L is for Literacy

I [Lori] am studying Literacy this session at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics.  I needed an elective to fill out my semester and thought this would be the best one for me.  I was an elementary school teacher for over ten years and home-schooled my kids for almost seven years.  I thought this class would be fairly straight forward.  But literacy, I've learned, is much more than teaching a kid to read.

How is it different ?

Well, try to imagine living where no one in your community reads.  Your language is not even written down.  If there is a school, it is taught in the national language that you do not speak.

Is literacy recognizing letters?  Making the sounds?  Writing?  Comprehension?

Now imagine coming to a place like this where linguists are learning the language in hopes of translating the Bible so that people can hear and read God's word for the first time ever.  How do you choose what letters should be in an alphabet?  What should they look like?  Should tone be marked?  Should it be the same script as the national language to help transfer the skills to a second language some day?  What if this language uses different sounds than the national language?

How do you choose what lesson to teach first?  Do you need to teach that marks on the paper stand for words - words that will be the same every time they look at them?  Do they need to learn how to hold a pencil?  What method of teaching will work with this group?

How do you train teachers?  What sources of writing are there?  Do books need to be written in this language for new readers?

These are the kinds of things our professor, Dr. Pete Unseth, is teaching us.  He is amazing - one of the best teachers I have ever met.  He worked in Ethiopia until health issues brought him back to the US.  Ethiopia's loss is so many students' gain.  But he is still not well and needs our prayers...

Mock orthography conference, where we dressed in character and worked through selecting an alphabet for a hypothetical language group

Dinner at the Unseths' home.  Pete and our kids are using word magnets to explore language.

We are amazingly blessed with opportunities to learn and grow here!