. It has been an incredibly exciting time that has been well attended by the Kovol community.

April and Sharon have been serving in PNG for over 20 years and have flown in to spend 2 weeks with us preparing our literacy materials. April and Sharon have been through the whole language learning process in the Madak language and have gone on to teach a literacy program and disciple a church. They have been involved in half a dozen literacy programs in other languages and have the experience to guide us through the creation of literacy materials.
We’re currently in the process of creating 4 primers and 4 readers that will slowly teach Kovol speakers all of the syllables that are used in their language (and a few extra Tok Pisin ones on top). We’ll have quite a bit of work to do to finish that off and develop a teacher’s manual to go alongside it. After completing that and getting everything printed we’ll be ready to take our first dozen students through the course.

How do you develop literacy materials for an unwritten language?
We’ve already done the linguistic analysis that has led us to pick an alphabet that would be suitable for the Kovol language. The next step is to feed into some software 20,000 words of natural Kovol speech. Our years of language learning have provided us with all that transcribed material. The software breaks the words used into syllables and spits out a list of our most frequent syllables.

Lesson 1 has us picking the 3 most common letters. For the Kovol language that was i, g and u. We pick keywords to teach those syllables: Gulum and Gimoolul. Lesson 1 then uses those words to illustrate, picking out the gi, i, gu and u sounds.
Then comes the tricky part we need to create a story that works in the Kovol language that works with just those 3 letters! It works out that “igu”, “he was” is a valid and common Kovol word. We did have to invent a name “Gigi” and our story was “Gigi igu”.
After an hour of practice recognizing those syllables, our students will be reading their first sentence 🙂

Then we pick 1 additional letter. Another keyword and another story or two. Slowly, ever so slowly our stories start to become more natural and “sweet”.
Creating the stories can be a real challenge. One significant complication is that even though lesson 1 teaches “gi” and “gu” it doesn’t teach syllable-final g. We can’t have any words ending in g until we hit the syllable-final g lesson. That has made it super challenging to get through the early stories because we couldn’t use most of the most common Kovol words, and for half the first primer we were super limited about how we could end sentences.

Another piece to the puzzle is that we can’t add too many new words too quickly. We are only allowed 6 new words per lesson for our stories. Capitalized versions of the same word count as new words towards that limit too! It has been a brain-stretching puzzle to figure out which characters to pick next. What letters will open things up and allow us to write better stories?
It has been common to wrack our brains for a short story we can use with limited words and syllables, only to put it into the software to be shown we used too many new words.

Slowly, slowly though we have been making progress. We now have two 30-page primers complete and two 6 page readers. Primer 3 and Reader 3 are well underway and we look set to finish Primer 4 and Reader 4 early next week before our consultants leave us.
All four of us Kovol missionaries on the ground here have been able to put some good time in with both Gerdine and Natalie contributing several stories.

My personal favourite is one I wrote myself. It’s so satisfying when the story comes together, so it’s not really surprising my favourite is one of my own. I managed to tell a story of someone going down to the river to wash and being bitten on the hand by a centipede. Upon returning home a lady gave him some food and he sat down and was able to relax. His peace of mind disappeared when a 2nd centipede bit him on the bottom. I was looking out for giggles when I read it the first time and was happy to see the Kovol guys happy and sniggering. It’s all told with just the allowable syllables for that point in the program.

Every day we’ve had 40+ Kovol people on hand to help us. They have been illustrating stories for us, checking our stories communicate, suggesting words to use, correcting spellings and rejoicing with each page completed. A highlight for them was a mock lesson where our consultants role-played being the teachers and we the students for our first literacy lesson.

We’re excited to see that there are Kovol guys who are attending every day. We told them clearly that since this was a 2 week-long effort they didn’t have to attend every day. Seeing people attending every day, there at 8 am sharp is encouraging. People are excited to learn to read. One of our older guys even asked us at the end of a workday if he could borrow a pencil and paper to take home so he could practice drawing. We had to refuse him sadly because that would set an expectation that this is something we do now and everyone would be asking for and expecting it. His request certainly made us take note though that this might be one of the guys who should go into the first literacy class in the near future.

That’s all I’ll write for now. I still have several full days of this to come and I need to make sure I stay rested. It’s a big exciting step forward though!