Preparing the 9-hole program

Creating a literacy program for a previously unwritten language is a huge task. Understanding the language and beginning to build a dictionary is a big undertaking. Once that is done, a literacy course can be created. Every syllable required to read in the language must be presented in the lesson. Flashcards and stories built using syllables already taught support the lessons.

Our literacy program ended up with 80+ lessons. Preparing the materials for those lessons has taken me a few months. Ready! Yes, let’s go!

Not just yet. What happens to your first graduates? When they leave the literacy course, having learnt to read and write the syllables they need, how will they practise those skills? What reading materials are available for them to dig into?
If there are no reading materials available for literacy graduates to read, they won’t be able to cement their new skill, but will instead forget it.

Thus, a task I’ve been working on is our post-literacy materials. I’m busy translating and checking reading material for a future library. I’m aiming to finish the 100-page “How the Jews lived” book before leaving for our home assignment. On top of the library books, though, our team is preparing a “9-hole” program.

The 9-hole program revolves around a bookmark with 7 progress levels. Each level has 9 reading or writing tasks.

Students will start at the snail level and move up through gecko, rat, wallaby, pig, cassowary and finally, eagle. Each number represents a task. When the student completes a task, the teacher takes a hole punch and punches out the task and the student levels up to the next task.
Holes 1-3 give the students a certain number of flashcards that they need to read correctly in 1 minute.
Holes 4-6 are writing tasks where students write in exercise books.
Holes 7-9 are reading tasks with comprehension questions.

Judging the difficulty level is a bit of guesswork at this stage. We don’t have any literate Kovol people to get an idea of the reading speed we are looking for. I had to set a timer for 1 minute and read from our Joseph translation in Kovol at a measured pace. I read 100 Kovol words per minute, and dividing that by 7, I’ve worked out the number of flashcards for flashcard tasks and the length of the stories for our reading tasks. Hopefully, later we won’t have to completely change everything because the difficulty was way off!

Now it’s just a case of preparing the materials. I’m back to writing stories of a particular length using restricted sets of syllables. We decided that the lower levels will focus on the most common Kovol syllables exclusively. The snail level only uses syllables taught in lessons 1-20 of the literacy course.

It makes for a brain-bending task to write stories when you can’t use the words you want to use! The idea behind it is that even students who struggle through the first course can start at the snail level and feel at home. They’ll be back to the material taught in the first lessons and can move forward at their own pace. It’s like a little reset for those who are feeling lost by the end of the first course. Faster students can level up and move on to harder tasks, but the struggling students can take their time in the snail level. They won’t have to remember how to read and write every single syllable, just a quarter of them.

Reading is like breathing to me. It is instinctive and natural. It’s hard to imagine illiteracy and so we’re being careful to err on the side of making it too easy.

The course requires 56 new short (up to 100-word) stories with comprehension questions, 21 sets of writing tasks, 21 sets of flashcards and a new teacher’s manual written in the Kovol language for future Kovol literacy teachers. Lots to be getting on with!
One major benefit of being part of a big mission is being able to steal good ideas. Other teams have been using a 9-hole program to great success. I chatted with Jack from the Wantakia team and they mentioned how they wished they had had their 9-hole program ready for their first literacy graduates. With Kovol literacy likely to start some time next year  we’re in a position to be able to do that.

On June 11, our family leaves Kovol for Goroka, and then on to the Netherlands for home assignment. It feels wrong that this week I’ve been in the office at the computer so much. It’s been a wet, miserable week, which means everyone is hiding in their houses by the fire. Nevertheless, it feels so weird to spend 3 days solid at my computer working on documents. It feels like I should be making the most of working alongside the Kovol people while I have the opportunity, but there are also just documents that need to be produced, and it takes time in the office.

Perhaps I need to resist my natural tendency to be as “efficient and productive” as possible. To me, that usually means ticking through the to-do list and not sitting by the fire with my Kovol friends asking how their yam harvest is going. There are only 3 full working weeks left. I do want to finish checking through the “How the Jews lived” library book, so that will be finished. Other than that, perhaps I should forget about “getting the work done” and spend my time just being with my Kovol friends instead? The documents can wait after all.