Teaching Writing to Children in Indigenous Languages: Instructional Practices from Global Contexts 9781138485358, 9781351049672

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As the world cascades toward sameness in languages, this volume puts up a huge stop sign. With convincing historical accounts and a wide range of instructional practices, this book is an absolute must-read for any social scientist or linguist. Dedicated to language revitalization, the experts represented here stress the vitality of entry into the social and cognitive worlds of children from different cultures through a substantial dedication to writing and reading. Shirley Brice Heath Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature; Professor of Linguistics, Emerita Stanford University This exciting book focuses on an under-researched topic that fills a hole in the fields of both literacy education and language revitalization— teaching the writing of Indigenous languages to children. Centering on the role of literacy education in language revitalization, the chapters range the world, with chapters on languages with millions of speakers, to a handful from revitalizing writing systems that have a past history of literacy, to new orthographies developed for the first time for re-awakening languages. Importantly, attention is paid to debates over possible negatives of putting oral languages to paper, but shows the importance of writing for the survival of endangered languages, for many reasons including (re) valorization, revival of genres, increased functions of the language, and present-day communicative needs. While both written documentation and orthographic development have been topics of research and activism in language revitalization, this volume is a very welcome first, with its emphasis on the pedagogy of writing. Leanne Hinton Professor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley The UN has issued alarming declarations about the state of learning for disadvantaged linguistic minorities. UNICEF1 documentation shows how even increasing school participation rates does not necessarily achieve commensurate learning gains for ethnic minority and indigenous students, with the most disadvantaged students gaining the least benefit. The cause of this dispiriting conclusion is often because of language policies, especially language of instruction, tied to persisting negative attitudes toward children’s mother tongues. This volume is a magnificent contribution to this critical area. Addressing the role of writing in intergenerationally endangered Indigenous language communities, it 1. Wils, A., Bonnet, G., and Brossard, M., (2016), Education Worldwide, Investing More Equitably, pp. 58–63 in Best of UNICEF Research. UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, UNICEF, Florence Italy.

bridges the gap between language revitalization literature, research on writing pedagogy, and the global agenda of a more equal and fair education. The chapters are expertly written by individual authors and intelligently integrated by the editors, Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton, to highlight a range of instructional writing practices connected to social and economic outcomes for Indigenous populations in such diverse environments as Finland, Ghana, Hawaii, Mexico, Papua New Guinea. The authors ‘rise above’ narrowly conceived literacy debates and narrowly conceiving theories of literacy. Here we find complexity theory, biliteracy, and genre and critical approaches enriching functional understandings of pedagogy and literacy learning, tied to a strong focus on the cultural rights of communities whose lives are subjected to control and domination. Joseph Lo Bianco Professor of Language and Literacy Education Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne A very valuable collection. Although the continued life of threatened languages depends finally on the willingness of parents to speak them to their children, the support provided by schooling is critical, and only with literacy in indigenous languages can the school find a place for the language. This pioneering collection shows a number of significant examples of success. Bernard Spolsky Professor Emeritus, Bar-Ilan University

Teaching Writing to Children in Indigenous Languages

This volume brings together studies of instructional writing practices and the products of those practices from diverse Indigenous languages and cultures. By analyzing a rich diversity of contexts—Finland, Ghana, Hawai‘i, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, and more—through biliteracy, complexity, and genre theories, this book explores and demonstrates critical components of writing pedagogy and development. Because the volume focuses on Indigenous languages, it questions center-margin perspectives on schooling and national language ideologies, which often limit the number of Indigenous languages taught, the domains of study, and the age groups included. Ari Sherris is an Associate Professor of Bilingual Education at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA. Joy Kreeft Peyton is a former Vice President and currently Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC, USA.

Routledge Research in Education

This series aims to present the latest research from right across the field of education. It is not confined to any particular area or school of thought and seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories and issues from around the world. Recent titles in the series include: The Phenomenological Heart of Teaching and Learning Theory, Research, and Practice in Higher Education Katherine H. Greenberg, Brian K. Sohn, Neil B. Greenberg, Howard R. Pollio, Sandra P. Thomas, and John T. Smith Performative Approaches in Arts Education Artful Teaching, Learning, and Research Edited by Anna-Lena Østern Kristian and Nødtvedt Knudsen Rethinking Schools and Renewing Energy for Learning Research, Principles and Practice Kris Van den Branden Paradigm Shift in Education Towards the Third Wave of Effectiveness Yin Cheong Cheng Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning The Experiences of Minoritised Groups Emily Dawson Teaching Writing to Children in Indigenous Languages Instructional Practices from Global Contexts Edited by Ari Sherris & Joy Kreeft Peyton For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Education/book-series/SE0393

Teaching Writing to Children in Indigenous Languages Instructional Practices from Global Contexts Edited by Ari Sherris & Joy Kreeft Peyton

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Ari Sherris & Joy Kreeft Peyton to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-48535-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-04967-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For the children, for language revitalization, and for the Indigenous struggle for self-determination

Contents

For the children, for language revitalization, and for the Indigenous struggle for self-determination: Foreword

xi

NANCY H. HORNBERGER

Acknowledgments 1 Teaching Writing to Children in Indigenous Languages: Introduction

xv

1

ARI SHERRIS AND JOY KREEFT PEYTON

2 Early and Emergent Literacy Practices as a Foundation for Hawaiian Language Medium Education

25

CANDACE KALEIMAMOOWAHINEKAPU GALLA AND WILLIAM H. “PILA” WILSON

3 Early Writing in Torwali in Pakistan

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ZUBAIR TORWALI

4 Early Childhood Safaliba Literacy in Ghana

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ARI SHERRIS

5 Emergent Writing in Notsi in Papua New Guinea

89

GERTRUDE NICHOLAS

6 Emergent Writing in Numanggang in Papua New Guinea

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SAMUEL SALENG AND GERTRUDE NICHOLAS

7 Teaching Task-Based Writing in Zapotec in Oaxaca, Mexico KATHERINE J. RIESTENBERG AND RAQUEL EUFEMIA CRUZ MANZANO

126

x

Contents

8 Cherokee Writing in an Elementary Immersion School

143

LIZETTE PETER, TRACY HIRATA-EDDS, AND RYAN WAHDE MACKEY

9 Writing Instruction in Xitsonga in South Africa

161

TINTSWALO V. MANYIKE AND NKIDI PHATUDI

10 Early Writing in Nungon in Papua New Guinea

185

HANNAH SARVASY AND ENI ÖGATE

11 Mother Tongue Instruction and Biliteracy Development in P’urhepecha in Central Mexico

202

KATE BELLAMY AND CYNTHIA GROFF

12 Ngäbere: An Orthography of Language Revitalization in Western Panama

218

GINÉS ALBERTO SÁNCHEZ ARIAS, MANOLO MIRANDA (TIDO BANGAMA), AND MARY JILL BRODY

13 The Global in the Local: Young Multilingual Language Learners Write in North Sámi (Finland, Norway, Sweden)

235

KIRK P.H. SULLIVAN, KRISTINA BELANCIC, EVA LINDGREN, HANNA OUTAKOSKI, AND MIKAEL VINKA

14 Re-Centering Pedagogy on Oral Traditions: Examples From Southwest Indigenous Languages

254

CHRISTINE P. SIMS

15 What Matters for Indigenous Language Writing

269

KENDALL A. KING

List of Contributors Index

283 290

For the children, for language revitalization, and for the Indigenous struggle for self-determination Foreword Nancy H. Hornberger We read in this volume about teaching writing to children in Indigenous languages, which are generally not written or used in schools. We observe orthography development and instructional writing practices in diverse Indigenous contexts around the world, with a focus on the teaching of children at early childhood and primary education levels. We look closely at written products of young writers of North Sámi in Scandinavia; P’urhepecha and Zapotec in Mexico; Xitsonga in South Africa; Hawaiian and Cherokee in the United States; Torwali in Pakistan; Safaliba in Ghana; Notsi, Numanggang, and Nungon in Papua New Guinea; and Ngäbere in Panama. The authors write from positions of engagement with the peoples and the Indigenous writing practices they describe; they draw on a rich conceptual framework, including biliteracy theory, complexity theory, critical theory, and genre theory, to interpret and analyze the Indigenous writing practices and products they discuss, as they consider such features as genre, style, morphology, orthography, and translanguaging. Joshua Fishman (1982), longtime champion of what he affectionately called “all those funny little languages” out there, famously noted that “problems in the socio-educational legitimization of languages/varieties hitherto unrecognized for formal educational purposes” regularly attend introduction of these “marked languages” into education (pp. 4–6). The Indigenous languages described here encounter ideological and practical challenges, in the form of lack of prepared teachers, lack of materials, lack of a writing system, and lack of status, that generations of vernacular languages newly introduced into educational contexts across the centuries—including English at one time—have encountered. As volume editors Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton tell us, teaching writing to children in Indigenous languages is compelling in light of the relatively little attention that has been paid to it, the accelerating pace of Indigenous language endangerment (a third of the world’s languages), and an ever-narrowing range of languages spoken by the peoples of the world (a mere 23 languages spoken by half the world’s population). As the editors describe in the Introduction, scholars have

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focused recently on characterizing the vitality, loss, or reawakening of languages. For example, UNESCO’s Language Vitality and Endangerment Report (UNESCO, 2003) and the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale or EGIDS (Lewis & Simons, 2010), based on Fishman’s (1991) GIDS, rank languages on features such as intergenerational language transmission, numbers and proportions of speakers, media and materials of use, governmental and community attitudes, official or national recognition. We see, in the chapters in this volume, the ways in which the efforts described demonstrate capacity development of language proficiency and use, creation of opportunities for naturalistic language use, and the creation of desire or investment in learning the language (COD; Lo Bianco & Peyton, 2013). These factors are key to the teaching and learning of writing in these languages, and the evocation of these conditions harks back to Cooper’s (1989) formulation of language acquisition planning as creating and improving opportunity and incentive to learn. It is in the nature of language and human existence that both are in constant evolution and contact with other ways of speaking and being; and the very acceleration of mobility we are seeing in the 21st century among peoples and their languages has brought both popular and scholarly recognition that communication is best understood not in terms of bounded languages per se but rather in fluid communicative repertoires, including not just languages but the whole range of semiotic resources including oral, gestural, and digital forms of communication, for example (Blommaert, 2010; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). In this vein, Christine Sims’ commentary provides a poignant reminder that literacy development in Indigenous languages is not always the first and foremost concern; recent Pueblo language initiatives re-center oral traditions as their pedagogical foundation. For the Pueblo, cultural literacy comes as younger generations learn cultural practices and place-based local ecologies through, for example, intergenerational mentoring. Why, then, bother saving dying Indigenous languages or trying to write them? For me, the answer is simple. It is important to do so for the people who speak and write them. This is all the more true since speakers and writers of Indigenous languages are usually the people whose voices and lives have mattered little to the world of power, and yet who so often are and have been the caring custodians of our globe, leaving a small footprint across countless generations. From the case of the one lone remaining speaker whose very existence encapsulates a whole way of being to the endangered languages still spoken by thousands, it is, as this volume’s editors tell us, a loss to humanity when one of these languages goes to sleep. Not only do speakers and writers lose a repertoire of instrumental, symbolic, conceptual, and identity communicative functions, but there are knowledges and ways of being whose expression is impoverished by the loss; for example, knowledge about folklore, homeopathic uses of

Foreword

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plants, ecological understandings of flora and fauna, and cultural histories and traditions (Introduction, this volume). Some years ago, reflecting on a collection of invited essays on Indigenous writing in the Americas, I depicted Indigenous literacies as language planning from the bottom up, as door of opportunity for the marginalized, and as cultural expression and enrichment (Hornberger, 1996, pp.  337–366), a multilayered perspective I see reflected here as well. A decade later, exploring the question of whether schools can save Indigenous languages, several invited authors and I asked, among other questions: Is the Indigenous language (IL) taught to all students or only to Indigenous students (and if the latter, how are they identified or defined)? What is the role of writing in IL instruction? And what of the visual, audio, spatial, artistic, electronic, and other modes? Is the IL taught as many varieties or only one? Who are the teachers? Are they speakers of IL? Literate in IL? How were they trained—where, by whom, in what language? Are teachers Indigenous-minded or ‘West-minded’? Is the Indigenous curricular content transformative—or additive—in relation to the official curriculum? And how so? (Hornberger, 2008, pp. 2–3). Among the memorable answers offered by authors in the volume were Teresa McCarty’s stirring clarity that schools are necessary but not sufficient to the endeavor (McCarty, 2008, p. 175) and Leena Huss’ eloquent reflection that Indigenous language revitalization is “a struggle—sometimes onerous and frustrating, often healing and empowering—but still a struggle, without an end in sight” (Huss, 2008, p. 134). These questions and answers are echoed in the present volume, highlighting how much work is ongoing and yet to be done. I am grateful to the editors and the authors for bringing to light the efforts described here, and I join with Kendall King’s final words of encouragement about the value of teaching writing in Indigenous languages to children—for the sake of the children, for language revitalization, and for the Indigenous struggle for self-determination. Nancy H. Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania

References Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cocq, C., & Sullivan, C. (Eds.) (2019). Perspectives on Indigenous writing and literacies. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Publishers. Cooper, R. L. (1989). Language planning and social change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, J. A. (1982). Sociolinguistic foundations of bilingual education. The Bilingual Review/ La revista bilingüe, 9(1), 1–35. Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

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Hornberger, N. H. (Ed.) (1996). Indigenous literacies in the Americas: Language planning from the bottom up. Berlin: Mouton. Hornberger, N. H. (Ed.) (2008). Can schools save Indigenous languages? Policy and practice on four continents. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Huss, L. (2008). Revitalization through Indigenous education: A forlorn hope? In N. H. Hornberger (Ed.), Can schools save Indigenous languages? Policy and practice on four continents (pp. 125–135). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Lewis, M.P., & Simons, G.F. (2010). Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, 2, 103–120. Lo Bianco, J., & Peyton, J.K. (2013, Winter). Vitality of heritage languages in the United States. Heritage Language Journal, 10(3), i–viii. Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (Eds.). (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages (Vol. BEB 62). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. McCarty, T. L. (2008). Schools as strategic tools for Indigenous language revitalization: Lessons from Native America. In N. H. Hornberger (Ed.), Can schools save Indigenous languages? Policy and practice on four continents (pp. 161– 179). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. UNESCO. (2003). Language vitality and endangerment. UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages.

Acknowledgments

Our deepest gratitude goes to the children who wrote in their Indigenous languages and to the teachers who planned and enacted Indigenous writing in their classrooms. Their willingness to share what they do and how they do it with the collaborating authors in this volume—some Indigenous, some allies—brings situated, local realities to a wider audience. We are also very appreciative of the authors who went into the field, kept field notes, photographed, planned, and documented how writing is taught. They drafted and re-drafted their chapters, addressing comments from the review process and re-writing and enriching their descriptions and analyses with care, tenacity, and dedication. As editors, we were fortunate to bring together such a talented group of authors from whom we have learned a great deal. We are thankful for the moving contributions of Nancy H. Hornberger and Kendall A. King; their words resonate with their scholarship, their values, and their dedication to Indigenous peoples, a dedication that speaks immeasurably to our humanity. Finally, we give many thanks to the thoughtful, optimistic, and very capable Matthew Friberg, research monographs editor at Routledge and Katherine Tsamparlis, an efficient editorial assistant. Their help made our book much better. Children’s writings are gifts. Without question, those gifts support a better understanding of Indigenous language preservation, revitalization, and wellness as well as individual, community, and cultural change and transformation, due in no small part to the hard work of many hands.

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Teaching Writing to Children in Indigenous Languages Introduction Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton

Overview Most of what we know about teaching writing to children is from research on high-status world languages with unquestioned vitality. This large and expanding body of research provides a center, of sorts, that garners power in the research on language, education, and literacy. This book represents a departure from that center, providing a narrative that is more expansive and complex. The volume brings together studies of instructional writing practices and the products of those practices from diverse Indigenous languages and cultures. The rich diversity of contexts (Finland, Ghana, Hawai‘i, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States) and diverse theoretical positions on writing, which include biliteracy theory, complexity theory, critical theory, and genre theory (see work by Freire, 1970; Hornberger & SkiltonSylvester, 2000; Ivanič, 2004; Kress, 1997; Larsen-Freeman, 2015; LarsenFreeman & Cameron, 2008; Vygotsky, 1978), expand our knowledge of writing pedagogy and development (for studies on writing pedagogy and development, see Kress, 1997; Martin & Rose, 2008; Tolchinsky, 2006). Because the volume focuses on Indigenous languages, it questions geopolitical center-margin perspectives on schooling as well as most standard national language ideologies, which often limit the number of Indigenous languages taught, the content and skills taught in those languages, and the age groups included in instruction in those languages. Such constraints contribute to lowering the status and power of some languages, to their endangerment. Unfortunately, most of the world’s living languages most likely face a bleak future. Indeed, a growing consensus among linguists is that by the end of the 21st century, 50–90% of the languages spoken today will disappear (Harrison, 2007; Krauss, 1992; Nettle & Romaine, 2000; Romaine, 2013; Sallabank, 2012). The Ethnologue reports that approximately one-third of the 7,097 reported living languages are endangered, often with scarcely 1,000 reported first-language speakers. Moreover, of

2 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton the 7,097 known first languages in the world, half of the world’s population of 7.6 billion people speak only 23 of those languages (listed in the Appendix) (Simons & Fennig, 2018; www.worldometers.info). These figures are staggering. However, perhaps even more staggering is the view taken in normative political theory, in which linguistic diversity is framed as a problem and its disappearance integral to the smooth workings of the state and the communicative needs of its polity (May, 2015; Weinstock, 2014). This is often in blatant disregard of the many instrumental and symbolic functions that language diversity performs and the significant roles that languages play in the enactments of identity, regardless of the size or status of the language (Blommaert, 2010). It is, perhaps, even more confounding from the point of view of what humanity loses when a language goes to sleep: rich folklore; homeopathic uses for plants; knowledge of plant life, fish, and animals; cultural history and traditions; and linguistic knowledge, often of the fragile and unique aspects of conceptual metaphor and idiom (Piirainen & Sherris, 2015).

Factors Influencing the Status and Vitality of Indigenous Languages A critical feature of the discussion of any language in a specific context is its vitality, which is demonstrated by the extent that the language is used as a means of communication in various social contexts for specific purposes (Summer Institute of Linguistics, n.d.), and which is influenced by a variety of factors. A number of approaches are used to determine the vitality of a language, which are relevant to the language revitalization initiatives described in this volume. Here we summarize three approaches and then show how the vitality measures can be seen in action in the initiatives described. Three Approaches to Examining Language Endangerment and Vitality UNESCO Language Vitality and Endangerment Report During the years 2001–2003, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) pulled together groups of language experts to consider patterns of language endangerment and define factors that affect it. In 2013, a group of linguists outlined the following nine factors, in order to “assist language communities, linguists, educators, and administrators (including local and national governments and international organizations) in finding ways to enhance the vitality of threatened languages” (UNESCO, 2003). Each of these factors ranks the vitality of languages along a scale of 5–0—Safe (5) to Extinct (0) (and

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other descriptors, such as Dynamic to Inactive)—based on specific features of the language and its use. 1. Intergenerational language transmission: To what extent and in what ways is the language being transmitted from one generation to the next? 2. Absolute number of speakers: What is the size of the population that speaks the language? 3. Proportion of speakers within the total population: What percentage of the population of the country speaks the language? 4. Trends in existing language domains: When, where, and with whom is the language used, and what topics do speakers address when using the language? 5. Response to new domains and media: To what extent is the language used in new domains for communication (in education and employment; in the media—television, radio, the Internet)? 6. Materials for language education and literacy: Does the language have an orthography? To what extent is the language used for reading and writing and in school? What materials are available? 7. Governmental and institutional language attitudes and policies, including official status and use: What is the status of the language? What are institutional, regional, and national attitudes toward and policies about the languages that are used? Is the language officially recognized at all? 8. Community members’ attitudes toward their own language: How do community members view the language? As an important part of their lives and identity or as a hindrance to personal and community development and global engagement? 9. Amount and quality of documentation: To what extent is the language documented and are texts in the language available—in extensive written texts, audio and video recordings, and in comprehensive grammars and dictionaries? Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) A second approach, the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS; Lewis & Simons, 2010; see discussion in The Ethnologue [Simons & Fennig, 2018]), uses a similar but somewhat different system to determine the status of a language (its level of development or endangerment), by two measures. The first measure of overall development versus endangerment of the language defines 13 levels of endangerment from the lowest level—International, 0, The language is widely used between nations in trade, knowledge exchange, and international policy—to the highest level—Extinct, 10, The language is no longer used

4 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton and no one retains a sense of ethnic identity associated with the language. (Some levels are divided into two components, a and b, for a total of 13. While the UNESCO scale goes from 5, strongest vitality, to 0, extinct, the EGIDS scale goes from 0, lowest level of endangerment, to 10, extinct.) Additional “labels for other special situations” are particularly relevant to the languages described in this volume: •

•

•

Dispersed: The language is fully developed in its home country, so that the community of language users in a different country has access to a standardized form and literature, but these are not promoted in the country in focus via institutionally supported education. Reawakening: The ethnic community associated with a dormant language is working to establish more uses and more users for the language, with the results that new L2 speakers (those who speak the language as a second language) are emerging. Second language only: The language was originally vehicular, but it is not the heritage language of an ethnic community and it no longer has enough users to have significant vehicular function.

The second measure of the EGIDS is the level of Official Recognition of the language within the country(ies) in which it is spoken. Official Recognition ranges, on 10 levels, from Statutory National Language (the language is used to conduct the business of the national government and is mandated by law. It is also the language of national identity for the citizens of the country; e.g., Spanish in Spain, or English in the United States) to Language of Recognized Nationality (a law names the ethnic group that uses the language and recognizes their right to use it and develop their identity through using it). The Ethnologue (which bases its language vitality reports on the EGIDS) also reports the following factors regarding language vitality/ endangerment, which are very similar to the factors used by UNESCO: • • • • • • • • • •

The speaker population The ethnic population; the number of those who connect their ethnic identity with the language (whether or not they speak the language) The stability of and trends in that population size Residency and migration patterns of speakers The use of second languages The use of the language by others as a second language Language attitudes within the community The age range of the speakers The domains of use of the language Official recognition of languages within the nation or region

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Means of transmission (whether children are learning the language at home or being taught the language in schools) Non-linguistic factors such as economic opportunity or the lack thereof

Capacity, Opportunity, Desire A third framework used to measure the vitality of a language in a specific context, developed by Francois Grin (1990, 2003; Grin & Vaillancourt, 1998) and elaborated by Joseph Lo Bianco (2008a, 2008b), synthesizes and extends previous ways of understanding and analyzing the prospects for language shift and maintenance (Ferguson, 1959; Fishman, 1967; Giles, 1977; Giles, Bourhis, & Taylor, 1977; Giles & Johnson, 1987), including Joshua Fishman’s Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS; Fishman, 1991, 2001), which served as the basis for the EGIDS, described previously. The framework specifies that three conditions are necessary for language vitality and revitalization—Capacity Development, Opportunity Creation, and Desire (COD)—and was developed as a tool to help communities and governments support regional and minority languages and to promote policy development at the national level related to language revitalization and use. (See Lo Bianco & Peyton, 2013, for discussion of how this framework can be applied to “heritage” languages spoken in the United States.) •

•

•

Capacity development: Development of personal language proficiency and language use, through both formal teaching and informal transmission of the language Opportunity creation: Development of and access to domains in which use of the language is natural, welcome, and expected. When the language in question is not the majority or privileged language of the country, and the desire is to maintain and increase its vitality, COD identifies a critical need to widen, deepen, and make appropriate opportunities for naturalistic use of the language. Desire: Creation of investment in learning the language, because proficiency in it brings certain rewards (which might include increased job possibilities, increased family and community connections, ability to maintain and transmit traditions)

While the first two approaches (UNESCO and EGIDS) described here focus primarily on factors pointing to language endangerment, the COD model focuses on what it will take to maintain or build language vitality. A central idea in the model is to distinguish between conditions that are necessary to foster language use in language revival contexts

6 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton and those that are sufficient to produce increased language use. The model does not aim to document endangerment or rates of loss of languages, but rather to point out that to succeed, language revival efforts must invest simultaneously in all three components: learning and teaching the language concerned (capacity development), creating real and active circumstances and domains for genuine use of the language (opportunity creation), and stimulating individual and collective motivation to actively use the language (desire enhancement). While many language revival efforts concentrate their energies on teaching and learning the language or on creating legislative decisions and policies regarding the language, the COD model is based on the clear understanding that all three elements must be co-present in any language revival activity. Dynamics That Influence the Vitality of the Languages Described in This Volume It is interesting to see how the dynamics described in the three approaches to determining language vitality and endangerment play out in the language initiatives described in the chapters in this volume. Here we give a few examples. UNESCO Language Vitality and Endangerment Report The importance of the nine factors listed in the UNESCO language vitality and endangerment report are clearly present throughout the discussions. For example, Factor 1, the number of speakers of the language, and Factor 2, their size within the total population, in many cases has driven the initiatives undertaken. For example, in the Cherokee Nation in 2003, before the language revitalization initiatives were undertaken, 10% of the small Cherokee population were fluent Cherokee speakers and 2% wrote the Cherokee syllabary. In Ghana, where many different languages are spoken and only a few are used at the national level and in schools, language advocates have undertaken specific initiatives to make their language visible and to build proficiency in it. Attention paid to Factor 5, response to new domains and media, can be seen in the efforts to revitalize and build use of the Sámi language in the Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, and Sweden). In schools offering Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish Sámi as a language of instruction and participating in the Literacy in Sápmi (the regions where they live) project, young people had laptops available, set up in temporary writing studios. In Norway, a North Sámi keyboard, which is well known and widely used in the country, is used by students to write about topics that are of interest to them and that also have global significance, including sports and causes of weather change.

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Factor 6, existence of materials in the language for education and literacy, is a critical component of all of the chapters. For example, in primary schools in San Isidro and Uringuitiro, Mexico, children read and write in P’urhepecha, and there is a desire among educators and language advocates that they will continue reading and writing the language throughout secondary school. This vision is based on research in the Mexican context that has demonstrated that pupils who receive literacy instruction in their mother tongue or their strongest language, whether an Indigenous language or Spanish, will achieve superior writing skills in both languages. In order to carry out this vision, many different materials for use in instruction needed to be, and have been, developed. Macuiltianguis Zapotec, in Mexico, is another language in which energy and resources have been devoted to creating materials for using and learning the language and to creating a culture of literature and writing, including an alphabet and word list, a Bingo game, a domino game, a booklet of songs and stories, a book on counting and measurement, and a bilingual book in Spanish and Zapotec on the community’s history and traditional knowledge. The authors point out that there is a difference between the existence of a standardized orthography and specific materials and a culture of literature and writing. For a culture of writing to emerge, new spaces must be opened, in which writing has sociocultural and communicative functions. Materials in Numanggang, Papua New Guinea, started being available in the late 1970s, with the New Testament, and now include a song book and a liturgical book for use in church services. Resources for literacy instruction included a transfer primer that helps Numanggang adults and children transfer their reading and writing skills in Melanesian Pidgin or English into Numanggang, alphabet books, several locally authored and illustrated children’s listening stories, phonics storybooks, and a one year vernacular Prep-level school curriculum. The work on developing a writing system for the Ngäbere language in Panama raises an important question in this regard: Whose writing system will be used? Latin alphabet-based writing systems have been developed for many Indigenous languages in Panama, and adopted by the Ministry of Education for instruction in many schools, with the desire that they will help Indigenous children ease into a future of being bilingual and able to participate fully in the society at large. However, the individual who developed the Ngäbere orthography, and those who now support its use, believe that it gives fresh expression to the unique sounds of the language and, as a result, is more precise and expressive for written expression than the Latin alphabet. Christine Sims’ chapter on Native American languages raises additional questions about the importance of written materials in the language: Are they needed at all for language preservation and for individuals using and learning the language? Or is writing the language part of a formal

8 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton education system that is not connected to and diminishes Indigenous understandings and practices? What are the role and power of oral language use rather than writing? Factor 7, governmental and institutional language attitudes and policies, has a tremendous impact on the status of the language in the community overall and in schools. For example, the Safaliba language in Ghana is one of 73 Indigenous languages, of which 9 are taught in school1. Safaliba is not one of them. Therefore, curriculum development, instructional approaches and materials, and teacher training are not done in Safaliba and 63 other Indigenous languages spoken in the country. Revitalization of the language, and development of these resources in it, is being carried out by language advocates. We can see the interplay between Factor 7 and Factor 8, community members’ attitudes toward their own language, in the revitalization of the Sami language in the Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden). Language policies in place in the four countries where Sami is spoken, which were not beneficial for the people and their languages, emboldened language advocates to institute new policies and actions in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, which included establishment of a Sami university college in Northern Norway, where Sami language teachers are trained and students can receive a college education, with North Sámi as the language of instruction. The cornerstone of this growth has been activism by the communities where Sami is spoken and a strong infrastructure that they manage, with language centers that undertake language planning, training, and consultation. Factor 9, amount and quality of documentation of the language, is being taken seriously by developers of the writing system for the Ngäbere language in Western Panama. Three books that they have developed contain all of the letters and syllabic combinations in the language, with short sentences about aspects of children’s lives; words that were first constructed by the developers and were fundamental to the creation of the orthography; short stories about fauna, people, and the landscape, including allegories and travel curiosities; legends about past heroes, place names, and events from oral history; and a workbook that organizes vocabulary words according to their similar meanings, prefixes, and suffixes. Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) We see the dynamic of Reawakening in different ways in several languages. For example, in Hawai‘i, due to the efforts of educators, families, and Native language speakers, Hawaiian Language Medium Education (HLME) has become an academic option for families, in spite of previous challenges that proscribed Hawaiian from being used as the language of education. We see here a highly endangered language, which has been  reawakened

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from its dormant state to become a language that is now the first language of babies at home, that is taught throughout the educational experience, from infant and toddler programs through graduate school education (from cradle to career), and has received national and international recognition as a language in use in the country. Instruction in schools is based on a philosophy of Hawaiian language use and education, a curriculum, materials for use in classes, and engaged teachers and parents. Reawakening has occurred in a different way with Numanggang, spoken in Papua New Guinea. The Numanggang were traditionally a non-literate, oral culture, and the people today continue to live in their patrilineal family groups as subsistence farmers, with daily activities that include tending coffee fields for income and gardening for food. Learning in Numanggang culture occurs primarily around a fireplace, in the garden, in the bush, or beside the river, and cultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes are passed on orally. Thus, while the language is used and passed on orally, reading and writing, now being done in some schools, is a relatively recent development, representing a shift in approach and uses of the language (as well as users of it, young children). We see dynamics related to the second measure of the EGIDS, level of Official Recognition of the language within the country in which it is spoken, in Notsi, spoken in parts of Papua New Guinea. While Notsi is recognized within the country as a spoken language, in 2013, educational language policy changed in favor of English instruction beginning in the first year of school (E-Prep). However, it was found that Notsi children, like children from other language groups and regions of Papua New Guinea, were not learning to write meaningful texts in any language by the time they reached Grade 3. This prompted the Notsi community to take another look at the value of early education in the vernacular language. Discussions with Notsi teachers and parents indicated that use of Notsi in classroom instruction would revitalize the language; facilitate children’s learning of initial literacy skills, since they learned them in the language they spoke; and improve children’s comprehension of English. The National Department of Education now supports the use of the vernacular language in school (in this case Notsi), if the community desires it and there is an approved orthography in the language. Capacity, Opportunity, Desire A strong focus on capacity building is described in every chapter— development of an orthography so that the language can be read and written and creation of educational programs, identification of teachers who speak the language, selection of curriculum, and instructional approaches used. Along with capacity building, we see clear efforts to build Desire to read and write the language. For example, as oral language use of

10 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton Cherokee waned due to government policies promoting assimilation to U.S. culture and schools that focus on English language learning, literacy in the Cherokee syllabary became a skill that only a few people possessed. However, a vibrant language and cultural revitalization movement among Cherokee Nation citizens in northeastern Oklahoma has spawned two new generations of speakers, readers, and writers of Cherokee: young adults, who have reclaimed their linguistic heritage and made the Cherokee language a priority for themselves and their families. For these contemporary speakers, writing in syllabary is integral to the larger mission of Cherokee language revitalization, and children, teenagers, parents, and teachers are fully engaged in it. Such efforts have mixed results in some cases. For example, Nungon language advocates (primarily elementary school teachers) in Papua New Guinea face a number of challenges in building Desire to learn and read and write in Nungon. First, there is a limited need for adult members of the Nungon-speaking community to read and write it. For most adult speakers who still reside on their ancestral lands, life is consumed with farming, home construction and repair, hunting, and foraging, and early literacy with children is being developed in a society in which literacy plays a minimal role. Second, attitudes toward the Nungon language are mixed, and for some, use of the language means that they lag behind others in the community, who speak Tok Pisin or English. Some community members believe that the Nungon language is doomed to extinction as a natural result of progress, with everyone in the region eventually switching to Tok Pisin or English. Third, every village has a distinct Nungon dialect, and it is a challenge to decide on the dialect(s) to teach in school. Finally, it is challenge for children to get to school at all, due to the need to walk through rough terrain that often is flooded, malnutrition, and lack of parental support for schooling and homework (often due to electricity shortages and the need to do chores at home). Strong capacity building efforts are underway, but building Desire is a significant challenge. Some of the chapters provide strong recommendations for building both Opportunity and Desire where they have previously been limited. For example, it is suggested that language revitalization efforts focused on the Safaliba language in Ghana might move away from rote learning, which is characteristic of Ghanaian government schooling, and focus on curriculum development that includes drumming, mud construction, wall design, weaving, and wood carving, to create opportunities to use the language while engaged in Safaliba practices that are relevant to the community. Efforts to revitalize Cherokee include Capacity Building, Opportunity Creation, and Desire. Initiatives to build its visibility; document its components; develop language learning materials in it; and provide multiple opportunities to speak, read, and write it have surged. The Cherokee Language Program employs linguistic “treasures”—men and women

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who have known the language since childhood and, as “master” speakers, readers, and writers of the language, contribute to revitalization efforts, including development of Cherokee linguistics and translation services for teachers and researchers. As many as 10,000 children, adolescents, and adults are learning Cherokee via courses offered throughout the 14-county jurisdictional region and internationally—including mandatory classes for all 8,000 Cherokee Nation employees—as well as online classes for learners anywhere in the world; a master-apprentice program; high school and college courses throughout Oklahoma; elementary school immersion classes; and self-study through tribally offered books and the online Cherokee Learning Center. The Cherokee Nation has partnered with Northeastern State University (NSU) to establish a Cherokee Education bachelor’s degree training teachers, teacher aides, and linguists. Syllabary is used throughout the town and environs of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the headquarters of Cherokee Nation—in street signs, post offices, banks, and businesses—as well as in the media, including a dedicated column in the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, radio broadcasts, public artworks, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter. Syllabary is available in digital technologies, and thousands of new terms have been invented by master Cherokee translators. These efforts, over nearly two decades, have resulted in a significant number of individuals who can speak Cherokee at Intermediate and Advanced levels, who have graduated from immersion schools, the Cherokee Master/Apprentice program, employee and community classes, online language courses, NSU’s Cherokee Language program, and some who have obtained State of Oklahoma teaching licenses. Adults in their 20s and 30s, who were deprived of the opportunity to acquire Cherokee as their primary language, have become staunch supporters of quality language learning programs for learners of all ages. They often have their children in the immersion school, use the language for artistic expression and in social media, and assume active revitalization roles as teachers, software developers, language program managers, curriculum supervisors and specialists, and technology and cultural community outreach specialists. For them, knowledge of the language is a form of cultural capital that strengthens their identities as contemporary Cherokees.

Efforts to Reverse Language Endangerment As can be seen throughout this volume, despite normative political theory, efforts to reverse the trends described earlier are underway worldwide. International, country-based, state-based, community-based, and activist-led initiatives are seeking to sustain the status and vitality of languages that are spoken and revitalize languages that are used in limited ways and whose future is threatened. Initiatives beyond those described here include the Rama Language Project in Nicaragua, initially funded by the U.S. National Science

12 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton Foundation during the turbulent U.S.-financed Contra War, has been underway for over 30 years and includes strong individual community activism (Grinevald & Pivot, 2013). The Arctic Indigenous Language Vitality Initiative includes 50 or so Indigenous languages and is a multinational project with community activists working to strengthen local ties to schooling and to the Artic Council of Indigenous peoples, as well as to increase constructive nation-state participation, a sometimes difficult proposition (Grenoble, 2015). Among these efforts are the establishment of schools and curricula for children, where the medium of instruction is an Indigenous language. These include Salish language revitalization in Montana, where teachers incorporate more interactive learning (Riestenberg & Sherris, 2018; Sherris, Pete, Thompson, & Haynes, 2013), the use of new technologies to revitalize the pedagogy of the Maori language in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Ka’ai, Moorfield, & Laoar, 2013), and nomadic schools for the children of Evenk-speaking reindeer herders in Siberia, where computers where introduced with much trepidation of adults (Lavrillier, 2013). While the focus of most research on the intersection of revitalization and pedagogy is on curriculum development or classroom practice, this volume is more specific in its focus; it brings together studies of instructional writing practices and the products of those practices.

Overview of the Book The chapters in this book describe efforts to revitalize Indigenous languages around the world and instructional practices used to develop children’s writing in those languages, with the theoretical and philosophical bases for the approaches and recommendations for future directions that the specific effort might take. As is true of any anthology of endangered languages, constraints of space limit the number of languages that can be discussed. While some readers may believe that Papua New Guinea is overrepresented, with three chapters, it is considered among the most linguistically diverse geographic zones in the world (Gorenflo, Romaine, Mittermeier, & Walker-Painemilla, 2012). The topic of children’s writing and teachers’ instructional writing practices remains an under-researched topic due to funding constraints and the priorities of nation-states, which focus on national languages and languages of wider communication. Each chapter consists of the following sections to contribute to a tight weave of converging and diverging theories and practices across each language and context: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction or rationale for the chapter. Literature review and guiding theory. History of the Indigenous group and their language and culture. Description of the structure of the language (with a focus on what is helpful for educators).

Teaching Writing to Children 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

13

Description of language revitalization efforts. Description of the school(s) in which the efforts are taking place. Description of instructional writing practices used in the school(s). Description of early writing development of the children. Promising future directions in writing instruction.

The book concludes with a commentary on the importance of oral language traditions and development in some Indigenous contexts and reflections on the significance of Indigenous language writing in terms of education, Indigenous communities, and politics. Figure 1.1 gives a summary of the languages described in the chapters (and the countries where they are spoken), the number of speakers, the age groups of the students involved in the writing initiative, and the types of writing that the students were engaged in. Here, we briefly describe each chapter. Early and Emergent Literacy Practices as a Foundation for Hawaiian Language Medium Education. The Hawaiian language has approximately 18,400 speakers. Since the 1980s, Hawaiian Language Medium Education (HLME) has become an academic option for families in Hawai‘i. Now, 30 years later, HLME has expanded to include infant toddler programs; language nest preschools; and primary, secondary, post-secondary, and graduate education, a system referred to as HLME from cradle to career. Candac Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla and William H. “Pila” Wilson illustrate early childhood emergent writing practices in Hawaiian language medium education. Focusing on examples from 3- to 5-year-olds from two nest preschools, the authors use the Kumu Honua Mauli Ola, a Hawaiian philosophy, to theorize the Indigenous value of the children’s written texts. Instruction centers on teaching from the Hakalama, a Hawaiian syllable chart, also called a syllabary. Writing emerges from chanting the syllabary as well as arranging squares, tracing with pencils, and using finger paints (textured glue or puffy paint) to spell their names. Words and sentences are also traced following teacher demonstrations. While a structured, well-organized program does not yet exist for teaching writing, the authors believe that this is a promising future development. Early Writing in Torwali in Pakistan. Torwali, with approximately 80,000–100,000 speakers, is an endangered language in Pakistan that lacks a rigorous writing tradition and is threatened by Pashto, a language of wider communication in the same region. The author, Zubair Torwali, describes steps to document the history of the language and develop an orthography and learning materials. Working with a group of language activists, the author wrote a Torwali alphabet book, a primer, and booklets of stories for children. The first Torwali-based early childhood multilingual

5–9 year olds 6 year olds 6–10 year olds 6–10 year olds 7–11 year olds 8–9 year olds and 11–12 year olds 9–10 year olds

80,00–120,000

7,000–9,000

2,000

2,300

2,000–5,000

5,000

9 year olds (compared to older children) 10 year olds 11–13 year olds 12 year olds

125,000

171,840

25,000

1,000

3.4 million

3–5 year olds

Ages of Writers

Estimated Total Number of Language Speakers of All Ages 18,400

Genre-based responses to questions about culture and history Genre-based responses to narrative prompts via laptops

Genre-based responses to narrative prompts

Genre-based recounts, reports, procedures

Drawing, labeling pictures, letter formation, spelling, word building, sentence building, poems Drawing, copying from the board, writing short sentences Writing in response to tasks (Task-Based Language Teaching), completing texts provided Use of the Syllabary; writing sentences and brief paragraphs, translanguaging (Cherokee and English) Independent story writing

Drawing and pretend spelling

Syllable-based writing (Syllabary) leading to response to dictation and personal journal writing Word and sentence writing and personal narratives

Writing Samples

Figure 1.1 Languages, number of speakers, age groups of children studied, and types of writing done in the chapters.

Hawaiian (Hawai‘i, USA) Torwali (Pakistan) Safaliba (Ghana) Notsi (Papua New Guinea) Numanggang (Papua New Guinea) Zapotec (Mexico) Cherokee (Oklahoma, USA) Xitsonga (South Africa) Nungon (Papua New Guinea) P’urhepecha (Mexico) Ngabere (Panama) North Sámi (Sápmi region of Norway, Finland, Russia, & Sweden)

Language, Country

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education school was established in 2008, followed by six additional schools. Children in Kindergarten 1 and 2 (4–7 years old) are taught in Torwali for two years. The Primer Track focuses on language accuracy, and the Story Track focuses on reading comprehension. Writing samples collected from children ages 5–9 (the year after Kindergarten 2) and 7–13 (former students) are personal narratives, written after the children have read stories. They show the degree to which the children engage in creative written expression and demonstrate accuracy. The study points to the need for an improved curriculum, teacher training, and the production of additional materials so that instruction in Torwali can be improved. Early Childhood Safaliba Literacy in Ghana. Safaliba is spoken by approximately 7,000–9,000 people who live primarily in a remote rural area of the northern region of Ghana. It is one of 65 Indigenous Ghanaian languages that are normally not taught in school. Ari Sherris discusses Safaliba teaching and writing in a primary 1 classroom in a rural northern town of Ghana. He frames the teaching of Safaliba as a decolonial move on the part of Safaliba activists, which re-centers linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) and investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015) in early childhood literacy practices. The re-centering of literacy within Safaliba resists the dominant schooling mandates from the Ministry of Education, thereby pushing aside the Gonja language. The author analyzes the invented spellings in twelve writing samples from four 6-year-old Safaliba-speaking children in a rural town in Ghana and uses complexity theory to discuss the variations in each child’s developmental trajectory. The chapter concludes with a report of activists’ plans for future activity, including developing academic writing skills in Safaliba, focusing on traditional Safaliba practices with Ghanaian school subjects, and moving away from rote learning. Future language revitalization efforts might focus on Safaliba curriculum development that includes activities such as drumming, mud construction, wall design, weaving, and wood carving. They might also include Safaliba writing across the curriculum and an increased use of talk-to-text activities. Emergent Writing in Notsi in Papua New Guinea. Notsi, also appearing in literature as Noatsi and Nochi, is an Austronesian language spoken by approximately 2,000 people. Schooling in Notsi since the 1950s combines the use of Notsi, Melanesian Pidgin, and English in five villages where Notsi is the dominant language. In the 1990s, Notsi language committees were formed to produce instructional reading materials for children. Moreover, the current Papua New Guinea education policy has instituted standards-based guidelines that were introduced to Notsi teachers in July 2016. These standards, as well as an outcomes-based curriculum and phonics-based methods of reading instruction, are currently the core of general

16 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton education for children, including writing instruction. Gertrude Nicholas describes the study of this approach. Samples of writing from children 6–10 years of age were collected, as well as observations and discussions with teachers which were documented in the study. Data include drawings, letter formation tasks, spelling dictations, letter fillins in isolated words, word matching, sentence slot-filler tasks, and sentence copying tasks. The data indicate that few standards and creative activities were incorporated in the instructional practices and, as a result, the children’s production was limited to rote learning. The paper cites research that argues that rote learning is culturally and socially relevant to traditions of Indigenous peoples in Papua New Guinea and suggests that this approach needs further study. Emergent Writing in Numanggang in Papua New Guinea. Numanggang is spoken by approximately 2,300 people today. The communities that speak this island language are found throughout the Saruwaged mountain ranges, where seven elementary schools teach Numanggang literacy, including writing. The livelihood for the majority of Numanggang people is subsistence farming supplemented by working in coffee fields for a small income. The Summer Institute of Linguistics provided the earliest literacy instruction in Numanggang, so that adults could read and understand the first Bible produced in Numanggang in the late 1970s. Like Notsi, schooling was enacted in Melanesian Pidgin and English as well as in Numanggang. Samuel Saleng and Gertrude Nicholas describe a study of this approach, in which data collected include drawings that tell stories, letter formation samples, copying from the board and the teacher’s writing, labeling photos, and writing sentences. They conclude that further development of materials and instructional approaches and professional development for early grade teachers are needed to develop the writing abilities of children in their vernacular language. Teaching Task-based Writing in Zapotec in Oaxaca, Mexico. Sierra Juárez Zapotec, of which Macuiltianguis Zapotec is one variety, has approximately 2,000–5,000 speakers in Oaxaca, Mexico as well as other parts of Mexico and the United States. In 2008, a group of educators and language advocates in Oaxaca engaged in a Zapotec language revitalization effort, including establishing an after-school Zapotec language program in the Macuiltianguis community of Oaxaca, to teach Zapotec to Spanish-speaking children in the community. Katherine Riestenberg and Raquel Cruz Manzano describe the challenges and successes of the program and the teaching and learning of writing to seven 7-to-11-year-old children, all of whom are learning Macuiltianguis Zapotec as a second language. They use a multilayered view of language (Ivanič, 2004) to describe and analyze the writing produced in a task-based instructional approach. The chapter describes writing activities, which are

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integrated with speaking activities and include practicing vocabulary and spelling, making signs about environmental conservation, labeling objects, and completing texts provided by the teacher. The authors conclude that as new Zapotec texts are created, they will be integrated into classroom lessons as a means of transmitting traditional knowledge. A task-based instructional approach creates new opportunities for written language use that grow out of students’ interests and daily activities. The authors hope that the classroom will continue to serve as an active space for written language use, as revitalization efforts progress. Cherokee Writing in an Elementary Immersion School. Cherokee is spoken as a first language by an estimated 5,000 speakers, primarily elders. However, the number of people who speak it as a second language continues to grow as a result of the work of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s language revitalization movement. Their work includes establishment of a Cherokee immersion school, where elementary school students spend their days immersed in Cherokee culture and language as they study academic subjects in English. Now, as many as 10,000 children, adolescents, and adults are learning Cherokee. Lizette Peter, Tracy Hirata-Edds, and Ryan Wahde Mackey explore the ways in which young, English-dominant writers select from their unique internal linguistic representations to communicate ideas in Cherokee and how they engage in translanguaging practices to fit their communicative needs. The authors examine narratives written by 14 students from two cohorts, as they progressed from grade 2 (7–8 years old) to grade 6 (11–12 years old). Findings show that children whose first language is English find Cherokee polysynthesism and the Cherokee syllabary challenging and resort to non-typical Cherokee forms that are sometimes more typical of English. The features of their writing suggest the need for instruction that focuses on form, provides corrective feedback, gives students ample practice to internalize complex forms of Cherokee and engage in productive self-regulation, and allows them to draw from their knowledge of both Cherokee and English, through translanguaging, to express themselves fully. Future research might further explore the use of translanguaging in the writing of bilingual Indigenous/national language speakers. Writing Instruction in Xitsonga in South Africa. With 3.4 million speakers in South Africa alone, Xitsonga, a Bantu language, is one of the official Indigenous languages recognized by the government of South Africa as an early childhood medium of instruction and language of literacy. Tinswalo Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi describe an inconsistent implementation of the language policy, which results in some Xitsonga-medium schools actually being English-medium schools, particularly in traditional White suburban areas of South Africa. Additionally, Xitsonga materials are

18 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton not utilized in many urban schools, a practice that may minoritize Tsonga children; urban schools often opt for English or Afrikaans. The authors describe teaching practices in township schools where Xitsonga reading materials are used and children learn to read and then write their own stories in Xitsonga. Using Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory to frame the analysis, the chapter discusses the use of folktales as triggers to dramatic enactments and creative writing among 9–10-year-old children in grade 3. Based on classroom observations and student writing samples, the authors conclude that teachers need training on and support with teaching higher-level writing skills that include written accuracy. Early Writing in Nungon in Papua New Guinea. Nungon, with 1,000 speakers, is an Indigenous language spoken in five villages in Papua New Guinea. Since the late 1990s, Nungon elementary school teachers have pushed for the teaching of Nungon in elementary school, so that two generations of Nungon-speaking children have now first learned to read and write in their language. As of April 2017, the Nungon language is the first language of all children in the Nungon-speaking area and the only language of everyday interactions in the village area among Nungon speakers. Hanna Sarvasy and Eni Ögate compare eight Nungon writing samples from 9-year-olds (grade 3 students) in one primary school, who had their initial literacy instruction in Nungon, with five Nungon writing samples from older students and one teacher, who had learned to write first in Nungon. Using Ivanič’s (2004) six discourse types, the authors find that the instructional approach to teaching Nungon literacy is skills-based, focusing on appropriate written symbols for sounds. Using a genre approach to text analysis (Martin & Rose, 2008), they find that the children’s texts mostly fall into three categories: recounts, reports, and procedures. Nungon clause chaining influences the writing, with long sentences used. Comparison with texts written by the older children and an adult with those written by younger children shows that sentence length and type relate to the type of discourse used in the text. These findings lead the authors to conclude that genres might be less germane to a Nungon pedagogy than an approach that focuses on discourse styles. Promising future developments might be for Nungon teachers to provide students with writing prompts that push them to vary their style, introducing both narratives and position statements, in which they must state their values, opinions, or beliefs, and justify these, thus using varied types of discourse and sentences in their writing. Teachers also need more professional development on teaching grammar and sentence structures, given Nungon clause chaining patterns. Mother Tongue Instruction and Biliteracy Development in P’urhepecha in Central Mexico. P’urhepecha is an Indigenous language spoken by

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approximately 125,000 people in four regions of the central highlands of Michoacán, Mexico. Although a compulsory eight-year program of bilingual and bicultural primary education was instituted across Mexico in the 1970s, in practice, only a few hours a week are devoted to the Indigenous language at most primary schools, and no provision is made for such lessons in secondary school. However, two rural primary schools have shifted to P’urhepechamedium instruction in elementary school, with a gradual shift to Spanish literacy. Kate Bellamy and Cynthia Groff analyze the writing of four children in grade 4 (10 years old) in these two schools. Writing assignments in P’urhepecha include copying notes, writing sentences, writing science experiment reports, and writing or retelling stories told to them. The analysis focuses on written responses to a story the children have heard. The authors discuss the narrative style, morphological complexity, and orthographic accuracy of the pieces and employ the continua of biliteracy (Hornberger & SkiltonSylvester, 2000) to describe the roles and uses of P’urhepecha and Spanish in the writing. They find that children’s writing includes Spanish loanwords, orthographic inconsistencies, and common P’urhepecha discourse structures. They encourage continued focus on P’urhepecha throughout students’ education, including expanding its use into secondary and tertiary academic contexts. Ngäbere: An Orthography of Language Revitalization in Western Panama. The Ngäbe are an Indigenous people in western Panama. Their language, Ngäbere, is spoken by roughly 171,840 people. A revitalization movement among the Ngäbe people included developing a writing system/orthography for the language and a school where the language is taught. Ginés Alberto Sánchez Arias, Manolo Miranda, and Mary Jill Brody describe the school, in a multipurpose building in Kiad, Panama, where Ngäbere is taught in a relaxed atmosphere. They use the perspective of the Sydney School on genre pedagogy to analyze four pieces of writing, written by three young Ngäbe children (11, 12, and 13 years of age). The writing is the result of the children’s responses to questions about the culture and history of their people. The authors find periodicity, ideation, and appraisal in the separate examples of children’s writing. They also argue that the power of literacy supports the revitalization of the Ngäbere language and is a tool for revitalizing an otherwise shattered Indigenous self-esteem. The Global in the Local: Young Multilingual Language Learners Write in North Sámi. The North Sámi language is spoken by 25,000 people of Sápmi, a region that today is divided across four countries: Norway, Finland, Russia, and Sweden. Until recently, the majority language has been the focus of schooling. However, language revitalization efforts since the 1960s have resulted in the offering of Sámi language classes in school; establishment of a Sámi university college, where teachers

20 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton are trained to teach Sámi; formation of language centers with a focus on Sámi; and, most recently, inclusion of Sámi in the formal education system (including preschools), where the language is used as the primary means of communication and instruction. Since 2011, a Sámi National Curriculum supports teachers teaching students about Sámi history, culture, tradition, and language. Kirk Sullivan, Kristina Belancic, Eva Lindgen, Hanna Outakoski, and Mikael Vinka analyze the writing instruction in the Sámi National Curriculum used in Sweden, specifically the syllabus for Sámi as a first language in grade 6. They compare the curriculum for Sámi as a first language and Swedish as a second language and find that the Sámi curriculum focuses on oral language, and the Swedish curriculum focuses on literacy. To develop Sámi literacy, laptops were set up with North Sámi keyboards in 12 schools across Finish, Norwegian, and Swedish Sápmi. Students were asked to describe what they did alone, with their family, and with friends. Findings indicate that the Sámi language is used to express local Sámi ethnic identity, while the superdiverse national and global contexts enter in, through English, and Sámi writing skills are less developed than are writing skills in English. Future policy might develop a Sámi literacy curriculum that places similar demands on Sámi students as does the Swedish curriculum, and opportunities to read and write in North Sámi need to increase. Re-centering Pedagogy on Oral Traditions: Examples from Southwest Indigenous Languages. In this commentary on the focus of this book—developing writing systems, instructional approaches, and writing proficiency of students in Indigenous languages— Christine Sims reflects on the importance that oral traditions continue to play in many Indigenous communities (including the Pueblo Indian languages in the American southwest), where language efforts to maintain and re-strengthen Native languages have increased over the past two decades. She wonders whether, for some of these language communities, Native literacy development is a necessary element of language revitalization efforts or if, in fact, it is increasingly linked to the formal education system and departs from Indigenous understandings and practices. She gives examples of educational practice with an oral language focus and argues that cultural literacy and place-based learning need to be considered as a fundamental aspect of Native literacy development and that this has implications for teaching American Indian languages and the broader issues related to the critical nature of Native language and cultural survival. What Matters for Indigenous Language Writing. Kendall King reflects on the value and merit of learning to write in an Indigenous language in terms of improved school outcomes, shifting colonial conceptions of schooling in ways that empower Indigenous

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communities, and formalizing Indigenous knowledge systems. She describes the need for writing systems, effective pedagogy, an ecology of literacy, language ideology that values the language and literacy in it, and individual leaders who promote the language and its development and learning. She suggests that we will all benefit from these initiatives, in both small (local development) and large (international endeavors, additional learning within and across languages) ways.

Note 1. Some linguists count 9 languages and others count 11 languages for which materials have been developed to teach children to read in a two-year kindergarten program and the first three years of elementary school in Ghana. Those who count nine include Akan as one language. Those who count 11 languages do not count Akan as one language. Instead, they remove Akan from the list of languages for early schooling, making it 8 languages and then add three dialects of Akan (Asante, Akuapem, and Fante), which then totals 11 languages. When the total is reported as 73 Indigenous languages of Ghana, Akan is used. Otherwise, the total would be 75.

References Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language of symbolic power. Cambridge: Harvard Educational Press. Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56. Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15, 325–340. Fishman, J. A. (1967). Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues, 23(2), 29–38. Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations for assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, J. A. (2001). Can threatened languages be saved? Reversing language shift, revisited: a 21st century perspective. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. Giles, H. (Ed.). (1977). Language, ethnicity, and intergroup relations. New York: Academic Press. Giles, H., Bourhis, R. Y., & Taylor, D. (1977). Towards a theory of language in ethnic group relations. In H. Giles (Ed.), Language, ethnicity and intergroup relations (pp. 307–348). New York: Academic Press. Giles, H., & Johnson, P. (1987). Ethnolinguistic identity theory: A social psychological approach to language maintenance. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 68, 69–100. Gorenflo, L. J., Romaine, S., Mittermeier, R. A., & Walker-Painemilla, K. (2012). Co-occurance of linguistic and biological diversity hotspots and high

22 Ari Sherris and Joy Kreeft Peyton biodiversity wilderness areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109, 8032–8037. Grenoble, L. (2015). Leveraging language policy to effect change in the Artic. In M. C. Jones (Ed.), Policy and planning for endangered languages (pp. 1–17). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Grin, F. (1990). The economic approach to minority languages. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 11(1–2), 153–173. Grin, F. (2003). Language policy evaluation and the European charter for regional or minority languages. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Grin, F., & Vaillancourt, F. (1998). Language revitalisation policy: Analytical survey. Part I: Analytical framework, Part II: Policy experience, Part III: Application to Te Reo Maori. Rapport au “Treasury”. Wellington: Government of New Zealand. Retrieved from www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/research-policy/ wp/1998/98-06 Grinevald, C., & Pivot, B. (2013). On the revitalization of a “treasure language”: The Rama language project in Nicaragua. In M. C. Jones & S. Ogilvie (Eds.), Keeping languages alive: Documentation, pedagogy, and revitalization (pp. 181–197). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, D. (2007). When languages die: The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hornberger, N. H. (2002). Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach. Language Policy, 1(1), 27–51. Hornberger, N. H., & Dueñas, F. K. (2017). From student shyness to student voice: Mapping biliteracy teaching in indigenous contexts. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 32(1), 1–23. Hornberger, N. H., & Skilton-Sylvester, E. (2000). Revisiting the continua of biliteracy: International and critical perspectives. Language and Education: An International Journal, 14(2), 96–122. Ivanič, R. (2004). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education, 18(3), 220–245. Ka’ai, T., Moorfield, J., & Laoar, M. (2013). New technologies in language revitalization: The case for Te Reo Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In M.  C.  Jones & S. Ogilvie (Eds.), Keeping languages alive: Documentation, pedagogy, and revitalization (pp. 115–127). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University press. Krauss, M. (1992). The world’s languages in crisis. Language, 68(1), 1–42. Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2015). Complexity theory. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (pp. 227– 244). New York and London: Routledge. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lavrillier, A. (2013). A nomadic school in Siberia among Evenk reindeer herds. In M. C. Jones & S. Ogilvie (Eds.), Keeping languages alive: Documentation, pedagogy, and revitalization (pp. 181–197). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, M. P., & Simons, G. F. (2010). Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, 2, 103–120. Special issue on endangered languages.

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Lo Bianco, J. (2008a). Organizing for multilingualism: Ecological and sociological perspectives. In Keeping language diversity alive: A TESOL symposium (pp. 1–18). Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Lo Bianco, J. (2008b). Policy activity for heritage languages: Connections with representation and citizenship. In D. M. Brinton, O. Kagan, & S. Bauckus (Eds.), Heritage language education: A new field emerging (pp. 53–69). New York, NY: Routledge. Lo Bianco, J., & Peyton, J. K. (Eds.). (2013, Winter). Vitality of heritage languages in the United States. Special issue of the Heritage Language Journal, 10(3). Retrieved from www.heritagelanguages.org/Journal.aspx Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre relations: Mapping culture. London: Equinox. May, S. (2015). Language policy and political theory. In F. M. Hult & D. C. Johnson (Eds.), Research methods in language policy and planning: A practical guide (pp. 45–55). West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Nettle, D., & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world’s languages. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Piirainen, E., & Sherris, A. (Eds.). (2015). Language endangerment: Disappearing metaphors and shifting conceptualizations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Riestenberg, K. J., & Sherris, A. (2018). Task-based teaching of indigenous languages: Investment and methodological principles in Macuiltianguis Zapotec and Salish Qlispe revitalization. Canadian Modern Languages Review, 74(3), 434–459. Romaine, S. (2013). Linguistic and ecological diversity. In R. Bayley, R. Cameron, & C. Lucas (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 773– 791). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Sallabank, J. (2012). Diversity and language policy for endangered languages. In B. Spolsky (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of language policy (pp. 100–123). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sherris, A., Pete, T., Thompson, L., & Haynes, E. (2013). Task-based language teaching practices that support Salish language revitalization. In M. C. Jones & S. Ogilvie (Eds.), Keeping languages alive: Documentation, pedagogy, and revitalization (pp. 181–197). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2018). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (20th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. Retrieved from www.ethno logue.com Summer Institute of Linguistics. (n.d.). Language assessment: Language vitality. Retrieved from www.sil.org/language-assessment/language-vitality Tolchinsky, L. (2006). The emergence of writing. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 83–95). New York: The Guilford Press. UNESCO. (2003). Language vitality and endangerment. UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages. Retrieved from https://ich.unesco.org/doc/ src/00120-EN.pdf; www.linguae-celticae.org/dateien/UNESCO_Language_ vitality_and_endangerment.pdf Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, US: Harvard University Press. Weinstock, D. (2014). The complex normative foundations of language policy. Language Policy, 13, 317–330.

Appendix Languages With at Least 50 Million First-Language Speakers

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Language

Number of Countries Where the Language is Spoken

First-Language Speakers (millions)

Chinese* Spanish English Arabic* Hindi Bengali Portuguese Russian Japanese Lahnda* Javanese Korean German, Standard French Telugu Marathi Turkish Urdu Vietnamese Tamil Italian Persian* Malay*

37 31 106 57 5 4 13 19 2 6 3 7 27 53 2 1 8 6 3 7 13 30 16

1,284 437 372 295 260 242 219 154 128 119 84.4 77.2 76.8 76.1 74.2 71.8 71.1 69.1 68.1 68.0 63.4 61.9 60.8

From Simons and Fennig (2018), The Ethnologue. www.ethnologue.com/guides/how-manylanguages#countries (*Signifies that the language is a macrolanguage, and includes other languages; used for historic reasons.)

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Early and Emergent Literacy Practices as a Foundation for Hawaiian Language Medium Education Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla and William H. “Pila” Wilson

Introduction Since the 1980s, Hawaiian Language Medium Education (HLME) has become an academic option for families in Hawai‘i. In spite of previous challenges that proscribed Hawaiian from being used as the language of education, the endangered language has received national and international recognition as an Indigenous language reawakened from a dormant state. This was a critical time, as second language speakers of Hawaiian were pioneering the reestablishment of first language Hawaiian-speaking babies in the home. Thirty years later, HLME has expanded to include infant toddler programs; language nest preschools; primary, secondary, post-secondary, and graduate education—a system collectively referred to as HLME from cradle to career. A common thread for children enrolled in Pūnana Leo (language nest preschools) is the Hakalama (Hawaiian syllable chart or syllabary). The ‘Aha Pūnana Leo (‘APL, non-profit organization) revitalized this tradition and expanded from it using contemporary linguistics, cognitive development research, and the Kumu Honua Mauli Ola (KHMO)—a Hawaiian philosophy of education. The Hakalama methodology has proven highly effective and allows reading instruction to begin at the early age of 3. The children’s knowledge of the Hakalama, print identification of the individual syllables, and decoding of strings of such syllables is the base from which strong emergent literacy develops by the end of preschool (Figure 2.1). This chapter describes the Hakalama practice as established by ‘APL with children ages three to four and four to five across the Pūnana Leo system before they are eligible to enter kindergarten, its contributions to early reading and writing for learners in HLME, and similarities and differences with English literacy instruction. As one successful model of Indigenous language revitalization and perpetuation in the United States, this case study contributes to the literature on HLME generally and begins to address emergent reading and writing practices in HLME settings specifically. The authors are Hawaiian speakers, with William H. “Pila” Wilson a founder, board member, and curriculum developer for the ‘APL from its founding until the present. The

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Figure 2.1 Emergent literacy practices based on the Hakalama in Pūnana Leo schools.

research base for this article comes from Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla’s larger work in Indigenous language revitalization and literacy practices, close and continued connections to HLME since 2010, and Wilson’s collected data specific to HLME.

Hawaiian Philosophy of Education & Theory At the foundation of HLME schools is the KHMO that is used to educate students; prepare teachers, administrators, and support staff; develop curricula; and be used as a framework for institutional operations and those affiliated with HLME (‘APL, Ka Haka ‘Ula O Ke‘elikōlani (KH‘UOK), & Ke Kulanui o Hawai‘i ma Hilo, 2009). At the “core of the philosophy’s foundation lies the mauli Hawai‘i, the unique life force which is cultivated by, emanates from, and distinguishes a person who self-identifies as a Hawaiian” (p. 17). Written in Hawaiian, the KHMO has been published with explication in four other languages—Japanese, French, Spanish, and English—for a wider audience, however the “statement abounds with language and terms rich in Hawaiian cultural meaning and nuances not easily explained in English and beyond the scope of this publication” (p. 15). The KHMO emphasizes three areas: 1) the mauli of a person, which in turn consists of four elements—ka ‘ao‘ao pili ‘uhane (the spiritual element), ka ‘ao‘ao ‘ōlelo (the language element), ka ‘ao‘ao lawena (the physical behavior element), and ka ‘ao‘ao ‘ike ku‘una (the traditional knowledge element); 2) the connecting centers of the mauli—piko ‘ī (the

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fontanel—spiritual connections), piko ‘ō (the navel—passively inherited connections), and piko ‘ā (the reproductive organs—actively created connections); and 3) the places where our mauli are expressed—honua ‘iewe (ties of family and kinship), honua kīpuka (ties of the community), and honua ao holo‘oko‘a (the entire world). These aspects of Hawaiian philosophy underpin HLME and are instrumental in cultivating new Hawaiian language speakers. KHMO acknowledges that foreign and external principles and systems can be borrowed and adapted within the Hawaiian base to further strengthen HLME and participating students, teachers, and family members. Literacy and the contexts in which it is maintained and used is a preeminent example of such adaptation of externally derived cultural practices. Within the overall KHMO, reading and writing is seen as spiritual in its use of personally meaningful symbols that access feelings; as language in its communicative and culturally symbolic function; as physical activity to be carried out with skill; and as a proud tradition developed by recent ancestors and elders that remains connected to earlier Hawaiian traditions and history. These mauli aspects of Hawaiian reading and writing are shared among people: first in an unconscious spiritual way; second through jointly participating in a genealogically inherited activity; and third through the conscious agency of individuals to connect to others over space and time. The places where reading and writing occur begin with the family and extended family, expanding next to several families joined together in a protected environment such as the Pūnana Leo, and finally extending at maturity to the entire world and its multitude of writing systems and languages. All HLME activities and relationships are seen as emanating from each of the areas of the mauli, its connecting centers, and its places of expression. Worldwide in literate communities, young children are exposed to language in various forms—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—which are interconnected and develop simultaneously when there is active and purposeful engagement with people and materials in a language-rich environment (Teale & Sulzby, 1989). Children need reading to help support and understand writing, writing to help support and understand reading, and oral language to support both (Roskos, Christie, & Richgels, 2003). By the age of 3, a child’s vocabulary comprises approximately 2,000–4,000 words and by age 5 increases to approximately 5,000– 8,000 words (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997). In HLME institutions, oral language is critical, as it serves as the link to reading and writing, and is necessary for children whose home language is not Hawaiian. Children progress from emergent forms—scribbles, drawings, letterlike forms—prior to the beginning of school (McGee & Purcell-Gates, 1997) to writing individual letters, a string of letters and syllables, and eventually writing complete words. They begin to write using symbols, directionality, and conventions that are employed within their culture.

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Children writing in Hawaiian orient text from left to right, top-to-bottom, use capital letters and punctuation similar to practices for English. As children develop and increase their knowledge base of writing, earlier forms appear with less frequency in an attempt to write a coherent message (Fox & Saracho, 1990). Their writing improves through observations, modeling, constructing, and active engagement with more advanced writers (McGee & Purcell-Gates, 1997; Teale, 1995). As emergent forms of writing materialize between the ages of 3 and 5, children begin to comprehend the role, the purpose, and the mechanics of writing (Yaden & Tardibuono, 2004), eventually leading to the practice of writing their names, which are typically the first words written and mastered by young children (Clay, 1977; Dyson, 1984). Research studies (in Hebrew, Spanish, and Chinese) reveal that when a child engages in writing exercises that include other words, phrases, or sentences, the “child’s name always shows the higher level of development in any of the features being considered” (Tolchinsky, 2006, p. 89). Emergent forms of writing continue to be used by children in complex tasks until they gain confidence in using more advanced forms (Fox & Saracho, 1990; Greer & Lockman, 1998) that incorporate punctuation and spelling.

History of Hawai‘i and Its People Early ancestors of contemporary Native Hawaiians lived in the isolated Hawaiian Islands in a highly organized, self-sufficient social system that was united under one culture and language. Prior to Western contact, 800,000 Hawaiians populated the islands (Warner, 1999). In 1778, British Captain James Cook’s arrival to Hawai‘i brought about sustained global attention to the islands; the population subsequently plummeted to 300,000 (Warner, 1999). In 1810, Kamehameha unified the Hawaiian Islands into a single political entity, which led to the establishment of an internationally recognized monarchy. At this time in history, when most of the nonWestern world was being colonized by foreign powers, Hawai‘i existed as an independent and sovereign country. In the 1820s, a standard orthography using the Roman alphabet was established, with the assistance from New England Christian missionaries. Literacy practices—primarily amongst adults—included chanted syllables, a custom that grew from the fusion of early missionary practices of learning to spell starting with shorter words and traditional Hawaiian pedagogy of memorization through chants and attention to syllables in literary genres. As the 1830s approached, the educational emphasis shifted toward teaching children and, in 1841, Kamehameha III established a system of compulsory education beginning at age 4. The introduction of literacy and the syncretization of earlier Hawaiian views of language and literature into Christian practices led Hawai‘i to become one of the most literate countries in the world (Reinecke, 1969). In 1853,

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the first English-medium schools for Hawaiians were established (Huebner, 1985), however students continued to speak Hawaiian as their peer group language. In 1882, the majority of students in Hawai‘i schools were learning a non-Hawaiian language in a Hawaiian-medium, Englishmedium, or other language-medium school (Reinecke, 1969). The population declined rapidly due to the introduction of foreign diseases, and in 1878 decreased to 47,500 (Warner, 1999). During the 19th century, immigrants from Asia and Europe, imported with the expansion of sugar plantations, commonly learned Hawaiian either in a pidginized or standard form as a second language from interaction with the dominant Native Hawaiian population. The Hawai‘i-born children of these immigrants were often fully proficient in Hawaiian. In 1893, the U.S. government, led by American business interests, participated in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. In 1896, HRS 298–2 was passed, closing all Hawaiian-medium schools. For nearly the entire next century, children attending schools in Hawai‘i were prohibited from speaking Hawaiian in the schools, which served as the primary agents of assimilation toward Anglo-American culture and lifestyle. By 1900, the number of Hawaiian speakers decreased to 37,000, and Native Hawaiian and plantation immigrant children began to replace the use of Hawaiian as the lingua franca among themselves with pidginized English.

Hawaiian Language Hawaiian belongs to the large Austronesian language family, which includes one-fifth of the world’s languages (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2016), and within this linguistic classification to the Polynesian subgroup, which is noteworthy for its wide geographic spread yet high degree of mutual intelligibility. Hawaiian is closely related to the East Polynesian languages of the Society and Marquesas Islands. Predominantly a verb-subject-object language, Hawaiian has a phonological inventory of thirteen phonemes—the vowels: a, e, i, o, and u and the consonants: h, k, l, m, n, p, w, and ‘ (‘okina—glottal stop). Although not a letter, the kahakō (macron) is used in the orthography to indicate vowel length. The canonical form of words in Hawaiian is such that all syllables end in a vowel and only a single consonant may occur before a vowel, although any number of vowels may precede another vowel. As we will see later, the Hawaiian word structure is the underlying feature of the language that allows for the distinctive Hakalama literacy program. Prior to World War II, the language was primarily written without the ‘okina and kahakō. Hawaiian has always maintained these phonological distinctions, but they were not regularly represented in the writing system. The publication of the Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary in 1957 standardized the regular markings of the ‘okina and kahakō and played

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a major role in making the learning of oral Hawaiian accessible to college students and other language learners.

Revitalization of the Hawaiian Language After statehood in 1959, young people in Hawai‘i began to reexamine existing inequities and the lack of attention to Hawai‘i’s own culture and history. The strength of the Hawaiian Renaissance movement of the 1970s, as well as influence from Māori in Aotearoa (New Zealand), contributed to the revitalization of Hawaiian. In 1972, Ka Leo Hawai‘i (KLH)—a Hawaiian radio program hosted by Larry Kimura—broadcasted live interviews of elders in Hawaiian by Hawaiians. KLH continued for 16 years under his guidance, leaving a legacy of 393 recorded programs (502 hours of recordings on 7-inch reels). The founding of KLH developed simultaneously, along with a dramatic increase in the enrollment in Hawaiian classes at the university-level. This was followed in 1978 with the adoption of Hawaiian as an official language of the state. The growth in college-level learners of Hawaiian at the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa campus alone increased from 27 students in 1961–1962 to 1,277 in 1992–1993 (Schutz, 1994). The number of learners has continued to grow, placing Hawaiian as one of the top fifteen languages other than English commonly studied in U.S. post-secondary institutions, with a national enrollment of 2,419 in the fall of 2013 (Goldberg, Looney, & Lusin, 2015). Prior to the opening of HLME schools in the early 1980s, there were 1,000 native speakers, all of whom were 60 years old and older or were members of a tiny remnant community on the isolated island of Ni‘ihau, where 200 residents of all ages were first language speakers of Hawaiian. In 1983, ‘APL was founded to nurture a new generation that would be able to describe the world through the lens of Hawaiian language and culture—thus began the Hawaiian language revitalization movement. On the heels of the Māori language educators who provided preschool-aged children the opportunity to learn Māori in Kōhanga Leo, Pūnana Leo was established where “just as young fledglings are fed directly from the mouths of their mothers, Hawaiian language is fed into the ears of our 3- and 4-year-old students from the mouths of the Hawaiian language speakers around them” (‘APL, n.d.). In 1984, fewer than 40 children under the age of 18 were fluent in the language (‘APL et al., 2009). In the late 1980s, political support for the revitalization of the Hawaiian language moved beyond the state of Hawai‘i, and to Washington D.C., which resulted in the passage of the Native American Languages Act of 1990 (with sponsorship from Hawai‘i’s Congressional delegation) (‘APL et al., 2009). In 1992, with a Native Hawaiian population of 220,747, there were between 500 and 1,000 native speakers of Hawaiian (Wilson, 1998b). Michael Krauss (1998) who is widely recognized for sounding the alarm

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regarding language endangerment, described Hawaiian as a severely endangered language spoken primarily by elders, but distinctive, however, in also having a new generation of children speakers. At the time of the KHMO publication, the number of Hawaiian speaking children increased to over 2,000 (‘APL et al., 2009). Today, there is a growing number of Hawaiian language speakers, as a first or second language, primarily in the younger ages. The most recent statistic indicates that 18,400 people above age 5 spoke Hawaiian at home, making Hawaiian the sixth most common non-English language spoken in homes in Hawai‘i (State of Hawai‘i, 2016). These statistics show a distinctive concentration of Hawaiian speakers among children between the ages of 5 and 17 with 5,200 speakers. While certainly not all those who self-reported use of Hawaiian in the home were likely fully proficient speakers of Hawaiian, the growth of Hawaiian speakers in recent years indicates a movement toward increased use of Hawaiian in the home and positive identification with use of the language. Enrollment in HLME has also grown steadily. Beginning with 12 students in the first Pūnana Leo in the fall of 1984, and with a combined enrollment of 34 for the first two elementary school classes in the public schools in the fall of 1987, statewide enrollments in the fall of 2016 reached 341 in Pūnana Leo and 2,734 in the public and charter schools. Enrollment from HLME preschool to grade 12 from the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2016 increased at a rate of 29.5% (KH‘UOK, 2017).

Hawaiian Language Nest Preschools There are thirteen Pūnana Leo throughout Hawai‘i that enroll children over 2 years and under 6 years of age for preschool (Figure 2.2). Two sites enroll younger children in the Hi‘ipēpē program, which focuses on areas where there are Hawaiian-speaking infants and toddlers with working parents. As laboratory schools of KH‘UOK at the University of Hawai‘i Hilo, the Pūnana Leo are the world’s first early education program conducted through an endangered and Indigenous language accredited by the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium. Children do not need to be of Hawaiian ancestry; however, the schools draw primarily from the Native Hawaiian population, especially from those using Hawaiian in the home. Total enrollment reached 341 students for the fall of 2016—the smallest site enrolled 14 students, while the largest enrolled 56. Each site has a kahu (director) with sufficient teaching staff to meet state childcare ratios. A total of 77 teachers were employed by the ‘APL—all of whom are either graduates of HLME, current students or graduates of college programs, or HLME family members who have learned Hawaiian through Pūnana Leo and/or online resources (K. Shintani, personal communication, January 26, 2017).

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Figure 2.2 Pūnana Leo locations (in order of established date).

Pūnana Leo are full-day, 5 days a week, 11 months per year private preschools where Hawaiian is the medium of instruction, as well as the language of the administration, support staff, and school events for families. The reestablishment of Hawaiian as a living language is the leading force contributing to the expansion of Hawaiian into the public schools and the increase of families using Hawaiian in the home. Families are required to take an active role in the educational experience of their children by providing monthly in-kind service and attending weekly language classes and monthly parent meetings. The Pūnana Leo classroom walls are decorated with vibrant, languagerich materials that range from posters with ‘ōlelo no‘eau (proverbial sayings), students’ names, the Hakalama, mele (songs), the Hawaiian version of the Roman calendar, the Hawaiian lunar calendar, and thematically based print resources. The visually engaging, culturally authentic, and relevant literacy materials displayed throughout the classroom nurture children’s curiosity, play, and self-initiated writing (McGee & Purcell-Gates, 1997; O’Leary, Cockburn, Powell, & Diamond, 2010; Powell, Diamond, Bojczyk, & Gerde, 2008). Hōnuanua (content specific learning centers) offer children access to literacy materials to support their writing, reading, and oral language development. Unlike English preschools with access to a wide variety of commercially printed posters and published books, Pūnana Leo depends heavily on teacher- and parent-produced hand-written materials.

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Early and Emergent Instructional Writing Practices Students at Pūnana Leo learn to read and write syllabically using the Hakalama (Figure 2.3). Within KHMO, this approach honors ancestors, builds children’s control over their bodies, and provides them a means to exert their own agency. Learning to read by syllables rather than by individual phonemes aligns with the progression of childhood cognitive development relative to conscious analysis of language first by words, then by syllables, and finally by phonemes. Once students make the connection between huahakalama (syllable-units) and syllables they can use their syllabic decoding skills to read and write short words, longer words, and then phrases and short sentences. The Hakalama approach parallels the hiragana syllabary approach that allows Japanese children to read at a considerably earlier age than children reading European languages using single phoneme-aligned letters (Nagy & Anderson, 1995; Wilson & Kamanā, 2006). A syllable-based literacy development approach suits a language such as Hawaiian with a basic syllable structure—optional onset (single consonant) followed by nucleus (vowel)—and few or no consonant clusters. The children’s knowledge of the Hakalama, print identification of the huahakalama, and decoding of strings of such syllable-units are the foundation from which strong emergent literacy develops by the end of preschool. As a perfect syllabary, the Hakalama makes pronunciation clear with no ambiguities and provides children the ability to decode and write any Hawaiian word that exists (e.g., “pu” plus “a” produces “pua”— “flower”). All units of the Hakalama are either a single vowel (e.g., “a”) or a vowel preceded by a consonant (e.g., “pu”). The Hakalama comprises 45 basic huahakalama and is expanded to 90 units to distinguish between the long and short vowel versions.

Figure 2.3 Hakalama syllable chart.

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The Hakalama methodology follows a chanted “reading” of all huahakalama starting from left to right, top to bottom, with simultaneous pointing to the individual units as they are chanted (Wilson & Kamanā, 2016). The chart helps to identify and differentiate the huahakalama— the majority of which are written as digraphs (e.g. hā)—and provides a consistent approach between the name of the syllable, pronunciation of the symbol, and written representation. The symbol does not “stand for” the sound it represents; at a basic level its name “is” that sound. Similar to Cree, “there is no need for the rule-governed logic and prerequisite ability to separate or abstract smaller segments of sound from a spoken unit or syllable, required by alphabetic literacy” (McCarthy, 1995, p. 65). This is unlike writing in English, which uses single letters whose names are typically one syllable (e.g., the name of the letters “b” and “h” are “bee” and “aitch” respectively), but whose pronunciation in words does not reflect the name of the letters. A further challenge of English, not found in Hawaiian, are the multiple pronunciations of English letters and the multiple letter combinations that represent a single phoneme (Figure 2.4). Reading is mastered much easier in HLME using the Hakalama method than reading through the medium of English. Unlike Standard English literacy instruction which begins with learning the names of letters, followed by the distinctive sounds symbolized by those letters, the Hakalama approach moves directly from learning each of the huahakalama names to reading by pronouncing those names when huahakalama are arranged in words and sentences. However, children beginning to write in HLME face the challenge of using mostly digraphs rather than single letters in writing. Sometimes they may write only a part of such a diagraph. These children, however, do have the advantage of a fewer number of symbols to master in writing those diagraphs. Students are taught to read and write huahakalama prior to learning the individual names of Hawaiian letters. This minimizes an observed confusion in decoding and writing when Hawaiian speakers begin reading instruction with learning the names of the letters of the Hawaiian alphabet. Since the

Figure 2.4 English spelling and decoding challenges.

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Figure 2.5 Hawaiian alphabet (with names of letters).

alphabetic letter names also reference huahakalama syllabic units (Figure 2.5), preschool-aged children who learn Hawaiian letter names may misspell, for example, “He lālā kēlā” (“That is a branch”) as “hllkl.” The Hakalama method, therefore, delays the learning of letter names until after children can already read and write using huahakalama. Since students may have non-Hawaiian names, Pūnana Leo teach children to write these names as single units and do not comment on symbols not found in the Hakalama. When they matriculate into elementary school, Pūnana Leo children will learn letters used in borrowed words and to sound out words of non-Hawaiian origin (e.g., zebera—“zebra”—from Latin).

Children’s Writing in Hawaiian Research shows that writing is critically important to learning to read (Clay, 2001), and at Pūnana Leo the mastery of reading and writing is bidirectional. Noted nearly 200 years ago, the nature of the Hawaiian language and its very regular orthography led Hawaiian children to master literacy in Hawaiian in a much shorter time than New England children mastering literacy in English (Dibble, 1839). Current student writing practices are distinctive and align with the contemporary Hakalama reading program used across the Pūnana Leo system and early Hawaiian traditions. The Hakalama methodology follows the practice of having children arrange squares with huahakalama in a row to spell out their names and other words. Once correctly arranged, children glue the huahakalama squares on to paper. Additional writing activities include tracing their names, for example, printed in dotted lines with a pencil, crayon (or dry erase marker when writing on a laminated surface), or tracing the syllables created with textured glue or puffy paint with their finger, which guides the writing process (Figure 2.6). The practice of name writing provides regular exposure to a word in both oral and print form (Villaume & Wilson, 1989), which is a part of the daily attendance routine and is one of the first language experiences that Pūnana Leo students master. From a KHMO perspective, the focus on names is a priority in mastering literacy and has an inherent connection to Hawaiian spiritual traditions—ka ‘ao‘ao pili ‘uhane that “creates a relationship with everything in the universe, both seen and unseen” (‘APL et al., 2009, p. 17),

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Figure 2.6 Ka‘imi Kāneali‘i (age 5) writing his name for daily attendance.

piko ‘ō that “connects us to our ancestors” and “future generations, and by extensions, represent all we create and establish” (p. 21), and honua ‘iewe that represents the “close ties of family and kinship that are the foundation of one’s mauli” (p. 21). Through writing attempts and explicit and direct instruction, children begin to develop an understanding that the phonological construction of words are meaningfully represented by letters and combinations of letters (Nagy & Anderson, 1995). The difference from English literacy development practices, however, is that Pūnana Leo students are making an association between each syllable of an utterance and a corresponding huahakalama representation (mostly consonant-vowel digraphs, but some single vowel symbols, e.g., pu, mē, a, ū) rather than between each phoneme of an utterance and a corresponding representation (mostly single letters in English, but also some multiple letter combinations, e.g., ch, sh, ee, oo). The Hakalama-based activities contribute to early Hawaiian literacy leading to students writing their names without any guided printed assistance and eventually to spontaneous attempts at writing. Students also write words and sentences with a focus first on tracing or copying written text. Teacher-spoken or written sentences to be written by Pūnana Leo students follow the hālau hula tradition of a teacher orally producing a line of a chant to be mimicked identically by students, followed by other lines until the entire chant is memorized. Proper following of teacher modeling is a highly valued feature of the KHMO ka ‘ao‘ao lawena, or physical skill, that is “usually learned through unconscious imitation at a young age” (‘APL et al., 2009, p. 19). Not only is copying of teacher-produced sentences common, the use of ‘ōlelo

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no‘eau—famous lines of chants or proverbial sayings—are used for such exemplar sentences, thus making the connection of writing, reading, and oral language to culture. The custom of keeping a journal is maintained and developed among students in some Pūnana Leo, thus promoting the KHMO, the power of personal agency. Student journals include scribblings, names, terms, and phrases from daily routines such as the calendar, and formal writing assignments from teachers (e.g., He keiki ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i au. “I am a child who speaks Hawaiian.”). Scribblings, drawings (circles), and some writing is discernable in two journal entries of Punahoa Ravey (age 4) dated September 13 and September 20, 2017 (Figure 2.7). As children develop over time, their writing becomes clearer in an attempt to convey a message (Fox & Saracho, 1990), as seen in the entry dated January 17, 2017. Punahoa’s drawing is indicative of a kalo (taro), and emergent writing as a string of words that are separated by clear and regular spacing (Tolchinsky, 2006). Through observation, modeling, and engagement—a characteristic of ka ‘ao‘ao lawena—with more capable others who are their peers and teachers, the students’ writing is improved (McGee & Purcell-Gates, 1997; Teale, 1995). Some children reach a point where they can write any sentence of reasonable length from dictation upon a single hearing. However, such sentences may not be fully standard in terms of capitalization, word divisions and boundaries, diacritics, and punctuation. The high degree of personal meaning and connection associated with writing one’s name has revealed that children prefer letters that comprise their name and are more likely to pay attention to these particular letters than other letters (Hoorens, Nuttin, Herman, & Pavakanun, 1990). Since Pūnana Leo students learn to read and write using the Hakalama, the attachment to individual letters may not apply here specifically, but rather to the

Figure 2.7 Punahoa Ravey’s journal entries dated September 13, 2016; September 20, 2016; January 17, 2017.

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syllable-unit. Nevertheless, a special relationship to symbols within one’s name is evident from a KHMO perspective—a spiritual relationship to be cherished and encouraged. In the classroom, the curriculum primarily emphasizes oral language development due to the immediate need to revitalize Hawaiian. While reading has taken precedence over writing for early learners in Pūnana Leo, children are encouraged to write through daily activities rather than through formal guided instruction. Upon entering the classroom, students write their name on a laminated card as an index for attendance with a color crayon of their choice. To the left of the card is the child’s name, followed by a lined space for children to practice their writing of their first and last name. This space is either blank or includes their name printed in dotted lines to help guide their writing. As students learn individual huahakalama syllable units, children can begin to write words, phrases, and eventually sentences from dictation. The following dialogue (Table 2.1) is between Pila Wilson, Kyla Manzano (teacher), and Punahoa Ravey (student) in which Punahoa was asked to write a few short phrases and/or sentences from dictation. The entire conversation and writing activity took approximately five minutes and 30 seconds from beginning to end. Punahoa and another student, Lā‘ieikawai Sakaguchi (age 5), each wrote their first name, followed by two dictated sentences that were provided to them one at a time and on an individual basis. As indicated in Table 2.1, the sentences for Punahoa were Nani ka manu (“The bird is pretty”) and Nānā i ka pua (“Look at the flower”). Although the dialogue with Lā‘ieikawai is not provided here, her sentences included Hele au i ke kula (“I go to school”) and Hu‘ihu‘i kēia lā (“Today is chilly”). As shown in Figure 2.8, the sentences were written with relatively clear word boundaries. Following their writing, they each read their sentences aloud without any hesitation and self-corrected their writing if any syllable units were missing. With the exception of the ‘okina and kahakō, both students included the correct spelling of each of the oral sentences that they were provided. Writing meaningful sentences in Hawaiian moves children from genealogical and spiritual connections to clear language-based connections and the generative piko ‘ā powers entailed within language. Children in Pūnana Leo around the age of 4 can divide words syllabically, which is the minimum cognitive skill necessary to begin reading in Hawaiian (Wilson & Kamanā, 2006). Conversely, the minimum cognitive skill needed to begin reading in English requires children to divide words into phonemes, which does not typically occur until age 6 (O’Grady, Archibald, Aronoff, & Rees-Miller, 2005). While research has noted that name writing in preschool, knowledge of the alphabet upon entry to kindergarten (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001), and understanding of individual letters and phonemes at the beginning of the first grade (Juel, 1988) are strong indicators of literacy achievement, the Hakalama methodology implemented in the Pūnana Leo preschools provide a

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Table 2.1 Dialogue where Punahoa Ravey writes from dictation. Participants

‘O̅ lelo Hawai‘i

Pila:

Hiki iā ‘oe ke kākau i Can you write your name? kou inoa? ‘Ae. Yes. Punahoa writes his first name with his left hand in large letters that take up most of the paper with “Punaho” in the center of the page that continues to the right, followed by the remaining letter of his name—“a”— on the following line that is left justified. It takes him approximately 45 seconds to complete. ‘Ae. Maika‘i. Kākau i ka Yes. Good. Write the hopuna‘ōlelo, “Nani sentence “Nani ka ka manu” ma kekahi manu” on another sheet pepa hou. of paper. Punahoa begins to write the sentence, and starts with the huahakalama “ni.” He finishes writing the sentence, which has three word boundaries, on a single line. It takes him approximately 90 seconds to complete. Heluhelu i ka hopuna‘ōlelo Read the sentence that you i kākau ‘ia. wrote. “Nani ka manu.” “Nani ka manu.” Heluhelu hou. Read it again. “Ni ka manu.” “Ni ka manu.” Punahoa corrects the first word originally written as “ni” and writes the huahakalama unit “na” before it to complete the word “nani.” Very smart. One more Akamai loa. Ho‘okahi sentence, “Nānā i ka hou hopuna‘ōlelo, pua.” “Nānā i ka pua.” Punahoa begins to write the sentence on another sheet of paper. He finishes the sentence, which has three word boundaries written on two lines—“nanaī” and “ka pua.” It takes him approximately 90 seconds to complete. Punahoa utters quietly, “Nānā i ka pua.” “Nānā i ka pua.” Maika‘i loa! Mahalo e Very good! Thank you, Punahoa. Punahoa.

Punahoa:

Pila:

Punahoa:

Kyla: Punahoa: Kyla: Punahoa:

Pila:

Punahoa:

Pila:

English

developmental approach to reading and writing at even an earlier age for HLME students than their English counterparts.

Promising Directions in Hawaiian Language Medium Education Preschools The ‘APL has placed more attention on reading than on writing. That is, no special effort has been made to date to systematize and strengthen writing practices that have developed spontaneously within Pūnana Leo schools

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Figure 2.8 Students, Punahoa Ravey (top row) and Lā‘ieikawai Sakaguchi (bottom row), writing from dictation.

in the way that careful attention has been given to reading. Although there is no formal curriculum for teaching writing in Pūnana Leo at this time, some of the practices of Pūnana Leo may encourage children to see writing as a normal activity and one that they are expected to develop. Special attention to writing is likely to occur as the system of schools continues to develop new approaches based in both Native Hawaiian traditions informed by international research on child development and research by the organization itself in its schools. Nonetheless, children in Pūnana Leo do write some Hawaiian and can read a short novel paragraph. Some reach a relatively high level of literacy by the end of preschool (Wilson & Kamanā, 2016). The program is quite strong in the area of decoding using the Hakalama and is currently focused on the transition from decoding to comprehension. The development of an ordered curriculum for teaching writing is the next step. Existing practices that have arisen spontaneously within Pūnana Leo sites from the Hakalama syllabic reading program and Hawaiian traditions are the logical base from which to begin developing such a curriculum. Additionally, we expect that the ‘APL will continue to review research on literacy development in other languages, including studies that assess early writing in preschool and primary grades, though few studies exist for endangered and Indigenous languages (see Rau,

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2005) and fewer still that reference languages that are written and read syllabically (see Peter & Hirata-Edds, 2006, 2009).

References ‘Aha Pūnana Leo. (n.d.). E ola ka ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i —The Hawaiian language shall live. Retrieved from www.ahapunanaleo.org ‘Aha Pūnana Leo, Ka Haka ‘Ula O Ke‘elikōlani, & Ke Kulanui o Hawai‘i ma Hilo. (2009). Kumu honua mauli ola: He kālaimana‘o ho‘ona‘auao ‘Ōiwi Hawai‘i. Hilo, HI: Authors. Retrieved from www.ahapunanaleo.org/images/ files/KHMO.pdf Bredekamp, S., & Copple, C. (1997). Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Clay, M. (1977). Exploring with a pencil. Theory into Practice, 16(5), 334–341. Clay, M. M. (2001). Change over time in children’s literacy development. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Dibble, S. (1839). History and general view of the Sandwich Islands’ mission. New York: Taylor & Dodd. Dyson, A. H. (1984). Emerging alphabetic literacy in school contexts: Toward defining the gap between school curriculum and child mind. Written Communication, 1, 5–55. Fox, B., & Saracho, O. (1990). Emergent writing: Young children solving the written language puzzle. Early Child Development & Care, 56, 81–90. Goldberg, D., Looney, D., & Lusin, N. (2015). Enrollments in languages other than English in United States institutions of higher education, fall 2013. Modern Language Association of America. Retrieved from https://mla.org/content/ download/31180/1452509/EMB_enrllmnts_nonEngl_2013.pdf Greer, T., & Lockman, J. (1998). Using writing instruments: Invariances in young children and adults. Child Development, 69(4), 888–902. Hoorens, V., Nuttin, J. M., Herman, I. E., & Pavakanun, U. (1990). Mastery pleasure versus mere ownership: A quasi-experimental cross-cultural and cross-alphabetical test of the name letter effect. European Journal of Social Psychology, 20, 181–205. Huebner, T. (1985). Language education policy in Hawai‘i: Two case studies and some current issues. International Journal of Sociology, 56, 29–49. Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437–447. Ka Haka ‘Ula O Ke‘elikōlani. (2017). Hōkeo ‘Ikepili Kula Kaiapuni (Annual student counts from Hawaiian medium/immersion sites and the Pūnana Leo schools). Hilo, HI: Author. Krauss, M. (1998). The condition of Native North American languages: The need for realistic assessment and action. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 132, 9–21. Lewis, M. P., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2016). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (19th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. Retrieved from www.ethnologue.com McCarthy, S. (1995). The Cree syllabary and the writing system riddle: A paradigm in crisis. In I. Taylor & D. R. Olson (Eds.), Scripts and literacy:

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Reading and learning to read alphabets, syllabaries and characters. Netherlands: Springer. McGee, L., & Purcell-Gates, V. (1997). So what’s going on in research on emergent literacy? Reading Research Quarterly, 32(3), 310–318. Nagy, W. E., & Anderson, R. C. (1995). Metalinguistic awareness and literacy acquisition in different languages: Technical Report No. 618. Center for the Study of Reading. Champaign: College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. O’Grady, W., Archibald, J., Aronoff, M., & Rees-Miller, J. (2005). Contemporary linguistics: An introduction. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. O’Leary, P. M., Cockburn, M. K., Powell, D. R., & Diamond, K. E. (2010). Head Start teachers’ views of phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge instruction. Early Childhood Education Journal, 38, 187–195. doi:10.1007/ s10643-010-0394-0 Peter, L., & Hirata-Edds, T. (2006). Using assessment to inform instruction in Cherokee language revitalisation. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(5), 643–658. Peter, L., & Hirata-Edds, T. (2009). Learning to read and write Cherokee: Toward a theory of literacy revitalization. Bilingual Research Journal, 32(2), 207–227. Powell, D. R., Diamond, K. E., Bojczyk, K. E., & Gerde, H. K. (2008). Head Start teachers’ perspectives on early literacy. Journal of Literacy Research, 40, 422–460. Pukui, M. K., & Elbert, S. H. (1957). Hawaiian-English dictionary. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press. Rau, C. (2005). Literacy acquisition, assessment and achievement of year two students in total immersion in Māori programmes. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 8(5), 404–432. Reinecke, J. E. (1969). Language and dialect in Hawai‘i—a sociolinguistic history to 1935. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press. Roskos, K. A., Christie, J. F., & Richgels, D. J. (2003). The essentials of early literacy instruction. Young Children, 58(2), 52–60. Schutz, A. J. (1994). The voices of eden. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press. State of Hawai‘i. (2016). Non-English speaking population in Hawai‘i. Honolulu, HI: State of Hawai‘i, Research and Economic Analysis Division Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. Retrieved from http://files. hawaii.gov/dbedt/economic/data_reports/Non_English_Speaking_Population_ in_Hawaii_April_2016.pdf Teale, W. H. (1995). Young children and reading: Trends across the twentieth century. Journal of Education, 177(3), 95–128. Teale, W. H., & Sulzby, E. (1989). Emerging literacy: New perspectives. In D. Strickland & L. Morrow (Eds.), Emerging literacy: Young children learn to read and write (pp. 1–15). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Tolchinsky, L. (2006). The emergence of writing. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 83–95). New York: The Guilford Press. Villaume, S. K., & Wilson, L. C. (1989). Preschool children’s exploration of letters in their own names. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 283–300.

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Warner, S. (1999). Kuleana: The right, responsibility, and authority of Indigenous peoples to speak and make decisions for themselves in language and cultural revitalization. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 30(1), 68–93. Whitehurst, G. J., & Lonigan, C. J. (2001). Emergent literacy: Development from prereaders to readers. In S. B. Neuman & D. K. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (pp. 11–29). New York: The Guilford Press. Wilson, W. H. (1998b). The sociopolitical context of establishing Hawaiianmedium education. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 11(3), 325–338. Wilson, W. H., & Kamanā, K. (2006). “For the interest of the Hawaiian themselves”: Reclaiming the benefits of Hawaiian-medium education. Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, 3(1), 153–181. Wilson, W. H., & Kamanā, K. (2016). The Hakalama: The ‘Aha Pūnana Leo’s syllabic Hawaiian reading program. In C. McLachlan & A. Arrow (Eds.), Literacy in the early years: Reflections on international research and practice (pp. 133–150). New York, NY: Springer. Yaden, D., & Tardibuono, J. (2004). The emergent writing development of urban Latino preschoolers: Developmental perspectives and instructional environments for second-language learners. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 20, 29–61.

3

Early Writing in Torwali in Pakistan Zubair Torwali

Introduction: The Torwali Language and People Simons and Fennig (2018) report that 27 languages of the 74 languages spoken in Pakistan are endangered. Torwali, among the 27 endangered languages, is rated as Definitely Endangered, because it does not have a written tradition and faces a rapid language shift toward the predominant language, Pashto, in the areas where it is the first language of children. Torwali is a Dardic language of the Indo-Aryan family, mainly spoken in the Bahrain and Chail areas of District Swat (Figure 3.1) in the northwest frontier province, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in Pakistan. The level of endangerment of the Torwali language can also be assessed by its small community of speakers, which is approximately 80,000 (Lunsford, 2001). A recent survey by Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT, 2015; Respondents, 2014), however, found that a majority (60%) of the respondents count themselves to be more than 120,000 Torwali speakers. About 30% of the Torwali speakers have migrated permanently to the larger cities of Pakistan, where their language is being replaced by the national language, Urdu, or by other languages of wider communication, such as Pashto or Punjabi. The Torwali language is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim Dardic communities of Pakistan (Viaro & Inam-ur-Rahim, 2002). The people who speak the language are called Torwalik or Torwal (Grierson, 1929). The area where Torwali is spoken is also known as Torwal by other Dardic communities like Gawri and Kohsitani. In Torwali folk literature, the entire area is referred to Tu:aal (Torwal); for example, in this Torwali couplet (Example 3.1): “Du zar Tu:aal hu shid egi Saidu si Bachaa, Thamurd Jaen Chi Dherina wa ni hi yi Panah” (Torwali, 2016) “Two thousand Torwal as well as the Ruler of Saidu knew that, but (she) is still alive—didn’t sink into the earth.” Another couplet in Torwali (Example 3.2) says, “Tu:aal Shid Hu Maasho Aa Khae Burai Ingola, Mhery Sha-e Theli Hey Mhi Sherin Lupata” (Gul, 2017). “Auntie, Torwal came to know [of my love]; how I hide my beloved. Now let me put it [beloved] on my head as it is now my sweet dupatta.”

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Figure 3.1 Torwali-speaking area in District Swat, Pakistan. Source: Lunsford, forthcoming, A Typological Profile of Torwali

Example 3.1 Torwali couplet.

Example 3.2 Towali couplet.

George A. Grierson has shown the area from Madyan town to the boundary of Kalam as Torwal in his map of the area (Grierson, 1929). Aurel Stein (Stein, Reprint 2000), however, mentions the entire area beyond Churrai (Madyan) as Swat Kohistan or Torwal in his book, On Alexander’s Track to the Indus. A history of the Pushtuns, Towarikh Hafiz Rahmat Ali (Histories of Rahmat Ali), that was written by ancient scholars and reproduced by Mirza Muhammad Ismail Qandahari in 1864 CE for the orientalist,1 H.W. Roverty (Tahir, 1979), states that the entire Swat to Torwal2 and Tirath (Shah, 1979) areas were under the rule of Khan Kaju. The Torwal area was brought under the rule of the Swat State by 1922 (Barth, 1956) after a number of small-scale wars with the Torwali people, though they used to be wild and had no cohesion (Hay, 1934). Dr. Leitner mentions the area as Torwal in his travel account, “A Rough Account, collected in 1886, of Itineraries in the ‘Neutral Zone’ between Central Asia and India” (Chaghatai, 2002) and states, “There

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are many wealthy people in Branihal [today’s Bahrain], which may be considered to be the capital of Torwal.” Like other Dardic communities, the Torwali people do not know where they and their language originated. The majority of the Torwali attribute  their descent to Arabs by “boasting an Arab origin” (Hay, 1934) and call themselves Kohistanis, an identity given by the Pathans (Barth, 1956), who captured their lands and converted them to Islam. (However, due to revitalization efforts, many of them proudly call themselves Torwali.) This can be due to the fact that “the Dards unfortunately did not succeed in arousing comparable interest” (Jetmar, 1961), and their history and origin remained shrouded in the debris of history. A few reports about them have been written by the British colonial officers during their service in the mountains, but the reports are not generally known about (Jetmar, 1961).

Research on the Torwali Language Numerous surveys have been done by individuals and international organizations on Pakistan’s endangered languages, including the Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan (Calvin, Sandra, & Daniel, 1992) and the Linguistic Survey of India (Grierson, 1928). Grierson’s book, Torwali: An Account of a Dardic Language in Swat-Kohistan, is perhaps the first published book that focuses specifically on the Torwali language. It is based on field data collected by Sir Aurel Stein, who visited Swat-Kohistan in 1926, and includes Torwali texts written in phonetics with English translations and a couple of folktales of the Torwali community narrated by a single person. Before that, in 1885, Col. John Biddulph dedicated a short chapter of his book, Tribes of Hindoo Koosh, to the Torwali lexicon (Biddulph, 1885). Fredrik Barth wrote a chapter on the language, people, economy, political organization, lineage, and habitat of the Torwali community in 1956 (Barth, 1956). The precolonial history of the people in upper Swat, Chitral, Indus Kohistan, Gilgit, Hunza, Nuristan, and Kashmir is clouded in thick mist (Cacopard, 2016). Mention of Torwali is, however, found in chronicles written primarily by British and Pushtun writers during the colonial period in order to map the areas and their inhabitants or to wage war on them so they would convert to Islam. For example, the first ruler of Swat, Syed Abdul Jabbar Shah, narrates how the Pushtun warrior and preacher, Syed Abdul Rahim, son of Akhund Darweza (who died in 1638), waged Jihad against the Kafirs of Braniyal (Sathanvi, 2011), the former name of Bahrain, the main town of the Torwali community. H.C. Willy (Willy, 1912) mentions Torwali in his travels to Swat in 1897. A book probably compiled by Mirza Muhammad Ismail Qandahari for H.W. Roverty mentions Torwal, the heartland of the Torwali people (Shah, 1979). Similarly, Dr. G.W. Leitner mentions Torwal in his writings (Chaghatai, 2002).

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Structure of the Torwali Language Torwali has two distinct dialects. The one with the larger number of speakers is spoken in the main valley to the north beyond the town of Madyan and is usually referred to as the Sinkaen or Bahrain dialect. The other is known as the Chail dialect and is spoken in the Ulaal Dara (Bishigram valley) to the east of the town of Madyan. Torwali has 35 consonant phonemes and 13 vowel phonemes (Bashir, 2003; Lunsford, 2001). The syllable structure of Torwali is limited to four types only, and there are no consonant clusters (Lunsford, forthcoming). Both Bashir and Lunsford have noted four types of tonal contrasts in Torwali. Torwali has subject-object-verb (SOV) sentence structure, with the verb occurring at the end of the clause, a pattern that is not uncommon with other Indo-Aryan languages. Torwali is postpositional. Instead of prepositions, adpositions are used in Torwali (Lunsford, 2001) and operate with noun phrases. Examples are [bop si] “father of,” [sum mi] “soil in,” or [tha:m zed] “tree on.” Torwali has a base-20 system for numeration, which means that the numbers 1–20 are all unique forms, although it is apparent that a few of the lower 10 are similar to a few of the upper 10. Just as the English decimal cycles on every 10, Torwali’s system cycles on every 20 (e.g., “bɪ:ʃ” [20]; “dʊbɪ:ʃ” [two 20s, 40]; “ɕəbɪ:ʃ” [three 20s, 60]; “ĉ əubɪ:ʃ” [four 20s, 80]; and so forth). Grierson (1928) describes the Torwali case system as it applies to nouns and claims that there are eight cases: nominative, accusative, agentive (ergative), instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative. Lunsford (forthcoming) differs and claims that, “grammatically speaking, there are only three definite grammatical cases applied to nouns—nominative (actually unmarked), ergative, and oblique.” For example, ɑ gɑm mɑ ɑp “I came from the village” has no case, whereas ɑ gɑm-ɑ ma ɑp “I came from the villages” has a plural oblique case. Torwali has three tenses: past, present, and future, and three aspects: perfective, imperfective, and inceptive. Inceptive refers to events about to begin. Torwali has four syllable structures: verb, verb-consonant, consonantverb, and consonant-verb-consonant (Lunsford, 2001). Lunsford (2001, forthcoming) has identified four contrastive tone patterns in Torwali: high (H), low (L), rising (LH), and falling (HL).

The Torwali Writing System Literacy is one of the most complicated issues in language revitalization efforts (Grenoble & Whaley, 2006) and is usually thought of as a first step in language revitalization. Since literate individuals and communities

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are deemed to hold high status in modern societies, literacy in a language can add prestige to it. Literacy in a local language makes it suitable to be used in many social domains. That is why many language revitalization efforts focus on putting in place school-based literacy programs. Grenoble and Whaley (2006) offer four recommendations for developing and adopting an orthography: It needs to be alphabetic, have learnability, be acceptable, and have transparency. Efforts of language revitalization generally adopt an alphabetic writing system, because it involves fewer symbols and is more likely to be compatible with computer keyboards and tends to be used in the language of wider communication. Learnability means that learners will have less difficulty reading and writing the language. Therefore, the connection between spoken phonemes and written forms of the sound needs to be transparent. When the writing system of a language is hard to learn, motivation to learn diminishes. Acceptability means that the writing system for the language is not only acceptable socially, politically, psychologically, and educationally to those who learn it but also to external stakeholders, such as local and national governments and media outlets. Acceptability of the writing system perhaps stands above the other three priorities. If the writing system is not acceptable to key users and stakeholders, it will not be used. Transparency refers to the correspondence between the spelling conventions of the target language and the language of wider communication, whenever possible. The writing system developed for Torwali is alphabetic, based on the Arabic script, because many of the Torwali people were already familiar with and accepted this writing system in Urdu, Pashto, or Arabic through the Holy Quran. Both the national language, Urdu, and the “regional language,” Pashto (the language of wider communication in the northwest province, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), are written using the Arabic script. Torwali has 47 letters/written symbols. All of them except four exist also in Urdu and Pashto. However, some dialects of Pashto, for example the Qandahari dialect, use two of these letters. One is a vowel, the open-front vowel /æ/, which is used frequently in Torwali. The other three symbols are the commonly used retroflex fricative /ɕ/ and the retroflex affricates /ʑ/ and /ʂ/ (Torwali, 2015). Figure 3.2 shows the alphabet, with the four characters in light grey.

Efforts to Revitalize the Torwali Language Wayne A. Lunsford (2001) noted that in late 1990s, the Torwali people were incorporating words from other languages such as Pashto, Urdu, and English in their daily conversations. However, today the Torwali people are very proud of their language and identity and use it in their daily life. This is the result of a number of initiatives and research carried out on the language since the 1980s. In 1982, a Torwali leader, Abdul

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Figure 3.2 Torwali alphabet.

Hamid Khan Karimi, wrote a booklet, Urdu-Kohistani Bol Chaal (UrduKohistani Conversation; Kohistani because the language is also known as Kohistani among Torwali natives and Pushtuns), which was reprinted in 1995 (Baart & Bremer-Baart, 2001) and is mentioned in a book by Mujahid Torwali (2015).

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In 2008, I wrote a Torwali alphabet book under the supervision of Lunsford (Torwali, 2016). In 2008, a team of language activists associated with the local organization, Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT), designed a primer in Torwali and wrote booklets of short stories for children in Torwali, under the guidance of linguists at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International. In 2010, a Torwali speaker, Inam Ullah, published a Torwali-Urdu dictionary (Ullah, 2010). In 2011, the Center of Language Engineering at University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, announced the launch of this dictionary online, the Online Torwali Dictionary (CLE, n.d.). In 2011, Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT) published Inaan (Rainbow, a collection of more than 300 couplets of Torwali folk poetry with Urdu translation; Roy, 2011). In early 2015, a research paper on the Torwali culture, written by me in 2006 (Torwali Z., Vestiges of Torwali Culture, n.d.) was published by Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT). Later in December 2015, a team of researchers associated with the IBT published three books (Khaliq, 2016): the first Torwali-Urdu-English dictionary by Aftab Ahamd (Australia, n.d.); a trilingual conversation book; and 15 Torwali folktales, with Urdu and English translation.

Education Planning for the Torwali Language Torwali had no writing tradition until 2007. In 2005, work began to develop an orthography, an alphabet book, and a primer, with the support of SIL International. In March 2007, I and other youth founded a formal organization, Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT; institute for education and development) to continue development and promotion of the Torwali language, with the wider mission of “transforming the most neglected sections of Pakistani society, especially the marginalized ethnic groups living in northwest Pakistan, into developed communities by the active participation of people without any gender, racial, or religious discrimination” (IBT, 2015). After two years, a curriculum for the early childhood multilingual education program was developed in Torwali. The course books, in Torwali, included graded reading stories, reading and writing primers, listening stories, big books, children’s rhymes, basic mathematical concepts, cultural and ethical studies, and counting books. A teacher’s guide, which was developed by Susan Malone, UNESCO, and a SIL International consultant on literacy and education, was translated into Torwali from English. Language does not operate in isolation; it is embedded in the culture, and language and culture are connected with the world around the community. The IBT devised a plan to celebrate culture in order to strengthen a sense of identity and develop self-esteem within the Torwali community. The IBT also started holding cultural festivals in the Torwali community. A large Indigenous culture festival was held in July 2011 in Bahrain, with

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the name Simam (meaning “celebration and dignity” in Torwali). The festival revived traditional games, which had been abandoned six decades ago, and poets sang songs of pride on their identity and culture. Given the onslaught of the popular media, particularly television, the folk music of Indigenous communities often does not survive, because younger generations become used to the “world of color and light,” where modern music is played. Realizing this, the IBT undertook the task of promoting Torwali melodies (The Friday Times, 2016) and holding local concerts with poets and singers. A local cable TV channel was sponsored, so that Torwali music could be broadcast to a larger audience. More recently, the IBT produced a DVD (named Manjoora, “gift” in Torwali) of Torwali melodies with state-of-the-art technology and modern musical instruments. The researchers and activists associated with the IBT began to voice their identity aggressively within and outside the community because of the research they were doing. After the IBT’s assertion of Torwali identity, Torwali youth formed Torwali student unions at their colleges. Now hundreds of youth proudly write Torwali or Kohistani as their names on social media. (The author of this chapter, for the first time in 2006, began to write Torwali with his name.) They can now proudly voice their identity; whenever anyone mocks their language, they teach them that their language is an advantage to them.

Education Opportunities in the Torwali Language: Initiating a Mother Tongue-Based Education Program As of December 2017, eight schools have been established in different Torwali communities, and 867 children, ages 4–11, have participated in these schools, starting their early education in the language they speak at home, Torwali. Owing to the overwhelming importance given to English and Urdu, these schools initially could not attract larger numbers of children, as their parents, having grown up in a linguistic context where their language was considered inferior by the dominant language communities, were reluctant to send their children to these schools. A reason that the parents would often give was, “My children already know Torwali. Therefore, they do not need to learn it at school” (Parents, 2008). It seemed that loss of their own language was of no concern to these parents, and the primary concern was the commonly held notion of economic and social development.

Teaching and Learning the Torwali Language: Theory and Approach The model of education in the Torwali revitalization program adopted by IBT is nearer to the Language Maintenance or Language Shelter

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Program, with a transitional early-exit strategy. It is a multilingual education (MLE) approach in which children aged 4–7 (beginning in preschool) are taught all subjects, cognitively high-demanding as well as less demanding, through Torwali as the medium of instruction in the first year. In the second year, oral Urdu and oral English are introduced as subjects, while the medium of instruction remains Torwali. Currently, there are three campuses of the Innovative Learning Model (ILM) School in different villages of the Torwali area. The course developed for the Torwali-based multilingual education schools, known as Innovative Learning Model Schools, is for students aged 4–7, taught in Torwali for two years, in Kindergarten 1 and 2. Each school has two mandatory classes—Kindergarten 1 (KG 1) and Kindergarten 2 (KG 2)— except on the main campus in Bahrain, where Class 1 and Class 2 are also included, and Torwali is taught as a subject. Almost all instruction is done in Torwali by the teachers, who are native speakers of Torwali with Pashto and Urdu as second and third languages. They are also somewhat proficient in English. The parents are multilingual: They speak Torwali as their mother tongue, and they are also fluent in Pashto and Urdu. A small number of them can understand English to some extent. As the ILM Schools charge no tuition fee, a number of the students are from low-income families. Students complete two years of their early schooling at these schools in Torwali, and then their parents get them admitted to either public primary schools or low-cost private schools, which are in Bahrain town only. In none of the private and public schools is Torwali taught as a subject or used as the medium of instruction. Most of the teachers, however, use Torwali to give instructions to the students during their teaching. The Torwali MLE approach involves a transitional early exit from the MLE schools, and then students are admitted to either the private or public schools. IBT staff, however, now and then evaluate the performance of the students at the other schools in order to connect them to mother tongue literacy. IBT and the MLE school staff call some of the students and evaluate their literacy—writing and reading—in Torwali each year. Often the parents of the children of a minority group view the dominant language as the language of advancement and power and want to ensure that their children master it (Cummins, 2009). This is also the case with the parents in the Torwali community. To help these parents support literacy development in Torwali, IBT has undertaken community-based literacy initiatives to enhance prestige of the Torwali language, identity, and culture outside the school environment. IBT staff realized that for a mother tongue-based early education program to be effective, it is imperative to change language attitudes in the children’s homes. Thus, the IBT started holding weekly literacy sessions for the mothers of children at the ILM Schools. The mothers came for two hours and learned how to read and write in their own language (Torwali) along with some basic Urdu. On a larger scale, the IBT designed and implemented a bilingual, Torwali

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and Urdu, literacy program for 2,000 adult women in the community in 2013, with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (Khaliq, 2013). This project has greatly changed the language attitudes of the women and also given them the opportunity to learn Urdu and learn about social issues.

Student Writing in Torwali: Classroom Practice The teaching of Torwali is based on two prominent principles, phonological and semantic. The teaching materials produced to teach Torwali literacy are based on a two-track pedagogy. One track (the Primer Track) is mainly focused on accuracy and correctness, whereas the other track (the Story Track) focuses on comprehension and meaning. The Primer Track uses materials that include an alphabet book and primers to teach basic reading and writing, while the Story Track involves reading and listening to stories. Each school year is divided into four terms, with eight weeks of instruction in each term. At the outset, oral Torwali is introduced with visual access to the alphabet book. Although the Torwali-speaking children have learned the language orally at home, they are instructed in oral Torwali language use in the first year in order to further polish their ways of articulating the language. Similarly at the later stages, oral Urdu precedes written Urdu, because the acquisition of written language depends on prior acquisition of oral language (Hannon, 2000). Later, in the third term of the first year, the primer is introduced, and the Story Track is continued. A period of one hour for instruction of each track is given daily, so that students receive two hours of literacy instruction in Torwali daily. In the alphabet book, the alphabet (letters representing the sounds) and encompassing words (words in which the letter is used word initially, word medially, and word finally) are supported with relevant contextualized pictures. Letters in the alphabet book are arranged so that the simplest, most frequent, and most memorable ones are presented to the children first before they go to the next (Hannon, 2000). Torwali is remarkably monosyllabic and disyllabic. The frequency of multisyllabic words is not common, although there are a great number of words with three syllables. Each lesson in the Primer Track is based on the teaching of two letters (although some lessons introduce one letter per day), the syllables and words they are used in, and their usage in sentences. The sequence of teaching is from letter to syllable to word to sentence to paragraph. Almost all of the key words in all of the lessons are nouns that can be represented in pictures. Each daily Primer Track lesson is one hour, distributed into four activities of 15 minutes each. First, the teacher discusses the picture used in the lesson with the students to help them use their home knowledge, pre-knowledge, to understand the lesson. She then shows the students how the letter is used in a word and then a syllable and reviews, going back to the letter. Boxes are provided below the key word and the letter, which provide the opportunity

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for breaking the word into syllables and letters and building a word from letters and syllables. At the end of each lesson, a short story is read aloud by the students, which mostly uses the letters, syllables, words, and parts of speech taught so far. This gives opportunities for students to use the words in meaningful ways. At the end of the lesson, there is a brief exercise in which students write words using the letters they have learned. The practice of teaching writing in the Primer Track seems conventional and falls within the Skills Discourse of Writing approach postulated by Roz Ivanič (Ivanič, 2004), where he states that learning to write involves applying knowledge of a set of linguistic patterns and rules for soundsymbol relationship and sentence construction. Ivanič believes that the Skills Discourse of Writing regards some components of writing as a “unitary,” context-free activity in which the same rules and patterns apply to all writing, independent of text type. Underlying this approach is the belief that good writing encompasses the “correctness of the letter, word, sentence and text formation” (p. 227). A sample lesson is shown in Figure 3.3. For the Story Track, a one-hour lesson is given daily. The teaching activities are children listening to and then reading stories from the Torwali culture. This track consists of 64 listening stories and 64 reading stories for two years. The reading story booklet, which each student has, has one or two short sentences per page with a picture above the text. Figure 3.4 shows a page of the reading story booklet. Teaching through the Story Track applies a thematic approach, wherein each week of each term has two themes, chosen from the students’ culture. The lessons for the theme are categorized as science, arts, socialization, health, play (games), and rhymes. Both the listening and reading stories are on the same theme for the week, and each week has two listening and two reading stories. The goal of the listening stories (which are longer than the reading stories) is comprehension. The learning goal for the reading stories is the ability to relate sounds to their written representation. Each reading story is supported with a big book of the story as well as a picture and the story in the student book. The teaching of a theme takes place over five days, Monday to Friday (Figure 3.5). On Monday and Wednesday, new lessons are taught, and on Tuesday and Thursday, lessons taught on Monday and Wednesday are reviewed. On Friday, all of the lessons taught during the week are reviewed. Each day, one hour is for the listening story and one hour is for the reading story. The one-hour period is divided into four activities of 15 minutes each. The focus of the lesson is on comprehending a story orally and then reading it, and then engaging in activities focused on learning to read and learning to write, especially creative writing. (1) The teacher instructs the students to look at the picture in the story first and then reads the story aloud to the students and asks them questions. They are then led to read the stories as whole texts, in their student books, in order to comprehend them. (2) In the next activity, the students are asked to process (think about), produce, and read stories about their own

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Figure 3.3 Sample Primer Track lesson.

experiences. (3) After they have thought about their experience stories, they narrate them aloud, and the teacher writes them on the board. After their narration, they are led to read together the stories on the board. (4) They are then given pieces of paper to write their experience stories, copying from the board. When they are finished, the papers are displayed

Figure 3.4 Sample of reading story booklet used in the Story Track.

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Figure 3.5 Sample of lesson plan, generally referred to as a Tonga Wheel.

in the classroom so that the other students can see them. The children value their products and attach a great deal of appreciation to them.

Student Writing in Torwali: Data Collection and Analysis Data Collection For my data collection, the teachers of the main campus of ILM Schools in Bahrain town were asked to collect texts in Torwali written by the students in Kindergarten 1 and 2. These are the writing samples of the current students (Examples 3.3–3.8). The other samples are written by the “former” students of the main campus of ILM Schools in Bahrain town, whom I invited through the monitoring and evaluation officer of the Torwali MLE program (Examples 3.9–3.17). I selected both current and former students of the ILM Schools’ Bahrain campus, because this campus is the oldest, in place for 10 years. Its former students are accessed easily, as they are now reading at either the private or public schools in the town of Bahrain. The former students of the other two campuses cannot be easily accessed, because the schools were not always in the same location in those areas. IBT shifts the locations in those villages in order to benefit as many children as possible. I asked the teachers at the ILM Schools in Bahrain town to help me select a story for the students to write. They selected a short folktale (Examples 3.3–3.8) that the students had learned in Kindergarten 1. The teachers got the text samples written by the current students at that school, which included few writing samples from the students in grades 1 and 2. For the writing samples of the former students, I guided them to write stories about their own experiences (Examples 3.9–3.17), and I supervised and observed them while they were writing. Since there were 15 students, I got 15 samples of creative writing. While the writing samples by the current students were based on a text that they had listened to, seen, and read multiple times (Examples 3.3–3.8), the writing samples by the former students are examples of “independent” writing—creative writing based on their daily experiences (Examples 3.9–3.17).

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I interviewed six teachers and the monitoring and evaluation officer. Among the six teachers only one was male. These teachers were from the ILM Schools in Bahrain and Kedam. I asked them: 1) What do you find difficult in teaching writing and in the materials you use? and 2) What do you find is a frequent difficulty on the part of students to learn to write? Data Analysis The writing samples collected consist of two sets. In one set, 11 students— seven girls and four boys, aged 5–9—were asked to write a short folktale (Examples 3.3–3.8), which they had listened to and read in class (more directed writing) in the first year of schooling (Kindergarten 1). These students (“current” students) still study at the Innovative Learning Model School, one of the IBT’s MLE schools. Among the 11 current students, three are reading at either grade 1 or 2 level. Their writing was evaluated in order to know how effective mother tongue instruction as a subject could be, and to learn how much instruction in the second and third language had affected their learning to write in the mother tongue. The second set (Examples 3.9–3.17) consists of writing samples from 15 students, eight girls and seven boys, aged 7–13. These students (“former” students) had been shifted to other schools after completing their two years of schooling at the Innovative Learning Model School. The writing of the “former students” was about an event in their daily life that they would like to write about (more independent writing). Here I show and describe six writing samples from the “current students” and nine writing samples from the “former students.” Torwali Writing of Current Students Example 3.3

Example 3.4

Name: Komil Age: 8 Translation: One face today is. One . . . on is—today. Lala of some today.

Name: Azan Age: 8 Translation: Frog river. One frog river. 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 A frog log sat on. 5 the frog began. 6 I and river brought.

Example 3.5

Example 3.6

Name: Shabnum Age: 9 Translation: Frog and river. I and river carried down log. One day river had flooded. In water were many logs. A frog was sitting on log. The frog was croaking. I and river had carried down log.

Name: Zaresh Age: 6 Translation: Frog. I and river log carried. Other day night—water flesh.

Example 3.7

Example 3.8

Name: Asiya Name: Abuzar Zeb Age: 5 Age: 6 Translation: I and river carried down Translation: I and river carried down log. One day river . . . . log. Other day night—water— Torwali Writing of Former Students Example 3.9

Example 3.10

Name: Ayesha Hussain Age: 11 Translation: I got up in the morning. Then washed hands and face. Then took tea. Then went to school. And from school came and said payers. Name: Azan Then I went to madarsah after having Age: 9

meal. In madarasah I said prayers. Then I took tea. Then I remembered school lessons. After that I said evening prayers and ate meal. Then I and my sister played. Then said night prayers and went to sleep.

Translation: I went to Shal. I went to school. My school went off. I ate lunch. I went to Shal. We learn lessons at schools. I and Shal went to the pasture. My teachers teach lessons. We learn lessons at home. My teacher showed tests (gave tests) for home (as homework). This is a duck. This is Shal. This is morning.

Example 3.11

Example 3.12

Name: Fayaz Ahmad Age: 13 Translation: My name is Fayaz. I read at ILM school. I am in class seventh. In my school there are two “sirs” and four “miss” [there are two male teachers and four female teachers]. They teach us lessons and tell stories as well. We take much fun from them. Our school has a canteen as well. In break we purchase things from this and then eat them. Then we have our school off. Then we go to homes.

Example 3.13

Name: Furqan Noor Age: 10 Translation: I wake up in the morning and go to school and I am in class fourth. I read at the public school. And then coming from school and after having eaten my meal I go to the madarsah. And then coming up from madarash I go to play after saying my late afternoon prayers. And after coming from playing I write my school lessons. Then having written that lesson again and remembering that then saying night prayers and then after eating meal I sleep. Then waking in the morning, washing hands and after taking tea I go to school. Example 3.14

Name: Iqra Age: 10 Name: Rinan Torwali Age: 12

Translation: I wake up in the morning and wash hands and face and then go to school. Then I come from school and say prayers. Then I eat meal and go to madarasah. Then I come from madarasah and say afternoon prayers. Then I take tea and after remembering my lessons I say prayers of evening. Then me and my sister play then we say night prayers and eat meal and then sleep.

Translation: I once went to Kaarchi. I went to my uncle’s home. I then went to the shrine of Quad-e-Azam. Then I came back to home [uncle’s home]. Then I went to bazaar. Then I came home. It became night. Then in the morning I went to school. I had my school test. Test was very good. Our test was done. I read in Bahrain Public School [it is a private school]. I am in class sixth.

Example 3.15

Example 3.16

Name: Marwa Akbar Age: 12 Translation: My name is Marwa. I read in class seventh. I wake up in the morning. I wash hands and face. Then I go to school. And I come from school and saying prayers I eat meal. I go to madarasah. Coming from madarasah I say prayers. Then I do school work. Then I say the evening prayers. After evening prayers I and my sister play. Then I say night prayers. Then I eat meal and sleep.

Name: Zaidan Torwali Age: 10 Translation: Once I went to school there a test was assigned. That test I learned. Seeing that my teacher gave me applause. My age is 10 years. My father is policeman. I was born in 2007. I am in class fourth.

Example 3.17

Name: Umm-e-Aman Age: 12 Translation: My name is Umm-e-Aman. I read in class fifth. I wake up in the morning, wash hands and face. I take tea, wear uniform and go to school. Coming from school and say prayers. Then after eating meal I go to madarasah. I come from madarasah and say prayers. Then after taking tea I do school work. Then I say evening prayers. Then I and my sister play. Then after saying night prayers then after eating meal I sleep.

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Reflection on Students’ Writing Machanzie, Scull, and Munsic (2013), citing Huot (2009), Calfee (2007), and Espin (2004), state that “effective assessment of writing involves the examination of skills across a range of criteria” (p. 376), and the purpose for the assessment determines the data gathered and analysis processes applied. Procedures for assessing writing should be situated within the context of purposeful and meaningful tasks and based on an understanding of learning along a continuum that acknowledges both summative and formative aspects of writing and the types and forms of texts (Machanzie, Scull, & Munsic, 2013). This approach implicitly applies the Six Discourses of Writing and Learning to Write developed by Ivanič (2004)—skill, creativity, process, genre, social practices, and sociopolitical. Ivanič describes the six discourses as a continuum that starts with skills, “decontextualised linguistic rules and patterns” and accuracy and correctness, and moves into creativity, particular ways of thinking about writing that view it as the product of the writer’s creativity. Process involves composing processes in the writer’s mind and their practical realization, and “learning to write includes both the mental processes and the practical processes involved in composing a text” (p. 231), planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Genre focuses on the written product and the social context that shapes it. “Writing is a set of text-types, shaped by social context” (p. 232), and learning to write involves learning the “characteristics of different types of writing which serve specific purposes in specific contexts” (p. 233). The focus is on “appropriacy” rather than accuracy. Social practices focus on writing being “purpose-driven communication in a social context” (p. 234). One can “learn to write by writing in real-life contexts, with real purposes” (p. 234). The sociopolitical dimension is embedded in the belief that “writing is a socio-politically constructed practice, has consequences for identity, and is open to contestation and change” (p. 238). Learning to write includes understanding why different types of writing are the way they are by taking a position among alternatives. The belief underpinning this framework is that writing is a complex mix of social and political factors and has implications for authors’ identities. Using Ivanič’s framework (2004), it is possible to explore the discourse positions taken by the students as writers and teachers as assessors or raters and to guide policy making around curricula and textbooks. Although the focus of the framework is Anglophone countries, Ivanič himself states that it can be a catalyst for non-Anglophone contexts as well. Ivanič’s framework is useful for assessing the folklore written by the young Torwali writers (Examples 3.3–3.8). In these examples, we see the students struggling to write accurately about what they have seen in the folktales in their books, where each sentence works as a separate paragraph. The students imitated the same format. They even tried to number each sentence as it is numbered in their book. In Examples 3.3–3.8,

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the students tried to write the actual story, Frog and Log in the River, except for Example 3.3, where the student, although using the same format, switched to something about her own experience (creative writing). Interestingly, all of them wrote their names and the title of the story in the center at the top of their writing notebooks. This may be due to the teaching materials and the assessment questions they were asked to respond to at the end of each term. Two of them (Examples 3.3 & 3.6) found it difficult to join the letters in words. None of them wrote the word for flood (‫ کﻫڙﺍ‬/khəʑɑ/) accurately with the special character /‫ڙ‬/. This is perhaps because of the aspirated letter /‫ﻫ‬/ with the special character. However, they have written another special character (/‫ݜ‬/) accurately. The writing of the students in Examples 3.3–3.8 differed in handwriting and legibility, ranging from the use of letter-like forms to a mix of upper- and lowercase letters with some distortions in legibility. Ivanič’s framework is also useful for assessing the writing samples collected and shown above from the older or “former students” (Examples 3.9–3.17). These writing samples are considered to be independent writing, by students who were asked to write a story about an important event of their lives. The majority, except for Example 3.16, understood this to be a chronology of one day in their lives. The stories they produced are about waking up in the morning and going to school. One story is about the student’s visit to Karachi. This indicates how important the context, school, is for the students. One overwhelming theme in the stories is “saying the daily prayers.” Since the samples are of independent writing, the length varies from student to student. In contrast, the samples produced by the “current students” are roughly the same length except for the few written by newly admitted students, age 6. The writing of the “former students” (Examples 3.9–3.17) shows “creative self-expression,” as described by Ivanič. Assessment of this writing is more concerned with the “story” or “writer’s voice” than about “accuracy” and “correctness.” The structure of the texts differs, as the complexity of meaning moves from daily activities, from home to school and school to home, to sequenced ideas, for example eating a meal, saying prayers, and going to bed. In Example 3.16, the student breaks the sequence of ideas and writes about his school. The texts reviewed demonstrate control over the genre, with a sense of context and intent. Along with the control over the text structure, the students’ command of sentence grammar, parts of speech, and verb tense is also evident in Examples 3.9–3.17. They connected their words and sentences with connectives like “then,” “and,” and “also.” It is also evident from the text samples that the students demonstrated an ability to write compound and complex sentences, such as “having eaten” and “having said.” They also wrote correct pronouns, mostly first person, as they were writing about themselves and their own experiences. In terms of vocabulary, words used related to home and school activities.

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Clearly evident in the examples were the varying levels students’ mastery of spelling. The texts (Examples 3.9–3.17) vary from random use of letters to representation of the dominant vowels and consonant sounds and phonemes. Orthographic awareness is also evident in the examples, where the students applied correct orthographic patterns in complex words and abided by spelling rules. They wrote multisyllabic words like ‫ ﻣﺪﺭ ﺳہ‬،‫ ﮐﺮﺍﭼﯽ‬،‫ ﺩُﻫﻮﺍﺋﯽ‬،‫ ﺍ ﻳِﺸﻴﺖ‬،‫ ﻧﻴﺎﺷﺎﻡ‬،‫ ُﮔﻮﺯﺍﺋﯽ‬for “madarasah,” “Karachi,” “washes,” “having stood,” “evening,” and “says [prayers].” Another feature noted is the use of punctuation, especially of full stop/ period. The texts demand no other punctuation mark, and Torwali, like Urdu, does not apply capital letters to proper nouns. The imaginative worlds that these children deploy in what they write indicates a shared enculturation, a common world of Torwali childhood, which is shaped by religious teaching at home, school, and madarasahs (schools for religious teaching). These three contexts are common to the majority of Pakistani children. The Story Track teaching approach used in the Torwali MLE program is based on the belief that writing and reading can best be taught by letting students describe their real-life experiences. The erasing and rewriting of words in almost all the of samples shows the emphasis given to correctness and accuracy in the teaching observed. Although the approach followed at the Innovative Learning Model School is very different from conventional pedagogical practice in the public sector and private schools, and although the teachers were trained again and again in this new approach, the conventional mindset related to teaching seems difficult to change. A common feature of Torwali speakers is switching between voiceless and voiced bilabial and dental plosives, /p/ vs /b/ and /d/ vs /t/, especially in words where they occur word finally. In spelling, the students tend to write /t/ where /d/ is plausible and is suggested in the orthography developed for Torwali. For example, in the above samples, |ʑɑd| is written as |ʑɑt|, meaning “morning” (Examples 3.9, 3.12, 3.14, 3.15). We also see switching of vowels, such as between close and mid front vowels, /ɪ/ vs /e/, and between the open-front vowel /æ/ and open back vowel /ɑ/ (Examples 3.9, 3.10, 3.12, 3.13, 3.15). Use of diacritics is also very common when writing Torwali. Torwali is a tonal language with four distinct features of intonation, but symbolizing the intonation in orthography poses difficult challenges for students. Owing to the principle that an orthography needs to be as simple as possible, intonation is not part of the writing system. However, Torwali orthography still uses a number of diacritics to indicate different vowels, length of vowels, and diphthongs. The common diacritics used are:‫ ء‬،َ ،ِ ،ُُ◌. Among these, ‫ ء‬is the most frequent. It distinguishes an open-front vowel from an open back vowel, used in representing diphthongs and glides. In the writing samples above, it is clear that the students were struggling

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with the correct use of this diacritic in various positions. The teachers consulted in the study also found it hard to teach diphthongs and glides, especially /ou/ or /au/ represented by (‫ )ﺅ‬in the Torwali orthography, and which is very frequent in many Torwali infinitives (e.g., /lhau/, “to wear,” / khau/, “to eat,” /kou/, “to do”). As the most senior teacher, Ms. Aliya Ahmad replied to my question in Torwali, “‫”ﺃ ء ﮨﺮ ﭘﻮﺕ ﻣﯽ ﻳﺌﯽ ﺁں ﮨﮯ ﭼﻴﺮ ﻣﺴﺌﻠہ ﺳﻮﺋﯽ‬, “This ‫( ء‬a frequent diacritic) comes in every place and makes much problem.” Sometimes the students were struggling with the exact representation of the vowel length, with this diacritic and others. In a number of samples, the students seem confused over the usage of the exact ways to write long and short vowels (Examples 3.9, 3.11, 3.14, 3.17). An important trend found in the samples, especially in the ones written by the “former students,” is shifting from Torwali to Urdu spelling (Examples 3.9, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.15). This might be because the students had transitioned to another medium of instruction rather than Torwali. At their current schools, Torwali is not taught as a medium of instruction or as a subject. This is probably a demonstration that early-exit transition to another language does not support maintenance of mother tongue literacy for a long span of time. In a number of samples, the students did not use punctuation marks (Examples 3.3, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.12, 3.15). Torwali uses the same punctuation marks used in Urdu. In one sample (Example 3.17) from one of the “former students,” I found that the student used diacritics that are used in Pashto, even though the Torwali MLE program does not teach Pashto, the regional dominant language. This is perhaps due to the fact that the student now reads and writes in the public, state-run primary school, where Pashto is taught as a subject. Finally, I summarize the findings from my interviews with the six teachers I interviewed, five females and one male. Their experience of teaching Torwali varies in terms of time. One has been teaching and supervising at the ILM Schools since 2008. The others are somewhat new to their jobs, with one to five years of teaching experience. I asked them two questions: 1) What did they find difficult for the children to learn to write? and 2) What did they find difficult in teaching writing? “ ‫“( ”ﺃ ﺅ ﭼﻴﺮ ﻣﺴﺌﻠہ ﺳﻮﺍﺩُﻭ ﺳﺮ‬This ‫[ ﺅ‬glide] makes much problem, sir”), said Ms. Aliya Ahmad, the senior teacher. She further elaborated that when this glide connects with other words, especially with the Torwali infinitive, it becomes difficult for children to write it correctly. The ‫ ء‬is used frequently in Torwali orthography, Ms. Ahmad went on to explain, and comes in some “irregular” places, which can confuse the children when writing, because in other places, for instance, ‫ ﺍ‬for the vowel /æ/ is used. When I asked the other teachers how they felt about teaching the writing of Torwali, they mostly agreed with what Ms. Ahmad had said. However, the teachers were optimistic, saying that over time the children

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gradually overcame this difficulty, and their writing improved. Mr. Imtiaz Ahmad, the only male teacher in the Torwali MLE program, ILM Schools, stated that orthography is an evolving product. No orthography of any language can be fully standardized. He mentioned examples from Urdu, where many diacritics are implicitly learned and read. He explained that with the expanding use of a language in writing, diacritics are gradually not written, as in the case of Urdu. Torwali will also move to that stage.

Future Efforts to Promote Torwali Revitalization In this chapter, I have given an overview of the Torwali language, its people, its history, some of its important linguistic features, and the various efforts to revitalize the Torwali language and identity of Torwali speakers. An important component of these efforts was the establishment of mother tongue-based multilingual schools by the IBT, the organization that has managed these efforts for the last 12 years. I have discussed the curriculum and pedagogy for developing literacy in the Torwali language and analyzed the writing in Torwali by current and former students in the Torwali MLE school, ILM School in Bahrain town. The study was restricted to a review of student writing samples and an interview with six teachers who teach students how to read and write Torwali. Since this is a new program, this is the first-ever attempt to evaluate the pedagogy, curriculum, and learning outcomes of students who have had instruction in mother tongue literacy in the program. It may help the teachers, managers, monitors, and internal and external assessors of the program to consider the long-term goals for revitalization of the Torwali language. It may also help educators in similar programs to scrutinize the theoretical approaches to this kind of educational model in Pakistan and elsewhere. The Torwali MLE model can best be described as a Language Maintenance Program but, unfortunately, with an early-transitional exit. This study reinforces the demand of the Torwali community that the model needs to cover the early five grades of primary education (after Kindergarten 1 and 2), for a total of seven years of early education. The study also points to the need for additional efforts to revitalize the Torwali language. These include, but are not limited to, conducting a review of the curriculum developed for the Torwali MLE program, training its teachers on different pedagogical approaches to developing literacy, writing more books for adults and students to read, introducing Torwali as a subject in the private and public schools, conducting research on the history and identity of the Torwali people, and producing literacy materials for informal (community-based) literacy programs by using existing folklore and Indigenous knowledge and by translating books and papers from other languages.

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Notes 1. H.W. Roverty wrote this note on the book in 1862: “This is a copy of a very unique and rare work, containing an account of the movements of the Yusafsaies and other tribes of Pashtonah. I know but of one copy.” 2. The reference here is to the entire area, which is now known as Kohistan of Swat or Swat Kohistan. At that time it was known as Torwal.

References Australia, N. L. (n.d.). National Library of Australia. Retrieved from Torvālī Urdū, angrezī lugh̲ at = Torwali-Urdu-English dictionary / Āftāb Aḥmad.: https://trove. nla.gov.au/work/222337725?q&versionId=243822077 Baart, L. J., & Bremer-Baart, E. L. (2001). Bibliography of languages of Northern Pakistan. Islamabad: Summer Institute of Linguistics and National Institute of Pakistan Studies. Barth, F. (1956). Indus and Swat Kohistan-an ethnographic survey (Vol. 2). Oslo: Forenede Trykkerier. Bashir, E. (2003). Dardic. In G. Cardona & D. Jain (Eds.), The Indo-Aryan Languages (1st ed., p. 865). Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge. Biddulph, J. (1885). Tribes of Hinoo Koosh (Vol. 1). Lahore, Pakistan: Ijaz Ahmad, Ali Kamran Publishers. Cacopard, A. M. (2016). Fence of Peristan: The Islamization of the “Kafirs” and their domestication. Archivio per l’Antropologia e la Etnologi, 145, 71. Calfee, R. C. (2007). Best practices in writing assessment. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), (1st ed.). Handbook of writing research. New York: The Guilford Press. Calvin, R. R., Sandra, D. J., & Daniel, H. G. (1992). Sociolinguistic survey of Northern Pakistan (Vol. 1, O. F. Clare, Ed.) Islamabad, Pakistan: National Institute of Pakistan Studies QAU, SIL International. Chaghatai, M. I. (2002). Writings of Dr. Leitner: Islam, education, dardistan, politics and culture of Northern Areas. Lahore, Pakistan: Government College Research and Publication Society & Sang-e-Meel Publications. CLE, E. (n.d.). Online torwali dictionary. Retrieved March 16, 2018, from www. cle.org.pk: www.cle.org.pk/software/ling_resources/otd.htm Cummins, J. (2009). Fundamental psycholinguistic and sociological principles underlying educational success for linguistic minority student. In R. P. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (Ed.), Social justice through multilingual education (p. 20). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Espin, C. A. (2004). Assessing the writing performance of students in special education. Exceptionality: A Special Education Journal, 12(1), 55–66. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327035ex1201_5 The Friday Times. (2016, February 12). Fading songs from the hills. Retrieved November 14, 2016, from thefridaytimes.com: www.thefridaytimes.com/tft/ fading-songs-from-the-hills/ Grenoble, L. A., & Whaley, L. J. (2006). Saving languages: An introduction to language revitalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Grierson, G. A. (1928). Linguistic survey of India (Volume VIII Part-II). Calcutta, India: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing.

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Grierson, G. A. (1929). Torwali an account of a Dardic language in SwatKohistan. New Delhi, India: J. Jetley for Asian Educational Services. Gul, S. (2017, August 26). (Z. Torwali, Interviewer, & Z. Torwali, Trans.). Bahrain Swat, Pakistan. Hannon, P. (2000). Reflecting on literacy in education. (R. Merttens, Ed.). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Hay, R. W. (1934). The Yousafzai state of Swat. The Geographical Journal, 84(3), 241. doi:10.2307/1785758 Huot, B. (2009). Toward a new understanding for classroom writing assessment. In R. Beard, D. Myhill, J. Riley, & M. Nystrand (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of writing development (pp. 423–435). London, UK: SAGE. IBT. (2015). History of IBT. Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT). Ivanič, R. (2004). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education, 18(3), 220–245. doi:10.1080/09500780408666877 Jetmar, K. (1961, February). Ethnological research in Dardistan 1958 preliminary report. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105(1), 79–97. Khaliq, F. (2013, March 3). Educating women: In Swat, over 2,000 targeted in new literacy programme. Retrieved from The Express Tribune: https://tribune. com.pk/story/514989/educating-women-in-swat-over-2000-targeted-in-newliteracy-programme/ Khaliq, F. (2016, January 1). Three Torwali publications launched. Retrieved November 14, 2016, from Dawn.com: www.dawn.com/news/1230025 Lunsford, W. A. (2001). An overview of linguistic structures in Torwali. Arlington, TX: University of Texas. Lunsford, W. A. (n.d.). A typological profile of Torwali (forthcoming). forthcoming, 5. Machanzie, N. M., Scull, J., & Munsic, L. (2013). Analysing writing: The development of a tool for use in the early years of schooling. Issues in Educational Research, 23(3), 276–277. Respondents. (2014, October). Baslineline survey repot-status of Torwali language. (T. Zubair, Interviewer). Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Roy, A. S. (2011, December 22). Inaan: Torwali ki zarbulmasal shaaeri (Rainbow: Proverbial poetry of Torwali). Retrieved November 14, 2016, from bbc.com: www.bbc.com/urdu/entertainment/2011/12/111221_book_review_zz.shtml Sathanvi, S. S. (2011). Kitab ul Ibra (Vol. 1). Islamabad, Pakistan: Poorab Academy. Shah, P. M. (1979). Tuwarikh Rahmat Khani. (P. Academy, Trans.). Peshawar: Pashto Academy, University of Peshawar. Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2018). Ethnologue: Languages of the world, twenty-first edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Stein, A. (Reprint 2000). On Alexander’s track to the Indus. New Delhi, India: Bahvana Books & Prints. Tahir, M. N. (1979). Preface to Tuwarikh Rahmat Khani. (P. Academy, Trans.). Peshawar: Pashto Academy, University of Peshawar. Torwali, M. (2015). Torwali-Urdu-English daily usage conversation. Bahrain Swat: Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT). Torwali, Z. (2011, June 22). Celebrating Swat-Kohistan Indigenous culture. Retrieved from The Express Tribune: https://tribune.com.pk/story/194056/celebrating-swatkohistans-Indigenous-culture/

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Torwali, Z. (2016). Reversing language loss through an identity based educational planning. Eurasian Journal of Humanities, 1(2), 23–39. Torwali, Z. (n.d.). Vestiges of Torwali culture. (Alliance for Linguistic Diversity). Retrieved April 4, 2018, from The Endangered Languages Project: www. endangeredlanguages.com/lang/3501/samples/10640 Ullah, I. (2010). ‫( ﺗﻮﺭﻭﺍﻟﯽ۔۔ﺍﺭﺩﻭ ﻟﻐﺖ‬Torwali-Urdu dictionary). Lahore: Center for Language Engineering Alkhawarizmi Institute of Computer Science, University Enginering and Technology. Viaro, A., & Inam-ur-Rahim. (2002). Swat: An Afghan society in Pakistan. Geneva, Switzerland: City Press and Graduate Institute of Developmental Studies. Willy, H. C. (1912). Tribes of Central Asia: From the Black Mountain to Waziristan. New Delhi: Adrash Books.

4

Early Childhood Safaliba Literacy in Ghana Ari Sherris

Introduction Safaliba is a Gur language spoken by 7,000 to 9,000 Safaliba people who live primarily in a remote rural area of the Northern Region of Ghana, southwest of the city of Tamale, west of the city of Wa, and on the western border of Ghana (Figure 4.1). The Safaliba are for the most part subsistence farmers, although a minority have additional occupations in their towns (e.g., as shopkeepers, blacksmiths, wood carvers, weavers, clothing designers, bakers, and cooks). The first Safaliba orthography was developed in 1996 by Edmund Kuŋi Yakubu, a Safaliba activist who studied at the Ajumako School of Ghanaian languages. Yakubu’s orthography was slightly refined by linguists Paul and Jennifer Schaefer from 1999–2003, based on their phonological data collection (Schaefer & Schaefer, 2003; 2004). A growing body of academic literature explores Safaliba syntax, narrative, metaphor, and early childhood phonological development. (For a brief history of Safaliba language and literacy documentation, see Sherris, 2017.) The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the instructional writing practices of a Safaliba subsistence-farmer-teacher-activist (henceforth, Teacher Samua) and analyze writing samples from four 6–7-year-olds in his class of 51 children, who are learning to write and read Safaliba. Samples are discussed from three data points, one from each trimester or from the beginning, middle, and end of the first year of primary 1 (grade level 1) schooling. Additional data are from field notes, photos, and video and audio recordings of Safaliba literacy activist meetings and classroom instruction as well as document collection (lesson plans and student notebooks). The data for this chapter are a small subset of ethnographic data that I collected during two two-week visits to the Safaliba in Mandari, Ghana, in 2014; while living among the Safaliba for a year (August 2015–July 2016) as a Fulbright Scholar and guest of the Safaliba leadership clan; and a one-week follow up visit in 2017. Additional data not used in this chapter include documentation of folklore, poetry, photos of traditional

Figure 4.1 Map of western border of Ghana. Source: public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ghana_Regions_map.png

72 Ari Sherris mud wall designs, and interviews with youth on the relationship of Safaliba language and identity.

Safaliba Language, Literature, and Theory When a government school positions its students, teachers, administrators, and learning itself in the language and culture that are not those of the homes, families, or clans that comprise the school community, school becomes a place to disinvest, disengage, and disassociate oneself for many students. This is as true of immigrant communities as it is of Indigenous ones (Sherris, Sulemana, Alhassan, Abudu, & Karim, 2014). School becomes a colonizing institution of and for others and their languages, which gain status (Paris, 2013) through use of the language(s) in school. There are several ways to understand how schools become colonizing institutions in postcolonial Ghana. One way is to realize, that when a language is not used for school and books are not developed with donor funding for those languages, it is often the case that the government does not officially recognize the Indigenous ethnolinguistic group’s Chieftaincy. Alternatively, the Chieftaincy is recognized, albeit granted only secondary status, such that a primary status Chieftaincy is required to function side-by-side with a secondary level Chieftaincy. The primary Chieftaincy has the sole representation at all national government organized convocations. Another way to understand colonization in postcolonial Ghana is to look at the use of large donor funding in the educational sector. Government policy makers often allow use of donor money to develop instructional literacy materials. Over several years, instructional materials development has focused mostly on nine of Ghana’s 73 Indigenous languages, and English, its only official language. For example, from 2004–2009, the Educational Development Center (EDC) reports using 27 million U.S. dollars to develop early childhood instructional literacy in Ghana’s public school system. From 2014–2019, Family Health International (FHI) 360 has been awarded 71 million U.S. dollars to continue to improve and develop early childhood instructional literacy in Ghana’s public schools. Both projects represent the largest single source of donor funding for early childhood instructional literacy at any point in Ghana’s history, including its funding under British Colonial rule. Instead of leveraging this funding, USAID and each of their proxy non-government organizations (EDC and FHI 360) developed or are developing early childhood instructional materials in three dialects of Akan (Asante Twi, Akuapem Twi, and Fante), Dagaare, Dagbani, Dangme, Ewe, Ga, Gonja, Kasem, and Nzema. Resisting the dominant discourse of educational language policy in Ghana is consequently about addressing the neglect of the 64 mother tongue languages for which there are no materials. This situation is not

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because all 64 language groups are particularly small (some have hundreds of thousands of speakers in concentrated areas). It is also not because of an ideology among the leadership of certain languages to remain outside of schools and to remain traditional oral cultures. At least, there is no evidence to that effect. It appears to be a result of the allocation of funding and successive generations of bureaucrats hired into leadership positions mostly from the nine Indigenous languages (particularly poignant in regional offices such as the Ghana Education Service). Consequently, the literature on linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1977, 1991), linguistic ecology (Creese & Martin, 2008), investment (Darvin & Norton, 2016; Norton, 1995, 2000), and complexity theory (LarsenFreeman, 2015; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008) are key to theorizing about the spaces where young Indigenous children might begin their education with a Safaliba curriculum that allows them to learn to write and read through community visits, talking, drawing, writing, copying, and engaging in alphabetics and phonics in and for their language and linguistic identities. When that language has few books and few components of a literary tradition but is rich with an oral tradition, literacy activists must be resilient, determined, and tenacious in the development their own materials. While no one from the Ghanaian Ministry of Education has stopped them, carving a niche for themselves and generating new linguistic and cultural capital opens them to the possibility of building a rich, varied, and helpful set of learning materials for use with students in their schools. Bourdieu (1991) writes, “The value of an utterance depends on the relation of power that is concretely established between the speakers’ linguistic competences” (p. 67). Arguably, very few relations of power, if any, might be established with 6-year-olds in a language that is not theirs— Gonja—and that they don’t understand, particularly if they are born and raised on their homeland and not uprooted, displaced, or torn from their heritage and roots. Under these circumstances, acquisition of language and literacy are contingent on what Norton has termed investment. Investment is a sociological concept that grounds identity and agency related to language and literacy in the realities of classrooms and the affordances (or lack thereof) to participate from an advantaged space. While research on investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015, 2016; Norton, 1995, 2000) was originally situated among migrants learning English as a second language in the Global North, Sherris et al. (2014) extended the use of the theory to explain development of Indigenous mother tongue literacy among the children of subsistence farmers, as well as extended the concept of revitalization to include literacy among Indigenous peoples who are decolonizing schooling. When writing is a mode of language that is outside the usual modes of a community, extending the concept of revitalization from oral to written modes (both reading and writing), where there is community investment in such activity, disrupts the status

74 Ari Sherris quo of schooling in ways that transform practice and pedagogy, particularly when schooling has been conducted in a particular way as a result of political ideologies and educational habits (Sherris et al., 2014). Language ecology is “the study of diversity within specific sociopolitical settings where the processes of language use create, reflect, and challenge particular hierarchies and hegemonies, however transient these might be” (Creese & Martin, 2008, p. XIII). In this chapter I argue that the instructional practices and the products from Safaliba children are disrupting the status quo in a government school and creating a transformation in both instructional approach and students’ engagement and products. The documentation of this is as important as the practice and reflects and constitutes language ecology, however micro-political. The emphasis on talking, drawing, writing, and reading in a language with a rich oral tradition such as Safaliba expands the communicative semiotic repertoires of young children from their foundation and from the foundation of their elders. It is an act of sign making in additional modes (Kress, 1997), linked to their own language, which generates the conditions for investment as well as linguistic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977, 1991), at the very least in terms of schooling. The school frees itself in fundamental ways by paying less attention to the mandates from a Ministry of Education that would have all Safaliba children learning to read and write in Gonja, a language that is lexically, morphosyntactically, semantically, and culturally very different from Safaliba. Gonja is not needed for university; English is needed. Finally, as an umbrella theory, I have adopted a complex adaptive system (CAS) understanding of the development of literacy among the children in the study, because I hope to show, with the work of four child authors, that CAS situates their individual learner trajectories in a self-organizing, adaptive, and dynamic theory (Larsen-Freeman, 2015; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). From a radical sociolinguistic perspective, it also situates language and literacy development in complexity theory (Adami & Sherris, 2018; Blommaert, 2016). I also argue that this best explains the development of multimodality from a social semiotic positionality, where language is only one communicative path, albeit with multiple modes (Adami & Sherris, 2018; Kress, 1997).

History of the Safaliba and Surrounding People The Safaliba language is the primary means of communication in seven towns and a subordinate means of communication in an additional seven towns within a 120-square kilometer area. Safaliba speakers are for the most part multilingual. Indeed, within a 50-kilometer radius of the Safaliba are additional towns where 11 other languages predominate (Birifor, Choruba, Dagaare, Deg, Gonja, Jula, Kamara, Lobiri, Siti, Vagla, and Waali) (from author’s field notes).

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Language contact is complex, because it intersects with social, religious, and economic factors. For instance, the regional oral tradition that provides a social frame of reference for the people of this area situates the Safaliba among the original inhabitants of the area, together with the Choruba, Deg, Siti, and Vagla. These five Indigenous groups are constructed as having original rights to the land where they have lived and farmed prior to trader colonial ways of life (from author’s field notes). The Gonja, on the other hand, are considered latecomers, who conquered the area in the 1500s. Indeed, they and the Kamara are outsiders who changed the power structure (Wilks, 2000). Furthermore, the Ghanaian constitution recognizes chieftaincies as land custodians and 80% of Ghana’s land is held in this way (Campion & Achaemping, 2014); however, the Gonja, and not the Safaliba, Chieftaincy is recognized as traditional custodian of Safaliba lands. While the Gonja and the Safaliba live peacefully with one another, the Safaliba would prefer more control over their traditional lands and the right to attend national meetings of tribal chieftaincies, which does not exist under current policies. The Safaliba are not alone; the majority of tribal chieftaincies, like tribal languages, go unrecognized. The Birifor, Dagaare, and Lobiri settled in the area during the colonial and postcolonial period to farm. While many sustain strong familial links with communities in the Upper West Region and elsewhere, they have created thriving farming communities of their own in the traditional Safaliba areas. Finally, Jula and Waali speakers are often traders with the Safaliba and share Muslim religious ties with them. These examples of diverse, complex languages and cultures in contact manifest an influence on Safaliba. Educational language policy in Ghana generated the development of materials to teach reading and writing in a two-year kindergarten program and the first three years of primary school. However, the policy only adopted 11 Indigenous languages1 for instructional materials development: Akwapim Twi, Asante Twi, Dagaare, Dagbani, Dangme, Ewe, Fante, Ga, Gonja, Kasem, and Nzema (Leherr, 2009); 64 Indigenous languages have no instructional materials. For this development, political leaders have collaborated with technical experts, international educational consultants, academics from the 11 Ghanaian school languages, and translators to utilize donor money to develop Indigenous literacy and literacy in English rather than literacy in all of the Indigenous languages (Rosekrans, Sherris, & Chatry-Komarek, 2012; Sherris, 2013; Sherris & Burns, 2015). Students can become disengaged and fall behind in school when materials are distributed and teachers are trained to use the materials in schools and communities where the languages used in the materials are not the languages of the home or the community. This is particularly poignant in rural multilingual areas such as the area within a 50-kilometer radius of Safaliba-dominant communities where, despite or because of

76 Ari Sherris the multilingual nature of the area, there is pride and value placed on community languages. Whether this sense of pride and value is framed as an ethnic, cultural, social, or linguistic phenomenon or reality or some combination of the above, it is a driving force that could potentially shift the focus and daily reality of government schooling. Currently, children who initially learn in a language that they do not speak at home or in the community, that is not theirs, do not usually do well, and those who do master the language take longer to do so than those for whom the language is their mother tongue. This creates inequalities in access, engagement, and outcomes, which are not helpful for these children. In most of rural Ghana, one language is dominant and linked to the ethnic and cultural values of the community at a structural level (Galtung, 1969, 1990). At the same time, most members of these communities are multilingual vis-à-vis additional Indigenous languages, particularly with respect to farming, going to market, and making contact with fellow believers during times of heightened religious observance (e.g., African, Muslim, or Christian). People marry and bring two or more languages into a home or traditional Ghanaian family compound.

Safaliba Language Paul Schaefer, who has documented and researched a variety of linguistic aspects of Safaliba (2009, 2015), reports that “there are no full reference grammars for any but the most distantly related languages” (2009, p. 10). To date, the most extensive grammatical overview is in Schaefer (2009), of which I describe a few details here. There are 28 letters of the Safaliba alphabet comprised of 19 consonants and 9 vowels (o̱ /o/e̱ /e/i/ɛ/ɔ/u/a). There are five digraphs: ch/gb/kp/ny/ŋm. Nouns and verbs share similar forms and different suffixes; many, but not all adjectives share these forms. Safaliba has two tones, high and low, with the former marked with an acute accent and the latter marked with a grave accent. Except for a definite article, all other elements in a noun phrase follow the head noun. Particles that precede the verb play an important role in determining tense, aspect, mood, and affirmative or negative polarity or some combination of these. Schaefer reports that there are “twenty different preverbal particles” (2009, p. 105). Clause structure is usually subject-verb-object.

Revitalization of Safaliba Language revitalization in the Safaliba context is a form of activism that extends the modalities of Safaliba to literacy through its development of materials for government schools. These materials revitalize the language in the modalities of reading and writing, which has been a 20-year process that often faltered but is growing strong at this writing.

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Indeed, from the development of the Safaliba orthography in 1996 by Edmund Kuŋi Yakubu, a Safaliba, until the activism begun in September 2015, several attempts to engage the community in Safaliba reading and writing instruction were short-lived. One occurred under the auspices of a charismatic Imam who passed away, and his school disappeared. Another occurred through the drive of a head teacher, who moved to another school; and a third, involving only a few teachers, simply ended. None if any of these attempts produced a body of materials that document or sustain the project beyond their development and use by the teachers themselves (Sherris, 2017). Some used materials and approaches developed for adult literacy. Adult literacy has been a sustained effort since 1999, in a volunteer after-work program led by Iddi Bayaya, a subsistence-farmer-teacher-activist. However, the focus of this chapter, and what the activists argue for, is on a sustained revitalization of Safaliba literacy for early childhood settings (from author’s field notes).

Description of the School Where Observations Were Done The English-Arabic Primary school is in the largest Safaliba town and had 369 students at the time of this study, of which 150 were female and 159 were male. The community language of the school and of 99% of the students was Safaliba. The mandated school languages were Gonja and English from a two-year kindergarten program through primary 3. The school employed eight teachers, two of whom were female and six of whom were male. The range and distribution of ages was as follows: the first year of kindergarten included children from 4 to 5 years of age; the second year included children from 5 to 6 years of age with P1 (6–10-yearolds), P2 (7–11-year-olds), P3 (8–12-year-olds), P4 (9–15-year-olds), P5 (10–17-year-olds), and P6 (11–18-year-olds). The overlap of ages is not uncommon in rural areas of Ghana, as schooling includes late starters. The academic year began in September and ended in July and was divided into 14-week trimesters. The government-mandated curriculum for P1–P6 included English, mathematics, science, Ghanaian language, creative arts, and religious education. While many if not most of the students are Muslims, and the name of the school is the English-Arabic Primary school, Arabic was not taught because there was not a qualified Arabic teacher. The school used Gonja materials for teaching reading and writing in Gonja from kindergarten through primary 3. After that, all textbooks were in English. All classroom teachers used some Safaliba and Gonja during classroom discussions, with greater prevalence of Safaliba in the early grades. Data were collected every day from all students (ages 6–10) during the 2015–2016 school year. Students attended a primary 1 class with 51 students at the beginning of the school year and 52 at the end. This study describes only a small amount of data from four students. Teacher Samua

78 Ari Sherris was their only teacher; he had five years of teaching experience. All students sat at roundtables with four to six students per table. The beginning of the year was in a building that had very broken concrete flooring, broken wooden shutters on the windows, and was very dark and dusty, but by January the students moved to a new government-built cinderblock building with wooden rafters, new wooden shutters, and smooth concrete flooring, brightly painted, with natural light on most days and very clean. While the new building was wired for electricity, it was not connected to the electric grid. The older building had two chalkboards, and the new building had one. Each had a poster-size whiteboard on an easel and 10 individual student whiteboards used for group work.

Instructional Writing Practices Primary 1 instructional writing practices were both structured and rule governed as well as free and creative. Structured and rule-governed practices included learning to hold a pencil and say, repeat, chant, trace, and copy letters, words, short sentences, and short texts. The letters of the alphabet don’t have names in Safaliba, so they are named by their sound. Teacher Samua would point to a letter from a list on the chalkboard, say the sound of the letter, and the children would repeat the sound in unison. Often, he would encourage children to follow his lead as he turned his back to them, extended his arm in the air, and carefully drew the target alphabet letter in the air. They enjoyed this kinesthetic task, if their smiles were any indication of how they felt. He often also practiced two- to four-letter consonant-vowel words. For example, since there are many short consonant-vowel words in Safaliba, Teacher Samua would write on the chalkboard a list of nine to 10 words with many of, if not all, of the nine vowel sounds. He would also write the vowels this way, as shown in Figure 4.2. He would point to a word on the board with a long thin branch taken from a tree, say the word, and have children repeat the word in unison. Teacher Samua would also call on children to lead the activity. He supported the process through recasting children’s misreadings. When a child leading the activity could not read a word after a few seconds of waittime, Teacher Samua would slowly read the first sound of the word, a form of priming, allowing time for the child to chime in. Seated children also recast misreadings made by other children, leading the activity at the request of Teacher Samua. Free and creative practices involved weekly class field trips on foot to a local community member engaged in an occupation. Occupations included wood carving, blacksmithing, haircutting, clothing design, cooking Fufu, basket weaving, taxi driving, cement mixing and block making, poultry farming, basket weaving, carpet weaving, and nursing; many of these people also were subsistence farmers of yams, cassava, guinea corn,

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Figure 4.2 Chalkboard with short Safaliba words and nine vowels.

and millet. Free and creative practices also included small-group discussions of what was learned on a visit to a community member and sharing what was learned as a whole group. Teacher Samua wrote some of what the children said about their field trips on the chalkboard, using their words and grammatical constructions;

80 Ari Sherris that, together with photos of the visit, became the raw material a team of Safaliba literacy activists and allies used to produce eight-page little books. The activists added English translations, so that the SafalibaEnglish bilingual little books could be used for teaching both languages and be useful for multiple grade levels. They pulled out key words in Safaliba for children learning to read sight words and glossed those in English too, for beginners who were not yet ready to read a full sentence. Each child in Samua’s class was given their own little book a week or so later for reading practice, further discussion, drawing, and pretend writing or invented spelling. Children in additional grades were also given copies. The children took to Teacher Samua’s free and creative practices with great engagement, particularly the field trips on foot, singing, holding hands, and chattering away in Safaliba. Community members would stop whatever they were doing when the children passed and smile with pride. School was being decolonized; becoming less separate from the community; and being transformed in some respects by Teacher Samua’s disruption of the state curriculum in order to enfranchise his language, culture, community, and the children whose education he cared for most. Schooling was less about the dictates from the leadership in Accra, which increasingly focused on the nine Indigenous languages and cultures at the expense of the rich multilingual landscapes of rural indigeneity—64 additional languages. Writing consisted of structured skills practice and creativity in Teacher Samua’s primary 1 class for 6–8-year-old Safaliba children. The structured skills practice focused on learning letter and digraph formation as well as spelling little words (shown earlier in Figure 4.2), whereas the creative activity focused on drawing and invented spelling (Figures 4.3, 4.4, 4.5). Samua and the group of teacher activists with whom he met regularly discussed his approach as a kind of apprenticeship. As discussed above, children copied letters in their exercise books and carried out dictations following practice in choral recitation of the sounds of each letter, as Teacher Samua pointed to them and called them out. There were dictations, too. Teacher Samua would say a word out of order from the way the words were listed on the chalkboard, and children would write it. At the end of the dictation, Teacher Samua would write the words on the board, in the order that he had spoken them in the dictation, and students would self-correct. Creative practice looked like this: The children engaged in a drawing and writing activity most days that related to the pictures or texts in the little books. Those books were mostly transcriptions of their own words, which they dictated to Teacher Samua, as discussed previously.

Children’s Writing in Safaliba In this section, I discuss drawing and invented spelling data—writing— from four 6-year-olds from three data points. Figure 4.3 is from the beginning of the year (October), Figure 4.4 is from the midpoint of the year (February), and Figure 4.5 is from the end of the year (July).

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Figure 4.3 Early year drawing and invented spelling examples.

The Safaliba teacher activists met in the middle of the school year and began a checklist that focused on what they saw in the notebook examples, such as the ones in Figures 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5. The checklist they created included (1) drawing; (2) letter(s); (3) number(s); (4) the child author’s name; (5) the date; (6) a correct or nearly correct first lettersound for a word; and (7) spacing between words (Table 4.1). Because the data that the teachers had from Teacher Samua’s primary 1 class only

82 Ari Sherris

Figure 4.4 Midyear drawing and invented spelling examples.

showed invented spellings for words, except for each particular child’s name, the list was left open to further development. The group discussed this in terms of development (from author’s field notes). As an ethnographer, my interest is to characterize the data in this paper using their list, because it has validity for them and it came from them, and was later member-checked by them for this paper. Using the Safaliba

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Figure 4.5 End of year drawing and invented spelling examples.

activist teachers’ checklist is an attempt on my part to erase the “white gaze” (Fanon, 1967) on their habits of mind and ways of knowing—if that is possible—so that I might be in a dynamic state of continuously becoming an ally and advocate for Safaliba language and literacy practice in their schools (from author’s field notes). At the same time, I construct my explanation through the theories of the Global North (e.g., an ecological

84 Ari Sherris perspective on language and literacy, the role of linguistic capital, the sociology of investment, and complexity theory bundled into a view of a humanist and even—as Pennycook [2017] has argued—a post-humanist worldview). The ecological side of my explanation of Teacher Samua’s activism focuses on the shifts or perhaps disruptions of government curricular guidelines, which do not engage in the levels of classroom assessment as embodied by Table 4.1 for its mandated nine Indigenous languages. As such, the Safaliba checklist (with items 1–6 above), a form of evaluation, is a “challenge to particular hierarchies and hegemonies” (Creese & Martin, 2008, p. VIII). Explaining it through an ecological approach to instructional and assessment practice valorizes Safaliba children’s evidentiary trail of investment in early Safaliba literacy development and in who they and their community are. It is also the investment of their teacher in organizing and facilitating the field trips on foot and the discussions afterwards among the children that result in the little books of their words. It is not about following a Ministry of Education’s programs for a language that is not their own. Meaning making takes place in their own language. It is an attempt to say this is who we are, and we are proud. Indeed, Edmund Kuŋi Yakubu, author of the Safaliba orthography, and James Ze̱ ne̱ so̱ ŋŋa Kotobiri, a teacher who taught children to read Safaliba in a short-lived program at the Malam Abdulai English-Arabic primary school in Mandari that no longer exists, indicated that earlier attempts to develop Safaliba literacy did not leave written records (from author’s field notes), although writing and reading in Safaliba were also earlier Indigenous goals, not government ones. So, these acts already increase the mode of expression within a government school in defiance of the inertia of a bureaucracy that would erase Safaliba and has never opened a door to Safaliba. Table 4.1 makes clear that there are individual learner trajectories toward Safaliba literacy development. Children co-construct and soft-assemble Table 4.1 Safaliba teacher-activists drawing and invented spelling checklist Safaliba literacy development checklist

Drawing Alphabet letter(s) Number(s) Child author’s name Date Correct—or nearly correct—first letter-sound for a word Spacing between words

Child Author 1

Child Author 2

Child Author 3

Child Author 4

B

M

E

B

M

E

B

M

E

B

M

E



  

 







  



  

  

            



  

    





Key: Regarding the school year: B = Beginning; M = Midpoint; E = end.

 

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their particular drawing and writing; paying attention to this and following this generates a complex adaptive systems orientation to the work (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). Figure 4.3 is a presentation of the data from the beginning of the school year. Teacher Samua asked the children to write their name and copy the date from the chalkboard. Then he asked them to draw and write about school. Child author 1 drew a picture with a round table with five children at her table that day; Child author 2 drew four children with books that look like rectangles with grids. We know they are books, because Teacher Samua asked the child what they were, and the child responded, “buksi,” which is Safaliba for “books” (from author’s field notes). Child author 3 wrote her name, “Mariama,” at the bottom right and some letters and numbers around five children playing outside the schoolhouse, which is also in the picture. “N kare̱ ŋna naa” is Safaliba for “I am reading.” It is what Teacher Samua wrote on the child’s drawing when the student said that is what she wrote with her letters and numbers. Child author 4 drew six or seven people and wrote his name, “Kuubu,” on the left side of the largest person in the drawing as well as three letters below his name. He also wrote his name a second time between the legs of the large person at the bottom center of the drawing. None of these early examples of writing have any relationship to letter-sound correspondence, except the names of the children themselves. From these and other drawings the Safaliba teacher-activists constructed their assessment checklist. By validating the drawing process and constructing writing as a development from that process, the activists have invested in authentic meaning making, creativity, and free semiotic processes that expand early schooling for these children and emphasize a shift in the linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1977, 1991) as well as investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015, 2016; Norton, 1995, 2000) by them and, in turn, by their eager young Safaliba writers. Figure 4.4 demonstrates a rich transformation, albeit an incremental transformation and development by midyear (February). Many more alphabet letter strings are appearing on drawings, which enrich the voices and narratives of young Safaliba writers. A few weeks earlier, the children had taken a field trip on foot to the “Te̱ ŋbanasuba zee” or “Traditional African Religious Leader’s place” to hear of his offerings to the Land Gods, water and pito (a fermented brew) libations, the slaughter of a sacrificial fowl, and prayers for health for the Safaliba community. In terms of grapheme-phoneme alignments, Child authors 2 and 4 show onset alignments. The prompt from Teacher Samua was a request to draw and write about the most important activity of the Te̱ ŋbanasuba. Intriguingly, these two students, as well as the most of the other 52 children, selected the slaughter of fowl. Figure 4.5 is from July 2016, the last month of the school year. Teacher Samua asked his primary 1 students to draw and write about their visit to the “Nage̱ kare̱ go̱ ” or “Cattle Kraal.” Many chose to draw and write

86 Ari Sherris about herding the cattle to the “naafo̱ ro̱ ,” or bush, to graze. It is important to note that the visit to the Nage̱ kare̱ go was a cross-cultural experience for the children, as the cattle herders are members of the Fulani, who are among the largest pastoral nomadic groups in the world. They live in peace with the Safaliba and live together in a community on Safaliba Indigenous land, with the blessings of the “Safale̱ naa,” or Safaliba Chief, of Mandari. Indeed, their community is but a short walk from the Safaliba schools. All four focal Child authors chose to draw cattle, each student except Child author 3 also drew a human, presumably a herder or perhaps themselves, with the cattle. Child authors 1 and 2 told Teacher Samua that they had written “I am taking/sending the cattle to the bush (to feed).” Both students got some onset graphemes aligned with phonemes. Child author 3 wrote a string of letters that begins with a number, and Child author 4 did not write anything. Nevertheless, Teacher Samua asked Child author 4 what he was thinking, and he said he was milking a cow, which is what Teacher Samua wrote on his drawing. The individual learning trajectories, when viewed through the explanatory lense of complexity theory, suggest a self-directed, nonlinear, adaptive, and dynamic concept of writing development that research, in this preliminary study, has only just begun to unpack with respect to children from oral Indigenous rural communities. Developing writing through drawing and invented spellings in a language that has no codified spellings, few books, and is “outside” the Indigenous language groups is testament to Safaliba activist investment in their language and culture.

Promising Exploratory Directions in Safaliba Literacy Development The Safaliba literacy activists discussed a variety of future directions in their meetings. For instance, Safaliba children in older grades who are more proficient writers might be instructed in writing different genres. The little books might be read and used for ideas that would lead to writing in new genres. This might involve some students writing an academic paragraph that summarizes the information in each little book. Others might write instructions on engaging in an activity that is briefly mentioned in a little book (e.g., preparing and cooking Fufu, making cement or mud bricks, cutting hair, designing a shirt, planting yams). Yet others might write questions for an interview with a community member from a little book. Children might learn how to produce a school or community newsletter on a weekly or monthly basis with interviews and current events (from author’s field notes). These ideas might be characterized as technical developments in a curriculum for Safaliba literacy. However, taken together, they could lead to a shift toward a project-based curriculum that blends government goals in content areas and more local topics and themes from the Safaliba community and culture.

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This would lead to further decolonizing of schooling; represent the rise of an ecologically sound language and literacy capital for its local market, the school; and be an example of a way forward for the 64 other Indigenous languages in Ghana, as well as others elsewhere. While no one is suggesting that there is one way forward, not even for other Safaliba schools and communities, the Safaliba language and literacy developments resonate, nevertheless, hopeful new directions for others facing similar challenges to seek their own solutions, however similar or different those may be.

Note 1. There are nine, not 11 Ghanaian school languages, by counts that consider Akwapim Twi, Asanti Twi, and Fante varieties of one language, Akan.

References Adami, E., & Sherris, A. (2018). Communicating beyond diversity: A bricolage of theories. In A. Sherris & E. Adami (Eds.), Making signs, translanguaging ethnographies: Exploring urban, rural, and educational spaces (pp. 9–25). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. (2016). From mobility to complexity in sociolinguistic theory and method. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 242– 261). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16(6), 645–668. doi:10.1177/053901847701600601 Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language of symbolic power. Cambridge: Harvard Educational Press. Campion, B. B., & Achaempong, E. (2014). The chieftaincy institution in Ghana: Causers and arbitrators of conflicts in industrial Jatropha investments. Sustainability, 6, 6332–6350. Creese, A., & Martin, P. (2008). Introduction to Volume 9: The ecology of language. In A. Creese, P. Martin, & N. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education (Vol. 9, pp. xiii–xviii). New York: Springer. Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56. Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2016). Investment and language learning in the 21st Century. Langage et société, 3(157), 19–38. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291–305. Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London: Routledge. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2015). Complexity theory. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (pp. 227–244). New York and London: Routledge. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

88 Ari Sherris Leherr, K. (2009). National literacy acceleration program (NALAP) baseline assessment. Washington, DC: United States Agency for International Development. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change. Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education. Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9–31. Paris, D. (2013). Language across difference: Ethnicity, communication, and youth identities in changing urban schools. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rosekrans, K., Sherris, A., & Chatry-Komarek, M. (2012). Education reform for the expansion of mother-tongue education in Ghana. International Review of Education, 58(5), 593–618. doi:10.1007/s11159-012-9312-6 Schaefer, P. (2009). Narrative storyline marking in Safaliba: Determining the meaning and discourse function of a typologically-suspect pronoun set (Doctoral dissertation). University of Texas at Arlington. Retrieved from http:// dspace.uta.edu/bitstream/handle/10106/1669/Schaefer_uta_2502D_10219. pdf?sequence=1 Schaefer, P. (2015). Hot eyes, white stomachs: Emotions and character qualities in Safaliba metaphor. In E. Piirainen & A. Sherris (Eds.), Language endangerment: Disappearing metaphors and shifting conceptualizations (pp. 91–110). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schaefer, P., & Schaefer, J. (2003). Collected field reports on the phonology of Safaliba. Collected Language Notes, 25. Legon, Ghana: University of Ghana. Schaefer, P., & Schaefer, J. (2004). Verbal and nominal structures in Safaliba. In M. Dakubu & E. Osam (Eds.), Studies in the languages of the Volta Basin II (pp. 183–201). Legon, Ghana: Department of Linguistics, University of Ghana. Sherris, A. (2013). Re-envisioning the Ghanaian ecolinguistic landscape: Local illustration and literacy. Intercultural Education, 24(4), 348–354. Sherris, A. (2017). Talk to text Safaliba literacy activism: Grassroots Ghanaian educational language policy. Special issue on orality and literacy. Writing & Pedagogy, 9(1), 163–195. Sherris, A., & Burns, M. S. (2015). New border crossings for the interaction hypothesis: The effect of feedback on Gonja speakers learning English in a rural school in Ghana. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 10(3), 238–255. Sherris, A., Sulemana, O. S., Alhassan, A., Abudu, G., & Karim, A. (2014). School for life in Ghana: Promoting literate opportunities for rural youth. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35, 692–708. doi:10.1080/0143 4632.2014.908891 Wilks, I. (2000). The Juula and the expansion of Islam into the forest. In N. Levtzion & R. L. Pouwels (Eds.), The history of Islam in Africa (pp. 93–115). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

5

Emergent Writing in Notsi in Papua New Guinea Gertrude Nicholas

Introduction and Rationale The Notsi people are at risk of losing their language. The purpose of this case study is to observe and analyze characteristics of early writing at Libba Elementary School during the first three years of formal education and to make recommendations for revitalizing the Notsi language. Factors contributing to diminishing vitality of the Notsi language include a limited number of native-authored books, especially books written by children and for children’s literacy. Traditional rote instructional practices exclude early writing strategies to teach children to write stories on their own in Notsi. Negative attitudes towards use of Notsi in formal education are added to factors such as inadequate teacher training, poor implementation of national curriculum methods, and general ignorance about the value of bilingual education. Ineffective learning among Notsi children by the time they reach grade 3 has become a major motivation of Notsi communities to return to using Notsi in elementary instruction. Observations of teacher instructional practices in early writing and student early writing samples helped to identify Notsi revitalization issues and make recommendations including ways to improve teacher training in writing instruction, ways to improve teaching practices in the classroom, and ways in which parents may help strengthen their children’s early writing skills. Elementary education in Papua New Guinea is referred to as Elementary Prep (E-Prep), Elementary One (E-1), and Elementary Two (E-2). Primary education in Papua New Guinea begins at grade 3 and finishes at grade 8. E-Prep is similar to kindergarten in the USA and in this paper E-Prep refers to the kindergarten year. In 2013, language policy changed in favor of English instruction beginning in E-Prep instead of in E-2. In addition, the national curriculum changed from Outcomes-Based to StandardsBased (Department of Education, 2015). In spite of policy and curriculum changes, one issue seems to re-surface: Notsi children, like children from other language groups and regions of Papua New Guinea, are not learning to write meaningful texts in any language by the time they reach grade 3 (Agigo, 2010). This problem has prompted the Notsi community to take

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another look at the value of early education in vernacular. Discussions with former Notsi teachers and Notsi parents about instruction and curriculum materials in Notsi indicate that English comprehension improved with instruction in Notsi and when children learned initial literacy skills in Notsi. Discussions with Notsi parents indicate that the use of Notsi in classroom instruction will help to revitalize the Notsi language. The National Department of Education supports the use of vernacular, provided the community desires it, and there is an approved orthography in the language.

Literature Review and Guiding Theories Two reading methods were introduced nationwide after the language policy changed in 2013 in Papua New Guinea (Department of Education & SIL PNG, 2013). The Creative Phonics Method (Hynum, 2013, p. 50) and Vernacular Path to English (Acton, Wilson, & Ayabe, 2014, p. 75) involve teaching children to read and write first in vernacular during kindergarten, followed by introduction of oral and written English in E-1 and E-2. Reading and writing instruction in English starts after children have gained some speaking and listening skills in English. These two approaches are based upon a theoretical framework of writing theory but more teacher training and supervision is needed. Vernacular Creative Phonics and the Vernacular Path to English are compatible with the former Outcomes-Based Curriculum and the current Standards-Based Curriculum in Papua New Guinea; they reflect current writing theory. MacKenzie summarized five driving theories which support emergent writing—behaviorist, developmental, socioconstructivist, critical literacy, and multiliteracy (MacKenzie, 2014). Behaviorist theories indicate that children develop writing skills with increasing proficiency over time. Developmental theories specify that children should be encouraged to be active, constructive learners engaged in discovery learning and childcentered teaching. Socioconstructivist theories propose that children learn with others as they construct stories. Two other theories, critical literacy and multiliteracy, are inferred as elementary teachers master application of the first three. Critical literacy theories indicate that students are encouraged to analyze texts and use writing to address social inequities. Multiliteracy theories suggest that children develop awareness of and competence in using a range of text forms (such as lists, poetry, chants, songs, and stories) to create meaning. MacKenzie mentioned that if different text forms were available, children could use digital technology to produce texts (MacKenzie, 2014). These five driving theories may be applied in modern methods of writing instruction as teachers learn more about the stages of early writing (Graham, 2010). Application of these theories is discussed within the context of Notsi instructional writing practices. Temple (1992) describes at least five stages of early writing: prephonemic, early phonemic, letter-name, transitional, and conventional. The

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pre-phonemic stage occurs prior to learning the sound-phonogram relationship. Children scribble, draw, make mock letters, and progress on to create letter strings from left to right and then begin to write separate groups of letters to resemble words (Temple, 1992). In early phonemic stage, the first letter of a word is used to represent the word. In the lettername stage, children write beginning and ending letters in words (Graves, 1989). Graham (2010) states that in the transitional stage of writing, a child points to individual words on a page when reading, and works to match their speech to a printed word. This stage helps the child to conceptualize individual words in the text. Children demonstrate oneto-one correspondence with words and write with beginning and ending sounds. They begin to spell some high-frequency words correctly and begin to insert vowels into words. As students transition to more conventional writing, they begin to write words the way they sound. Punctuation begins as writers experiment with forming sentences. A brief review of the history and culture of the Notsi people follows.

Brief History of Notsi Culture and People Notsi language is referred to by other names such as Noatsi (Ross, 1970) and Nochi (Erickson & Erickson, 1990). The Notsi lived in the central area of New Ireland Island. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch, English,  and French explorers and traders visited Notsi communities, and Germany controlled the Notsi area along with other language communities. New Ireland was a colony from 1884 to 1914 (Countries and their Cultures, 2016). Japan controlled the island from 1942 to 1946 and little is known about their impact on the formal education of the Notsi. In 1946 German and English plantations recruited Notsi workers, and development of the Boluminsky highway increased socialization between New Ireland language groups. Government requirements for all communities to relocate to coastal areas regardless of linguistic affiliation has had a negative effect on the vitality of Notsi and neighboring Kuot, and Nalik languages. McLaughlin and O’Donoghue (1996) provide some history of education in the New Guinea Islands and their research reveals that Roman Catholic and Methodist missions played a major role in the formal education of the Notsi as well as other language groups in the New Guinea Islands. In 1950, the medium of instruction was vernacular or Melanesian Pidgin and simple English (McLaughlin & O’Donoghue, 1966). This trend of using vernacular, Melanesian Pidgin, and English in the formal education of the Notsi has continued to the present. Notsi culture is Melanesian and the people live in six major villages in central New Ireland Province. Notsi people plant gardens twice per year on clan-owned land and establish clan-owned oil palm, coconut, or cocoa plantations. Each clan selects a chief who is respected because of his ability to lead and advise the clan and preside at traditional events such as funerals, bride price ceremonies, and other feasts. According to Notsi

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tradition, a chief must be an elder in the community, grow a garden, and be a fisherman, a house builder, and one who raises pigs (unpublished essay by J. Lavoi, 2016). Most Notsi live on the east coast in houses made of bamboo or sawn timber, with thatched or corrugated iron roofing. Notsi art may be observed in their Malagan carvings, and the woven bamboo walls of their homes. Families usually have two houses—one for sleeping and another for cooking and maybe a third house for young men. Most educated Notsi live and work in towns around Papua New Guinea and return to traditional villages after retirement.

Notsi Language Structure Notsi language is in the New Ireland Network of Austronesian languages in Papua New Guinea and is spoken by about 2,000 people (Year 2010 national census data). The Notsi orthography has been revised at least three times in attempts to resolve sociolinguistic issues regarding 10 Notsi vowels (and the consonant phoneme /tʃ/) (Bekas, 2000; Erickson, 1990; McCarthy, 2003). King (2007) conducted an acoustic study of Notsi vowels that distinguished differences in the two central vowels of Notsi, /ə/ and /a/. The latest Notsi alphabet inventory is based upon decisions from edited Notsi stories published in 2013 (Nicholas, 2012). See the current Notsi Phonemic and Orthographic Inventory in Table 5.1. Organized phonological data was originally done by Erickson and Erickson (1990) and revised by McCarthy and McCarthy (2003). Notsi has six syllable patterns: V, VV, VC, CV, CVV, and CVC. Sentence structure type is SVO; stress is contrastive with minimal contrast, therefore it is not written. The non-syllabic phonemes /u/ and /i/ are written as letters w and i, respectively, in syllable onsets. Since the phoneme /ə/ does not occur at the beginning of words, the phoneme /ɑ/ is written with a single letter a at the beginning of words. This decision calls for a spelling rule which should be taught in early writing lessons. See Table 5.1. Table 5.1 Notsi phonemic and orthographic inventory Phoneme

/ə/

/ɑ/

/b/

/d/

/e, ε/

/e:/

/g/

/i/

/ᴵ/

/i:/

Lower case grapheme

a

aa

b

d

e

ee

g

i

ie

ii

Capital grapheme

-*

A

B

D

E

Ee

G

I

Ie

--*

Phoneme

/k/

/l/

/m/

/n/

/ng/

/r/

/s/

Lower case grapheme

k

l

m

n

ng

o

oo

p

r

s

Capital grapheme

K

L

M

N

Ng

O

Oo

P

R

S

Phoneme

/t/

/ tʃ/ /u/

/u:/

/ ʋ/

/w/

/ɤ/

Lower case grapheme

t

ts

u

uu

uo

w

x

Capital grapheme

T

Ts

U

Uu

--*

W

X

/o, ͻ/ /o:/ /p/

--* These graphemes are never capitalized, as they never occur at the beginning of words.

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Notsi Language Revitalization Efforts Notsi language revitalization efforts seem to be closely connected to elementary education. In the 1990s, the Notsi language community selected language committees for each of its six villages in order to write children’s literature to teach their children to read and write. Each village produced Notsi storybooks and primers and established non-formal preschools. A Notsi language committee was organized to promote literacy and translation of the Bible. The Summer Institute of Linguistics ran curriculum materials development workshops and training courses for adult and elementary literacy classes in collaboration with the government. The result was an ongoing local literacy program in five Notsi elementary schools where children transferred Notsi literacy skills to learning in English.

Description of Libba Elementary School Libba Elementary School is one of six elementary schools in the Notsi language community. It is a three-room facility with two classrooms separated by a small office/storage area. Each classroom has a chalkboard, a desk, and chair for the teacher. Students sit on a wooden floor facing the chalkboard. Natural lighting is allowed through large, wide louvre windows on two sides of the classroom. The walls of the classroom are covered with samples of student writing, art, and a few commercial curriculum materials—some of which are dated from previous school years. Libba elementary students are taught by two male teachers. Since Libba Elementary classes have fewer than 30 students, the head teacher instructs E-1 and E-2 classes. Every child is required to have an exercise book to copy information from the chalkboard and other writing activities. Students enter E-Prep at ages 6 to 7 years, E-1 at ages 7 to 8 years, and E-2 at ages 8 to 9 years depending on age of entry into elementary school and whether they repeat a grade. It is common to find children aged 8 and 9 years in an E-Prep class. Class sizes range from 12 to 20 students. The head teacher is a grade 10 graduate and the other completed a grade 10 equivalent through distance education. Both teachers receive annual modular training, the main path for elementary teacher education offered by the National Department of Education.

Instructional Writing Practices in Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea policy requires that teachers follow 2014 StandardsBased Curriculum (SBC) guidelines, training for which was only introduced to elementary teachers in July 2016. Teachers may download the SBC syllabus and the teacher guide from the internet (Department of Education, 2015). The 2015 Elementary Syllabus recommends a writing strand which includes instruction in pre-writing, spelling, writing skills, and creative writing (p. 6).

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The Creative Phonics Method ( Hynum, 2013) was developed for vernacular language instruction and it is one of the prescribed phonics methods for implementing Standards-Based or Outcomes-Based Curricula. Notsi teachers were introduced to Creative Phonics in a one-week inservice. Since teachers were not inserviced with Standards-Based Curriculum guidelines until mid-2016, this study focuses on observing instructional writing practices indicated by Outcome-Based Curriculum guidelines (Department of Education, 2003). National learning outcomes dictate instructional writing practices for all three elementary grades (Department of Education, 2003). E-Prep teachers should instruct students to (a) use pictures and writing to represent ideas and information; (b) recognize strategies that help them to write; and (c) recognize that pictures and print are used for different purposes (Department of Education, 2003). The Department of Education recommends that E-Prep teachers provide a range of writing materials (small chalkboards, paper, chalk, crayons, or charcoal) for emergent writers. Learning outcomes require teachers to encourage “writing-like” behavior by using pictures and symbols to communicate messages. In addition, the E-Prep teacher should model writing behaviors that help students learn to write letters, words, phrases, sentences, and stories in the vernacular. These learning outcomes are encouraged by behaviorist and developmental theories. Socioconstructivist theories are implied with teacher modeling to help students write. Outcomes-Based Curriculum guidelines support the teacher’s role to help students proceed through early stages of writing as they build on prior knowledge (Department of Education, 2003). E-1 student-learning outcomes require teachers to instruct students to (a) write texts for a variety of purposes; (b) use a range of strategies to write texts; and (c) identify some of the purposes of writing. For example, children should learn to write about familiar topics from the community, use writing to record simple messages, write simple stories and information texts for book development, write familiar words without copying them, and change the wording of familiar texts. These writing activities are child-centered that help children engage in discovery learning and are supported by developmental theories. E-2 student-learning outcomes require teachers to instruct students to (a) plan, write, and publish fiction and information texts; (b) select and apply a variety of strategies to plan, review, and edit texts; and (c) identify ways in which print and pictures differ. Examples of instructional activities include teaching children how to write different types of texts such as keeping a journal, publishing a range of texts, writing a vernacular dictionary, and proofreading, editing, revising, and rewriting work (Department of Education, 2003). E-2 learning outcomes are supported by socioconstructivitist and critical literacy theories and include shared writing and genre approaches. This case study compares and contrasts the prescribed

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teaching practices with observed teaching practice in Libba Elementary School. Multiliteracy theories are implied in the learning outcomes for all elementary grades. Lists, poetry, chants, songs, and stories may be used in Creative Phonics and Vernacular Path to English approaches.

Notsi Instructional Writing Practices Early writing samples were taken from children ages 6 to 10 years. Information was collected from discussions with teachers, observation of instructional writing practices, and individual student exercise books. Exercise books provided a record of student writing behaviors and teacher interviews provided clarified aims of instructional activities. Digital photos of writing samples were obtained using an Apple iPhone 5C. Low contrast photos of student writing samples were edited using Adobe Photoshop to make the photos more contrastive at 600 dpi. Notsi elementary students seemed eager and attentive during class time, although writing instruction was given in a traditional rote fashion by the teacher. I observed writing activities of three male and three female students which the head teacher selected from each grade level. It appeared that the teachers wrote the term, week, and date on the chalkboards and student exercise books showed their attempts to copy this information. Sometimes the date was legible and sometimes the students wrote the wrong date. In any case, I could double check this information with a school calendar. The children carried their exercise books home and usually brought them back to class each day.

Early Writing Samples of Libba E-Prep Students E-Prep observations began near the end of Term 2 in May 2016. Roman letters JM and MR were used to identify the E-Prep students. Actual instructional writing activities in Libba E-Prep classes included drawing, labeling pictures, letter formation, spelling, word building, and sentence building. Creative story writing was not observed. Daily lessons did not follow closely with the Creative Phonics lesson plans and no lesson plans prepared by the teacher were observed except the order seen in student exercise books. Writing activities were integrated into Language Arts, Culture and Community, and Math subject areas. JM drew and labeled a dog biting something. He wrote ngalti for the word ngaalti, a transitive verb meaning to bite something. He made a common spelling mistake when he failed to put the second letter a for the long tense central vowel. The short lax vowel is represented by a single letter a, which sounds similar to the vowel in the English word but. In Notsi, the long tense central vowel is written with the letters aa and sounds similar to the English vowel a in father. MR drew a picture of a pig on its back and labeled it correctly with the word buol. Teaching of spelling rules was not observed.

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The teacher began writing instruction by introducing the phonogram and helped the children recognize, hear, and say the sound represented by the phonogram. He explained the sound-symbol relationship and pointed out the capital and lower-case phonograms written on the chalkboard. He demonstrated how to write the phonogram in the air and on the chalkboard. JM and MR showed their successful effort at forming the letters /O o/ and /R r/ in their exercise books. In one lesson the teacher wrote examples of Notsi words that had the key phonogram and instructed the students to point to the phonogram in those words. In another lesson, he asked the students to point to the phonogram as it occurs in the beginning of the words. JM and his classmates were instructed to copy the words into their exercise books. Copying words when the children are unable to decode is not prescribed by the Creative Phonics Method, but it follows traditional rote teaching strategies. Creative Phonics activities for reading and writing words are prescribed each Wednesday (Hynum, 2013), and such activities are found in student exercise books on other days as well. The teacher introduced a fill-in-the-missing letter activity for Notsi words. All words contained the vowel /uo/, which indicated that the focus was on teaching that sound in Notsi words. The repetition allowed students to see and write the vowel in different words. Again, JM and MR received check marks for correct spelling of the words tsuo, luot, suol, and buol. The teacher wrote the word “good” in English. In a matching words activity, JM copied two lists of the same words in two columns and did a word matching activity in his exercise book. He drew a line from one Notsi word in the first column to its mate in the second column. JM exhibited word recognition and matched correctly each of the five words. MR completed a spelling activity showing her skills in letter recognition and blending letters to write meaningful words. Activities focused on reading and writing Notsi sentences also included written instructions in English on the chalkboard. Activities included cloze, question and answer, and copying words and sentences from the chalkboard. The teacher repeated instructions orally in Notsi and Melanesian Pidgin (a national trade language). JM copied the instructions and completed the three sentences, as shown here. 1. Didi ngien Libb (Libba). (Didi is from Libba.) 2. Dada a dik tuba ngali ngani. (Dada collects greens to eat.) 3. Lolo a ngaati (ngaalti) no guma. (Lolo chews the oysters.) The teacher praised completed sentences and corrected the spelling of the word ngaalti in the third sentence by writing in red on top of the child’s writing (in parentheses here). In another exercise, MR, the female student, copied the sentence, Buol luot a suolsuol. The translated

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sentence means “A big pig is running.” She copied a second sentence, Pura a tsaapi palo. The translated sentence means “The chicken hit the dog.” The second sentence is nonsense, because a chicken is incapable of hitting a dog. It is possible that the teacher wrote the sentence and MR copied what she saw on the board or the teacher observed the nonsense sentences and encouraged student effort to create a grammatical sentence, Pura a tsaapi palo. MR allowed space between words and elongated the letters l, t, and p into the line below. She drew pictures to match the text in both sentences. MR misspelled the words puraa for chicken and palu for dog. These words should be spelled palu instead of palo and puraa instead of pura. The word for dog in the Lossu dialect of Notsi is xapuna. The word palu is specific for the Tio dialect, which is used in Libba Village and reflects students’ use of their home dialect. The E-Prep teacher modeled declarative and interrogative sentence constructions in Notsi and had the students copy these Notsi sentences. English translations are added here for the sake of the reader. Saa [a] ritii rikrik taman riirii? (Who hit Rikrik with the broom?) Taura a ritii rikrik taman riirii. (Taura hit Rikrik with the broom.) Saa a rupki no KauKau? (Who pulled out the sweet potato?) Rikrik a sarsar o a ga rupki KauKau. (Rikrik was playing and pulled out the sweet potato.) The word for sweet potato in Notsi is sua not kaukau, which is from Melanesian Pidgin. Mixing Melanesian Pidgin with Notsi is common in the Notsi language community. Developmental theories specify that children should be encouraged to be active constructive learners engaged in discovery learning. Again, the teacher wrote sentences and stories on the chalkboard and required students to copy what was written, whether the children understood the text or not. Creative writing strategies were not observed in E-Prep.

Early Writing Samples of Libba E-1 Students E-1 student letter formation skills improved during the E-Prep year but their ability to write meaningful text in Notsi was not observed. In E-1, the focus changed to writing English before the children learned to communicate well in their first language. Students learned some English vocabulary by copying from the chalkboard and hearing the teacher explain concepts in vernacular or Melanesian Pidgin, but the writing samples indicate that students remain at emergent stages of writing meaningful texts. Socioconstructivist strategies suggest that children discuss and learn with others as they construct stories. Traditional rote learning in the Libba Elementary classroom does not include the teacher and students talking with each other to complete a task (McLaughlin & O’Donoghue,

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1996). Use of socioconstructive strategies such as language experience activities contradict cultural rituals of teacher directed activities. Writing samples from exercise books of a female student, ND, and a male student, JK, repeat the same writing practice seen in the E-Prep exercise books. No vernacular was used in any of E-1 lesson activities. Student notes in exercise books included English vocabulary building exercises including word lists, picture labeling, and story writing focused on the English phonograms being taught. Activities in the E-1 exercise books revealed whole texts which the students copied from the board. In the Vernacular Path to English Method, the students would learn content and sight words prior to attempting to write independent writing of whole texts. Some exercises included drawings which seemed to tell a story. Punctuation at the end of sentences was not observed in English texts copied from the board. In E-1, the focus shifted from instruction and learning in Notsi to instruction and learning of oral English. The teacher taught letter formation of English phonograms, which were the same as Notsi although they had been taught in E-Prep. Familiarity with the government-prescribed bridging strategies in the Vernacular Path to English (Acton et al., 2014, p. 50) was lacking, so the teacher was unable to help students compare and recognize Notsi sounds and words that are the same as or similar to English. The teacher wrote the following sentences for the children to copy: The moon shines brightly at night. We plant different foods in our gardens. Use a spoon to eat your food. My loose tooth will fall out soon. ND copied the English sentences from the chalkboard, but letter formation skills, spelling, and capitalization are missing. Like JK, she left extra spaces between words in the sentence. Spacing between words and absence of punctuation indicate that the student looked at each word and then one word at a time into her exercise book. The student is struggling to copy correctly what is written on the board. See Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1 E-1 Early writing sample by ND.

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JK copied the English sentences from the chalkboard. His copy included letter reversals and inappropriate use of capital letters. Both students had trouble distinguishing n from h, indicating the need for more practice writing words with either n or h, or both, to recognize the contrast. Perhaps this error is partly because there is no h in Notsi and the students had not yet been taught the English h. He wrote: The moon shines bpightly _t hight We Plant different foor in oUP garaer Use a sqooh to eat youp fooa Use theblooom to sweeP Poom My loose too th will_ll ouTSoOh

Observations From E-2 Early Writing The Elementary Grade 2 male and female students JD and AR are 10 years old. They may have started school later or may have repeated one or more grades in elementary. Starting school later or repeating a grade is common in Notsi schools. E-2 students wrote everything in English, even though they were still learning the English letters and lacked English vocabulary to understand what they wrote. Oral and written vernacular translations of the English sentences may have helped the students understand the meaning of what they wrote. Multiliteracy theories suggest that children develop awareness of and competence in using a range of text forms (lists, poetry, chants, songs, stories, etc.) to create meaning. On Thursday, 9 June 2016, the teacher engaged the class in copying poems he had written on the board. JD and AR copied the poem the teacher wrote about a mango, and afterwards the teacher instructed them to write similar poems on their own. JD did so by substituting the name of a different fruit. In both instances, he wrote the conjunction “and” before two adjectives instead of between them. Their effort marked the beginning of independent writing. The teacher corrected both instances and crossed out the conjunction that was placed incorrectly. AR wrote a longer poem about a mango. This scaffolding strategy could help the students toward independent writing as they improve their English vocabulary, as shown in Table 5.2. On Tuesday, 14 June, the teacher wrote the following instructions on the chalkboard. “Think and make up your own poem.” JD rewrote the words to the poem about a pawpaw (papaya fruit) as sentences rather than verses in a poem, as shown in Table 5.3. In another poem, JD wrote two lines about a flower, substituting flower for pawpaw (papaya), and colorful instead of sweet. Then he changed the noun to snake and described the size of the snake. AR wrote six lines about a flower.

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Table 5.2 English poems copied from the chalkboard English poems written by JD

English poem written by AR

Mango mango mango Mango mango mango you so sweet and nice (and) juicy I like to eat you

Mango mango mongo Mango mango mango you a so green and yellow Mango mango mango you a so sweet to eat

Paw Paw you and nice I like

Paw Paw paw paw so sweet (and) juicy to eat

Mango mango mango You a my mango

Table 5.3 Flower poems written by JD and AR JD Flower flower flower you so nice and Then he wrote: Snake snake You are long and Coconut coconut You are very tall

AR colorful snake short coconut

Flower / flower / flower You a so green and red Flower / flower / flower Makes my area look beautiful Flower / flower / flower You are so beautiful

Application of behaviorist theories such as the use of child-centered activities in the language the children speak and understand would help promote grade-level writing in all subject areas, but use of this strategy was not observed with the E-1 students. Writing activities about a variety of topics can help students recognize and write about things that interest them. Copying or substituting words to change the meaning in a poem is an effective way to use socioconstructive writing strategies. If these strategies had been used in Notsi during E-Prep and E-2 classes, students may have advanced to group work in story development. Implementation of these strategies in earlier grades could have expedited student mastery in writing other genres such as narrative, procedures, and reports by the time they began E-2.

Limitations Observations of the E-Prep classes were limited to May, June, and September. Traditional rote teaching practice limited student early writing to sentence level. Unannounced school holidays hindered two planned visits to observe teacher instruction and the actual writing activities in

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Libba classrooms. Teachers were unclear about the use of curricula and teaching methods. Use of vernacular shifted to English by the end of E-1 which limited further observation of Notsi language writing development in vernacular in E-1 and E-2.

Recommendations and Exploratory Directions for Future Revitalization Revitalization of Notsi language is closely connected with elementary education of Notsi children and instructional practices of teachers. Effective instruction in the writing process is essential if children are to learn to write meaningful texts and grow in their ability to use Notsi in academic writing. Graham (2010) offers four basic recommendations to teach elementary students to be effective writers: 1. Provide daily time for students to write to help them gain confidence in their writing abilities. 2. Teach students to use the writing process for a variety of purposes including strategies for different parts of the writing process. 3. Teach students to become fluent with handwriting, spelling, and sentence construction so that they may focus more on developing and communicating their ideas. 4. Establish a supportive environment in the classroom to foster a community of young writers who are motivated to write well. (Graham, 2010) Notsi teachers have had limited training in application of these recommendations by Graham, but their positive response to student efforts promote confidence. Also, E-Prep students are well practiced in letter formation and writing skills and are ready for more challenging writing activities. Specific recommendations for Notsi writing, language development, and revitalization follow. 1. Sufficient teacher training will help Notsi teachers become aware of how to apply and integrate behavioral, developmental, and socioconstructivist theories into elementary subject areas. 2. Continued in-services to help teachers model spelling, punctuation, and capitalization in Notsi in lieu of National Department of Education plans for a one year pre-service training for future elementary teachers. 3. Regular writers’ workshops engaging Notsi parents and teachers to develop teacher writing skills, knowledge of Notsi language, and literature production. 4. Regular supervision in use of effective writing strategies, facilitating student collaboration with other students in the writing

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process; teacher-student conferences and giving feedback in the writing process. 5. Train teachers and parents to use a three-point POW strategy (Pick ideas, Organize notes, and Write and say more) to foster a community of young Notsi writers who are motivated to write well. 6. More training in the Creative Phonics and Vernacular Path to English methods to improve instructional practices among Notsi teachers. (Graham, 2010)

Exploratory Directions for Future Revitalization Teacher training, pedagogy, and cultural perspectives on writing seem to be key areas affecting further revitalization of the Notsi language. Although independent, student-centered learning strategies are emphasized in the current national curriculum, McLaughlin and O’Donoghue (1996) argue for caution in criticizing traditional rote learning because it is compatible with traditional ritual learning of PNG cultures. Rote teaching strategies were observed in the Libba classroom instead of what is prescribed in the national curriculum. Is the use of rote strategies a hindrance to writing development of Notsi elementary students? Does rote learning promote language vitality among the Notsi? Further exploration of ritual teaching practices may offer answers to these questions. Two studies are suggested. 1. Conduct a comparative study of student vernacular writing development between traditional rote learning and student-centered strategies in elementary grades. 2. Research traditional (rote) instructional practices in Papua New Guinea. Does rote copying of texts from the chalkboard hinder Notsi language and writing development in Notsi children? Do rote instructional writing practices hinder Notsi language vitality?

References Acton, B., Wilson, T., & Ayabe, J. (2014). Vernacular path to English: A teacher trainer guide and resource (1st ed.). Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: SIL-PNG. Agigo, J. O. (2010). Curriculum and learning in PNG schools: A study on the curriculum reform implementation project 2000 to 2006. Special Publication No. 57. Waigani: National Research Institute. Bekas, E. K. (2000). Trial spelling guide for the Notsi language. Kavieng: Unpublished manuscript. Countries and their Cultures. (2016). Lesu: Orientation. Retrieved August 2016, from www.Everyculture.com/Oceania/Lesu-History-and-Cultural-Relations.html Department of Education. (2003). Outcome-based elementary language syllabus. Papua New Guinea: Department of Education. Department of Education. (2013). Language policy in all schools. Secretary’s circular No. 04/2013. Papua New Guinea: Department of Education.

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Department of Education. (2015). Language Syllabus Standard Based Elementary 2015. Papua New Guinea: Department of Education. Erickson, L., & Erickson, L. (1990). Organized phonology data of the Nochi language. Ukarumpa: SIL Papua New Guinea. Graham, S. (2012). Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers. In Reading rockets and what works clearinghouse. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from WETA: www.weta.org Graves, D. H. (1989). Writing teachers and children at work. In D. H. Graves & D. S. Morrow (Eds.), Emerging literacy: Young children learn to read and write. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Hynum, Y. (2013). Creative phonics instruction manual with activities and games. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics. King, P. (2007). An acoustic description of central vowels in three Austronesian languages of New Ireland. SIL electronic reports. Ukarumpa: SIL. Lavoi, J. (2016). How and why the maimai system in New Ireland is important. Unpublished manuscript. MacKenzie, N. (2014). Understanding and supporting emergent writing . Retrieved May 12, 2016, from www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/earlyyears/ profilearn McCarthy, J., & McCarthy, J. (2003). OPD supplement. Ukarumpa: SIL. McLaughlin, D., & O’Donoghue, T. (1966). Improving teacher education: Pedagogical problems. In D. McLaughlin & T. O’Donoghue (Eds.), Community teacher education in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea. Retrieved from www.pngbuai.com/300socialsciences/300.htm McLaughlin, D., & O’Donoghue, T. (1996). Community teacher education in Papua New Guinea. Retrieved from www.pngbuai.com/300socialsciences/300. htm Nicholas, G. (2012). Xoxot in Notsi. Kavieng: SIL PNG. Papua New Guinea Department of Education. (2015). Elementary prep teacher’s guide for the home language and English syllabus. Waigani: National Department of Education. Ross, Malcolm. (1970). Pacific and regional archive for digital sources in endangered cultures. Retrieved December 6, 2016, from www.language-archives.org/ item.php/oai:paradisec.org.au:MR1-040 Temple, C. E. (1992). The beginnings of writing (3rd ed.). Needham Heights: Allyn and Bacon.

6

Emergent Writing in Numanggang in Papua New Guinea Samuel Saleng and Gertrude Nicholas

Introduction Research on developmental literacy among children has shown a consistent sequence of literacy acquisition, but it has largely been conducted in literate cultures, where children start school at the age of 4 or younger and often come to school with some exposure to reading in the language that they speak at home. The purpose of this case study is to observe and analyze the emergent writing process of six Numanggang children at Mobisa Elementary School in Nawaeb District of Papua New Guinea. The children, ages 6 to 13, were in classes at three grade levels: Elementary Preparatory (E-Prep) and Elementary Grades 1 and 2 (E-1 and E-2). Instructional approaches used by Numanggang teachers and writing samples of children were observed. The data collected and documented include the developmental writing process evident in children’s drawing, early phonemic learning, letter formation, writing Numanggang words, and writing sentences and stories—including transitional and conventional writing stages (Temple, Nathan, & Burris, 1992). A brief review of early writing literature provides a theoretical basis for discussion and analysis of the observations and writing samples.

Literature Review and Guiding Theory The following literature review cites foundational theories on child development by theorists such as Watson (1930), Skinner (1974), Piaget (1930), Bandura (1977), and Vygotsky (1978). MacKenzie (2014) summarizes these theories from the perspective of emergent writing, which creates a segue into curriculum and methodology used to teach early writing in the Numanggang context. A further review of literature on stages of emergent writing has helped to guide observations in this case study. Berk and Shute provide us with the following background information on child development theories (Berk, 2009; Shute & Slee, 2015). Behaviorists such as Watson and Skinner (Berk, 2009) insisted that all

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human behavior can be described in terms of environmental influences. Piaget (1930) looked at how thought processes influence the way we understand the world. His theory of cognitive development includes four stages of children’s intellectual development, including sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational (Berk, 2009). The preoperational stage occurs between ages 2 and 6, during which a child learns to use language. The concrete operational stage is a period between ages 7 and 11, when children begin to think logically about concrete events but find it difficult to understand abstract concepts. In the preoperational stage, children begin to think symbolically and learn to use words and pictures to represent objects; in the concrete operational stage, they begin to think logically about concrete events and to understand that their thoughts are unique to them and that not everyone shares their feelings and opinions. These two stages that Piaget describes offer insight into the cognitive development patterns to look for among Numanggang children in this case study. Bandura (1977) proposed a child development theory that argues that observation plays a critical role in learning, but this observation need not take the form of watching a live model. Instead, people can learn by listening to verbal instructions about how to perform a behavior. Numanggang teachers and children come from an oral culture, where observation of live models plays an important role in their learning. That is, in Numanggang culture, verbal instructions require visual examples of others performing a given task. Vygotsky (1978) proposed a sociocultural theory that children learn actively and through hands-on experiences. He suggested that parents, caregivers, peers, and the culture at large were responsible for developing higher-order functions. Vygotsky introduced the concept of the zone of proximal development, which is the gap between what a person can do with help and what they can do on their own. Numanggang people seldom do important activities alone; they learn and work in groups of two or more in most village tasks. This behavior is learned from others and may be practiced by Numanggang children in classroom settings. MacKenzie (2014) summarized the above theories, which help to guide analysis of emergent writing in Numanggang children. Standards-based curriculum guidelines embrace Piaget’s proposal that children be encouraged to be active, constructive learners engaged in child-centered learning. This study looks at whether Numanggang teachers are encouraging child-centered activities, such as the language experience approach and process writing. Observations and analysis of Numanggang instructional practices should reveal whether teachers included shared and independent approaches in teaching writing. This study also takes a close look at the stages of writing suggested by Temple et al. (1992). They suggest that there are five stages of writing development during which children make connections between spoken

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and written language. Children gradually understand symbolic forms that are used to record oral communication as they progress through stages of writing development. Temple et al. (1992) provided examples of the pre-phonemic, early phonemic, letter-name, transitional, and conventional writing stages. The stages show milestones that children may achieve in art, literacy, spelling, and writing. Adi-Japha (2001) offered a transitional stage between writing and drawing and called it the interference stage. To control the interference between writing and drawing, a specialized process for fluent writing or drawing is needed from age 6 upwards. This concept of an interference stage has implications for Numanggang children that are not dealt with in the scope of this study. Sandbank (1992) and Calkins (1986) discussed the issue of developing writers in an oral society. They argued that certain teaching methods have turned writing into a perceptive-motor skill and exercise with hands and pencils instead of allowing children to construct ideas about written language. Allowing children to communicate their life, culture, traditions, and belief systems without the use of pen and paper is very common among oral cultures like Numanggang and may be viewed as a segue to written communication by elementary school teachers. The Papua New Guinea Department of Education continues to implement reforms that seek to include traditional ways of learning while also applying sound theoretical principles in elementary school education. The trend of education reforms since the nation’s independence in 1975 has meant shifting from an objectives-based (OBE) curriculum (1992–2004) to an outcome-based curriculum (2004–2013) and moving to a standards-based curriculum (SBC) framework in 2013 (Kekeya, 2014). The objectives-based model followed a sequential cycle from aims, goals, and objectives to content-based learning activities, evaluation, and situation analysis. In general, OBE focuses on organizing everything in an educational system around what is essential for students to succeed at the end of their learning experiences (Spady, 1994). In the Papua New Guinea context, it was to include all aspects of integral human development (Norman, 2006). Learning outcomes were to be student-centered, written in demonstrable terms, and measurable, and to allow student achievement of the outcomes. The curriculum aimed to give teachers flexibility to devise workable programs in a broad range of settings in the nation; help teachers to monitor, assess, and report student achievements; and plan future teaching programs (Department of Education, 2003). Under the OBE elementary school curriculum, three subjects were taught: language (vernacular in E-Prep and E-1 and English in the second half of E-2), Mathematics, and Culture & Community (Department of Education, 2003). Standards-based education was introduced in schools in 2013 to improve education standards, which OBE seems to have failed to do. Standards-based curriculum (SBC) requires separate classes for English and the vernacular to be taught as subjects for a full hour each,

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beginning in E-1. As a result, elementary school classes should finish their daily lessons at 2 p.m. instead of at 12 p.m. The following four principles are the basis for the PNG standards-based curriculum: (1) Clarity of focus through learning statements expressed in content standards, student performance standards, and benchmarks; (2) high expectations for all students to work toward reaching set standards; (3) equal opportunities for all students to learn regardless of the geographical context; and (4) expanded opportunities for and empowerment of students in rural, urban, average, or intellectual populations. Aims of the standards-based elementary school syllabus are to (1) introduce English as a subject in E-1; (2) use English as a medium of instruction; (3) prepare children for learning in English in primary school (grades 3–8); (4) build on vernacular language and literacy skills learned in the vernacular language syllabus; (5) enable children to communicate in basic English in the classroom; (6) teach children to read, understand, and write simple sentences in English; and (7) encourage enjoyment of and interest in learning English. The SBC syllabus requires phonics to teach the sounds to build and read English words. As this curriculum was being formulated, Litteral, a linguist, introduced the Creative Phonics Method to the Department of Education (Litteral, 2013). His goal was to provide a simple approach to teaching literacy skills and train teachers and teacher trainers in remote minority language groups of Papua New Guinea. Subsequently, Hynum (2013), a literacy specialist, expanded upon the Litteral method and wrote an instruction manual for systematic phonics instruction, which is used by the Department of Education (2015). Creative Phonics applies behavioral, developmental, and socioconstructivist writing theories by teaching handwriting, spelling, and punctuation along with the application of whole-story activities, shared writing, and language experience activities in which children are encouraged into creativity through creative writing instruction. This method teaches phonics and phonemic awareness components, which play a central role in setting the stage for emergent writing skills. As these skills are learned, children begin to read and write words, sentences, and stories (Litteral, 1986, 1999; MacKenzie, 2011). Numanggang teachers have received initial training to use this method in the E-Prep classroom. Another SBC requirement is to provide English instruction in E-1 and E-2. An English bridging course was developed by Acton, Wilson, and Ayabe (2014) to help children move from learning in the vernacular to learning in English. The authors decided to avoid use of E-1 and E-2 in the manual and refer the progression of transfer from vernacular to English in terms of levels: Level 1 and Level 2. Progression of the child from one level to the next depends on whether the child reads and writes in their vernacular. The Vernacular Path to English Method organizes activities first into listening then speaking in Level 1, followed by beginning reading and writing in English in Level 2. Seven Numanggang elementary schools teach reading and writing using the

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Numanggang alphabet at the E-Prep level. In E-1 and E-2, the teachers use Numanggang as one of the languages of instruction for bridging into English, using the Vernacular Path to English Method and according to SBC guidelines.

History and Background of the Numanggang People Numanggang is part of the family of Papuan languages spoken in New Guinea and neighboring islands, perhaps the third largest language family in the world by number of languages. Numanggang has approximately 2,300 speakers, living in 10 villages (Simons & Fennig, 2018). First contacts with the outside world began about 15 years prior to World War II (Wagner, 1986). Formal education at primary and secondary school levels was administered with a traditional rote (repetitious) learning approach. This approach is related to ritual, repetitious, informal learning done in Numanggang culture. Jones (as cited in McLaughlin & O’Donoghue, 1996) holds that rote teaching and rote learning are the biggest inhibiting factors to quality teaching in Papua New Guinea. Regardless of national education reforms in 1995, 2005, and 2014, which endorse student-centered learning, school teachers have tended to follow ritual rote teaching practices (McLaughlin & O’Donoghue, 1996). The educational background of the Numanggang elementary school teachers is based on traditional rote learning approaches, and it is not surprising to see teachers default to traditional rote teaching in their classes. The people continue to live in patrilineal family groups as subsistence farmers. Their daily activities consist of tending coffee fields for income and gardening for food. The language is spoken by Numanggang communities scattered along the Saruwaged Ranges northwest of the city of Lae. The map in Figure 6.1 shows the language boundaries shared by each language in the province, including the Numanggang linguistic community.

Numanggang Language Structure Numanggang is a Papuan language characterized by verb-chaining, in which sentences are often made up of multiple medial verbs that indicate the action but not the person, number, and tense, followed by a final verb, which indicates those parameters. The medial verb system includes object reference but only tracks whether the subject remains the same or changes, which has been aptly named “switch reference.” Table 6.1 gives an example of verb-chaining. Table 6.2 is an example of switch reference, used when the subject or agent of the clause changes to a different subject. The first three verbs have the same subject (the people of Tumung). The “uune” has a different

Figure 6.1 Numanggang in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Source: SIL-PNG Language Resources/Language Assessment Survey/Language Maps/Large/ Morobe Map

Table 6.1 Numanggang verb chain “Buŋa ilaŋa beŋa uŋa yaweneŋa kamehebiŋa ugiŋ” “Come and sit and get and go and wrap it and hide it and they went.” Person, Number, Tense

Table 6.2 Numanggang switch reference Tumuŋhi iŋgoŋ buŋa kamehebiŋa People of Tumung here came and hide it

uune wosuwagumut after they left we-two arrived

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Table 6.3 Numanggang sentence: Object-verb clause order Subject

Object

Verb

Me wapuhidi man big “The headmen ate all the food.”

nanaŋe food

nadapmagiŋ they ate it all

Table 6.4 Numanggang alphabet IPA ɑ ε ɔ i u b d g m n ŋ t k p w j l h f s kw gw Lower Case a e o i u b d g m n ŋ t k p w y l h f s kw gw Upper Case A E O I U B D G M N Ŋ T K P W Y L H F S Kw Gw

subject marker (-une), meaning that the subject is changed and the following verb subject is marked on the verb as “we-two.” The normal clause order is sentence-object-verb (SOV), as shown in Table 6.3. There are 22 letters in the Numanggang alphabet, which is made up of five vowels and 17 consonants (Hynum, 1992), as shown in Table 6.4. Some other letters, such as /j/ and /r/, are used in borrowed names, such as John and Girina. There are five syllable patterns (consonant/vowel) in Numanggang: V, VC, CV, CVC, and CVVC. There are no restrictions on which vowels or consonants can fill the initial consonant or the vowel position; however, only nasals /m, n, ŋ/ and voiceless stops /p, t, k/ occur in the final consonant position that closes syllables. The voiceless velar fricative /kw/ does not occur in the final consonant position that closes syllables (Hynum, 1992).

Numanggang Revitalization Efforts Prior to the 1970s, Numanggang was used for all oral communicative functions. Use of the language for reading and writing began in the late 1970s, while the Summer Institute of Linguistics helped to translate the New Testament in Numanggang. The New Testament was completed in 2005 (Simons & Fennig, 2018). Other available literature includes a song book and a liturgical book for use in church services. Resources for literacy include a transfer primer, a reader that helps Numanggang adults and children transfer their Numanggang reading and writing skills to Melanesian Pidgin or from English into Numanggang. Other resources include alphabet books, locally authored and illustrated children’s stories, and phonics storybooks. These resources were produced and distributed along with a one year vernacular preparatory school curriculum for non-formal literacy (Hynum, 1999). Five vernacular Prep schools benefited from this curriculum and training. Children who graduated from them were sent to grade 1. In 2006, Numanggang teachers were still using the non-formal

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one year prep curriculum materials in Numanggang, despite elementary education reform that began in 2002. Education reform mandated use of the new OBE curriculum on Language, Culture & Community, and Cultural Mathematics syllabi for elementary grades. These subjects are administered during four 10-week terms. Use of vernacular instruction in E-Prep classes is encouraged, along with bridging to English in E-1 and E-2. Today, Numanggang is still used in all oral communications in the village context despite the increased use of Melanesian Pidgin and English.

Description of Mobisa Elementary School Mobisa was named for three remote, mountainous villages whose children attend the school: Mombang, Bisit, and Sadau. This rural school was selected for the study based on its rural location in the Nawaeb District of Morobe Province, the availability of education resources, and the access to training and curriculum. Another reason was because of the experience and amount of training the teachers had received. It was originally a non-formal vernacular prep school and is now a registered government elementary school. Travel in and out of these villages is by foot after leaving the main road. Only one school visit was made to Mobisa Elementary School because of its remoteness and the difficulty of travel into and out of the area. The researcher (Samuel Saleng) is from the Numanggang language community and works with SIL Papua New Guinea as a literacy trainer. He traveled four hours from his place of employment by public transport to the nearest town, Lae. He took public transport and disembarked along the main road to follow the nearest path to Mombang village (about a three-hour walk). After resting for the night at Mombang, he walked to nearby Mobisa Elementary School. The school is a one story, semi-permanent building, with bamboo outer walls supported by a sawn-timber inner frame. Floors appeared to be made of woven bamboo. Classroom furniture included small stools rather than tables or desks. The building has two classrooms separated by an office, storage area, and small library. A large blackboard was nailed to the wall in each classroom. An E-2 Weekly Time Table for 2016 was posted on the bamboo wall in the E-2 classroom. Mobisa had a total of 49 students enrolled, between 6 and 13 years of age. The Elementary Preparatory (E-Prep) class included six males and seven females (a total of 13 students). The Elementary Grade 1 (E-1) class included nine males and seven females (a total of 16 students). The Elementary Grade 2 (E-2) class included 12 males and eight females (a total of 20 students). Table 6.5 shows enrollment data for July 2016. The reason that the age range is from 6 to 13 years in these grades is that some students repeat a grade due to illness, transfer into the school from somewhere else, or have low achievement in the grade they are in. The 13-year-old student was still in E-2.

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Table 6.5 Mobisa Elementary School class and school enrollment, 2016 Mobisa Elementary School E-Prep E-1 E-2

Description M=6 F=7 M=9 F=7 M = 12 F=8

Class Total

School Total

13 16

49

20

In the multi-grade classroom, E-Prep and E-1 children sat on the floor in rows according to grade levels. The teacher explained to the researcher that new arrivals and students struggling with their reading and writing fluency sat in the front rows of the class. More advanced students sat toward the back of the class. English language instruction takes place from 8:15 to 8:45 a.m., and Numanggang language instruction from 8:45 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. A half-hour break is scheduled at 10 a.m. Math and Culture & Community are scheduled for an hour each, until 12 p.m. Drawings and classwork posted on the walls were from the current year. The researcher interviewed the two elementary school teachers after observing classroom instruction and student activities. The interviews were informal and began with getting permission to ask questions and take photos of student writing samples from exercise books. This permission was given from the Teacher in Charge (TIC), who was the E-2 teacher. Six students from E-Prep, E-1, and E-2 were chosen at random from among their classes by the TIC. Observations included the school facility, classroom instruction, writing samples, and written displays. Photos were taken of writing samples for analysis later. In addition, discussions were held with the two elementary school teachers about curriculum resources and student enrollment patterns. Brief, informal discussions with the teachers included these questions: (1) What was the length of their experience in elementary school education? (2) What was their understanding of the Outcome-Based Curriculum Guidelines? (3) How much formal training did they have to teach? (4) What languages did they use to give instruction? (5) What was their understanding of the stages of early writing? The E-2 teacher was the Teacher in Charge (TIC) at Mobisa Elementary School, which is a subordinate role under the headmaster of a primary school. The TIC is supervised by the headmaster of Bosa Primary School. He had 13 years of teaching experience and was trained through the SIL Papua New Guinea literacy training program as a non-formal literacy teacher, trainer, and supervisor. The multi-grade teacher at Mobisa was recruited and trained by the Department of Education. Both teachers at Mobisa Elementary School received non-formal teacher training

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through the Numanggang Literacy Program and additional formal teacher training from Morobe Provincial Education Department. Training from the Department of Education included curriculum planning and programming, classroom administration, and teaching Numanggang and English as subjects along with Culture & Community and Math. The E-2 teacher attended a three-week Vernacular Creative Phonics course and a three-week Vernacular Path to English Course at SIL Papua New Guinea. The multi-grade teacher (E-Prep and E-1) attended a one-week teacher-inservice on Vernacular Creative Phonics at Balob Teachers College. He did not attend the three-week course for Vernacular Path to English. Even though they had received the training above, the two elementary school teachers stated that they had general knowledge and skills in writing pedagogy. The E-Prep teacher reported using the Numanggang pre-reading and pre-writing resources designed for the vernacular prep schools as his instructional writing practice guide. He stated that he used the Creative Phonics Method to teach writing but admitted that he lacked sufficient training and supervision to implement it effectively. Discussions with the teachers revealed that following the writing instructions taken from the Outcome-based Teacher’s Guide was a challenge for them.

Numanggang Instructional Writing Practices Instructional practices in E-Prep are based on the Creative Phonics Method developed by Hynum and Litteral (Hynum, 2013; Litteral, 2013). E-1 and E-2 teachers were trained to teach English as a subject (including writing) based on the Vernacular Path to English Method (Acton et al., 2014). Instruction in Creative Phonics is a prerequisite to the Vernacular Path to English Method. E-Prep writing lessons focused on the 22 Numanggang phonograms. During the first three weeks of the E-Prep year, the teacher introduces new phonograms, which have been selected because of their productivity in building new words. Writing activities begin as each phonogram is introduced, so that each school day includes a writing activity. Students learn to write the new phonogram (Mondays and Tuesdays), write content and sight words with the phonograms they have learned (Wednesdays), write sentences using words they have learned (Thursdays), and do shared writing and independent creative writing (Fridays). The aim of the E-Prep phonics instruction is that the children read and write meaningful texts independently in Numanggang. The Vernacular Path to English Method is an activity-based, childcentered approach prescribed for teaching English in E-1 and E-2. Lesson plans have three parts: language learning, language practice, and language review. Listening and speaking English are the primary focus for E-1 activities. Language practice and language review are focused on

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activities with drawing pictures and reading and writing English letters, words, phrases, and sentences, all of which the children should be able to decode. Before teaching children to write in English in E-2, Numanggang teachers from all elementary schools worked together to prepare a worksheet. They collaborated to determine which vernacular sounds are the same as English, such as /a/ and /a1/, which were written differently but sounded the same (for example, /a/ and /ei/), and which vernacular sounds were new to the children, such as /r/ and /z/. This worksheet is used to develop language-specific lessons to ease the transfer of learned concepts and skills from Numanggang to English. The goal is that by the end of E-2, children will be able to use skills and strategies to write simple meaningful texts in both Numanggang and English.

Description of Numanggang Early Writing After observing classroom instruction, the researcher photographed and examined early writing samples of six elementary school children found in student exercise books. Samples were labeled with letters to protect the privacy of the students. These samples were examined and analyzed to compare the Numanggang writing samples with the five stages of writing development by Temple et al. (1992). Since the study began in the middle of the academic year, it was expected that the student samples would include the following stages of writing: (1) some pre-phonemic drawings and letter formation; (2) early phonemic picture labeling; (3) transitional stage spelling; and (4) conventional writing of Numanggang words, sentences, and stories. Findings from the exercise books are discussed by grade level, starting with E-Prep.

E-Prep: Drawing—Pre-phonemic and Early Phonemic Stages Drawing samples were done in the E-Prep class by MS and BA, who were 6 years of age (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). MS is a female, and BA is male. The teacher drew pictures of trucks on the board to tell a story and encouraged the students do the same. No instruction was given to write a story, which is not necessary in the pre-phonemic stage of writing. MS did a simple drawing of a truck, which appeared less complex in comparison to that of BA. MS demonstrated a level of control in making circles, lines, and strokes but included a line drawing of a palm tree and an outline of a truck. BA drew a more detailed picture of the truck, with controlled lines and circles with more attention to details. No pre-phonemic scribbling was observed in the E-Prep writing samples. This may be due to the age and physical development of the children and the fact that they were accustomed to copying what the teacher wrote or drew.

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Figure 6.2 Drawing a picture to tell a story: MS.

Figure 6.3 Drawing a picture to tell a story: BA.

E-Prep: Letter Formation This early phonemic (alphabetic) stage includes letter formation and picture labeling. In this stage, the teacher modeled the letter by teaching the sound and illustrating the way it was written on the board. The teacher wrote the lower-case letter /y/ and provided the key word yot, which means house. MS formed the letter /y/ eight times between the lines in her exercise book. The teacher also used the letter /y/ in a sentence that MS copied as, I adi yot. (This is a house). MS drew a picture of a house. The teacher checked both students’ writing and wrote in English, “Good” or “Very Good.” Following the SBC curriculum guidelines and the Creative Phonics Method, it would be more meaningful if the teacher had written these words in Numanggang to encourage the students in E-Prep.

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BA also copied the same information that the teacher wrote on the board into an exercise book. The lesson continued as the children learned the Numanggang grapheme and phoneme as they repeated it several times with the teacher and then by themselves as they wrote it on slates. They followed the “Hear—Say—See—Write” sequence of activities (following the Creative Phonics Method) for the letter formation stage. The teacher could have started by saying three words in Numanggang that begin with the phonogram /y/. The children would hear the teacher repeat the words. On Monday, the teacher would ask them to think of and say three other words in Numanggang that have the phonogram /y/ at the beginning of the word. On Tuesday the teacher should review the sound at the beginning of the word and ask the students to give words that have the /y/ in the middle and at the end. The teacher did not write other examples of words on the board so that the students could see the words written on the board. The teacher wrote the phonogram /y/ so the children could see the phonogram /y/ written for the first time; then, together with the teacher, the children wrote the phonogram many times on slates, on dirt, or in the sand as they repeated the sound. Although imperfect, this classroom practice, with the students following the teacher’s example, is supported by behaviorist and socioconstructivist theories in early writing practice. Such practice enables children to develop increasing proficiency in letter formation and early writing skills. E-Prep: Transitional Spelling MS and BA wrote the word wagim and drew a picture of it as a Numanggang word writing activity. Wagim is a traditional musical instrument made of wood and is used in traditional dances and ceremonies. MS labeled her drawing as wagim and placed a small a and a dot to represent the vowel /i/ in between the two consonants /g/ and /m/. BA also wrote the word wagim and, in his second attempt, tried to correct the way the letters /a/ and /g/ were written. MS and BA demonstrated this level of emergent writing by labeling their pictures. The children showed independent thinking, hearing, and writing of medial sounds to correct their own spelling. E-Prep: Writing Numanggang Words When the students started writing words, MS copied 10 of the 11 Numanggang words from the board (neŋ, eŋ, nanaŋene, de, nene, nedi, deniŋ, negiŋ, nine, inde, dediŋ), using the learned phonograms. The words appear as letter strings, without proper space between words, variable letter sizes, slope, and shapes. BA did the same thing but placed a bit more space between the words. In another lesson, they wrote the list of words from the board including unda, uŋaniŋ, uŋiŋ, unduŋ, unda, du, duniŋ, duuŋ, nu, nuniŋ, and undiniŋ. Both students placed commas

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between words. If BA and MS recognized the words, they wrote indications of the transitional spelling stages, with less emphasis on uniformity in letter formation. They used commas to indicate spacing between words. The children formed the letters in each word and tried to blend sounds to spell each word at this transitional stage. Perhaps with more practice they will form all the letters in their alphabet well, use spacing between words, and write the letter tail below the line, like /ŋ/. Listing the words on the board in a vertical fashion may have helped the students to see and separate each individual word. E-Prep Conventional Writing When the E-Prep children started writing sentences, MS wrote the following three short Numanggang sentences using the phonograms she had learned: 1. Amoŋne i adi tam kuye. (My mother is a young woman.) 2. Finaŋgon toi i adi fafau. (This axe handle is white.) 3. Ana adi tam timeniŋ. (Ana is the firstborn girl.) Her writing samples showed more than just phonetic writing. Although she was able to use correct sentence structures and logical sequence, formation of letters still reflected emergent writing. This was reflected in letter size and writing letter tails such as /g/ and /ŋ/ above the line. BA wrote a single sentence to describe his experience: Sise mafu kaliŋ ugumun uŋa mafu foloŋ foguk u kagumun. (The day before yesterday we went to collect pandanus fruits and we saw the real fruits.) Student developmental writing stages in Numanggang reflected a steady, progressive, and near predictive sequence. The difficulty that they seemed to have is mainly with the size, shape, spacing, and the slopes of letter formation. Following behaviorist theories, learners at this stage require more practice in developing phrases, sentences, and stories, along with continued instruction on spelling and using punctuation to achieve fluency in their writing. This level of conventional writing implies that students are creating their own stories.

Observations and Discussion: E-1 Early Writing in E-1 According to the Vernacular Path to English Method, teachers should begin teaching oral English and building speaking and listening skills. In terms 1 and 2, all activities for English should focus on instruction on

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hearing and beginning to speak English. Writing activities in Numanggang should continue in E-1 while children are learning oral English. The teacher explained instructions in Numanggang, and this helped children understand the meaning of words as they listened to spoken English. Although no writing in English is prescribed in the first two terms of E-1, writing samples revealed a shift to writing instruction in English. FH, a female, and NF, a male, were 8 years of age in E-1. They were learning to hear and speak English but continued to receive instruction in the vernacular to explain the English activities. The teacher used a chanting activity to teach recognition of English phonograms. FH and NF followed the teacher’s instructions and copied the work directly from the board during a class exercise. In one lesson the teacher introduced different English words that use the letter /s/ and taught the children to chant sentences that repeat the phonogram in focus. Student drawings mimicked what the teacher had drawn on the board, and the samples show student skill in forming the same shapes and images to match the sentences. FH drew what looks like the sun rising or setting behind the mountains. The writing sample shows what looks like extensions above some letters. These extensions are numerical markings that the teacher used to differentiate vowel and consonant sounds in English, such as a1 in the English word father, a2 that occurs in the word axe, or a3 that occurs in the word rake. FH wrote: September sun reads s s s S s reads s s s In another lesson, when learning the letter /n/, NF drew a portrait of a girl, and his writing suggests that she is a nurse called Nancy. NF wrote: Nancy nurse reads n n n N reads n n n The teacher repeated letter formation activities used in E-Prep for introducing English, so that E-1 students wrote the letters /p/ and /y/ correctly with the letter tails below the line. In comparison to the E-Prep handwriting in the multi-grade classroom, E-1 student handwriting skills appear more advanced. E-1 Transitional Spelling FH and NF continued to follow the traditional rote learning style as they copied conventional sentences from the board. In addition, the language focus appeared to be on the English sound /eɪ/, as in “main,” “drain,” “rain,” and “train.” FH copied two English sentences, one of which was

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a question, and the other a declarative sentence answering the question. Her writing sample included the vowel /i2/ with a numerical superscript denoting the long /i/ vowel. She wrote: Is I2an in the main drain? Yes, I2an is in the main drain. In another lesson, NF copied four sentences, including a question and answer. These sentences formed a short dialogue of connected text about people getting on a train. The sentences were not written on separate lines as with the sentences FH wrote. NF wrote: Miriam ran to the train. Did the man sat in the train? No he did not. Ian and Ini sat in the train. Both E-1 students showed skill at copying what the teacher had written on the board, but more observations are needed to confirm how much English they understood. More discussions with the teacher may help explain why he instructed the children to write English sentences before they had spent the prescribed time developing English vocabulary. E-1 Conventional Writing in English E-1 students experience conventional writing as they see and hear the teacher read what he wrote on the board. Then the students copy the English stories into their exercise books after hearing the story read repeatedly. Again, this seems to be more traditional rote teaching practice in Papua New Guinea, but the teacher is following one principle of the Vernacular Path to English Method by marking the vowels and consonants. This helps students to differentiate between English sounds that use the same letter. The teacher wrote a group of sentences that seem to focus on the vowel /a2/ that occurs in the words Sam, ram, ran, dam, rat, sat, and ant. He also wrote the letter /s2/, which is found in words like Sam and sand. No other activities appear in the exercise book, but it is possible to use these sentences to help students recognize /a2/ and write the words and sentences that focus on this sound. FH copied the sentences, being careful to mark all the vowels and the consonant /s2/. FH added a drawing of a rat and a person on a mat in her exercise book. The ra2m ra2n to the da2m. This is the ra2t tha2t ra2n to the da2m. This is the ra2t tha2t s1a2t on the a2nt. S1a2m is a ma2d ma2n. S1a2m and da2d are on the s1a2nd.

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NF wrote similar sentences in paragraph format and included wider spaces between words. He did not place numerical identifications on the /a/ and the /s/, and the errors in his sentences indicate his effort to write the sentences on his own. The teacher corrected the wrong letters by writing the correct one on top of the errors. NF included two phrases in his story. Was he trying to write what he had seen on the board from memory? A follow up talk with the teacher about this writing sample may reveal whether NF was attempting to write independently or if he made mistakes in copying. See his sentences transcribed below: Rat is on the mad. The mad man ran at the mad. The rat ran at the mat. The 10 red ants. Sam’s rat. The rat and the mad man are on the mad. The corrected sentences looked like the following: Rat is on the mat. The mad man ran to the mat. The rat ran to the mat. The 10 red ants. Sam’s rat. The rat and the mad man are on the mat.

Observations and Discussion: E-2 The two E-2 students are KT, a male 12 years of age, and JS, a female 8 years of age. The E-2 teacher taught the language lesson in Numanggang rather than in English. After the writing activity with the teacher, KT copied the information into his exercise book. The teacher discussed the phonogram /u/ with the class. After he provided examples of words using the phonogram, he asked the students to give words that have that phonogram. In the next Numanggang lesson, the teacher wrote the headings in English and the lesson content in Numanggang. It is not clear if the English words are being used because Numanggang teachers have not developed Numanggang words or phrases for concepts like “known phonogram,” “new words,” “sentence,” or “phonogram.” This terminology comes from the Creative Phonics Method and indicates the teacher’s effort to follow its guidelines. The phonograms that the students had learned include /m, e, ŋ, d, i, n, a/. The new phonogram is /u/. KT listed new words made with the new phonogram and the phonograms the students learned in previous lessons. See the transcribed list in Table 6.6. The teacher developed decodable sentences with some of these words, introduced them to the students, and elicited independent thinking from the students. He asked them to think of short phrases using the words built from learned phonograms, as shown in Table 6.7. Although this lesson should have been taught in E-Prep, this scaffolding strategy of eliciting short phrases is an effective way to encourage students toward conventional writing.

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Table 6.6 New Numanggang words New Numanggang Words Learned

English Translation

Uŋa Uŋaniŋ uŋiŋ unduŋ unda du duuŋ undiniŋ unim une uneŋ

go and from there they went like that Okay, allright you down there something/someone like that we will go let us go they/you are going

Table 6.7 Numanggang sentences and phrases copied by KT Numanggang Sentences and Phrases

English Translation

Ana du Du adi Nini Didi adi undiniŋ Du adi Didi Du adi Dada

Ana you You are Nini. Didi is like that. You are Didi. You are Dada.

It is conspicuous that the E-2 teacher was teaching a Numanggang phonogram lesson, which is the job of the E-Prep teacher during the E-Prep year. According to SBC guidelines, the children in E-2 should learn to read and write longer meaningful texts in Numanggang and begin to write simple English texts. Planning and programming books for each grade level were not observed at the school. The researcher discussed this late phonics instruction with the teachers at Mobisa and found that teacher absence was the main reason the E-2 teacher was still teaching new phonograms in Numanggang. In another lesson, the E-2 teacher prepared a set of English writing activities on the chalkboard and encouraged the students to write the letter six times and practice writing sentences with the letter in focus. JS, the E-2 female student, copied what the teacher had written on the blackboard. The Vernacular Path to English method prescribes other writing activities to help children learn 49 English phonograms, such as listening and writing with dictation or reading and copying words or sentences from flash cards. In this lesson, the teacher focused on writing letters in upper and lower case, as well as letter formation. The letter in focus was /s/, but the teacher made a common mistake differentiating between the two phonograms /s/ and /sh/. Numanggang speakers often miss the /sh/

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sound found in English when pronouncing words like shoe, shell, or ship, and it is common to hear these words pronounced as su, sel, or sip. The Numanggang alphabet has an /s/ and an /h/, but no /sh/, as shown below. JS copied the phonograms, words, and sentences from the blackboard. Her handwriting resembles the conventional handwriting of her teacher. She succeeded in writing both upper- and lower-case letters in practice as well in the two sentences, as shown in transcription of her writing activity below. S S S S S S s s s s s s shoe shoe shoe shoe shoe This is my shoe. It is a blue shoe.

Summary of Observations Numanggang students seemed to learn through observation and practice without questioning what was presented by the teacher. Bandura (as cited in McLeod, 2016), a social theorist, suggested that observation is a critical part of learning. Numanggang culture is imbued with observational learning outside the classroom, such as in learning to hunt or to make a garden. This learning is often done with scaffolding and minimal conversation as parents or extended family members model the desired behaviors. In the village setting, Numanggang children learn behaviors by observing and working in groups alongside family members. Certain activities in the village, such as gardening, fishing, hunting, and house building, are constant, which allows for repetition that results in mastery of village tasks. Such activities lend creditability to the developmental theories of Bandura (social) and Vygotsky (sociocultural). It appears that traditional rote teaching style influenced how the teachers applied the Creative Phonics and Vernacular Path to English methods and affected early writing development in Numanggang students. Did the students of Mobisa Elementary School exhibit early writing development, according to Temple et al. (1992)? Writing sample analysis revealed areas of concern in teaching practice, and Mobisa teachers admitted their need for further training and supervision. Little attention is paid to pre-phonemic writing before the child enters school. In the Numanggang context, early writing development is associated with forming letters and writing words and sentences in the classroom, beginning around age 6. Stages of early writing were evident, even though much of Numanggang student writing reflected what they observed the teacher write on the blackboard. Repetition strategies common in rote learning helped students develop skill in letter formation, which was seen in writing words, phrases, and sentences in each of the three grades. The level of

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writing development seems to depend on how much the teacher ventured away from traditional rote teaching practices and began to encourage the children to think of words, phrases, and sentences on their own. Further study is needed on Numanggang teaching practices to observe the extent to which teachers used shared and independent approaches to teaching writing. The E-2 teacher seemed to be moving in that direction as he coached the children to recall words that they had learned to decode. A more child-centered approach was evident when he encouraged them to write whole phrases and sentences independently, so that the children succeeded in writing meaningful phrases and sentences on their own. It is difficult to say whether the teachers understood and followed the government reading methods and curriculum. If observations had continued to the end of the year, student progress toward transitional and conventional writing development may have been observed. These two later stages are not likely to happen without greater application of language experience approaches; process writing; and shared, guided, and independent approaches to teaching writing, as suggested by developmental and socioconstructivist theories.

Limitations of the Study This case study is based on a single school visit, which made it difficult to do a comprehensive study of Numanggang emergent writing. Also, the study began midyear, which hindered important data collection at the beginning of the school year, when students exhibit first stages of emergent writing in a classroom setting. Classroom observations lasted four hours, and the interviews with the two elementary school teachers lasted three hours total. The Numanggang language community is in a mountainous district of Morobe Province, which made it difficult to make repeated visits to gather data or discuss observations with the teachers.

Exploratory Directions for Future Revitalization Efforts The fact that Numanggang is used in all oral communications in the village context is a promising direction for future revitalization efforts. Non-formal education strategies continue to play a significant role among the Numanggang people, and this allows opportunities for local training in student-centered early writing activities. Numanggang elementary school student writing showed sequential development along the five stages proposed by Temple et al. (1992). The Department of Education is moving in another promising direction by allowing the vernacular to be taught in the first three years of children’s education. It has established a standards-based framework, which has specific guidelines for teaching the vernacular. Expanding pre-service elementary school teacher education is a promising direction for Numanggang language revitalization.

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Quality formal training should empower future elementary school teachers to deliver bilingual, child-centered, standards-based education in rural classrooms. The challenge for teacher training institutions is to develop a language curriculum that is based on multilingual education principles and methods. This direction would result in effective training and language development of elementary school teachers in the Papua New Guinea context.

Conclusion In Western contexts, early writing awareness begins with helping children around the ages of 3 or 4 become aware that what they say are words and that these words can be written down (Language Disabilities Association of America, 2013). The future of Numanggang language vitality could be affected by young writers who are not only aware that the words, phrases, and sentences they write in Numanggang have meaning but that their words have the power to help other children and adults understand their world. It is hoped that the discussion about this case study, and other chapters in this book, will help chart a path forward for the preservation and revitalization of endangered languages of the world.

References Acton, B., Wilson, T., & Ayabe, J. (2014). The vernacular path to English: A teacher trainer’s guide and resource. Papua New Guinea: SIL-PNG. Adi-Japha, E. F. (2001). Development of differentiation between writing and drawing systems. Developmental Psychology, 37(1), 101–114. Retrieved from www.realtutoring.com/phd/drawing.pdf Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Berk, L. E. (2009). Child development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Retrieved from www.verywellmind.com/child-development-theories2795068 Calkins, L. M. (1986). The art of teaching writing. Toronto, Canada: Irwin Publishing. Department of Education. (2003). Outcome-based elementary language syllabus. Papua New Guinea. Author Department of Education. (2015). Standards-based elementary language syllabus. Papua New Guinea. Author. Gruber, H. E. , & Voneche, J. J. (Eds.). (1977). The essential Piaget: An interpretive reference guide. NY: Basic Books. Hynum, D. (1992). A preliminary phonology of Numanggang. Ukarumpa, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea: SIL-PNG. Hynum, Y. (1999, December). Indigenously authored and illustrated literature: An answer to esoteric notions of literacy among the Numanggang adults of Papua New Guinea. San Bernadino, CA: California State University. Hynum, Y. (2013). Creative phonics instruction manual with activities and games. Ukarumpa, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea: Summer Institute of Linguistics PNG.

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Kekeya, J. L. (2014, November). Curriculum development and implementation in Papua New Guinea. DWU Research Journal, 21, 99–109. Retrieved from www.dwu.ac.pg/en/images/Research_Journal/2014_Vol_21/8__Kekeya_ Curriculum_development__implementation_in_PNG.pdf Language Disabilities Association of America. (2013, October). Early writing: Why squiggles are important. Retrieved from https://ldaamerica.org/early-writingwhy-squiggles-are-important Litteral, R. (1986). Vernacular education in Papua New Guinea: Preschools. Papua New Guinea Journal of Education, 22, 41–46. Litteral, R. (1999). Four decades of language policy in Papua New Guinea: The move towards the vernacular. Unpublished manuscript. Paper originally titled “Language Development in Papua New Guinea, Cheaper by the Hundreds”. Special lecture sponsored by the Linguistics Department of the University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX. Retrieved from www.sil.org/ silewp/1999/001/silewp1999-002.html Litteral, R. (2013). Tok Pisin progressive creative phonics lessons. Unpublished manuscript. Papua New Guinea. MacKenzie, N. (2011, October). From drawing to writing: What happens when you shift teaching? Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 34(3), 322–340. MacKenzie, N. H. (2014). Predictors of success with writing in the first year of school. Issues in Educational Research, 24(1), 41–54. McLaughlin, D., & O’Donoghue, T. (1996). Community teacher education in Papua New Guinea, Chapter 6. Retrieved from www.pngbuai.com/300socialsciences/ education/training/teacher-ed-mclaughlin1of6.htm McLeod, S. A. (2016). Bandura—social learning theory. Simply Psychology. Retrieved from https://simplypsychology.org/bandura.html Norman, P. (2006). Outcome-based education: A PNG perspective. Madang, Papua New Guinea: DWU Press. Piaget, J. (1930). The child’s conception of physical causality. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & company. Sandbank, A. (1992). Emergent literacy: Children’s way of writing in preschool years. Mount Carmel International Training Institute. Haifa: UNESCO. Shute, R. H., & Slee, P. T. (2015). Child development theories and critical perspectives (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Retrieved from www.routledge.com/ Child-Development-Theories-and-Critical .  .  . Child Development: Theories and Critical Perspectives. Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2018). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (21st ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. Retrieved from www.ethnologue.com Skinner, B. F. 1974. About Behaviorism. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Spady, W. G. (1994). Outcome-based education: Critical issues and answers. Arlington, VA: American Arlington Association of School Administrators. Temple, C. A., Nathan, R., & Burris, N. (1992). The beginnings of writing (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. Readings on the development of children, 23(3), 34–41. Wagner, H. (1986). Beginnings at Finschhafen. In The Lutheran church of Papua New Guinea: The first hundred years, 1886–1986 (pp. 31–83). Adelaide, AUS: Lutheran Publishing House. Watson, J. B. (1930) Behaviorism. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.

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Teaching Task-Based Writing in Zapotec in Oaxaca, Mexico Katherine J. Riestenberg and Raquel Eufemia Cruz Manzano

Introduction Ivanič (2004) proposed that writing consists of four embedded layers in which a text, or written product, exists at the center of the cognitive processes, social practices, and sociocultural contexts that surround its creation (see also Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 2013; Ivanič, 1998; Jones, 1990). She argued that “learning to write . . . compris[es] all four layers,” and that this framework could serve as the “basis for imagining a holistic, comprehensive writing pedagogy” (p. 241). In fact, this “multilayered view” of writing mirrors the principles that underlie communicative approaches to second language (L2) instruction such as task-based language teaching (TBLT) (Ellis, 2009; Long, 1985, 2009, 2015; Norris, 2009; Robinson, 2011; Van den Branden, 2006; Van den Branden, Bygate, & Norris, 2009). Like Ivanič, TBLT researchers and practitioners are concerned with issues of language beyond language form, including how cognition and sociocultural practices shape communicative interactions (Norris, 2009; Robinson, 2011). In this chapter, we describe how Ivanič’s holistic model draws attention to some of the challenges associated with teaching and learning writing in an Indigenous language. Our goal is to show that an approach to writing instruction informed by TBLT offers mechanisms for addressing these challenges. As a case study, we discuss early writing among a group of primary school students, ages 7 to 11, who are learning the Zapotec language traditionally spoken in their community through an extracurricular language revitalization program. The students live in San Pablo Macuiltianguis, a community in Oaxaca, Mexico. All regular school instruction takes place in Spanish, and Spanish is also spoken at home. In this chapter, we therefore refer to the students as second language (L2) learners of Zapotec.1 The arguments in this chapter are based on our experiences applying a TBLT approach in the Zapotec classes between August 2015 and June 2016.

Literature Review A key characteristic of Ivanič’s (2004) “multilayered view” of writing is that it treats a text (i.e., “linguistic substance,” p. 222) as embedded within

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a set of psychological and social processes in a layered structure (see Figure 7.1). Language text, the innermost layer, primarily concerns the written language form but also includes the meaningful visual and physical characteristics of the written product. The second innermost layer, “cognitive processes,” describes the mental strategies underlying language use. The third layer is the writing event, which refers to the immediate social and educational context surrounding an act of writing, including features of social interaction and the objectives for language use. The outermost layer is a bird’s-eye view of the social, cultural, and political universe in which writing takes place. While the inner three layers of the framework are concerned with language and language use, the outermost layer is concerned with why these inner layers “are the way they are” (p. 223). While the original purpose of Ivanič’s (2004) framework was to identify and interpret discourses of writing, her framework is also useful for exploring instructional practices and writing development in diverse contexts. For Ivanič, the layered structure demonstrates that the written text at the center of the structure is a subset of, and inseparable from, the cognitive and social processes that generate it. This feature makes the framework particularly effective for describing the challenges that learners face in learning to write an Indigenous L2 within the context of language revitalization. Indigenous language revitalization involves a complex tension among Indigenous identities on the one hand and national, global, or colonial identities on the other, with some level of decolonization or resistance against the latter as a necessary component (e.g., Henze & Davis, 1999; Hinton, 2011; Leonard, 2017). It is therefore critical that analyses of teaching and learning be grounded in an understanding of the social and cognitive environment in which the Indigenous language exists. Ivanič’s framework mirrors evolutions in theories of language pedagogy over the last few decades and embodies the principles of task-based language teaching (TBLT) in particular. TBLT is a communicative language teaching approach grounded in the principle that language learning 4. Sociocultural and political context 3. Writing event 2. Cognitive processes 1. Text

Figure 7.1 Ivanič’s (2004) multilayered view of language (p. 223).

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is most successful when learners are engaged in activities that go beyond language practice and are “worthwhile for their own sake” (Dewey, 1933, p. 87, cited in Norris, 2009, p. 579). It involves identifying the realworld tasks that learners need to be able to perform in the language and then developing instructional versions of these tasks. The approach proceeds based not on language structure but on the communicative needs of learners, shifting instructional focus from grammar and memorization of vocabulary to authentic, communicative interaction. With this shift has come an increased interest in the relationship between cognition and social interaction, as well a new emphasis on the sociocultural motivations and challenges that surround language learning (Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman, 2010). TBLT aims to provide an approach that is “radically learner-centered” (Long, 2015, p. 325) and therefore offers strategies for addressing the challenges identified through Ivanič’s multilayered view of writing. Although TBLT is likely to be considered an imported pedagogical approach in many Indigenous communities, these characteristics can, at least in principle, help to ensure that Indigenous language instruction proceeds as an emic rather than etic process.

Where the Language Is Spoken: San Pablo Macuiltianguis San Pablo Macuiltianguis is located in the mountainous Sierra Juárez region in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico (see Figure 7.2). Macuiltianguis Zapotec is a variety of Sierra Juárez Zapotec (International Organization for Standardization [ISO], 2007, 693–3), a group of languages spoken by approximately 2,000 to 5,000 people in Mexico and the United States

Figure 7.2 Location of San Pablo Macuiltianguis.

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(Tejada, 2012). Zapotec languages group with Chatino languages to form the Zapotecan language family, in turn a member of the Otomanguean stock (e.g., Campbell, 2017). This group of languages is richly diverse: Glottolog counts 57 distinct Zapotec languages (Hammarström, Forkel, Haspelmath, & Bank, 2017), and the Mexican National Institute of Indigenous Languages counts 62 (INALI, 2008). Beam de Azcona (2016) gives a more conservative estimate and states that there are “at least 15 and probably twenty-some Zapotec languages” (p. 3). Macuiltianguis is located on what is considered the northern boundary of the Zapotecspeaking area of Oaxaca. Traditionally, communities on the other side of the boundary speak Chinantec languages that share a common ancestor but are not mutually intelligible with Zapotec. However, this boundary has become blurred in recent decades as patterns of mobility and migration in the region change. The name of the community follows a common template for Mexican place names, combining a patron saint name in Spanish (San Pablo, “Saint Paul”) with an Indigenous place name. A testament to the historical influence of Aztec society in this region of Mexico, the name Macuiltianguis is from the Uto-Aztecan language Nahuatl and translates to “five plazas” or “five markets” (macuil, “five,” tianguis, “plaza” or “market”). The Zapotec name for the community is Tagayu', which the language revitalization group in Macuiltianguis has analyzed as “the señor of the five” (ta is a term of address for adult males, gayu' is “five”) (Grupo Cultural Tagayu', 2017). The 2010 Mexican Census reported that Macuiltianguis had 897 residents over age 3, nearly a quarter of whom were over age 65 (INEGI, 2010). This includes residents in Macuiltianguis proper as well as those in San Juan Luvina, a Zapotec community that shares municipal jurisdiction with Macuiltianguis and is located about 7.5 kilometers to the south. Based in part on numbers given in the 1995 Census (see Foreman, 2006), we estimate that approximately half of the 897 residents counted in the 2010 Census live in Luvina. Foreman (2006) describes a sharp population decline in Macuiltianguis since 1960 and in Luvina since 1980 due to migration to locations throughout Mexico and the United States. The 2010 Mexican Census reported that 90% of Macuiltianguis respondents self-described as Indigenous (INEGI, 2010). Values in line with Indigenous identity are visible in all aspects of community life: in governance (a form of autonomous, representative government unique to Latin American Indigenous communities called usos y costumbres); in numerous festivals and other traditions; in the relationship to the land as realized through the local sustainable forestry industry; and in food preparation. At the same time, most members of the community are highly connected to life outside of Macuiltianguis. Nearly everyone has close family members living outside of the community. Members of younger

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generations tend to use social media and express an interest in learning English (Riestenberg, 2017). The 2010 Census showed a rapid decrease in the number of Indigenous language speakers in the Macuiltianguis municipality over the last two generations, with 96% of people over age 45 but only 36% of people ages 5–14 reporting that they spoke an Indigenous language (INEGI, 2010). We find these numbers somewhat surprising, because we know of no Zapotec-speaking children in Macuiltianguis between the ages of 5 and 14. However, some children in this age group do have good Zapotec comprehension skills, and there are reports of children who speak the language in the diaspora community near Mexico City. The young people identified by the Census as speakers may be residents of San Juan Luvina, or they may be newer migrants to the community who do not speak the traditional Zapotec language but rather a neighboring Chinantec language. The Census data do not distinguish which Indigenous language an individual speaks, and many residents of neighboring Chinantec communities have migrated to Macuiltianguis in recent years to work in the community’s sustainable forestry industry. In 2003, with the passage of the Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas, the Mexican government officially recognized the rights of Indigenous communities to speak their languages (Cámara de Diputados, 2003). This followed a long and complex history of Hispanicization of Indigenous communities in Mexico dating back to colonization in the early 16th century (see Hamel, 2008a, 2008b for overviews). Sources point to the founding of the national Secretaria de Educación Pública in 1920 as a turning point towards hostile government policy towards Indigenous languages in Mexico (Beam de Azcona, 2016; De Korne, 2016; Hamel 2008a, 2008b; Montemayor, 2003). Official assimilationist policies continued through the 1970s with only isolated and short-lived exceptions (Hamel, 2008b). Current policies have not reversed the momentum of colonization and assimilationism. Although Mexico has had an official program of bilingual Indigenous education since the late 1970s, Hamel (2008a) states that the most common practices in Mexico’s bilingual schools still “propel [a] transition to Spanish” (p. 305). San Pablo Macuiltianguis has never had a bilingual school. The community has a public elementary school and public secondary boarding school; instruction is conducted entirely in Spanish at both schools. Zapotec-speaking members of the Macuiltianguis community recall being castigated and sometimes corporally punished by teachers at the elementary school for speaking Zapotec, especially throughout the 1960s. One resident reported that teachers went door-to-door asking parents to speak Spanish and not Zapotec to children at home. Many older residents point to this time period as the impetus for the current decline of the Zapotec language in the community.

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Structure of Macuiltianguis Zapotec Macuiltianguis Zapotec joins with a handful of other Zapotec varieties spoken in the area to form a subgroup referred to as Sierra Juárez Zapotec (International Organization for Standardization [ISO], 2007, 693). The description of Macuiltianguis Zapotec given here refers to the particular Zapotec language traditionally spoken in San Pablo Macuiltianguis proper and may not apply to the closely related varieties spoken in neighboring communities such as San Juan Luvina and San Juan Atepec. Like other Zapotecan languages (Beam de Azcona, 2016), Macuiltianguis Zapotec is a head-initial language with VSO word order. Verb roots take a prefix that marks tense, aspect, or mood (TAM). Derivational affixes (e.g., statives, adjectives, versives, causatives) optionally appear between the TAM marker and the verb root. Subject and object pronouns and a variety of adverbial morphemes can follow the verb as enclitics. Noun phrases in Macuiltianguis Zapotec are head-initial except for quantifiers and plural markers. Nouns may be followed by their modifying adjectives, possessors, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and demonstratives, usually in that order (Foreman, 2006). The consonant inventory of Macuiltianguis Zapotec is given in Table 7.1 (Riestenberg, 2017). Words borrowed from Spanish may also include the consonants /f/, /x/, and /ɲ/, which are not included in Table 7.1. All consonants except for the rhotic /ɾ/ can be grouped into contrastive pairs in which a long, geminate, or fortis segment contrasts with a short, singleton, or lenis segment. This type of distinction among consonants is attested in all Zapotec languages, and most modern descriptions of Zapotec languages refer to this as a fortis/lenis contrast (Beam de Azcona, 2016; see Riestenberg, 2017 for further elaboration). Table 7.1 Consonants of Macuiltianguis Zapotec Bilabial Dental Alveolar Postalveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Plosives Nasal stops Taps/flaps Fricatives Affricates

p: b pb m: (m) mm

𝛉: ð dh d

t: t tt t n: n nn n ſ r s s t:s ts

Approximants Laterals

k: (k) g kg

Labiovelar k:w gw ku gw

ʂ: ʂ (ʐ ) xx x x tʃ t:ʃ ch ch j: j yy y

l: l lh l

Notes: IPA symbols for phonemes are bolded. Parentheses indicate that the phonemic status of the sound is unclear. Orthographic symbols are in italics.

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Macuiltianguis Zapotec has five vowel qualities, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, which exhibit contrastive phonation. Vowels in stressed position in open syllables can be modal (V), “checked” with a glottal stop (Vʔ), or rearticulated (VʔV). Vowels in unstressed position or in stressed position preceding a lenis consonant can be modal or checked. Vowels in stressed position preceding a fortis consonant can only be modal. There are also five diphthongs: /ia/, /iu/, /ua/, /ue/, and /ui/. As in other Zapotec languages, there is a relationship between vowel length and the fortis or lenis status of a following consonant such that vowels are long on open syllables and before word-medial lenis consonants, but short before word-medial fortis consonants (Nellis & Hollenbach, 1980). Word roots in Macuiltianguis Zapotec are monosyllabic or bisyllabic and exhibit a six-way tone contrast consisting of three level tones (low, mid, high) and three contour tones (falling, rising, and dipping). Tones begin on the stressed syllable of the root and continues to the right edge of the root. All tones except the dipping tone can appear across one or two syllables of a root. The dipping tone only occurs on a single syllable which is necessarily stressed. When there are additional elements to the right of the root, such as enclitics, the tone may continue to the right edge of the word (see Riestenberg, 2017 for examples). Like many Indigenous languages, Macuiltianguis Zapotec is largely an oral language. In 2009, the revitalization group produced a standardized alphabet. The alphabet was developed with the aid of two linguists and strongly corresponds to the phoneme inventory of the language, though tone is not represented except in the following manner. When the rising and dipping tones occur on a single syllable, these vowels are produced as extra long and can be up to twice as long as the lengthened vowels that occur in open syllables and before medial lenis consonants. These extra long vowels are written as digraphs: , , , , and . Glottal stops associated with vowels are represented with a single straight quote (or .

Macuiltianguis Zapotec Language Revitalization Efforts Organized efforts to revitalize Macuiltianguis Zapotec began in 2008, with a grassroots initiative by a small group of speakers to establish a standardized alphabet for the language. The group is directed by the second author of this chapter, Raquel E. Cruz Manzano, and conducts activities under the name Grupo Cultural Tagayu' (Macuiltianguis Cultural Group). Since its inception, the group has engaged in a cohesive effort to document and revitalize the language, producing several printed resources with funding from small municipal, state, and federal grants. The resources include an alphabet and word list, a Bingo game, a domino game, a booklet of songs and stories, a book on counting and measurement, and a bilingual book in

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Spanish and Zapotec on the community’s history and traditional knowledge (Grupo Cultural Tagayu', 2017).

School Where the Language Is Taught In 2010, the Grupo Cultural Tagayu' registered a learning center to teach Zapotec to children with the Center for the Study and Development of the Indigenous Languages of Oaxaca (CEDELIO). CEDELIO is a statelevel gubernatorial organization that provides professional development opportunities for Indigenous language activists and official recognition of language revitalization projects. The goal was to teach Zapotec to Spanish-speaking children in the Macuiltianguis community. Manzano, who is a retired primary school teacher, is the main instructor of the Zapotec classes. She self-describes as dominant in Spanish, speaking Zapotec at 80% or 90% proficiency. Beginning in 2010, she has sporadically held informal Zapotec language classes for children in the community. In September 2014, Manzano attended a workshop led by the first author of this chapter, Kate Riestenberg, on TBLT for Indigenous languages, sponsored by CEDELIO in Oaxaca City. From there, a collaboration was formed, and Manzano expressed that her main objective was to increase spoken Zapotec interaction in the classes. Between August 2015 and June 2016, we worked together to design and carry out Zapotec lessons in Macuiltianguis informed by a task-based approach. Classes were held after school two to three times per month and ranged in length from 1.5 to 2 hours. Most classes took place in the Zapotec language classroom located in the community’s municipal building. Some classes included excursions to other locations in the community, such as an ancient Zapotec tomb, the homes of native Zapotec speakers, or shops with native speaker shopkeepers. Explicit explanations of Zapotec grammar and pronunciation were limited in these classes. Instead, lessons were designed using principles of TBLT with a communicative emphasis on meaning over form. The class also received support from other native speakers of Macuiltianguis Zapotec, who occasionally volunteered to assist in the classes. The reflections presented in this article are based on our experience carrying out the Zapotec classes and draw from class lesson plans, students’ in-class writing samples, and video recordings of 23 class sessions. The videos were collected as part of a larger project to document classroom interaction and the nature of the target language input learners receive (Riestenberg, 2017).

Instructional Writing Practices: Sociocultural Context and the Writing Event In this and the following section, we use Ivanič’s (2004) multilayered view of language to provide a description and analysis of children’s Zapotec writing in the language revitalization program in San Pablo

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Macuiltianguis. We relate the layers of Ivanič’s framework to the challenges that students face in learning to write in Zapotec. In each case, we show how a task-based approach to language teaching aims to address these challenges. The first theme, writing for language revitalization, links Ivanič’s outermost layer, the sociocultural context, to the “real world” language use that TBLT emphasizes. The second theme, writing in a speaking-driven classroom, addresses the next layer of Ivanič’s framework, the writing event. This discussion centers on how TBLT can foster connections between writing and speaking and the importance of such a connection in Indigenous language instruction. Sociocultural Context: Writing for Language Revitalization Indigenous language instruction relies on an understanding of the sociocultural universe in which students’ learning exists. This involves, as Ivanič (2004) suggests, acknowledging the “patterns of privileging and relations of power” surrounding writing (p. 224). Although many linguists believe that literacy is not a prerequisite for language revitalization (e.g., Bielenberg, 1999), the contemporary discourse surrounding Zapotec revitalization in Oaxaca demonstrates a belief that languages are only important if they are written, and only important languages are written. However, there is a difference between the existence of a standardized orthography and the existence of a culture of literature and writing in the language (e.g., De Korne, 2016; Lillehaugen, 2016). For a culture of writing to emerge, new spaces for writing must be opened in which writing has sociocultural and communicative functions. The existence of functional spaces of language use is a crucial requirement of TBLT. Because TBLT aims to foster learners’ ability to communicate in the “real world,” there must be an active speech community on which to base authentic and useful communicative tasks for the learners (Riestenberg & Sherris, 2018). That is, the language must be spoken in some social domains, and these domains must be accessible to learners. However, Zapotec languages have largely been excluded from traditional educational institutions and practices in Oaxaca (De Korne, 2016), so the academic, personal, and professional objectives for writing usually found in a second or foreign language classroom largely do not apply in this context. A goal of TBLT is to provide functional, rather than purely pedagogical, outlets for language use that would otherwise not take place. In Macuiltianguis, Zapotec writing has a very limited function among the small group of first language (L1) Zapotec speakers who make up the Grupo Cultural Tagayu'. This function is to transmit traditional knowledge. The texts they have produced are appreciated by community members who support the language revitalization efforts both in Macuiltianguis and in the diaspora communities in Mexico and the United States, and they are used regularly in the Zapotec revitalization program.

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In the classroom, we use task-based lessons to build on the functional goal of transmitting traditional community knowledge. Students visit Zapotec-speaking community members in their homes or shops, or elders visit the classroom to give demonstrations, tell stories, or answer students’ questions about a topic. Lessons center on the completion of a communicative task. The primary focus of a communicative task is on meaning, and there should be an informational “gap” or need to convey information (Ellis, 2009). For our lessons, the informational gap often involves traditional knowledge that older members of the community know but that the students do not. In one example task, students learned to ask questions about the preparation of a traditional drink made from the fermented sap of agave plants, known as nupi yatsi in Macuiltianguis Zapotec and tepache in Spanish. To complete this task, learners first needed to know the words in Zapotec for the materials and ingredients involved. We used a writing activity to introduce and practice these vocabulary items. The instructor held up each item that would be used in the demonstration of preparing nupi yatsi and pronounced the name of the item in Zapotec. Students were instructed to listen to the pronunciation of the word and first write the item in their notebooks the way they thought it would be written. Students then compared their spelling to their neighbor’s spelling. Then the instructor wrote the word on the whiteboard. Students compared their spelling to the spelling on the whiteboard, then copied the instructor’s spelling onto an index card. Once students had a card for each vocabulary item, they were called upon individually to label the items with their card by taping the index card to the item. Many other tasks carried out during the Zapotec class also served to transmit knowledge from older members of the community to the Zapotec learners. In some cases, the written materials produced by the cultural group served as the basis for knowledge transmission. Students learned songs that had been documented or translated by the cultural group and performed them at cultural events. The book on counting and the flash cards associated with the Bingo and domino games are used in a variety of classroom activities. In other cases, the transmission of knowledge took place through spoken interaction. During one class, students visited the home of a woman who described the traditional handmade tools she uses for household activities. Students guessed the use of each tool before hearing the description by the speaker. Another task focused on basketball, which has been an important pastime in the community since the 1950s. Most of the students in the Zapotec program are on the community basketball team. A former basketball player and coach visited the classroom and was interviewed in Zapotec by the Zapotec instructor and the students. Afterwards, the class created a set of chants in Zapotec to recite at community basketball games and wrote the chants on signs to give to the attendees who cheer on the players.

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In other instances, the Zapotec lessons complemented what students were learning in school, rather than focusing on traditional knowledge. For example, leading up to Earth Day, students learned about environmental conservation, especially as related to the local sustainable forestry industry. Students made signs with environmentally friendly slogans in both Zapotec and Spanish. The signs were posted in the forest along the main highway to Macuiltianguis, where travelers could see them. These examples show that by using a task-based approach in the classroom, it is possible to directly address the sociocultural challenge of creating new spaces for functional language use. For the older members of the community who write the language, the main goal is to transmit traditional knowledge. The classroom provides dedicated space for this transmission to take place. In the classroom, students’ writing is often used as a tool to support the functional goal of transmitting traditional community knowledge, as in the nupi yatsi activity. However, this approach has also led to opportunities for writing that are more connected to students’ daily lives, as in the basketball and environmental conservation examples. The Writing Event: Writing to Scaffold Speaking The next layer of Ivanič’s framework, the writing event, encompasses the educational context, social interactions, and objectives surrounding language use. Because the principal goal of implementing TBLT in the language revitalization program was to increase spoken Zapotec interaction in the classes, the writing event was always highly connected to the objectives for spoken language use that guide each lesson. Class lessons focused on speaking skills but integrated writing activities to support speaking tasks. For example, students sometimes labeled target vocabulary in the creation of materials that were subsequently used as the basis for a speaking task. After the speaking task, students were sometimes asked to write on the whiteboard to reinforce aspects of grammar, pronunciation, or spelling. One example of how writing can be used to support speaking tasks is what Long (2015) calls an “overt plagiarism” task. For this task, students memorize a short text line by line through spoken repetition, then the instructor distributes a written version of the text. Students then use “chunks” from the original passage to write their own adaptation. While this task involves the type of memorization that is common in noncommunicative approaches to language teaching and has largely been rejected in communicative approaches, Long (2015) argues that this task is communicative because students engage with a “gestalt, semantically rich and meaningful . . . sample of the target language” and then adapt it in a way that forces them to rely on their own linguistic resources (p. 315). An example of this task as used with the Zapotec learners is shown in

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Figure 7.3 “Overt plagiarism” task to encourage chunk learning.

Figure 7.3. This task was used to prepare learners to introduce themselves in Zapotec at a community event, a new yet authentic space for language use outside of the instructional setting. After completing the task, learners were able to more readily use phrases such as antu ru'ulasaya “I really like” and langua ru'ulasaya “I also like.” The “overt plagiarism” task (Long, 2015, pp. 314–316) demonstrates how integrating writing and speaking using a task-based approach helps to address the challenge of balancing the sociocultural role of literacy in language revitalization with the goal of fostering spoken interaction. We combine writing and speaking into a single writing event by using writing to scaffold the completion of speaking tasks.

Early Writing Development: Cognitive Processes and Texts The Zapotec learners described in this chapter are beginning writers and do not yet produce extensive written texts in Zapotec. Instead, writing development at this stage revolves around what Kress (1997) calls “drawing sounds” (p. 77), which connects learners’ orthographic development to their phonological development. The dependency between the inner two layers of Ivanič’s framework, cognitive processes and text, helps to illustrate the challenges that students face in learning to “draw” Zapotec sounds. For Ivanič, the written product is embedded within the mental strategies underlying language use, such that the text represents a subset of cognitive processes. In contexts of Indigenous language revitalization, multilingualism is inevitable, and the cognitive processes underlying language use are complex. Ivanič’s framework allows

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for an understanding that students’ Zapotec texts are embedded within the cognitive processes associated with their L1, Spanish, as well as the target language, Zapotec. Half-way through the academic year (in January 2016 after completing 12 class sessions), we examined orthographic errors in the class assignments of seven students who had consistently attended the classes (64 pages). This was a type of informal, formative assessment meant to help us better understand students’ struggles in representing Zapotec sounds and propose teaching modifications. We determined that many orthographic errors mirrored features of learners’ Zapotec pronunciation that are influenced by Spanish, such as the lack of a distinction between fortis and lenis consonants, between modal and checked or rearticulated vowel phonation, or between short and long tones. Spanish does not make these distinctions, and only a few of the more advanced learners occasionally make these distinctions in their Zapotec pronunciation (Riestenberg, 2017). Likewise, these distinctions were often missing from students’ orthographic representations, such that learners wrote iya instead of iyya for “flower,” beku instead of beku' for “dog,” or da instead of daa for “bean” (see Figure 7.4). Through a principle known as “focus on form” (Ellis, 2016; Long, 2000), TBLT offers an approach to addressing learners’ orthographic errors that respects the complexity that is present when multilinguistic cognitive processes are at play. Focus on form advocates for briefly drawing learners’ attention to language form (i.e., grammar, pronunciation, spelling) as a reactive response to communicative difficulties during a lesson in which the primary focus is on meaning (Long, 2015, p. 317). This approach allows issues of form (i.e., those at Ivanič’s “text” layer) to be targeted as they naturally arise during learner development, without discouraging learners through constant correction or dedicating valuable class time to learner errors that do not affect communicative difficulty. Writing da instead of daa for “bean” creates a communicative issue, because da is the spelling for “butter.” Therefore, informed by a focus on form approach, we agreed to call attention to such differences in students’ writing. However, writing bexi instead of bexxi for “tomato” creates no such issue, because there is no word spelled bexi in Macuiltianguis Zapotec. Therefore, we decided to minimize pointing out this type of error to learners, especially to those students who were new to the classes. In sum, the inner two layers of Ivanič’s framework allow us to demonstrate that in contexts of Indigenous language revitalization, learners’ texts are likely to be subject to complex cognitive-linguistic processes and face difficulty in learning to “draw” target language sounds. The principle of TBLT known as focus on form offers a strategy for addressing this challenge.

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Figure 7.4 Example of common orthographic errors (iya instead of iyya for “flower” and beku instead of beku' for “dog”).

Summary and Future Directions We have shown that Ivanič’s (2004) four layers of writing reveal challenges that learners face when learning to write in Macuiltianguis Zapotec as a second language. At the outermost layer, sociocultural context, we argued that the objectives for writing usually found in a second or

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foreign language classroom do not apply in this context, and it is necessary to create new functional spaces for writing. We address this challenge by using TBLT as a paradigm for the functional goal of transmitting traditional knowledge to students, while at the same time opening new spaces of Zapotec writing more connected to students’ daily lives. At the next layer, the writing event, we discussed the necessity of balancing the goals of Indigenous language literacy and spoken proficiency within a revitalization program. We showed that this balance can be achieved by using writing to scaffold speaking tasks. At the innermost layers of Ivanič’s framework, cognitive processes and text, we discussed the relationship between learners’ phonological development and their orthographic development. We argued that learners’ ability to spell Zapotec words is influenced by their ability to produce Zapotec words, which is influenced by the phonological characteristics of their L1, Spanish. This challenge is addressed by employing a principle of TBLT known as “focus on form” (Ellis, 2016; Long, 2000), which advocates for briefly drawing learners’ attention to language form as a reactive response to communicative difficulties during a lesson in which the primary focus is on meaning. In summary, we have argued that TBLT provides strategies for addressing some of the challenges that arise for students learning to write in Zapotec as an L2. Future work could include a more rigorous empirical study to elucidate the extent to which the use of TBLT affects students’ writing development over time. As the Zapotec speakers/writers of the Grupo Cultural Tagayu' generate new Zapotec texts, these will continue to be integrated into classroom lessons as a means of transmitting traditional knowledge. At the same time, by employing a task-based approach, we as instructors remain flexible enough to capitalize on new opportunities for written language use as they arise from students’ interests and daily activities. Our hope is that the classroom will continue to serve as an active space for written language use as revitalization efforts progress.

Note 1. Other possible terms include “heritage” or “ancestral” language learners, as Zapotec was the first language of the grandparents and ancestors of these students, or simply “later” language learners, as they are beginning to learn Zapotec after learning Spanish since birth. Here we chose to refer to the students as second language learners to emphasize that some challenges they face are typical of second, later, or additional language learning contexts. We avoid the term “heritage” learners in part because these students are the children of a generation who report to understand but not speak Zapotec and are likely to be considered more prototypical heritage learners.

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Jones, N. (1990). Reader, writer, text. In R. Carter (Ed.), Knowledge about language and the curriculum: The LINC reader. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking paths to literacy. London: Routledge. Leonard, W. Y. (2017). Producing language reclamation by decolonising “language”. In W. Y. Leonard & H. De Korne (Eds.), Language documentation and description (Vol. 14, pp. 15–36). London: EL Publishing. Retrieved from www. elpublishing.org/PID/150 Lillehaugen, B. D. (2016). ¿Por qué escribir en una lengua que (casi) nadie lee? Twitter y el desarrollo de literatura. Coloquio sobre Lenguas Otomangues y Vecinas 2016, Oaxaca, México. Long, M. H. (1985). A role for instruction in second language acquisition: Taskbased language teaching. In K. Hyltenstam & M. Pienemann (Eds.), Modeling and assessing second language acquisition (pp. 77–99). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Long, M. H. (2000). Focus on form in task-based language teaching. In R. Lambert & E. Shohamy (Eds.), Language policy and pedagogy: Essays in honor of A. Ronald Walton (pp. 179–192). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Long, M. H. (2009). Methodological principles in language teaching. In M. Long & C. J. Doughty (Eds.), The handbook of language teaching (pp. 373– 394). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Long, M. H. (2015). Second language acquisition and task-based language teaching. Somerset: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral. proquest.com Montemayor, C. (2003). Lenguas y pueblos indígenas de México. Guaraguao, 17, 91–100. Nellis, D. G., & Hollenbach, B. E. (1980). Fortis versus lenis in Cajonos Zapotec phonology. International Journal of American Linguistics, 46(2), 92–105. Norris, J. M. (2009). Task-based teaching and testing. In M. H. Long & C. J. Doughty (Eds.), The handbook of language teaching (pp. 578–594). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Riestenberg, K. J. (2017). Acoustic salience and input frequency in L2 lexical tone learning: Evidence from a Zapotec revitalization program in San Pablo Macuiltianguis. (Doctoral dissertation), Georgetown University. Washington, DC, USA. Riestenberg, K. J., & Sherris, A. (2018). Task-based teaching of indigenous languages: Investment and methodological principles in Macuiltianguis Zapotec and Salish Qlipse revitalization. Canadian Modern Language Review, 74(3), 434–459. Robinson, P. (2011). Task-based language learning: A review of issues. Language Learning, 61(6), 1–36. Swain, M., Kinnear, P., & Steinman, L. (2010). Sociocultural theory in second language education: An introduction through narratives. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Tejada, L. (2012). Tone gestures and constraint interaction in Sierra Juárez Zapotec. (Ph.D. dissertation). University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Van den Branden, K. (Ed.). (2006). Task-based language education: From theory to practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Van den Branden, K., Bygate, M., & Norris, J. (Eds.). (2009). Task-based language teaching: A reader. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

8

Cherokee Writing in an Elementary Immersion School Lizette Peter, Tracy Hirata-Edds, and Ryan Wahde Mackey

Introduction In 1821, the Cherokee folk hero Sequoyah made public his creation of an orthography for the Cherokee language. Called syllabary, or ᏗᏣᎳᎩ ᏗᎪᏪᎵᏍᎩ (dijalagi digowelisgi) in Cherokee, the system was rapidly and extensively adopted by Cherokees as a medium for maintenance of government documents, activism, record keeping and accounting, medicinal recipes, news events, and personal correspondence (Bender, 2002). Most fluent Cherokee speakers of the time became literate in syllabary (Boudinot, 1832), demonstrating its learnability and effectiveness of soundsymbol mapping for fluent speakers. But as Cherokee oral language use waned due to assimilative policies and mainstream schooling, literacy in syllabary become a skill possessed by few. Fortunately, among Cherokee Nation citizens in northeastern Oklahoma, a vibrant language and cultural revitalization movement has spawned two new generations of speakers, readers, and writers of Cherokee: young adults, who have reclaimed their linguistic heritage and made the Cherokee language a priority for themselves and their families, and children who attend ᏣᎳᎩᏗᏕᎶᏆᏍᏗ Tsalagi Dideloquasdi (Cherokee School), the immersion elementary school that is the focus of this chapter. For these contemporary speakers, writing in syllabary is integral to the larger mission of Cherokee language revitalization. Here, we discuss characteristics of writing by Tsalagi Dideloquasdi students. Our goal is to describe elements of these young authors’ writing practices with respect to translanguaging and their negotiation of Cherokee polysynthesism through the more analytic lens of English.1

Literature and Guiding Theory Richards (2008) has pointed out that language fluency, which includes ease of production; good intonation, vocabulary, syntax, and grammar; coherence; and comprehensibility, does not necessarily match the ability to complexify. Complexity requires restructuring, a process that involves the internalization of intake and adjusting of one’s developing language

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system to account for that intake (VanPatten, 1993). But new language coming in is not easily accommodated without practice outputting the new target language forms, in which case they do not become internalized as part of one’s long-term store. “For learners’ linguistic systems to take on new and more complex linguistic items,” Richards (2008) stated, “the restructuring, or reorganization, of mental representations is required, as well as opportunities to practice these new forms (the output hypothesis)” (p. 8). Although writing provides learners opportunities to more fully engage their “mental representations” of the target language than the spontaneity of oral speech, writing poses other challenges. Pellegrini (2001) proposed that literacy, and writing in particular, must be “lexicalized,” or explicitly encoded, so that a “generalized other,” with whom the writer may share little knowledge, can comprehend a message (pp. 55–56). Without shared knowledge, or the ability to rely on context, gestures, and other extra-linguistic features to communicate meaning, writers must employ their understanding of language to effectively select the best way to convey their intentions. Among biliterate individuals, this is accomplished through cognitive strategies not used by monolingual writers. For example, bilingual writing features substantial translation and back translation, which entails testing the “fit” of words or phrases being written by translating into the “other” language (Cumming, 2001). Rather than view these strategies as first-language interference, we posit that bilingual writers engage in translanguaging. The concept of translanguaging, a term first coined in Welsh by Williams (1994), valorizes the integrated linguistic systems of writers, who select from their repertoires to communicate and express their unique voice (Velasco & García, 2014). The writing of Tsalagi Dideloquasdi students resembles translanguaging among youth in other Indigenous communities (see Wyman, McCarty, & Nicholas, 2014), who consistently transcend named language boundaries and draw from multiple linguistic resources to fit their communicative needs (García, 2009; Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015; Wei, 2016; Williams, 2000). Two dimensions of Tsalagi Dideloquasdi students’ narrative writing practices in particular—their knowledge of Cherokee verb morphology and use of certain stylistic devices—provide a window into the multiple competencies they bring to composition and their acquisition processes. The understanding that comes through such analysis leads to identification of more effective methods of enhancing those processes pedagogically (Belcher, 2012).

History of Cherokee Language Contact and Shift The 1700s marked the beginning of Cherokees’ sustained contact with British settlers in the Appalachian region of North America (Perdue &

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Green, 1995). Cherokee language use has declined since, resulting from linguistic intermingling, catastrophic population reduction, and largescale relocation (Thornton, 1990). Amidst this turbulent era in Cherokee history, from about 1809 to 1821, a Cherokee man named George Gist, or Guess—known more familiarly as Sequoyah—embarked on a project to create a system for writing Cherokee, known as syllabary. The contemporary version consists of 85 moraic characters and the non-moraic /s/ (Rogers, 2005) (Figure 8.1). According to lore, Sequoyah was fascinated by the “talking leaves” used by English settlers and was determined to create a method for putting Cherokee on paper. Soon after its publication in 1821, the syllabary orthography was adopted by the tribe (Perdue, 1989). Type cast for printing syllabary led to the publication of the Nation’s first Indian press, the Cherokee Phoenix, a translation of the New Testament, and a hymnal, leading to more widespread literacy. By the 1830s, literacy in syllabary had risen to 90% (Bender, 2002; Rogers, 2005). But Cherokee self-governance, once promoted under President George Washington’s “civilization” plan, became a perceived threat to U.S. interests. Passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave President Andrew Jackson authority to force Cherokees from their homelands to Indian Territory (northeastern Oklahoma). This forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, was one of the greatest tragedies in U.S. history, where an estimated one-third to one-half of the population died from exposure, disease, or exhaustion (Perdue, 1989; Perdue & Green, 1995). Today, Cherokee Nation, the largest of three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, covers 14 counties in northeast Oklahoma (Figure 8.2) and has an enrollment of approximately 300,000 citizens worldwide. However, few Cherokee citizens speak Cherokee, and even fewer can read and write syllabary functionally. A 2003 convenience-sample survey of 300

Figure 8.1 Cherokee syllabary and corresponding sounds.

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Figure 8.2 Location of Cherokee Nation in the United States.

citizens of Cherokee Nation reported that 10% of respondents were fluent Cherokee speakers and, of these few fluent speakers, only 2% could write in syllabary (Cherokee Nation, 2003). The monumental task of perpetuating the language and Sequoyah’s legacy falls on people committed to Cherokee’s survival, and the success of immersion programs in contributing to children’s long-term success in acquiring the language of their ancestors.

Structure of the Cherokee Language Cherokee is the sole member of the southern branch of the Iroquoian language family, related to northern Iroquoian languages such as Seneca, Oneida, and Mohawk (Mithun, 1999). These languages are polysynthetic, conveying an array of information by means of affixes to roots in a complex inflectional system. This differs from more analytic languages like English, which, though weakly inflected, primarily demonstrates grammar without inflectional morphology. Verbs encode much of the information in polysynthetic languages, and are therefore used relatively more frequently than other parts of speech. In English, there is roughly one verb spoken for every three nouns; however, polysynthetic languages have a higher ratio of verbs per noun (e.g., five verbs per noun) (Mithun, 1989). The Cherokee verb root carries semantic meaning and functions as a stem to which a minimum of two and as many as 21 morphemes must be affixed. These morphemes indicate such information as who is doing the action; how many people are involved; tense; completedness; whether the action was witnessed; and size, shape, and animacy of objects receiving the action. Affixes in polysynthetic languages thus provide precision that, in analytic languages, require additional words. As an

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example of morphological affixation, the English sentence “They drank it again” translates into a single, inflected Cherokee verb (Example 8.1). Example 8.1 Analysis of “They drank it again”.

Cherokee Syllabary: ᎤᎾᏘᏔᎲᎢ Pronunciation representation: uu-na-tii-tha-hvv-ʔi Morphological analysis and gloss: itr-3.pl-drink:cmp-exp2 Free translation: They drank it again. (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008, p. 296) Cherokee affixes can contain several grammatical components not readily distinguishable from the root or each other and may also incorporate internal phonological changes (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008). These unique characteristics make Cherokee challenging to teach and learn as a second language. Given this complexity and the central role that Cherokee verbs play, we have documented children’s acquisition of verb forms as part of their overall language learning (Peter & Hirata-Edds, 2006, 2009; Peter, Hirata-Edds, & Montgomery-Anderson, 2008; Peter, Sly, & HirataEdds, 2011; Peter et al., 2017). Detailed grammatical documentation of adult language exists (see Montgomery-Anderson, 2008, 2016; Pulte & Feeling, 1975). Our explorations supplement the extant documentation by addressing the less-studied phenomenon of children’s acquisition of Cherokee as a second language, which has its own unique set of documentation questions and methods of collection and analysis.

Cherokee Revitalization It is estimated that Cherokee is spoken as a first language by fewer than 5,000 individuals, mostly of the grandparental generation or older. Given the extent of language shift over numerous generations and the disruption of its transmission to children as a first language, Cherokee is “severely endangered” (UNESCO’s Scale of Linguistic Vitality, 2003), meaning that, although the parental generation may still understand the language, typically only grandparents speak it. Recognition of its dire status prompted a widespread community effort to promote Cherokee language teaching and learning, and the Cherokee Nation Language and Cultural Preservation Act #10–91, signed in 1991, began officially providing for promotion and preservation of Cherokee language, history, and culture. Since then, visibility of the Cherokee language; its documentation; development of language learning materials; and opportunities to learn to speak, read, and write the language have surged. The Cherokee Language Program (i.e., offices of Translation, Community Language, and Language Technology) employs linguistic “treasures”—men and women who have known the language since childhood—who, as “master”

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speakers, readers, and writers of the language, contribute to revitalization efforts, including development of Cherokee linguistics and translation services that teachers and researchers rely on. (Irrespective of their level of proficiency on the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 2012, Cherokee Nation identifies those who can speak fluently, as well as read and write in Cherokee, as “master speakers.”) As many as 10,000 children, adolescents, and adults are learning Cherokee via courses offered throughout the 14-county jurisdictional region and internationally, including mandatory classes for all 8,000 Cherokee Nation employees, as well as online classes for learners anywhere in the World, a master-apprentice program, high school and college courses throughout Oklahoma, elementary school immersion classes, and selfstudy through tribally offered books and the online Cherokee Learning Center.2 Additionally, Cherokee Nation has partnered with Northeastern State University (NSU) to establish a Cherokee Education bachelor’s degree to train teachers, teacher aides, and linguists. Tahlequah, Oklahoma, serves as the headquarters of Cherokee Nation, and throughout the town and its environs, syllabary is ubiquitous in signage (e.g., street signs, post office, banks, businesses), a dedicated column in the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, and public artworks. Moreover, syllabary representations now have a foothold in digital technologies (e.g., fonts, Apple devices, Office Suite [Word, PowerPoint, Excel], Gmail, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter). According to Cherokee Nation’s Language Technology website,3 Microsoft’s efforts to integrate Cherokee language into Windows 8 was one of the largest translation projects in modern history, in which thousands of new terms were invented by master Cherokee translators. Nearly two decades of time, effort, and funding have resulted in approximately 200 Intermediate-level second language speakers and perhaps as many as 10 who have achieved a rating of Advanced proficiency on the ACTFL proficiency scale (Mackey, personal observation). (“Advanced” speakers on the ACTFL proficiency scale [2012] are able to produce “abundant” language in terms of length and discourse and can communicate on a wide range of topics with enough control over structures and vocabulary that they can be understood by speakers of the language who are unaccustomed to “non-native” speech.) This includes 52 immersion school graduates, as well as six graduates of the Cherokee Master/Apprentice program, of whom three have attained Intermediate levels, and three who have attained Advanced Low Plus. Of the employee and community classes, fewer than 50 participants have achieved and maintained conversational fluency. The Nation’s online language courses have fared better, with around 100 students achieving Intermediate Low to Intermediate High, and a couple reaching more advanced levels of proficiency. Approximately 50 adults have attained Intermediate level of proficiency through NSU’s Cherokee Language program, including 14 who have also obtained State of Oklahoma teaching licenses.

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There are exceptional cases of second language learning among adults. Among the strongest advocates of Cherokee language revitalization are adults in their twenties and thirties who, being deprived of the opportunity to acquire Cherokee as their primary language, have become staunch supporters of quality language learning programs for learners of all ages and have reclaimed the language for themselves and their families. These individuals often have children in the immersion school, use the language for artistic expression and in social media, and assume active revitalization roles as teachers, software developers, language program managers, curriculum supervisors and specialists, and technology and cultural community outreach specialists. For them, knowledge of the language provides more than just an iconic sense of Cherokeeness—it is also a form of cultural capital that they use to strengthen their identities as contemporary Cherokees. The long-term goal of the Cherokee Language Program is to infuse Cherokee into its citizens’ daily conversations, online activities, and ceremonial practices (Cherokee Nation, 2017). Nowadays, as old and new generations of Cherokee language users meet in traditional and technologyinfused language domains, they expressly integrate syllabary into the normalcy of everyday life.

The Cherokee Immersion School: Tsalagi Dideloquasdi Tsalagi Dideloquasdi, the Cherokee Immersion School located in Tahlequah, plays a central role in Cherokee Nation’s overall language revitalization. The school opened in 2001 to 17 3-year-old preschoolers, and a pre-kindergarten class opened in 2003. Starting in 2004, new grades from kindergarten through sixth grade were added sequentially each year, until there were nine grade levels. Annual enrollment hovers around 100 pupils divided among the grade levels, with upper grades typically smaller due to attrition. The school’s physical space includes two adjacent buildings that house classrooms, administrative offices, and multipurpose areas. Also on the premises is a small playground and a resource center that provides space for the curriculum specialists, as well as a work room with copying, laminating, and poster-making equipment and materials for teachers and school staff. Food services and physical education facilities (e.g., basketball court, track) are provided by neighboring Sequoyah, a Bureau of Indian Affairs combination middle/high boarding school operated by Cherokee Nation. Tsalagi Dideloquasdi students have preferential admission to seventh grade at Sequoyah upon graduating. As a state of Oklahoma charter school, Tsalagi Dideloquasdi operates with some freedom from state regulations while also being accountable for demonstrating academic achievement in line with state standards. Since gaining charter school status in 2010, academic performance has

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become a greater priority to school administrators than language proficiency. General classroom activities consist of typical school requirements (e.g., science, history, mathematics) that are mostly translations from the state’s English curriculum into Cherokee, and English is introduced in the third grade as an after-school subject. By fifth grade, the language of instruction shifts from complete immersion in Cherokee to half of the day in Cherokee and half in English. The instructional staff of Tsalagi Dideloquasdi numbers around 15, and comprises both master speakers and second language learners of Cherokee with varying degrees of proficiency. Given that none of the adults had the opportunity to be educated in a Cherokee-medium system, academically oriented Cherokee was relatively unfamiliar to them at first. Moreover, although most teachers had been exposed to syllabary throughout their lives, very few could read and write syllabary proficiently until they joined the immersion school teaching staff. Like their students, then, teachers are immersed in a sociolinguistic domain where their own language abilities are challenged. Cherokee Nation has provided incentives for teachers to become licensed through NSU’s Cherokee education program, and several have completed the requirements. Still, not all master speakers are able to commit to completing the necessary college coursework required for licensure, though in a few instances, the licensed teacher is also a master speaker. To address the differing levels of language proficiency while adhering to state charter school requirements that every class be taught by a licensed teacher, one master speaker and one licensed teacher have been assigned to each individual class. Around 52 children have graduated from the school. Of those, about 85% would be considered Intermediate Low or Intermediate Mid-level speakers on the ACTFL proficiency scale. Not surprisingly, the few students who attain more advanced levels of proficiency tend to come from families in which parents are highly committed to Cherokee language and culture and have worked to use the language in the home.

Instructional Writing Practices in Cherokee Fishman (1991) contends that literacy is not a requirement for reversing language shift, yet in the case of Tsalagi Dideloquasdi, literacy in syllabary plays an important and complementary role to orality. Although Romanized orthography for Cherokee exists, from the time children enter the immersion school, syllabary is the predominant orthographic system they see and learn. Labels for furniture, name tags on desks, classroom instructions—all are written in syllabary. Teachers at every level dedicate a large proportion of their instruction to literacy for the dual purpose of learning a second language and gaining content knowledge in mathematics, science, social studies, geography, physical education, language arts,

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and fine arts. Writing is integrated throughout the curriculum and daily instruction. In the early grades, literacy instruction largely involves memorization. At circle time, teachers move pointers across wall charts as children read and recite the days of the week, months of the year, seasons, or whatever vocabulary is the focus of the lessons. At tables, children complete worksheets where they trace syllabary until they can write their own names, as well as the names of animals and objects. By first grade, small groups of children work with their teacher at a reading station, where they take turns reading from a picture book that repeats verb patterns, such as one, two, and then three birds landing on a fence and then taking off. As children advance, so too do their literacy practices, including writing academic reports as well as autobiographical and imaginative narratives. Writing products are shared and displayed in the classroom and on bulletin boards in hallways. Teachers and peer editors proofread and guide students with constructive criticism, correcting form and accuracy while simultaneously trying not to alter the children’s voices. This may include overlooking small errors that do not impede communication, although people who are unfamiliar with the children’s writing might find such variances difficult to understand. Establishing primacy of literacy in syllabary has not been without its challenges. Cherokee lacks a standardized written form, so spelling reflects dialectic and idiolectic pronunciations of words. Thus, students are presented with different pronunciations—and hence spellings—of words throughout their immersion education, and teachers and students sometimes struggle to understand a text written by someone whose dialect differs from theirs. Another challenge for teachers has been developing the necessary pedagogical expertise to use literacy instruction as a means for oral language learning, and vice-versa, particularly regarding the more compulsory features of Cherokee morphology, such as verb inflections that indicate person, number, and tense. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that even upper-level children with nine years of immersion have difficulty recognizing the more complex morphological markings that they read. This, in turn, constrains their ability to communicate in writing what they are fully capable of imagining, and contributes to the creative translingual practices they employ for more effective meaning making. As questions of students’ actual and potential language achievement through immersion arose, we partnered with teachers to design assessments to elicit certain linguistic elements in the modalities of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. We began to administer the assessment to preschoolers in the early years of the school’s operation, and did so each spring, expanding the scope of the assessments as students matriculated to higher grade levels. At the end of second grade, and through sixth grade, end-of-year writing assessments included a basic narrative task in

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Figure 8.3 Writing test picture prompt and student writing sample.

which students told a story about a picture. The image changed each year to eliminate the possibility of students rehearsing the story ahead of time. The test was not timed, so students had the option of writing as much or as little as they wanted. On average, they wrote four to five sentences (Figure 8.3), but some filled a page and a half. Our dataset comprised more than 50 written narratives by 14 students from two cohorts as they progressed from grade 2 (7–8 years old) to grade 6 (11–12 years old). All narratives were initially scored using the test scoring protocols and analyzed for general patterns; from those, we selected eight narratives written by four children for morpheme-bymorpheme translations, followed by in-depth discussions about both the meaning conveyed and the morphosyntactic features present. We then checked our findings with master Cherokee speakers to validate those impressions. The following descriptions are based on general patterns observed among this subset of eight narratives, with a focus on one fifthand two sixth-graders: Student 1, grade 6, age 12; Student 2, grade 6, age 12; and Student 3, grade 5, age 11.

Tsalagi Dideloquasdi Students’ Writing Grappling With Cherokee Verbs From a communicative standpoint, Cherokee immersion students were able to convey ideas through writing, especially when they stuck to basic sentence and verb structures over which they had the most control. When expressing more complex ideas, such as relationships between subject, verb, and object, however, precision was compromised. We found examples of morphological breakdowns when writers reached the upper limits of their understanding of Cherokee polysynthesism. We discuss two samples, Examples 8.2 and 8.3 below, produced by Student 1, whose entire narrative appears in Figure 8.3.

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Example 8.2 Student 1 (grade 6, age 12) writing sample 1, analyzed.

ᎠᏨᏯ a-tsv-ya rooster

ᏍᏓᏯ s-da-ya loud

ᏕᎦᏃᎩᎠ de-ga-no-gi-a he’s singing

A rooster is loudly singing.

Example 8.2 is a properly executed sentence that aptly describes the picture prompt. The verb root has three affixes: an ending denoting that the action is in the present time and continuous; a pronomial third person singular prefix; and a pre-pronomial prefix indicating that the action is iterative, i.e., that more than one note is being sung. By sixth grade, students could capably write common third person, present continuous actions like this, uncomplicated by objects of varying shapes and other information. In contrast, we see here the same student’s attempt to convey a much more complicated idea: Example 8.3 Student 1 (grade 6, age 12) writing sample 2, analyzed.

ᎯᎢᎾ hi-i-na here

ᎠᏍᎦᏯ a-s-ga-ya man

ᎠᎴ a-le and

ᎤᏩᎧᎭ u-wa-ka-ha living thing owned

ᎠᏧᏣ a-tsu-tsa boy

ᎠᏂᏅᏏ ᏚᎾᏝᎠ ᏥᏔᎦ ᏥᏔᎦ ᎠᏂᎩᏍᏗ a-ni-nv-si du-na-tla-a tsi-ta-ga tsi-ta-ga a-ni-gi-s-di they gave living captives chickens chicken food. Here, a man and his boy gave their chickens chicken feed.

Analysis of this sentence was not nearly as straightforward as for Example 8.2, given the complications of possession and both direct and indirect objects. Descriptors like “correct” and “incorrect” overlook ways that this young writer expressed how she imagined the scene with the language she had at her disposal. Our sense of her knowledge of Cherokee polysynthesism is that, what she lacked in precision from a polysynthetic point of view, she attempted to supplement with extraneous information at the word level. Her first verb, ᎠᏂᏅᏏ (a-ni-nv-si), can be analyzed as a third person transitive plural, with the root meaning “give” attached to a suffix indicating an action completed in the recent past. Disregarding the lack of parallelism of tenses between Examples 8.2 and 8.3, the root and suffix can be appropriate choices for telling a story in the recent past. But the prefixes would be considered unnatural by first language speakers who would more likely, if indicating the idea “gave,” use a passive form,

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ᎤᎾᏓᏅᏏ (u-na-da-nv-si), with the prefix indicating an action directed at something or someone (i.e., direct object): “the chickens were given chicken food by the dad and son.” Student 1’s sentence also contains information that a master speaker would likely consider extraneous. For example, ᎤᏪᏥ (u-we-tsi) “son” is a more precise way to convey ᎤᏩᎧᎭ ᎠᏧᏣ (u-wa-ka-ha a-tsu-tsa) “his boy.” It is not that what was written is “incorrect,” but a master speaker reading the story, unfamiliar with learner language though able to read the phrase, would find strange the idea of a man “owning” a boy. Similarly, ᏚᎾᏝᎠ (du-na-tla-a) is a possessive pronoun used for domesticated animals or captive beings, and is redundant when used to qualify “chickens.” Finally, Student 1’s sample provides evidence of translanguaging at the syntactic level. Although subject-verb-object is the preferred word order in English, word order in Cherokee is highly variable and governed more by pragmatics, such as “newsworthiness,” in which the most important information is foregrounded (MontgomeryAnderson, 2008). An adult master speaker we consulted stated the same sentiment using an active form with the verb “fed” and an object-verbsubject word order. Example 8.4 Adult master speaker recast of writing sample 3.

ᏥᏔᎦ ᏓᏁᏢᎶᏂ ᎠᏍᎦᏯ ᎤᏪᏥ. Chickens they fed man offspring. The man and his son/daughter fed the chickens. Immersion students’ written productions of Cherokee illustrate how polysynthetic verbs pose many more complex components—and, thus, options—for learners than do verbs in non-polysynthetic English, requiring a level of intricacy that is challenging even for advanced learners. Additionally, it appears that these developing writers were inclined to use forms of language not typical or required in Cherokee, as evidenced further in the following examples. Repurposing ϴ (na) as a Common Determiner Verbs were not the only part of speech in which learners faced polysynthetic options that differed from their English first language. Of interest is the stand-alone determiner ϴ (na), translated as “that/those” or simply “the.” But ϴ does not work in Cherokee the way that such forms work in English. As a rule, definite and indefinite articles such as “the” and “a” are implied in Cherokee, as in this excerpt, translated as “The turtle left,” taken from a folktale about the turtle and rabbit, narrated orally to Montgomery-Anderson (2008) by a master-speaking consultant:

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Example 8.5 “The turtle left,” as told by an adult master speaker.

ᎤᏂᎩᏎ u-ni-gi-se uu-ah-nii-kii-s-eʔi 3b-leave:cmp-nxp The turtle left.

ᏓᎦᏏ da-ga-si taksi turtle (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008, p. 565)

For master speakers, Ꮎ fulfills a mostly emphatic purpose, as in the following example, where Ꮎ modifies the noun “turtle” to emphasize the exasperation faced by the rabbit every time he saw that turtle was keeping up with him on a race up a mountain: Example 8.6 “Now he saw that turtle running,” as told by an adult master speaker.

ᏃᏊ no-quu noo-kwu Now

ᏭᎪᎮ ᏩᎦᏟᏒ Ꮎ ᏓᎩᏏ wi-ko-he wa-ga-tli-sv na da-gi-si wi-uu-kooh-eʔi wi-a-a-ti-thli-is-vv-ʔi na taksi trn-3-see:cmptrn-3-run:cmpthat turtle nxp exp\sub Now, he saw that turtle running. (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008, p. 567) Other than examples like this, none of the language used by the three master storytellers that Montgomery-Anderson analyzed used ϴ as a determiner (e.g., article, demonstrative) for a noun. The immersion students’ writing samples, in contrast to language use of master-speaking elders, appeared to have repurposed ϴ as a determiner preceding nouns, as is common in English. Student 2, for example, employed ϴ before every noun in her story (Figure 8.4). We suspect that

Figure 8.4 Student 2 writing sample, with “na”.

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this resulted from calquing a literal translation from English to Cherokee, with ϴ filling an English article’s syntactic position. Curious as to whether this student may have picked up this form from classroom texts she had read, we reviewed multiple instructional resources such as storybooks, teacher-authored narratives, and practice language worksheets, but we found nothing resembling Student 2’s translingual interpretation of ϴ. Repurposing ᎠᎴ (ah-le) as a Cohesive Device Although forms such as adverbs (e.g., ᎯᎢᎾ [hi-i-na] “here,” in Example 8.3 earlier) created cohesion in the children’s narratives, the overwhelming majority of cohesive devices were additive in function. Of those, the preferred device was ᎠᎴ (ah-le). In Cherokee, ᎠᎴ is a stand-alone conjunction used typically in very formal speech and writing to join nouns, verbs, and clauses in ways comparable to the English conjunctive “and” (Pulte & Feeling, 1975, p. 343). More commonly, and in less formal communication, master Cherokee speakers use the suffix -Ꮓ (-hno) as a connector for various constituents to fulfill this function (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008, 2016). Moreover, whereas an English speaker might begin a sentence with “and” to serve as both a conjunction and a topic starter, master Cherokee speakers announce a new sentence by attaching the suffix -Ꮓ to the first word in the sentence. In the oral folktales “The Wolf and the Crawdad,” “The Search Party,” and “The Turtle and the Rabbit,” none of the storytellers began a sentence with ᎠᎴ (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008, 2016). However, there were several instances of -Ꮓ that served as topic announcers, like in the following example. Example 8.7 “When he got to the top of the hill,” as told by an adult master speaker.

ᏭᎷᏣᏃ ᎦᎸᎾᏗ ᏗᎨᏒ Wu-lu-tsa-no ga-lv-na-di di-ke-sv Wi-uu-ʔja-hno kalvnati ti-kees-vvʔi trn-3\sub-arrive:cmp-tav=cn on.top.of cis-be:inc-exp When he got to the top of the hill (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008, p. 552) In contrast, Cherokee immersion students’ attempts at cohesion continued the translingual practice of substituting individual words for affixation. Student 3, for example, began her sentences with ᎠᎴ (ah-le) “and,” and ᏃᏭ (no-wu) “now” (Figure 8.5). In much the same way as the sixth grader who repurposed Ꮎ (na) as an article in Figure 8.4, this author opted for the English convention of a stand-alone sentence starter rather than using a suffix in the fashion of Cherokee-speaking elders.

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Figure 8.5 Student 3 writing sample with “ah-le” and “no-wu”

By and large, the writing of fifth and sixth graders in Tsalagi Dideloquasdi was characteristic of Novice High, according to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines. With the grammatical knowledge they have acquired, Novice High writers can “partially communicate” their intentions; their writing “is often comprehensible to natives used to the writing of non-natives, but gaps in comprehension may occur” (ACTFL, 2012, n.p.). So, despite general fluency in Cherokee and the ease with which most of them used high-frequency language forms, complexity, at least morphosyntactically, appeared difficult to acquire. This can be partially explained by the pedagogical context of Tsalagi Dideloquasdi, and by syllabary itself, which poses some disadvantages for second language learners. Besides the lack of standardized spellings, as noted earlier, syllabary is an under-differentiated system. Suprasegmental features and phonemic contrasts, such as glottal stops, aspiration, vowel length, and tone, which are important for communication, are not always represented in the orthography (Rogers, 2005). Moreover, morphological forms of Cherokee do not always correspond exactly to pronunciation of syllabary characters. For example, first and third person forms of some verbs are indistinguishable when written in syllabary, although their pronunciation is quite different (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008). Thus, while syllabary is an effective representational system for fluent speakers who already possess morphosyntactic competence and for whom context guides pronunciation (Montgomery-Anderson, 2008), it is more challenging for second language learners to use (Peake Raymond, 2008)

Promising Future Directions in Writing Instruction in Cherokee Sociolinguistic domains such as the Tsalagi Dideloquasdi school afford endless possibilities for hybrid language practices. We view the de-synthesizing

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of Cherokee according to the rules of English as a translingual act, in which young writers inject existing linguistic codes with novel uses— especially when the task is complicated by time, person, object, direction, and orthographic ambiguity. Programmed by their use of their first language, English, to think analytically, our findings suggest that these writers perform a kind of morphosyntactic calquing: What they know about morpho-syntax in English is borrowed for what they do not know in Cherokee. This sketch should be viewed as a pedagogical opportunity to provide purposeful focus-on-form writing input and feedback, as well as to support practice of new forms until students are able to restructure them within their developing Cherokee system, which Richards (2008) indicated as vital to internalizing language. Otherwise, it will continue to be difficult for young writers to acquire the complexities and precision of Cherokee morpho-syntax. A question for further research into development of Cherokee writing among second language learners/users is the role that corrective feedback could play in raising metalinguistic awareness of how polysynthesism works in Cherokee. Using stimulated recall (prompting participants to remember their thinking during specified events), as Ó Duibhir (2011) employed in his investigation of Irish immersion youth, could reveal thought processes underlying Cherokee immersion students’ choices while writing and further engage them in self-regulating, ideally toward a greater sense of agency on their part and internalization of targeted forms over the long term.

Abbreviations Abbreviations used in the examples come from Montgomery-Anderson (2008): ITR- = iterative pre-pronominal prefix to convey a repeated action 3.PL- = third person plural pronominal prefix “drink,” “leave,” etc. = semantic root :CMP = completed past action, fused to root -EXP = past final suffix that conveys that the speaker has personal knowledge of the event -NXP = non-experienced past suffix, i.e., the speaker did not witness the event TRN- = translocative pre-pronominal prefix \SUB = tone change indicating subordination -TAV = time adverbial suffix =CN = conjunction clitic CIS- = cislocative imperative pre-pronominal prefix :INC = incompletive past action, fused to lexical root

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Notes 1. This research received IRB approval from the University of Kansas Human Subjects Review Board and the Cherokee Nation Institutional Review Board. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect views of the Cherokee Nation. 2. www.cherokee.org/LearningCenter 3. www.cherokee.org/languagetech

References American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. (2012). ACTFL proficiency guidelines 2012. Alexandria, VA: Author. Retrieved from www.actfl. org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/actfl-proficiency-guidelines-2012/ english/writing Belcher, D. (2012). Considering what we know and need to know about second language writing. Applied Linguistics Review, 3(1), 131–150. Bender, M. (2002). Signs of Cherokee culture: Sequoyah’s syllabary in Eastern Cherokee life. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Boudinot, E. (1832). Invention of a new alphabet. American Annals of Education, 2(April), 174–184. Cherokee Nation. (2003). Ga-du-gi: A vision for working together to preserve the Cherokee language. Report of a needs assessment survey and a 10-year language revitalization plan. DHS ANA Grant #90-NL-0189. Tahlequah, OK: Cherokee Nation. Cherokee Nation. (2017). Cherokee language program. Retrieved from www.chero kee.org/About-The-Nation/Cherokee-Language/Cherokee-Language-Program Cumming, A. (2001). Learning to write in a second language: Two decades of research. International Journal of English Studies, 1(2), 1–23. Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Mithun, M. (1989). The acquisition of polysynthesis. Journal of Child Language Acquisition, 16, 285–312. Mithun, M. (1999). The languages of native North America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Montgomery-Anderson, B. (2008). A reference grammar of Oklahoma Cherokee linguistics. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Kansas, Lawrence. Montgomery-Anderson, B. (2016). Cherokee reference grammar. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Ó Duibhir, P. (2011). “I thought that we had good Irish”: Irish immersion students’ insights into their target language use. In D. J. Tedick, D. Christian, & T. W. Fortune (Eds.), Immersion education: Practices, policies, possibilities (pp. 145–165). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6, 281–307.

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Peake Raymond, M. (2008). The Cherokee nation and its language: Tsalagi ayeli ale uniwonishisdi. Tahlequah, OK: Cherokee Nation. Pellegrini, A. D. (2001). Some theoretical and methodological considerations in studying literacy in social context. In S. B. Neuman & D. K. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (pp. 54–65). New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Perdue, T. (1989). The Cherokee. New York, NY: Chelsea House. Perdue, T., & Green, M. D. (1995). The Cherokee removal: A brief history with documents. Boston, MA: Bedford. Peter, L., & Hirata-Edds, T. (2006). Using assessment to inform instruction in Cherokee language revitalization. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(5), 643–658. Peter, L., & Hirata-Edds, T. (2009). Learning to read and write Cherokee: Toward a theory of literacy revitalization. Bilingual Research Journal, 32(2), 207–227. Peter, L., Hirata-Edds, T., Feeling, D., Kirk, W., Mackey, R., & Duncan, P. T. (2017). The Cherokee nation immersion school as a translanguaging space. Journal of American Indian Education, 56(1), 5–31. Peter, L., Hirata-Edds, T., & Montgomery-Anderson, B. (2008). Verb development by children in the Cherokee language immersion program, with implications for teaching. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 18(2), 166–187. Peter, L., Sly, G., & Hirata-Edds, T. (2011). Developing language assessments to inform Indigenous immersion instruction. In D. J. Tedick, D. Christian, & T. W. Fortune (Eds.), Immersion education: Practices, policies, possibilities (pp. 187–210). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Pulte, W., & Feeling, D. (1975). Outline of Cherokee grammar. In W. Pulte (Ed.), Cherokee-English dictionary (pp. 235–355). Tahlequah, OK: Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Richards, J. C. (2008). Moving beyond the plateau: From intermediate to advanced levels in language learning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rogers, H. (2005). Writing systems: A linguistic approach. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Thornton, R. (1990). The Cherokees: A population history. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. UNESCO. (2003). Language vitality and endangerment. Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages. Paris, France: UNESCO. VanPatten, W. (1993). Grammar teaching for the acquisition-rich classroom. Foreign Language Annals, 26(4), 435–450. Velasco, P., & García, O. (2014). Translanguaging and the writing of bilingual learners. Bilingual Research Journal, 37(1), 6–23. Wei, L. (2016). New Chinglish and the post-multilingualism challenge: Translanguaging ELF in China. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 5(1), 1–25. Williams, C. (1994). Arfarniad o Ddulliau Dysgu ac Addysgu yng Nghyd-destun Addysg Uwchradd Ddwyieithog, [An evaluation of teaching and learning methods in the context of bilingual secondary education]. (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Wales, Bangor. Williams, C. (2000). Bilingual teaching and language distribution at 16+. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 3, 129–148. Wyman, L. T., McCarty, T. L., & Nicholas, S. E. (Eds.). (2014). Indigenous youth and multilingualism: Language identity, ideology, and practice in dynamic cultural worlds. New York, NY: Routledge.

9

Writing Instruction in Xitsonga in South Africa Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi

Introduction Home language instruction is regarded by most language researchers as the best option to use in schools. However, unfortunately, most learners around the world are educated in languages that they are not familiar with (Alexander, 2010; Heugh, 2014; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2002). The use of children’s home language as a medium of instruction with children learning to read and write assists in the development of their cognitive academic language proficiency skills. According to Cummins (1979, 1984, 2000, 2013), learners learn best when they are taught in their first language (L1), because they are able to concentrate on and express their thoughts about content and ideas, which can only be done through a language they speak. Furthermore, Vygotsky’s (1978) research shows a strong correlation between language and thought. He argues that it is only through language that people are able to convey their thoughts, and without the necessary language proficiency skills, learners are unable to do that. For this reason, children who speak a language other than English are often unable to succeed academically in English-medium instruction because of the lack of the necessary language proficiency skills to express their thoughts. Other researchers are also of the opinion that second language (L2) learners often know more than they can express (Manyike & Lemmer, 2012, 2014). This chapter investigates the teaching of writing proficiency skills in Xitsonga, the learners’ home language, in order to increase their opportunity to succeed academically in school. This is important, because academic success depends on learners’ ability to read and write. However, most of the learners in studies from South Africa proceed through school without mastering these two important skills (NEEDU Report, 2012; PIRLS Literacy, 2016). This is especially true for learners in a school program in which the medium of instruction is not their first language. Although research has been conducted on the teaching of reading (Henning, 2012; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 2005), very little is known about

162 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi the teaching of writing. This is despite the fact that academic success and access to work opportunities and promotions depend on one’s ability to write coherently (Manyike & Lemmer, 2015). We argue that reading is actually easier than writing. In order to emphasize the importance of providing learners with writing instruction during the early grades, the teaching of reading should complement the teaching of writing, and they need to be taught in an integrated way. In this chapter, writing instruction provided by foundation phase teachers is explained, followed by a discussion of the products of learners’ writing exercises. Most of what is known about writing instruction in classrooms has been studied through the use of surveys. For example, Gilbert and Graham (2010) and Cutler and Graham (2008) surveyed grade 3 teachers’ writing instructional practices and found that 36% of the teachers surveyed reported using their reading program to teach writing. These teachers saw a correlation between reading and writing and integrated the two language skills in their teaching. They reported providing direct instruction on basic writing skills such as spelling, grammar, and punctuation, which they claimed to teach daily. Teachers also reported that they taught sentence construction and handwriting several times per week and spent an hour a day on writing instruction. Gilbert and Graham (2010) concluded that teachers need better training on how to improve the time spent on writing instruction and how to balance time spent teaching writing and time spent actually writing. Gilbert and Graham (2010) and Cutler and Graham (2008) recommended that classroom observations be conducted by independent observers, as self-reports by teachers (in surveys and interviews) tend to be inaccurate. Observation data is more reliable, as the researchers observe what is actually happening in the classroom. In this chapter, we discuss the writing instruction practices used with foundation phase grade 3 Xitsonga first language (L1) learners in a rural South African school, as observed by the researchers. The aim of investigating this particular language group was to add to the body of knowledge on efforts used in classrooms to teach an African language with the intention of revitalizing the language taught. In the classes observed, folktales were used to teach learners words that are no longer used in their everyday language. The use of folktales not only develops their mother tongue/first language but also teaches them morality, which further enhances their sense of identity and pride (Vygotsky, 1978). The teaching of writing proficiency involves using defined steps, such as the process approach, to inculcate coherent and systematic writing. Writing proficiency further includes the teaching of handwriting. Research also alludes to the close and positive correlation between good handwriting and writing proficiency. For example, learners who have mastered good handwriting skills tend to achieve more good writing habits than those who are unable to write legibly. Good handwriting skills

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also promote reasoning and memorization skills (Dinehart & Manfra, 2013; Langcamp, 2008; Langcamp, Zerbato-Poudou, & Velay, 2005). Although a lot is written about the writing proficiency skills of university students (e.g., Fortunati & Vincent, 2014; Taipale, 2015) and secondary school students (Cheng, Ling, & Tsai 2015; Liabo et al., 2015), there is relatively little research on writing instruction in the early years, particularly in African languages. Most authors point to the advantages and impact of handwriting on early writers’ outcomes, such as the development of writing speed and accurate spelling (Ferrier et al., 2013). However, the most challenging task is the development of free writing, which requires a range of skills that are more cognitively demanding than transcription and dictation. Free writing requires the ability to generate ideas and translate them into written form (Ferrier et al., 2013). This, in turn, involves the use of logical thinking, structuring, and self-monitoring (Berninger, Nielsen, Abbot, Wijsma, & Raskind, 2008). According to Berninger and Chanquoy (2011), writing skills improve with development, and learners’ writing proficiency needs to be enhanced to meet required grade-level expectations. Early writing instruction needs to include learning how to write letters, spell words, and compose short texts. Early learners are expected to be able to write letters fluently and quickly, write words, and acquire handwriting fluency. However, most teachers are no longer sure of the importance of providing instruction in handwriting in the age of advanced technological development (Berninger et al., 2008). Early writing instruction also involves teaching learners to translate phonemes (sounds) into graphemes (letters) to spell words. Handwriting fluency and spelling skills, also referred to as transcription skills, consume a significant amount of cognitive energy when they are first being learned, leaving few resources for higher-order writing processes such as planning and composing texts. Underdeveloped transcription skills constrain the quality of written products. Individual differences in fluency with transcription predict writing achievement, especially in the primary grades (Graham & Harris, 2014). Because handwriting and spelling fluency have a tremendous impact on learners’ written expression, emergent writers need explicit instruction. According to the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy (2010), at the end of kindergarten, learners should be able to print in both upper and lower case all of the letters of the alphabet; write the letters of the alphabet in their correct order; write letters for most consonants; spell simple words phonetically, drawing on the knowledge of sound-letter relationships; and use a combination of drawing, dictation, and writing to write about their experiences, stories, people, objects, and events. It is important to understand the types of writing instruction that teachers use in various foundation phase classrooms, because most learners of school age only partially achieve grade-level writing proficiency, and

164 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi only 1% of the total learner population achieves writing proficiency skills at an advanced level (Graham & Harris, 2014). The following section describes the theoretical framework that underpins this study.

Background to the Study South Africa is a multilingual country, and the South African constitution gives nine African languages official status along with English and Afrikaans (Republic of South Africa, 1996). This is despite the fact that there are more than 25 languages spoken in the country. The official status of the nine languages, however, does not translate into their use as a medium of instruction in the education system (Heugh, 2014). As a result, children who speak the nine official languages learn in that language to a limited extent in grades 1–3. The languages are used as languages of teaching and learning. All subjects in these grades are taught in these languages eight hours per week, and English as a second language is taught as a subject, for three hours per week. The choice of the Indigenous language used as a language of teaching and learning is based on the ethnic backgrounds of the majority of learners in a particular school. From grade 4 to tertiary education, the language of teaching and learning changes over to English, with African languages taught as subjects (Department of Basic Education, 2012). This early transition results in most learners failing to attain the necessary language proficiency skills required for academic success in both their first language (L1) and second language (L2), which is mostly English. Cummins (2003, Cummins, Mirza, & Stille, 2012) makes a distinction between everyday language, Basic Interpersonal Skills (BICS), and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), which is the language of learning in school. He claims that BICS are acquired in a period of six months to a year of being immersed in the language, whereas CALP is acquired after eight to 12 years of schooling. He makes this distinction to assist language teachers in understanding why and when second language learners appear to be proficient in a language, what their proficiency is in oral language, and when they are unable to read and write. Despite some criticism of Cummins’ theory, which was first articulated in the late 1970s (Edelsky, 1990; MacSwan, 2000; Valdes, 2004; Wiley, 2006), it is still helpful in explaining language-related challenges experienced by learners.

Sociocultural Theory The research reported in this chapter is underpinned by the sociocultural theory of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who has had a tremendous influence in the field of education as well as psychology.

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Vygotsky (1978) regards the human mind as inherently developmental and dynamic, because culturally developed signs such as language mediate human activity. He sees a close relationship between language and thought despite the fact that they have separate origins. He argues that thought is initially nonverbal, while speech is non-intellectual. According to Vygotsky (1979), the interactions between language and thought occur when children realize that the objects they see around them are named. This recognition signals the start of language being used as a thinking tool, as an elaboration on one’s thinking. He views a word to be a microcosm of human consciousness (Vygotsky, 1991). He explains that when children are learning words, they understand the meanings that others attach to them. When they are able to think on their own without relying on their parents’ objective reference for words, they become capable of using the words independently. As they internalize the speech structure related to the social functions of the language, it becomes the basic tool for thought. Vygotsky (1978) sees verbal thought as a cultural process that is governed by the historical development of human society. The relationship between language and thought is the result of the development of human consciousness as directed by human variables (Wertsch, 1991). This dynamic relationship changes and develops with the evolution of thinking and language across time and societies. He differentiates between two aspects of independent linguistic development in children: phonetically, children build the whole with the parts; semantically, they begin to learn the whole and later learn to master the smaller and basic meaning units for production. Vygotsky (1979) further views egocentric speech as reflecting children’s transition and development from inter-psychological to intrapsychological functioning. Egocentric speech is, thus, a precursor of inner speech, which originates in children’s social interactions with adults. As children’s language develops, they use adult language for themselves first overtly, then covertly for self-regulating functions. The initial stage of self-regulation is characterized by the inner speech that accompanies action. In the higher form of self-regulation, inner speech precedes initiation of action. According to Vygotsky, the amount of inner speech declines and becomes syntactically abbreviated as children grow older and become proficient at the various tasks they are engaged in. Advanced knowledge of the native language plays an important role in socialization of children into their various communities. Language learning is a product of the socialization process through a web of social interactions in which the process of acquiring a language and the process of becoming a competent member of a society affect each other (Rogoff & Wertsch, 1984). In addition, once the social processes of turn taking and role exchange are acquired, they remain constant from paralinguistic to linguistic communication. The process of becoming a competent member of a society is realized through language by acquiring

166 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi knowledge of its functions, its social distribution, and its use in socially defined situations. This implies that while learning a language, children are simultaneously using the language to learn. Social experiences are individually internalized and mold the individual’s use of language. According to Vygotsky (1980), language plays a major role as a culturally mediated system and remains an important tool for communicating with and extracting information from the outside world. Children’s cultural learning requires the cognitive ability to acquire the perspectives of those with whom they are interacting (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993), because every language act is accompanied by socially relevant and culturally prescribed convictions. One of the indications of children’s cognitive and linguistic development is their ability to identify these culturally authentic practices; e.g., knowing how to take turns and knowing what to do in a given situation. According to Vygotsky (1978, 1986), children’s cognitive growth is tied to their mastery of the social means of thought. According to Rogoff and Wertsch (1984), human speech undergoes transformation. Once they are internalized from outer sources, speech acts organize, unify, and integrate many aspects of children’s behaviors, including perception, memory, and problem solving. These higher mental functions are socially formed and then mastered and internalized. According to Wertsch and Tulviste (1992), variations in the social organization will result in variations in individual psychological functioning. This suggests that to understand children’s cognitive growth, it is necessary to explore specific types of social interactions occurring in their environment. The notion of cultural learning is inextricably linked with the contexts in which children are placed. Children’s development is preceded by learning through internalization. What is being learned is another person’s point of view, which guides a dialogic process. In the dialogic process, the internalized voice is usually that of an adult or more advanced child (Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992). The more knowledgeable other adjusts and negotiates their assistance from moment to moment as they interact with the child. This negotiation is called semiotic mediation, scaffolding, and assisted performance (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986). For children to benefit from such activities, they must be linked to their potential developmental levels, surpassing their actual developmental stage. Vygotsky (1978) calls this area of potential development the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). According to Brunner (1984), the realization of the child’s power through the utilization of knowledge and shared consciousness depends not on the individual child but on the society’s capacity to provide the child with the symbolic tools that the child needs to grow. Providing children with opportunities to enter into relationships with someone wiser, who can provide them with the necessary consciousness, enables them to make the epistemic leap

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forward that Vygotsky saw as the promise of the learning revolution. The ZPD is its instrument. To conclude, the transition from other-regulation, or interpersonal activity, to self-regulation, or intrapersonal activity, occurs in the Zone of Proximal Development. This is where the child and the adult participate in a dialogical process in which the adult initiates the direction that the child needs to take and later adjusts the direction based on the child’s responses and the degree of task completion. This process is aimed at teaching the child how to tackle and solve problems strategically. Good teaching surpasses the child’s current developmental level. The Zone of Proximal Development is the difference between a child’s actual developmental level, as determined through solving problems alone, and the level of potential development, as determined through solving problems under adult guidance. According to Wertsch (1991), children do not need to reach the ZPD alone. A ZPD is created whenever learners interact with more capable people to accomplish particular tasks. The key to successful development in learners is how to create such ZPD and help them move through the ZPD to a more independent performance stage. Instructional collaboration is more effective when capable adults adjust their level of interaction in response to the child’s needs than when they apply predetermined pedagogical strategies. Teachers might also study learners’ social interactions with more capable others, to determine what is happening in the various ZPDs created through these interactions. A common understanding between children and adults can be reached through understanding each other’s perspectives and negotiating shared meanings.

History of the Xitsonga Language Xitsonga/Xichangana languages are mainly spoken in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Swaziland (Mesthrie, 2002). Mesthrie regards the Xichangana language spoken in Mozambique, which is also the country’s lingua franca, to be a dialect of Xitsonga and notes that both languages share most phonological and grammatical features. Hence, most people use the two language names interchangeably. Xitsonga is a minority language in South Africa, but is one of the 11 languages—9 African languages plus Afrikaans and English—given official status by the country’s constitution (Republic of South Africa, RSA, 1996). Other languages are also spoken in the country, including French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, and Tamal. In South Africa, Xitsonga speakers are primarily located in Limpopo Province, although they are also found in other parts of the country. In Zimbabwe, they are primarily located in the Chiredzi District in Maswingo Province. The Xitsonga language is classified as a Bantu language. The linguistic group classified as Xitsonga comprises of at least three distinct but

168 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi mutually intelligible subgroups: The Tsonga/Shaman, the Thaw, and the Ronga. The Xitsonga language has various alternative names: Tsonga, Thonga, and Tonga.

Revitalization of African Languages Revitalization efforts of Indigenous languages are not a uniquely South African effort but a worldwide phenomenon, as the world realizes that most minority languages are facing extinction (Fishman, 1997). Language revitalization often occurs when a language is on the brink of extinction as a result of language contact with communities opting for a new dominant language. Language extinction, according to Crystal (2000), Fishman (1997), and Tshotsho (2014), further occurs when a community fails to transmit its language to the next generation. Language extinction is easily detected in communities where a language is spoken by only a few elders, because community members have stopped transmitting their language to the next generation. Africa is reported to be the most diverse and multilingual continent, with over 2,000 languages spoken (Simons & Fennig, 2018). As one of the least developed continents, the extent of language extinction in Africa is unclear because languages are still being discovered and they may be dialects. (Crystal, 2000; Fishman, 1997; Tshotsho, 2014). The more developed a country is, the more likely it will experience language shifts within its communities. There is a correlation between the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and the number of extinct languages that were spoken in the country, due to globalization (Tshotsho, 2014). The more economically viable a community is, the more likely that its population will be compelled to move to cities where more languages are spoken. Such moves usually result in speakers of minority languages opting to use the dominant language for communication (Crystal, 2000; Fishman, 1997; Tshotsho, 2014). This dominant language is not necessarily the language of the economy, as is often the case with English. It can be other powerful Indigenous languages. Language extinction can also be a result of the community’s decision to use or to discontinue to use specific languages. Language revitalization, therefore, requires an effort on the part of the community to be actively involved in using and promoting use of the language (Crystal, 2000; Fishman, 1997; Tshotsho, 2014). There should be clear understanding of the purposes for the revitalization efforts, whether they will be done to promote use of the language in education, for use in oral interactions or reading and writing in the community, or to assist communities with retaining their identity. Within the South African context, Indigenous languages suffered marginalization during colonial rule, as different ethnic communities were divided and relocated according to their ethnic identities (Alexander, 2010; Heugh, 2014). This created mistrust among different ethnic communities. Initially, apartheid policies used language in

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education to undermine Black communities (Alexander, 2010; Heugh, 2014). During this era, mother tongue education was implemented until grade 8, although the materials used to teach these languages were of inferior quality (Heugh, 2012). After the 1994 democratic election, the newly elected government tried to restore the prestige of these languages by putting them on par with English and Afrikaans, the former official languages (Ngobo, 2012). The implementation of this multilingual policy has proven to be a challenge in schools due to lack of political will (Hughes, 2012) and lack of finances (Alexander, 2010; Heugh, 2014). Among the efforts taken by the government to sustain and revitalize the languages are policies such as the Pan South African Language Board Act (PANSALB) of 1995. The Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities was established as one of the independent Chapter 9 institutions of the State in 2002. A Language Task Group (Lang Tag) was formed in 1996 by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. The latest attempt to revitalize African languages in South Africa, which is the most prominent language reform instituted by the South African government since the dawn of its democracy, is the introduction of incremental implementation of African languages (IIAL) in the education sector. The Department of Basic Education (DBE) introduced this draft policy in 2013. According to the African Language Policy, it is compulsory for all South African students in school to learn an African language of their choice as a subject. This policy aims to empower both mother tongue language speakers, who did not have access to instruction in their home language in former White and Colored schools. The policy provides these learners with an opportunity to not only learn their languages but to also respect their cultural identities. African, Colored (in South Africa, mixed race—offspring of a Black person and a White person), and White learners will learn these African languages as a second language (L2). This policy seeks to strengthen the position of African languages in schooling across the country. The Department of Basic Education aims to phase in IIAL over a period of 12 years, with a 2015 start date. Formerly, South African White and Colored schools did not change the racial makeup of their teacher population despite admitting Black learners who speak a variety of languages at home. These schools were expected to recruit and train African language specialists to offer these languages and to develop and make available cost-effective teaching and learning materials of sufficient quality and quantity for teaching these languages. It should be noted that while this reform is a welcome deviation from the past policies on the use of African languages in education, the South African government is still ambivalent about what the role of these languages should be. An example can be gleaned from the fact that prior to this revitalization effort there was an initial draft document, which was

170 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi introduced in June 2013, on the role of African languages in education. This first draft, which was subsequently shelved, indicated the importance of using African languages as a language of teaching and learning to improve the academic success of students in grade 4. The draft highlighted challenges that these learners face when switching to English as a language of teaching and learning, which resulted in a decline in their grades (Department of Basic Education, 2013). Furthermore, it provided a rationale for the extended use of African languages as a medium of instruction beyond the foundation phase, citing major cross-national studies, such as the Annual National Assessment (ANA) of literacy and math performance in primary schools (Department of Basic Education, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014). However, the use of African languages as the language of learning and teaching (LOLT) has now been dropped in the latest version of the African Language Policy. It is for this reason that African languages are introduced as subjects across the entire South African education system.

Study Methodology The study reported here is a qualitative study that used an action research methodology. Action research is a cyclical approach, which involves practice and reflection. Each stage of the study was underscored by reflection, whereby the teacher and the observers took stock of what happened and what needed to happen next. This approach was found to be suitable for the instruction and outcomes studied. The methodology chosen allowed the researchers to be part of the design of the writing program, with the teachers (de Vos, Strydom, Fouché, & Delport, 2014). One school in rural Mohlaba Tribal Authority in Limpopo Province, South Africa, was purposefully selected. Two grade 3 teachers and their classes were involved in the writing project. The aim of the project was to investigate the teaching of writing using folktales. This study intended to address the gap in schools, which revealed that teachers give more attention to reading than they do to writing (de Vos et al., 2014). The researchers first met with the teachers to understand their challenges in teaching writing. This was done as part of the needs analysis to ensure that the program met the needs identified. After a series of meetings, a program was developed to teach writing. This program had the hallmarks of a process approach to teaching writing. To make the process interesting, we decided to use folktales based on everyday life. The process of teaching writing was evaluated throughout the course of its implementation to ensure that the whole process was worthwhile and offered opportunities for growth. Data were collected through observation of teaching creative writing and evaluating the books that learners wrote. The following research question underpinned the study: How can story reading and storytelling be used to promote creative writing? To answer

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this primary question, the following secondary questions were critical in understanding the processes and strategies that are effective in teaching creative writing: • • • •

What are the processes to be followed in story reading and storytelling? What are strategies to be used to promote creative writing? What resources are needed to teach creative writing? What effect does the teaching of creative writing have on learners?

The School Context The school chosen is situated in a low socio-economic area, where most of the parents are unemployed. As a result, learners are exempted from paying school fees. The school is categorized by the education department as a quintile one school, which are no fee-paying schools that are subsidized by the government. Learners in quintile one schools are provided with free lunch, which might be the only meal for the day for most of the learners in such schools. The total number of learners at the school was 600, and there were two grade 3 classrooms. One classroom had 40 learners, and the other 45, with girls outnumbering boys in both cases. Xitsonga, an Indigenous language in this part of the country, is used as the language of teaching and learning from grade 1 to grade 3. English and Afrikaans are taught as subjects in grades 1 to 3. In grade 4, learners transition from first/Indigenous language medium of instruction to English as medium of instruction. From grade 4 onwards, Indigenous languages are taught as subjects. Grade 3 learners are between the ages of 9 and 10. The writing instruction observed and writing done in the grade 3 classrooms was in Xitsonga. The participating school was purposefully chosen as a research site because it used Xitsonga as a language of teaching and learning in the foundation phase, grades 1 to 3. The school was established in 1971. Although it is an old school, the local community tries hard to maintain the grounds and the classrooms. The government supplies each child with reading materials in Xitsonga. However, the teachers complained that not enough books were supplied, which resulted in learners sharing books. Some of the storybooks provided to learners are old, with torn pages. Folktales are not part of the reading materials in these classrooms. Therefore, the project brought in a new genre of reading. Folktales were photocopied for the learners and used for reading.

Teacher Participants Two teachers in the two grade 3 classrooms were study participants and part of the design of the writing project, together with the researchers. They had 10 and 20 years of teaching experience respectively. They

172 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi are well qualified to teach in primary schools, as they have the requisite qualifications recommended by the Department of Basic Education. They come from the same community as the learners, with Xitsonga as their home language. We report here on the observations in one Grade 3 classroom.

The Writing Process Reading and writing are said to be the opposite sides of the same coin, meaning that when teaching reading, you must also give attention to writing (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2010). The process of writing began with the teacher reading the folktales aloud. The following are some of the benefits of reading aloud: • • •

Learners’ imaginations are engaged in the story, in preparation for a writing experience. Learners visualize the story before they put ideas on paper. Learners who find reading and writing their own stories pleasurable tend to develop positive lifelong reading and writing habits (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2010).

Folktales were chosen as appropriate reading material to be used for promoting a love for reading, which can be translated into writing. Whitehead (1993) says that folktales offer experiences that are humorous and have repetitive phrases. Folktales are a powerful medium of introducing children into the structures of a language. She is of the opinion that any approach that disregards dramatic play and storytelling disregards the promotion of creative writing. Any writing process happens in different phases, especially with young writers in primary school. The first phase is transcription, which is the easiest and includes handwriting and spelling. The second phase involves the use of executive functions, which includes conscious attention, planning, reviewing, reversing, and self-regulation strategies (Berninger et al., 2008). The final component of writing instruction involves high-level text generation skills, a multidimensional process of learning to write. Transcription skills are developed first, enabling writers to convert ideas and spoken language into written text. According to Berninger et al. (2008), transcription involves the development of a fluent and legible form of handwriting and spelling skills. The writing program that was developed followed the sequence described here. However, the process was not as simple as those steps would imply, because the procedure the teachers used was not cast in stone. They were allowed to bring variation into the process. The emphasis in the program in grade 3 was on creative writing. The steps emphasized in the process approach began with brainstorming the topic, followed by writing

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a first draft, revising the draft with a peer, writing a second draft, editing their own work by using a dictionary, and publishing their own writing. The aim was to lead learners to become independent writers who could develop their own ideas and spoken language into written texts with little support from the teacher. The following are observations made by the researchers as the teachers taught creative writing by following the steps in the process approach.

Classroom Observations: Steps Followed in Writing Instruction Writing instruction in the grade 3 classroom took place at the same time that reading instruction was conducted. The researchers spent 10 days planning together with the teachers and observing the presented lessons. Both authors of this chapter participated in observations of two classrooms, but the information reported here is based on observations of one classroom. The observations took place over a period of 10 days, interspersed with days where no observation was carried out. The Xitsonga language teacher first asked the learners to predict from the title what the story would be about. The teacher then read the folktale aloud to the learners. After reading the story, the teacher asked the learners questions to test their understanding of the story. The learners then imagined their own ending to the story, as authors. The learners  were then divided into groups to discuss the moral of the story. After group discussion, the teacher gave the learners an opportunity to report to the whole class. The new words read in the folktales, which were written on the board by the teacher, were to be used in context during the presentations. During the group discussions, the teacher worked with the learners in various groups to assist them with further understanding the story and using unfamiliar words in context. As the groups worked together and asked about different words, the teacher wrote the words on cards and put them up on the wall. These words were used several times in the discussion, with the teacher drawing the learners’ attention to them. Learners were then provided with an opportunity to independently write their own story, using the same story line and the newly acquired vocabulary. The teacher provided them with an opening line for the introduction, and they all then wrote their own introduction. After writing their introductions, they shared their introduction with their peers. In this way, learners were able to review each other’s work and provide each other with comments and suggestions to improve their writing. After that, learners were given a chance to revise their introductions and submit them to the teacher, who was able to quickly review them. Learners were then helped to understand what the body of the story was supposed to include. For example, one folktale that they were writing about was “The lion and the hare as animals tried to choose a leader”.

174 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi The teacher explained to the learners that the body of their essay would be the core of the story, which was what happened at the meeting between the animals. Learners were given an opportunity to write independently and exchange their writing with friends to review and make comments and suggestions. The teacher then provided the learners with an opportunity to revise their work and submit it to her to review. The writing of the conclusion followed the same order. When they were finished with the body, the learners were told by the teacher to read their own stories as a whole and conclude their story. She explained the importance of going back to the introduction and reading what they had written before writing the conclusion. She explained that in the conclusion, learners should not introduce new information. In summary, the teacher followed a process writing approach in guiding the learners through the various writing stages. Starting with the planning stages of writing, she creatively used language to assist the learners with expressing their thinking, which is in line with Vygotsky’s view of the importance of language to express one’s thoughts. Secondly, the social constructivist theory was adopted, as most of the learning was not done in isolation but in collaboration with peers. From the observed lessons, learners were actively engaged in their own learning and were able to discuss and work collaboratively with their peers. Furthermore, the lessons were not teacher-dominated, but the teacher acted as a facilitator. We argue that in these lessons the teacher was able to test learners’ prior knowledge and moved the learners into the Zone of Proximal Development. In this way, their writing proficiency skills were enhanced (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986). The teacher understood the challenges of developing writing proficiency skills and divided learners’ tasks into manageable chunks that could be handled with ease. Furthermore, the different writing stages provided learners with the opportunity to assist each other in producing a quality product. In the process, the teacher was able to model good writing skills and teach the learners that writing involves various stages such as planning, drafting, revising, publishing, and reading. Learners came to realize that writing requires planning, drafting, and revising before the final product is completed. Learners’ writing proficiency skills were further enhanced through the use of their home languages, which enabled them to think creatively and critically. From their samples of written work, these learners showed that they were developing the necessary language proficiency skills required for academic success. The study was done alongside an in-progress project that was introduced by the Department of Basic Education and the National Education Collaboration Trust (Department of Basic Education, 2015), which helped teachers to better understand the process approach that underpinned the methodology the teacher used for creative writing. These documents were a pilot study introduced by the Department of Basic Education for

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teaching first languages to poorly performing schools. These documents helped teachers to better understand the process approach to teaching writing. This project also covers a whole range of professional development for language teaching, including language studies, reading, and writing.

Observations of Learners Classroom observations of the writing instruction was divided into two broad categories: the learner variable, where we concentrated on the activities of the learners, and the teacher during writing instruction. The main aim was to observe the writing instruction provided by the Xitsonga-speaking teacher. The classroom variable was chosen to align with good and effective writing instruction, as recommended by Graham et al. (2012). According to Graham et al., effective writing instruction includes equal distribution of activities between teacher instruction and learners writing independently. They further recommend that learners be provided with an opportunity to practice writing daily. Teachers should instruct learners to become fluent in handwriting, spelling, and sentence writing. Finally, writing instruction needs to be provided in such a way that it creates an engaged community of writers. Despite the fact that the lessons were designed by both the teachers and the researchers, we observed that learners spent more time writing independently than they spent involved in instructional and group writing. Teachers were quick to present the lessons and gave ample time to students to write independently. This was against research that shows that for writing instruction to be effective, there should be a considerable amount of time for learners to watch the teacher brainstorm and write, for the teacher to edit the writing, and for the teacher to conduct process writing instruction. There should also be group instruction directed and facilitated by the teacher. Graham et al. (2012) suggest that teachers should spend at least 30 minutes daily providing writing instruction and developing learners’ writing proficiency skills. The observed teacher in this study spent 15 to 20 minutes introducing the lesson. The rest of the time, more than one hour, was spent with learners writing independently. Since this was an action research study, we reflected with teachers after each lesson to identify strengths and gaps in the lesson. The teachers stated that they prefer to use scripted lessons instead of their own developed ones. As part of the initial stages of the program, we decided to wean teachers steadily from this practice, so that they could be more self-reliant and develop their own methods. In the last stages of the writing program, teachers were expected to develop their own lessons, using their storybooks. After teaching writing by following the program that was developed, both teachers and learners seemed to have enjoyed the process. The stories that the learners wrote

176 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi showed some coherence in their writing. Their thoughts were ordered in such a way that the information flowed from one paragraph to the next. Learners could use new words introduced in class, but there were still some who found it difficult to use these words, because they were not frequently used in their community. Creative writing does not happen in a short period of time. It has to be inculcated through repeated practice until the learners are confident enough to write independently. Teaching of writing mechanisms is an important part of the teaching of creative writing. It was, therefore, important to find how the teachers were exposing grade 3 learners to the use of writing mechanisms. Lack of rules prevalent in children’s written texts results in such texts being incomprehensible. Despite the importance of handwriting and spelling during writing instruction, the teacher did not provide the learners with such instruction, despite the fact that they were part of the lesson preparation. Researchers such as Cutler and Graham (2008) and Gilbert and Graham (2010) found that the teachers they observed spent, at most, 20 minutes daily teaching these skills. However, this study did not show such results, as the observed teacher did not teach handwriting and spelling at all. This can be partly attributed to the different amounts of time that the teachers received training, with most of the teachers having received little or no training on the teaching of writing. Teachers might not have deemed the teaching of handwriting and spelling important to teach, but rather believe that children will acquire them incidentally. According to Troila and Graham (2003), teachers should spend at least 60 to 75 minutes a day teaching spelling. They further note that students will engage in invented spelling, which should be accepted, and that learners should be exposed to examples of correct spelling. Most of the learners in the study wrote words without apostrophes; for example, they named animals as follows: Nwampfundla instead of N’wampfundla Nwanghala instead of N’wanghala Nwana instead of N’wana (child) n’wampfundla (rabbit) n’wanghala (lion) The results from learners’ writing also revealed that they confused the endings of words. They wrote hinkweni instead of hinkweru, the correct spelling (“all of you” instead of “all of us”). This is shown in the following examples: “Vanwana va ku a hi hlawuleni loyi a nga tlhariha ku hi tlula hinkweni” (Some said let us choose a leader who is smarter than all of you). Another student wrote, “a hi hlawuleni loyi a nga tlhariha ku tlula hinkwenu” (Some said “let us choose a leader who is smarter than all of you”).

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The correct words should have been “a hi hlawuleni loyi a nga tlhariha ku hi tlula hinkwerhu” (Let us choose a leader who is more intelligent than all of us). These learners also used words that are not necessarily synonyms interchangeably. They also divided words that did not need to be divided, as in the following examples: N’wanghala u vitanile shiharhi hinkwaso leswaku va ta lava hosi (The lion called upon other animals to search for a leader.) Another learner wrote: Swiharhi swi twananile kuva na hosi (Animals agreed to have a leader.) They are confusing choosing a leader with searching for and having a leader. Another learner wrote: Vana va sarile va ri yexe instead of Vana va sarile vari voxe. (“Children are left alone,” and not “Children is left alone,” as indicated in the learner’s written text). Another student wrote “vana va ta funya ribuwa” (literally translated, “children will eat a sand ball,” an idiomatic expression meaning to die). They also combined words that need to be separated, as in the following sentence from one of the learners: vana vatwa ndlala (Children are hungry) van’wa mpfundla (hares) van’wa nguluve (pigs) These words are not supposed to be separated, as they refer to different kinds of animals. The correct spellings of these words are as follows: Vana va twa ndlala Va n’wampfundla Va n’wanguluve The learners were expected to use both direct and indirect speech in their creative writing exercise, which almost all of them chose to ignore. Those who used direct speech were unaware of the importance of using appropriate conventions to indicate that the words were not theirs, but those of the narrator. For example, in the story about the animals choosing their leader, the tortoise remarked with the following words: “Let us start the meeting so that we can go home to our children for dinner.” In

178 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi using the tortoise’s words, some of the students failed to use the conventions that would show that they were using the exact words, thus making the text look like indirect speech. In another example, in reporting about a story that had been read to them aloud (one of the stories is shown in Xitsonga, with the English translation, in Appendix 1), they were expected to use the exact words from the story that had been read aloud. Learners wrote the following texts: Van’wana va ku vana va sale va ri yexe (Children are left alone). N’wanghala u vitanile swiharhi aku ahi hlawuleni hosi (The lion called upon all the animals and said, “Let us elect our leader.”— Conventions for reporting direct speech are not used). Nwaxibodze a ku vulavulani phela hikuva hi siyile vana va twa ndlala (The tortoise said, “Inform us of the purpose of this meeting. We left our children at home, and they are hungry.”—Conventions for reporting direct speech are not used). The texts indicate that these learners have not yet mastered the use of direct and indirect speech, and almost all of them failed to use them. They appeared not to recognize the difference between reported speech and direct speech. Some learners also borrowed words from English instead of using Xitsonga words. For example, instead of writing Swihari swi hlawurile hosi, one learner wrote, swihari swi chuze hosi (instead of the word hlawurile, she borrowed the English word chose and wrote it as chuze, which, although used in verbal communication, is unaccepted in academic writing). Learners also did not use Xitsonga idiomatic expressions correctly. Most wrote, for example, fundza buwa instead of Funya buwa (an idiomatic expression meaning to die). These types of challenges can only be overcome if the differences between the spoken language and written language are made apparent to learners. Better writing skills and vocabulary can be cultivated through exposure to books. The teaching of reading, and the act of reading itself, should be an activity that is done daily in class. Learners should be allowed to read independently and allow for the ideas and vocabulary gained to transform their own thinking about life itself, so that this may be reflected in their writing (Rogoff & Wertsch, 1984).

Conclusion The teaching of creative writing is an ordered process that needs to be planned before being conducted. Writing is a high-cognitive activity that needs to be taught by a conscientious teacher, who knows how and when

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to introduce higher-order skills and lower-order skills, and when to teach the mechanisms of writing (spelling, punctuation) and ordering of ideas in a text. According to Berninger and Chanquoy (2011), writing instruction should include both lower-order and higher-order writing skills. Lower-order skills include the teaching of spelling, while essay writing is a higher-order skill. We argue here that reading should inform writing, and writing should flow from reading. The writing of stories needs careful planning before it can be introduced to learners. The teacher observed did not seem to have a way of teaching lowerorder and higher-order writing skills. Moreover, the teacher spent only a few minutes providing writing instruction to the learners and left them writing by themselves, despite using the scripted lessons. This suggests that teachers must be given time to practice teaching writing on a regular basis. Instructing learners in higher-order writing skills and a process approach to writing requires that the teacher scaffold the learning, with students watching the teacher write, revise, edit, and publish, and that the teacher direct and facilitate group writing instruction. We argue that since the teacher observed did not engage in such activities, her writing instruction was insufficient. This partly explains why most of the learners in this class were not proficient writers. Writing requires explicit and intense instruction in handwriting and spelling as well as in composing texts. It requires the management and coordination of multiple cognitivelinguistic processes simultaneously. Thus, it requires explicit, systematic, and sustained instruction in all of the languages taught to develop learners’ proficiency. Research indicates that teachers are not adequately trained to teach writing (Heugh, 2014; NEEDU Report, 2012). There is also a general lack of knowledge regarding the most effective practices to teach writing. Research should be conducted on teachers’ knowledge of writing and how such knowledge affects their practices.

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182 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi PANSALB. (Pan South African Language Board Act.) (1995). The South African constitution. Pretoria, South Africa: Author. PIRLS Literacy (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study). (2016). Centre for Evaluation and Assessment, Faculty of Education. Hatfield, South Africa: University of Pretoria. Republic of South Africa. (1996). The constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Pretoria, South Africa: Government Press. Rogoff, B., & Wertsch, J. V. (1984). Children’ learning in the Zone of Proximal Development. In J. V. Wertsch (Ed.), New directions for child development (pp. 7–18). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2018). Ethnologue: Languages of the world, twenty-first edition. Dallas, TX: SIL International. Retrieved from www.ethno logue.com/ Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2002). Why should linguistic diversity be maintained and supported in Europe? Some arguments. Strasbourg, Germany: Council of Europe. Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (2005). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Taipale, S. (2015). Bodily dimensions of reading and writing practices on paper and digitally. Telematics and Informatics, 33(4), 766–775. Tomasello, M., Kruger, A., & Ratner, H. (1993). Cultural learning. Behaviour and Brain Sciences, 16, 495–552. Troila, G. A., & Graham, S. (2003). Effective writing instruction across grades: What every educational consultant should know. Journal of Educational Psychology Consultation, 14, 75–89. Tshotsho, B. (2014). Supporting students writing using systematic functional linguistics at a university in South Africa. International Journal of Education Science, 6(3), 425–433. Valdes, G. (2004). Between support and marginalization: The development of academic language in linguistic minority children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7, 102–132. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1979). Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behaviour. Soviet Psychology, 4, 3–35. Vygotsky, L. S. (1980). The genesis of higher mental functions. In J. W. Wertsch (Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology. New York: Sharp. Vygotsky, L. S. (1984). Sobranie sochinenii [The collected works] (Vol. 3[1]). Moscow: Pedagogica. Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (Abridged from 1934; A. Kozulin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J. V., & Tulviste, P. (1992). L.S. Vygotsky and contemporary development psychology. Developmental Psychology, 8(4), 549–557. Whitehead, M. (1993). Born again phonics and the nursery rhyme revival. London: Taylor & Francis. Wiley, T. G. (2006). Literacy and language diversity in the United States. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics & Delta Systems.

Appendix 1 Story Read to the Learners

Swiharhi Swi Hlawula Hosi Ya Swona (Xitsonga) Garingani was garingani Garingani Garingani wa garingani Garingani

Khale ka khaleni loko swiharhi swa ha kota ku vulavula swi twananile ku hlawula hosi. Kutani siku rin’wana N’wanghala u bile mhalamhala ku vitana swiharhi ku ta ehlengeletanini yo hlawula hosi. Swiharhi hikwaswo swa tiko swi tile eka hlengeletano leyi. Ku tile swiharhi swa tinxakanxaka, vaN’wampfundla, vaN’wamhuti, vaN’waxibodze, vaN’wamhelembe, vaN’wandlopfu, ku hlaya i ku xurha. Endzhaku ka nkarhi N’waxibodze u vutisile a ku “mi hi vitanele yini ? Hi byeleni leswaku hi kota ku tlhelela emakaya hikuva hi sukerile vana va ri voxe. Va nga sala va funya buwa hi ndlala. Hi loko N’waghala a hlamula aku” A hi hlawuleni xiharhi lexikulu leswaku xi hi rhangela. Marito lawa a ya kongomisiwe eka N’wandlopfu, loyi a kurile ku hundza swiharhi hinkwaswo. Kambe swiharhi swin’wana swi vonile leswaku vukulu bya xiyimo a byi nga swi pfuni ngopfu, kutani swin’wana swi hlamurile swi ku “hina hi hlawula N’wampfundla hikuva u tlharihile ngopfu kutani u ta swi kota ku hi ponisa eka valala hi tshama hi sirhelekile”. Ku vile ni nkwetlembetano wa mavonele hikuva swin’wana swiharhi a swi ri ni mavonele yo hambana. Swona swi te “hina hi hlawula N’wanghala loyi a nga na matimba yo tlula ya hina hinkwerhu. Loko N’waghala a ri hosi ya hina u ta swi kota ku hi sirhelela eka valala”. Eku heteleleni hlengeletano yi twananile leswaku N’wanghala u ta va yena hosi ya vona hikwalaho ka matimba ya yena. Ku sukela eka siku lero ku fikela namuntlha N’wanghala hi yena hosi ya swiharhi hinkwaswo. Hi swona swi tswaleke Xivulwana xa leswaku Nghala i hosi ya swiharhi. Swiharhi swa swi tiva leswaku hambi swi nga navela vukosi byi vekeriwele vaN’wanghala.

184 Tintswalo V. Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi Phtu! Choyoyooo . . . Xa mina i nkuwa wa matatani!

Animals Choose Their Leader (English Translation) Garingani was garingani Garingani Garingani wa garingani Garingani

(This is an introduction to a folktale in African languages to arouse interest and anticipation. There is nothing similar to this in English or an English translation.) Long, long ago, when animals were able to talk to each other, they decided to elect a leader amongst themselves. One day the lion called a meeting, inviting all of the other animals so that they could elect a suitable leader for themselves. Amongst the animals attending the meeting were the lions, the elephants, and the hares, to mention a few. The meeting did not start on time, leading to other animals to complain about the delay as they feared for their children who were left unattended at home. The complaining animals mentioned that they needed to prepare food for the young ones before they died of hunger. The meeting convener, Mr. lion, then declared the meeting open after ensuring that all the animals were present. He then explained to the other animals what the purpose of the meeting was and advised the animals to think carefully before choosing a leader. Then a discussion ensued wherein he discussed the attributes that the elected leader needed to possess in order to be a good leader. While some believed they needed an intelligent leader, others felt that strength would be a good quality. Those who wanted a strong leader thought it would be a good idea to elect a lion to assist them to fight off intruders. They decided that it would not be right to elect an elephant, who was the biggest, because he was not as fast as the lion. Those animals who felt that a leader had to be intelligent had the hare as their preferred leader. In the end, the lion was chosen as their leader and from that day on, the lion became known as the king of the jungle.

10 Early Writing in Nungon in Papua New Guinea Hannah Sarvasy and Eni Ögate

Introduction Much literature on the acquisition of linguistic literacy is framed within the assumption that adults are literate. In Nungon-speaking society, however, there is no need for adult members of the community to read and write. This chapter surveys the situation of early literacy in a society in which literacy plays a minimal role. For most adult speakers of the Papuan language Nungon residing on their ancestral lands, life is consumed with farming, home construction and repair, hunting, and foraging. The region, the highest inhabited reaches of a river valley, has no electricity and is inaccessible by road. People drink from, bathe in, and wash their dishes in mountain springs and waterfalls. The occasional hardy politician hikes through the region with campaign posters before elections, but otherwise most printed material (in Tok Pisin, English, or, rarely, the Papuan language Kâte) is tattered and years old. The main incentive for adults to write and read is participation in weekly Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) church study groups and reading of the Tok Pisin Bible. With the construction of a cell phone tower in the vicinity in 2015, impending changes to people’s lives became clear. Cell phone access means that text messaging to faraway relatives is now possible—for those who can write. But even with the sudden proliferation of cell phones, people chronically lack credit, so text messaging and calling is still infrequent.

Theory Underlying Nungon Literacy Emergent literary practices in Nungon are examined here through the frameworks of Ivanič (2004) and Martin and Rose (2008). Ivanič introduces a framework involving six distinct discourses on the teaching of literacy—“skills,” “creativity,” “process,” “genre,” “social practices,” and “sociopolitical.” In Ivanič’s view, all six discourses are integrated within the ideal pedagogical approach (2004, p. 241). The Nungon pedagogical approach to literacy acquisition is rooted in the discourse that Ivanič calls

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“skills,” aimed at appropriate applications of written symbols for sounds. Since writing in the Nungon cultural context is a special skill largely limited in scope to the formal educational domain, with little application outside this, the emphasis in early education is on mastering the representation of sounds with written symbols, with little exploration beyond this. Genre is fundamentally important in Nungon discourse organization. The Nungon texts written by children can be assigned to genres defined by Martin and Rose (2008), including “observation/comment,” “report,” and “procedure.” But beyond these micro-level genre distinctions, two overarching genre types trigger the use of very different types of sentences in Nungon. The classic Papuan long “clause chains” (see the following section) occur when trajectories of actions or events are depicted, while shorter sentences, more akin to English sentences, are found in thematic (Farr, 1999) discussions of the type used in position statements and static descriptions.

The Nungon language and speech community Nungon is a Papuan language spoken by about 1,000 people in five villages in the Uruwa River valley, Kabwum District, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea (P.N.G.). Villages are located at roughly 1,500m to 1,700m above sea level, and villagers’ land holdings extend up to 4,000m high in the cloud rainforest. The area is isolated; access is by small plane or several days of hiking in the high-altitude rainforest. Nungon speakers are expert farmers, with ample food supplies year-round. Men hunt birds, including dwarf cassowaries, with bows and arrows; women have traditionally hunted rodents, ground fowl, and amphibians. Traditional trade patterns have linked Nungon speakers to the Vitiaz Strait trading circuit (Harding, 1967) to the northeast, and to speakers of other Papuan languages to the south. Most outside involvement in the region in modern times has been church-related. Papua New Guinean missionaries arrived in the Uruwa River valley in the 1930s, and baptisms began in the 1950s (Wegmann & Wegmann, 1994). The missionaries brought new crops, such as cabbage, squash, and coffee beans. Most speakers today maintain small coffee plantations for export in addition to numerous taro, banana, pandanus, and greens farms. In the 1970s, villagers constructed two mountainside airstrips, one in the northern half of the valley and the other in the south. The area is served by the private air company North Coast Aviation, which runs irregular weekly flights from the city of Lae. There is no electricity in the region; water comes from mountain springs. The five Nungon-speaking villages—from 30 minutes to two hours apart by footpath—typify the unmatched linguistic diversity of P.N.G.;

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each historically had its own dialect, so that no more than 300 or so people actually share a dialect. Nungon is the content question word “what” in four vibrant dialects. The fifth village’s nearly obsolete dialect, as well as a sixth dialect spoken in a sixth village, feature widespread elision of intervocalic consonants and use nuon to signify the word “what.”1 The question word “what” is an exemplar of the differences between the dialect groupings and functions as a macro-dialect name, although most people speak of dialects at the village level, naming them using village names. The Nungon and Nuon dialects form the southern half of a dialect continuum, of which the northern half also encompasses speech areas with two different words for “what”: yaö and yanu. From 1987–1997, Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) Bible translation teams were based in the yaö-speaking area. Swiss-born translator Urs Wegmann wished the yaö variety to become the written standard, akin to High German in Switzerland (Wegmann & Wegmann, 1994). Through his efforts, the entire dialect continuum became referred to as Yau by The Ethnologue (Simons & Fennig, 2017). (In this chapter, Yau is used only to refer to the dialect with yaö for “what.”) The southern and northern Uruwa River valley dialects share most structural characteristics except the formation of the Remote Future tense, which differs between the southern (nuon/nungon) and northern (yaö/yanu) groupings.

Structure of the Nungon Language Sarvasy (2017a) provides a full reference grammar of Nungon; further details of Nungon grammar are in Sarvasy (2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2017b, 2017c). Nungon phonology is typical of Finisterre-Huon Papuan languages. Phonological inventories differ slightly among dialects. In the Towet dialect, there are 15 phonemic consonants: voiced and voiceless bilabial, alveolar, and velar oral stops; nasal stops at these places of articulation; alveolar voiceless fricative /s/, glottal voiceless fricative /h/, trilled or tapped alveolar /r/, palatal glide /y/, labio-velar glide /w/, and labio-dental voiceless fricative /f/ with limited distribution. Words may only end in vowels, voiceless stops, or nasals; voiceless stops are unreleased word-finally of word and intervocalic stops that do not begin stressed syllables are often spirantized. There are six contrastive vowels—three back vowels, a low central vowel, and two front vowels— and phonemic vowel length. The Nungon orthography taught in Yawan and Worin elementary schools is based on the practical orthography created by SIL teams for Yau (Wegmann, 1993). The orthography uses all Latin characters, with one digraph and one vowel bearing a diacritic. The Nungon orthography, with corresponding IPA symbols, is in Table 10.1.

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Table 10.1 Nungon orthography in use today. Part 1 Phoneme a e i ɔ o u b d ɡ p Grapheme a e i o ö u b d g p Realization [a]~[ɑ] [e]~[ɛ] [i]~[ɪ] [ɔ]~[ɒ] [o] [u] [b] [d] [ɡ]~[ɣ]~[ɰ] [p] Part 2 Phoneme Grapheme Realization

t t [t]

k k [k]

m m [m]

n n [n]

ŋ ng [ŋ]

r r [r]

l l [l]

f f [f]

s s [s]

h h [h]

w w [w]~[β]~[v]

j y [j]

Vowel length is contrastive in at least the Towet, Yawan, and Kotet dialects of Nungon, but this is not represented in the orthography as taught in the elementary schools. Vowel length is the sole aural delimiter between members of the minimal pairs in Example 10.1: Example 10.1 Selected vowel length minimal pairs in Towet Nungon.

biip [bi:p] “paternal uncle,” bip [bip] “rain” hoonga [ˈhɔːŋa] “closing (as a door),” honga [ˈhɔ.ŋa] “cooking” huup [huːp] “new, exotic,” hup [hup] “chicken” mööwat [ˈmoːβat] “I vomited (Near Past),” möwat [ˈmo.βat] “I planted it/I fell” naahak [ˈnaːhak] “s/he sees me,” nahak [ˈna.hak] “s/he eats” yaat [jaːt] “I say,” yat [jat] “mushroom” (Sarvasy, 2017a, p. 70) If these words are uttered in complete isolation, vowel length should play the deciding role in determining how listeners interpret them. But even in written Nungon that lacks indication of vowel length, context means there is little chance of a reader’s mistaking, for instance, “I say” with “mushroom,” or “closing the door” for “cooking.” Encouraging Nungon speakers to indicate vowel length in writing yields mixed results. Vowel length in some words, especially those for which minimal pairs as in (1) exist, can be agreed on by all. But where minimal pairs are lacking, Nungon speakers often differ in their interpretation of vowels as underlyingly long or short. Thus obligatory indication of vowel length in the orthography could result in more spelling variation than already exists. Nungon is an agglutinating language with some fusion. Clauses are verb-final. One of the most salient features of Nungon grammar, and

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one it shares with many Papuan languages, is the prevalence of “clause chains” (Longacre, 1985). Clause chains are sentences containing one or more clauses with minimally inflected verbal predicates, followed by a single clause with a fully inflected verbal predicate. In the Papuanist tradition, the minimally inflected verbal predicates are called “medial verbs,” occurring in “medial clauses,” while the fully inflected predicates are “final verbs,” and their clauses are “final clauses.” Nungon medial verbs are unmarked for tense or mood. Medial verbs index their subject arguments only when the subject of the following clause (medial or final) is expected to differ in reference. This is classic switch-reference marking (Haiman & Munro, 1983). Nungon also has sentences more similar to those of English: either single final clauses or combinations of final clauses. Nungon further permits verbless clauses of four main types: equational, negative existential, circumstantial, and sequential (Sarvasy, 2017a, pp. 453–459). Narratives describing sequential actions are primarily framed through clause chains. A narrative may be told in a single clause chain including twenty or more medial clauses, but more often, clause chains contain roughly five to 10 medial clauses. Succeeding clause chains usually begin with a tail-head linking (de Vries, 2005) medial clause summing up the previous clause chain or reiterating its final clause. A typical clause chain is in Example 10.2: Example 10.2 Nungon clause chain, no switch-reference marking.

E-ng-a, Inabö sakök hagim-o tana-ng-a, e-ng-a, come-dep-mv Inabö choko leaf-3sg.poss pick-dep-mv come-dep-mv yok bag

yoo-ng nsg.o.take-dep

ongo-ng-a, go-dep-mv

yamuk=dek, water=loc

bög-in house-loc

songgöm corn

bög-in house-loc yamuk water

hi-ng-a, put-dep-mv

guo-ng-a, bathe-dep-mv

ho-ng cook-dep

e-ng-a, come-dep-mv

na-wa-mong. eat-pres.nsg-1pl

“Coming, picking choko leaves at Inabö, coming, taking the bags and putting them in the house, going out, bathing in water at the waterside, coming, we are cooking and eating corn in the house.” In the clause chain in Example 10.2, the subjects of every clause are co-referential; a single group of people, including the speaker, are understood to have performed all the actions described. Thus, none of the medial verbs bear any subject indexation. In Example 10.3, not all subjects are co-referential; every medial verb just before a switch in subjects inflects to index its own subject.

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Example 10.3 Nungon clause chain with switch-reference marking.

Sirewen Sirewen öön farm

orin conj

hai-ng-a, cut-dep-mv

ongo-ng-a go-dep-mv

Lii Lii

i-iny-a, be-ds.2/3du-mv

mabö-uny-a, call.out-ds.2/3du-mv

Urongo-n ridge-loc Towet Towet Lii Lii

Oe woman

orin conj

ongo-ng-a, go-dep-mv orin conj

Sirewen Sirewen

Hana Hannah

bög-in house-loc

e-ya-morok. come-np.nsg-2/3du “Sirewen and Lii going to Ridgetop, clearing a farm, staying (there), Towet Woman and Hannah, going on, calling out (to them), Lii and Sirewen came home.” In Example 10.3, two medial verbs are marked for switch reference. Note that the two different subjects, while differing in reference, are both third person and dual number.

Vitality of the Nungon Language As of April 2017, the Nungon language is the first language of all children in the Nungon-speaking area except for the children of school teachers from outside the region. Nungon is the only language of all everyday interactions in the village area among Nungon speakers. This means that it rates (6a), “Vigorous,” on the EGIDS scale of language endangerment (Lewis & Simons, 2010): the lowest level at which a language is still considered “safe.” Indeed, as is already attested in many other communities in Papua New Guinea, the rapid expansion of the English-based creole Tok Pisin could be imminent in the Nungon community. Tok Pisin is sometimes used instead of Nungon in Seventh-Day Adventist church sermons and public announcements. In these two domains, Tok Pisin is used despite the fact that all listeners are Nungon speakers. When non-Nungon speakers, or some Nungon speakers long-resident in the diaspora, visit the region, locals speak to them in Tok Pisin. Attitudes toward the Nungon language are mixed. Language has been caught up in a constellation of signs that, for some, indicate that progress has left them behind. The presence of an outside linguist, Sarvasy, who spoke only Nungon during her field research (totaling 10 months in the village since June 2011) may have bolstered awareness of the language and perhaps helped elevate its stature. In late 2016, the authors sponsored a Nungon-language essay contest on the question: Nungon maa iikma ha bureikma? “Will the Nungon language survive or perish?” This contest garnered five entries; the authors of four essays were trained in

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Nungon writing in Yawan Elementary School (see the following section), while the fifth entry came from a Yawan elementary school teacher. Of the five essays, one argued (in Nungon) that the Nungon language is doomed to extinction as a natural result of progress, with everyone in the region eventually switching to English. (In reality, in cases of partial language shift elsewhere in northeast P.N.G., the shift is to Tok Pisin, not English.)

Schools in the Nungon Region There was no tradition of writing in the Nungon region before missionaries began teaching literacy in the Papuan language Kâte, using a modified Latin alphabet, as throughout northeast P.N.G. Kâte is a distantly related language with structural similarities to Nungon, but with extremely few obviously cognate forms. A handful of Nungon speakers attended a Kâte school in the Yau area in the 1960s. Yawan Elementary School, which today includes three grade levels— Prep, E1, and E2—was established in 1998 by a single teacher, Eni Ögate, who attended a six-week teacher training program that year. An elementary school was established in another Nungon village, Worin, the previous year; before that, there had never been a government school serving the Nungon communities. Eni is herself a native speaker of a distinct but related language, Nukna; she married into the Nungon area. In its first year, Yawan Elementary School had 32 students, all entered into the Prep grade. Because there had never been any schools in the area before, this first group of students ranged in age from 6 to over 10. In 1999, Eni was joined in teaching by a Worin man, Refös, who attended teacher training to teach Prep. Eni herself attended training to teach E1 that year. The next year, they added a third local teacher, the late Pegisön Kuso of Towet village, who trained to teach Prep while Refös trained to teach E1 and Eni trained to teach E2. All three teachers are parents themselves, and their own children attended Yawan Elementary School. These teachers remained the Yawan Elementary School’s teachers until Pegisön’s untimely death in 2016. At the time that all three attended trainings, Papua New Guinea still upheld a policy of local mother tongue education for the first three years. In E2, however, some Tok Pisin is introduced to help children transition to primary school. In 2016, Yawan Elementary School enrollment was: Prep, 39; E1, 31; E2, 17. After completing E2, students now enroll in grade 3 at Yawan Primary School (established in 2007) across the local airstrip from Yawan Elementary, which includes grades 3 through 8. At the end of grade 8, students take an exam to obtain a grade 8 diploma. If they are successful, they may matriculate at high schools three or more days’ hike away in arduous conditions from Yawan. High school attendance is expensive, with tuition fees compounded by dormitory expenses. In contrast to Yawan

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Elementary, most Yawan Primary School teachers are from outside the Nungon area and cannot speak Nungon. Apparently, to encourage students to master Tok Pisin and English, speaking Nungon on Yawan Primary grounds is a punishable offense. A national policy shift in 2013 saw the establishment of local English “kindy” programs meant to introduce literacy in English first. These have mixed success, since the teachers often know little English and are unpaid volunteers. Nevertheless, children now attend “kindy” in small groups at age 6 or 7 close to their homes, and thereafter continue into Prep at Yawan Elementary School. Children are generally 11 or 12 by the time they enter grade 3; grade 8 students are generally in their late teens.

Nungon Instructional Writing Practices Eni Ögate originally designed the Yawan Elementary School curriculum in line with the teacher training she underwent in 1998. Beginning in Prep, the Nungon letters are introduced one by one with explanation in Nungon. Introduction of the orthography proceeds using phonics as the guiding principle. Introduction by the teacher is followed by small-group practice and then group presentations to the whole class. (This system is also used later, for learning to write and read whole words.) First, the teacher introduces the letter by writing it on the chalkboard or holding up a piece of construction paper with the letter on it. Whenever possible, the sound indicated by the letter is compared to the sound produced by an animal or an object that the children know from their environment. For instance, the sound [m] is known to the children as the humming vocalization mmm of kanarom, the imperial pigeon (Ducula rufigaster). The sound [n] is the buzzing nnn of a fixed-wing airplane— the only machinery heard in the region semi-regularly. The sound [s] is the vocalization ss sst ss of the bird-of-Paradise species sömun (Huon astrapia, Astrapia rothschildi—found only in the mountains of the Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea). After several letters have been introduced, the children divide into small groups, each assigned a letter. They practice identifying the letter on a sheet of construction paper and making its sound, then work together to come up orally with short Nungon words (two to three sounds long) that include the sound of the new letter. Then they present the letter and its sound to the class and recite the words that use it. Since the children speak three different dialects at home, the dialect of Towet village is used by teachers as the main reference dialect. This was determined partly because the three founding Yawan Elementary teachers were either Towet people (Pegisön) or have marriage or adoption ties to Towet village (Eni and Refös), and partly because speakers of other dialects are said to have acknowledged the Towet dialect as the bestsounding one at the time that Yawan Elementary School was established.

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(Towet has [r], where other dialects have [l]; and [k], where some other dialects have a glottal stop. Both [l] and the glottal stop make these dialects sound similar to baby talk conventions in the region; Sarvasy, 2017a, p. 19.) Unfortunately, the use of the Towet dialect to exemplify sounds often leads to conflict between the child’s native phonology and that used in the classroom. For instance, Towet children are able to produce trilled and flapped [r], as this is the realization of the rhotic/lateral phoneme in their home dialect. Although the Towet dialect lacks minimal pairs contrasting [l] and [r], Towet speakers easily distinguish the two sounds. But children from two other villages, Yawan and Kotet, are familiar only with the lateral realization [l] and have trouble distinguishing between both the sounds [l] and [r] and the corresponding letters. On the other hand, the Towet and Yawan dialects lack a glottal stop as the realization of the phoneme /k/ word finally. Kotet children are instructed that the “correct” spelling of words that end in [k̚ ] in Towet is with , although this is not what they hear in their own speech. The symbol represents the glottal stop in Wegmann’s orthography for Yau (1993), following the tradition established by the Kâte orthography. It would conceivably not take much extra effort for teachers to drill students in the application of this symbol in writing the Kotet dialect. Although the symbol is introduced as representing the glottal stop (referred to as houk or houc, literally “hiccup”), its use is not emphasized in repetition drills. In Eni’s experience, children have difficulties learning to write the letters for sounds that are relatively similar, such as and , and , and and . Purely visual difficulties arise with letters that are similar in form, such as and . Consistent instruction at Yawan Elementary School is challenging. Student attendance is often haphazard; while students from Yawan village walk only a few minutes to school, students from Kotet village walk for roughly 20 minutes along a mountainside, and students from Towet village must hike steeply downhill for about 20 minutes (at a brisk pace, sometimes a run) to the raging Uruwa River, cross a bamboo-and-twine bridge, then hike steeply uphill for another 20 minutes. This is repeated in the afternoon to get home. If the Uruwa bridge is in disrepair, parents hold their children back from school. Second, children are undernourished during the school day: They eat roasted taro or plantains at dawn before hiking to school, then generally do not eat until returning home after school. Third, both infrastructure and parental support for homework are lacking: There is no lighting at home for children to study after dark, and parents expect children of both sexes to assist in afternoon and evening chores, such as gathering edible greens, washing dishes, and caring for smaller children. These challenges mean that children’s early writing instruction in Nungon ends with basic letter identification (simple reading) and production

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(simple writing). Introduction of conventions such as capitalization and punctuation is minimal. This purely skills-focused approach (Ivanič, 2004) does not include discussion of the notions of fiction and non-fiction, genre, or style. It is the teachers’ hopes that these topics are covered at Yawan Primary School. Since instruction there is completely in Tok Pisin or English, children generally do not write free-form stories in Nungon at school at all. Their Nungon writing practice ends with single Nungon descriptive sentences—either equational sentences lacking a verb, or sentences with a single verb (not clause chains). At this point, they are already preparing to enter Yawan Primary School and to “bridge” into Tok Pisin.

Children’s Writing in Nungon Early writing in Nungon is described here based on a collection of 13 writing samples. Eight of these are from grade 3 students at Yawan Primary School, aged about 8–11. It had been one year since these students graduated from Yawan Elementary School, where they first learned to write in Nungon. These students happen to be all native speakers of the Kotet dialect of Nungon. To compare the children’s writing samples with older people’s writing in Nungon, we also analyzed five contributions to a 2016 essay contest on the future of the Nungon language. These were written by two grade 8 students at Yawan Primary School, two uppergrade students at a Primary School outside the Nungon area but who learned to write in Nungon at Yawan Elementary School, and one of the Yawan Elementary School teachers. The grade 3 students were asked to write on a topic of their choice. The Nungon word used in the prompt, hat, translates into English as “story,” but its scope is beyond the genre-specific English “story” and includes “news item” and sometimes indicates just “speech.” The texts range from recounting the escapades of local notables to explaining how women plant crops. The topics the students chose are: a.

Brother Boi. This narrative is unfinished. It describes the community response to a boy’s falling into the flooded river Yat. This is the only text of the group with first person material. The narrative begins by describing the author’s activities at the time of the announcement that a boy was caught up in the river. Nine sentences; 122 words b. A man named Manggirai. Describes the fall of the Kotet elder, Manggirai, from a platform while felling trees. He is carried home from the scene over rough terrain by his wife, a younger female relative, and his 8-year-old granddaughter. The story recounts in detail the circumstances of the fall, the wife’s calling to the other two to help her, the type of vine they bind Manggirai with to transport him, and the

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names of the two minor streams they cross en route to their home. 19 sentences; 195 words c. The orange-footed scrubfowl. A procedural text framed largely in the second person, this tells how to find the prized eggs of the orangefooted scrubfowl (Megapodius reinwardt) beneath its mounds in the forest and to pack them in moss to carry home. This is the only text of the group in which emotions are mentioned: The writer states that, having gathered eggs from one mound, then seeing another mound, “you will be happy.” 18 sentences; 101 words d. Planting crops. A procedural text in the third person, describing the process by which women cultivate earth and plant new crops. Includes details such as the soaking of corn kernels in water before planting and the preparing of taro seedlings. Three sentences; 72 words e. Frogs. An informative text describing frogs in general and the way people collect, cook, and eat them. Given in full translation in Example 10.4 below. Eight sentences; 84 words f. House. A hunting anecdote involving a married couple and their hunting dog. This is the most repetitive of the group, with the man and dog repeatedly chasing down quarries and the woman cooking them. Nine sentences; 104 words g. A man named Peta. Relates the murder of a Kotet man and his dog and the journey of the Kotet community to retrieve his body and bury it in Kotet. It details where the party stopped to rest, where they slept en route, their making of a coffin, and details of the burial. Four sentences; 137 words h. A man named Gomes. Tells how an elderly man went to work in his farm plot, then fell a great distance down the mountainside. His three daughters carried him home. The tale ends with the detail that his face was muddy. Six sentences; 44 words The four samples titled with a specific person’s name are narratives relating memorable events in recent years. It is noteworthy that all of the texts focus on the activities and adventures of adults, with samples (b), (g), and (h) especially centered around the mishaps of elderly men. While (a) surrounds the fall of a boy into a river in flood, the story follows the community response to the emergency rather than the boy himself. In contrast to the “observation/comment” genre noted in Australian children’s writing (Martin & Rose, 2008, p. 2), none of the texts include mention of the feelings, thoughts, or emotions of the child-writer. The non-narrative samples are thematically organized but include snippets of narrative. One of these, sample (e), on frogs, is given in full translation as Example 10.4. For clarity, we have inserted commas between medial clauses within clause chains and periods after clause chains.

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Example 10.4 Nungon grade 3 student writing sample translation.

The frog is a type of small bug, it stays within water. That being the case, bearing dry bamboo torches, going on, picking them up, bringing them, cooking them, dividing them amongst themselves, they cook and eat them. Just like that, another day, going on just like that, picking them up, bringing them, they used to eat them. Just like that, if it were in the dry season, people making the announcement, hearing it, breaking and stashing the bamboo pieces, then at night bearing bamboo torches to look for frogs, picking them up, bringing them, they used to cook and eat them. Just like that, another day, small children going, looking, picking up frogs, bringing them, they cooked and ate them. The frog is a type of small bug, it stays within water. As for it, it doesn’t have teeth, only in its season, it calls out its song. The fourth full sentence of Example 10.4 is given in the original spelling and (lack of) punctuation in the first two lines of Example 10.5. The only spelling mistake present in this excerpt is the use of for for velar nasals everywhere except the third word and the last word. These erroneous instances of are in bold here, followed by a literal translation. Example 10.5 Nungon grade 3 student writing sample excerpt, original.

. . . wogon iyep bongon ina owe amna manaru yona orom sina gop wagana kuna hina dombi urop gop kadona guwot ta dabina yona hena hona nana idung wogon . . . “. . . just like that being in the dry season woman man speech saying understand putting bamboo pounding taking away putting night enough bamboo bearing looking for frog taking them bringing them cooking eating they were just like that . . .” Although Example 10.5 might appear to English tastes as a prime example of a run-on sentence, this is a typical Nungon clause chain. Only the final verb, idung (morphologically it-du-ng “be-rp-2/3pl”), is marked for tense and subject person/number. The twelve other verbs are all medial verbs that lack tense marking; of these, just the first, ina (morphologically i-in-a “be-ds.3sg-mv”), bears subject person/number marking. This text, like the other seven by grade 3 students, includes no punctuation or regular use of capital letters for proper names. The word guwot “frog” is capitalized appropriately in the title of the text, as the first word of the text, and later as the initial word of a new sentence. (Although there is no punctuation marking the end of the preceding sentence, the final verb there makes it clear that it is the end of a clause chain.) Like the other seven children, the author generally uses for both /n/ and /ŋ/, while

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indicates the sequence /ŋg/, with two exceptions. The author also has difficulty including syllable-final unreleased /p/. All writing samples from grade 3 students show mastery of basic aspects of writing, such as the separation of words and appropriate matching of most sounds to written symbols. All students, however, still struggle with some aspects of the Nungon orthography. Only twice in all of the eight samples is the character used; almost everywhere that /ö/ occurs, or are used instead. But since /ö/ is relatively rare, this accords with orthography creator Urs Wegmann’s thinking in choosing to use a diacritic for the least-common vowel in Yau: “If someone writes without any differentiation between /o/ and /ö/, he will still be right in more than 90% of the cases” (1993, p. 12). The students all write grammatical-relation-marking clitics as separate words and complex verbal inflections as single words. Nungon grammatical relations are indicated through six cliticizing postpositions. Although these usually combine in single phonological words with the constituents they mark, they are separable under disfluency or for other reasons. The Habitual aspect combines a Dependent verb form, marked with -ng if the verb root is vowel-final, with the inflected verb it- “be” in a single phonological word. In general, writers, including all of the grade 3 children who use this inflection, write these forms as single words. The Near Future inflection is the only tense inflection in which the tense-related suffixes are more than one syllable. The adult teacher who uses this tense in the sample essay tends to write it as two words, while all of the students write it as a single word. A major challenge for teaching in the context of Papua New Guinea’s unmatched linguistic diversity is dialect differences. These differences should not obstruct teaching of literacy, however. Indeed, the Kotet students often correctly sound out words in their own dialect that differ formally from those in the Towet dialect. For instance, Kotet for “hole” is iim, while Towet for “hole” is eem. Although the students do not indicate the long vowel, they use the correct vowel symbol for their own dialect. One problem for these students, however, is the glottal stop; this reflects a Towet dialect-centric curriculum. None of the Kotet students write glottal stops where they occur in their own dialect. In some instances, they write where their own dialect has a glottal stop, in at least one instance a is used, while in others their awareness of glottal stops is reflected in the absence of any final letter, where Towet has /k/ and Kotet has the glottal stop. Farr (1999) indicated that in the Papuan language Korafe, discourse organized “tense-iconically,” i.e. discourse in which trajectories of events were described tended to take the form of clause chains. In contrast, “thematically organized” discourse was less likely to comprise extended clause chains. Sarvasy (2017a) corroborated this observation for adult Nungon based on an adult oral narratives corpus (transcribed from recordings made in 2011–2013).

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Indeed, comparison of the teen and adult essay contest entries with those of the grade 3 students would seem to confirm that sentence length and type relate to discourse organization. In none of the essays is there a clause chain with more than six medial verbs. A sample from a current grade 8 student at Yawan Primary School is in Example 10.6. The first sentence here is a clause chain of three clauses; all punctuation in the Nungon given is from the original hand-written essay. In the English translation, commas have been inserted after topics and between medial clauses for clarity: Example 10.6 Nungon grade 8 essay writing sample excerpt.

Torokno Japen hu China ho yoniwin maa dek bapia bögin ongonga manomano au ambarak yoniwin maa dek gon tuya imbange hongoritak. Worokai nok wogondon toktok ka orom hitat. “For example Japan or China, going to school in their own languages, they doing all various subjects in their own languages, it comes out wonderful. For that reason, I believe in doing something like that.” In thematically organized discourse such as that used in Example 10.6, there are few sequences of more than four consecutive events or actions. In the first sentence in Example 10.6, these are: a) going to school, b) studying, and c) it turning out wonderfully. Thus, thematic discourse is distinguished from tense-iconic discourse in sentence structure. Most of the essays’ written sentences are still much longer than a typical English sentence. But this is due to internally complex medial clauses like “they doing all various subjects in their own languages” in Example 10.6, not due to stacking of multiple one-verb medial clauses as in Example 10.5. The need to persuade the reader through argumentation in these essays also means there are more singleton final clauses as sentences, introduced by discourse-organizing expressions such as worok=ka-i “for that reason” in Example 10.6. Content-wise, the Nungon grade 3 children’s texts span three genres identified by Martin and Rose (2008) and others: recounts, reports, and procedures. But despite their different genre content, these texts are formally of a piece; all are largely framed in long clause chains. The Nungon discourse genre that obliges the writer to use shorter sentences seems to be the position statement, in which the writer lays out a number of points to support a claim. Since these points are not related to each other as sequences of actions, they are presented as individual final clauses joined by discourse-organizing expressions, not as medial clauses within clause chains. Beyond content-based genres, then, type of discourse organization (tense-iconic versus thematic) seems to be a powerful factor in the structure, and even sentence-level syntax, of Nungon texts.

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Next Steps in Nungon Writing Instruction Apart from identification of student difficulties with specific letters and words, then, a major result of examination of Nungon grade 3 writing samples is identification of the need for further Nungon grammatical awareness on the part of Yawan Elementary and Primary teachers. The vast majority of verb forms used in the grade 3 samples are medial, not final. As seen in Examples 2 and 3, and the translations in Example 4 and 5, these forms are unlike regular English verbs in being unspecified for tense or mood, and often person and number. They are best translated using the English gerund with -ing. There are no established punctuation conventions in written Nungon for clause chain structures. Writing commas, for instance, after every medial clause, and a period after a final clause, would be logical conventions to instate. The samples examined here suggest that genre, as described by Martin and Rose (2008) and others, may be less relevant to the Nungon and possibly greater Papuan context than the major distinction between tenseiconic and thematic discourse organization. The writing samples here show that content that aligns with differing genres in Martin and Rose’s framework is framed with the same Nungon syntactic devices (long clause chains), in contrast to position statements (shorter, more internally complex sentences). With this knowledge, the next step for Yawan Elementary teachers will be to provide students with writing prompts that push them to vary their style, introducing both narratives and position statements, in which they must state their values, opinions, or beliefs, and justify these. Although there is no definitive cross-linguistic analysis of clause chains (Haspelmath, 1995), these forms are widely attested; similar structures have been described for Turkish, Mongolian, Japanese, all Tibeto-Burman languages (Delancey, 1991), some Amazonian and North American languages, and some East and West African languages (e.g. Amha, 2010), as well as hundreds of other Papuan languages (Foley, 1986, Roberts, 1997). It remains to be seen whether the overarching distinction between two discourse organization styles gleaned from Nungon texts will be valuable for early writing in other clause chaining languages.

Abbreviations = 1,2, 3 DEP DS DU LOC MV

clitic boundary, or single phonological word first, second, third person dependent different-subject dual locative medial verb

200 NP NSG POSS PL PRES SG

Hannah Sarvasy and Eni Ögate near past non-singular possessive plural present singular

Note 1. Question words, especially “what,” are common ways for speakers to refer to languages or dialects in P.N.G. See McElhanon (1974) on similar names for dialects of Kâte.

References Amha, A. (2010). The converb in Wolaitta: Form and functions. In S. Völlmin, A. Amha, C. Rapold, & S. Zaugg-Coretti (Eds.), Converbs, medial verbs, clause chains, and related issues (pp. 139–155). Frankfurt, Germany: Frankfurter Afrikanistische Blätter 19. Delancey, S. (1991). The origins of verb serialization in Modern Tibetan. Studies in Language, 15(1), 1–23. de Vries, L. J. (2005). Towards a typology of tail-head linkage in Papuan languages. Studies in Language, 29(2), 363–384. Farr, C. (1999). The interface between syntax and discourse in Korafe, a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea. Canberra, Australia: Pacific Linguistics. Foley, W. (1986). Papuan languages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Haiman, J., & Munro, P. (Eds.). (1983). Switch reference and universal grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harding, T. G. (1967). Voyagers of the Vitiaz Strait: A study of a New Guinea trade system. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Haspelmath, M. (1995). The converb as a cross-linguistically valid category. In M. Haspelmath & E. König (Eds.), Converbs in cross-linguistic perspective: Structure and meaning of adverbial verb forms: Adverbial participles, gerunds (pp. 1–55). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ivanič, R. (2004). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education, 18(3), 220–245. Lewis, M. P., & Simons, G. F. (2010). Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS. Revue roumaine de linguistique, 55(2), 103–120. Longacre, R. E. (1985). Sentences as combinations of clauses. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, Volume II: Complex constructions (pp. 235–286). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McElhanon, K. A. (1974). The glottal stop in Kate. Kivung: Journal of the Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea, 7, 16–22. Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre relations: Mapping culture. London: Equinox. Roberts, J. (1997). Switch-reference in Papua New Guinea: A preliminary survey. In A. Pawley (Ed.), Papers in Papuan Linguistics, 3, pp. 101–241. Canberra, Australia: Pacific Linguistics.

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Sarvasy, H. (2013). Across the great divide: How birth-order terms scaled the Saruwaged Mountains in Papua New Guinea. Anthropological Linguistics, 55(3), 234–255. Sarvasy, H. (2014a). A grammar of Nungon, a Papuan language of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea (PhD dissertation). Cairns: James Cook University. Sarvasy, H. (2014b). Non-spatial setting in Nungon. In H. Sarvasy (Ed.), Nonspatial setting in Finisterre-Huon languages. Special issue of Language Typology and Universals: Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, 67(3), 395–432. Sarvasy, H. (2014c). Across the great divide: How birth-order terms scaled the Saruwaged Mountains in Papua New Guinea. Anthropological Linguistics, 55(3), 234–255. Sarvasy, H. (2015a). Breaking the clause chains: Non-canonical medial clauses in Nungon. Studies in Language, 39(3), 664–696. Sarvasy, H. (2015b). The imperative split and the origin of switch-reference marking in Nungon. In A. Jurgensen et al. (Eds.). Berkeley Linguistic Society 41 Proceedings. Berkeley, CA. Sarvasy, H. (2016). Sexless babies, sexed grandparents: Nungon gendered person terms. International Journal of Language and Culture, 3(1), 115–136. Sarvasy, H. (2017a). A grammar of Nungon: A Papuan language of Northeast New Guinea. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Sarvasy, H. (2017b). Imperatives and commands in Nungon. In A. Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (Eds.), Commands (p. 9). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Sarvasy, H. (2017c). Quantification in Nungon. In E. Keenan & D. Paperno (Eds.), Handbook of quantification in natural language (Vol. 2). New York: Springer. Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2017). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (20th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. Retrieved from www.ethnologue.com Wegmann, U. (1993). Orthography paper: Yau language. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Wegmann, U., & Wegmann, J. (1994). Yau anthropology background sketch. Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: Summer Institute of Linguistics.

11 Mother Tongue Instruction and Biliteracy Development in P’urhepecha in Central Mexico Kate Bellamy and Cynthia Groff

Introduction P’urhepecha (previously known as Tarascan)1 is spoken by around 125,000 mostly bilingual people in four regions of the central highlands of Michoacán, Mexico (INEGI, 2010). This figure may suggest that P’urhepecha is quite vital, but the reality is that fewer and fewer children are learning the language at home (Chamoreau, 2000, p. 14); therefore it is potentially only a few generations away from grave endangerment. Economic circumstances have contributed to rapid language loss. In search of work, many P’urhepecha speakers have emigrated abroad, changing language use patterns and rupturing the transmission of the Indigenous language from parent to child. Within this context of emerging language shift, our chapter presents positive examples of educational initiatives that have promoted literacy development in P’urhepecha and provides a preliminary analysis of writing samples by P’urhepecha pupils attending bilingual primary schools. To survive under pressure from changing socio-economic circumstances and a dominant national language, it is important for the minority language to feature prominently in the education system (Baker, 2011; Cummins, 2000; Fishman, 1991). In the case of P’urhepecha, children need to be schooled in their language as well as in Spanish, and to see the value in learning to read and write both languages. Despite the introduction of a compulsory eight-year program of bilingual and bicultural primary education across Mexico in the 1970s, and the concomitant founding of the Dirección General de Educación Indígena (DGEI, Directorate General of Indigenous Education), Spanish remains the language of instruction at all levels. Only a few hours a week are devoted to the Indigenous language at most primary schools, and no provision is made for such lessons in secondary school. However, two rural primary schools in Michoacán have shifted to P’urhepecha-medium instruction in an encouraging but rare example of Indigenous language promotion in an educational context (Hamel, 2008, 2009; Hamel & Francis, 2006). As part of our ongoing analysis of biliteracy development through mother tongue instruction, we present here an evaluation of P’urhepecha

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writing samples penned by four P’urhepecha-dominant pupils at the end of fourth grade, who had been instructed to retell the P’urhepecha story Tukuru “Owl.” We focus on how the texts are written in terms of narrative style, morphological complexity, and orthographic accuracy. Our analysis highlights how the P’urhepecha children can represent their own contemporary version of the language, including some (mostly lexical) elements from Spanish, in a grammatically and stylistically appropriate way. The following section provides the theoretical background to biliteracy development in Indigenous education that motivates our analysis, focusing on the value of gaining initial literacy skills in one’s own native language and on contesting established linguistic hierarchies in educational contexts.

Biliteracy Development in Indigenous Education Much has been said about the importance of educating children first in their native language, thus facilitating cognitive development and the acquisition of competence in other domains, not just language (Baker, 2011; Carlisle & Beeman, 2000; Cummins, 2000; García, 2011; Thomas & Collier, 2003). Education in the native language or mother tongue is particularly important for linguistic minorities whose home language is undervalued, or in some cases not even recognized, by the dominant society around them. For Indigenous communities attempting to preserve or revitalize their language, emphasis should be given to developing literacy skills in both the native, minority language, and the language of the dominant society. Previous research in the Mexican context, including at the schools featured in this chapter, has demonstrated that pupils who receive literacy instruction in their mother tongue or strongest language, whether that be an Indigenous language or Spanish, achieve superior writing skills in both languages (Hamel, 2008). Such findings suggest a common underlying language proficiency in multilinguals that supports the transfer of literacy skills from one language to another (Cummins, 1980; Hamel & Francis, 2006). In further exploring the connections between first and second language literacy, we make use of the continua of biliteracy framework, which brings together key research on literacy and multilingualism, emphasizing the interconnectedness among various aspects of biliteracy contexts, development, content, and media (Hornberger, 1989; Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000; see Table 11.1). Biliteracy refers to “any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in or around writing” (Hornberger, 1990, p. 2). Of particular interest here is the interconnection among the various skills in the development of biliteracy, whether first language or second language, oral or written, receptive or productive. Although the opposite ends of the continua may appear to be dichotomous and finite, the notion of continua emphasizes

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Table 11.1 The Continua of Biliteracy (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000) Traditionally less powerful

Micro Oral Bi(multi)lingual

Reception Oral L1 Minority Vernacular Contextualized Simultaneous exposure Dissimilar structures Divergent scripts

Traditionally more powerful Context of biliteracy

Development of biliteracy

Content of biliteracy

Media of biliteracy



Macro Literate Monolingual

Production Written L2 Majority Literary Decontextualized Successive exposure Similar structures Convergent scripts

a more nuanced and dynamic perspective. Indeed the framework draws attention to what these aspects of biliteracy have in common; e.g., the interrelatedness between first and second language skills. It also recommends the promotion of the traditionally undervalued aspects of biliteracy, giving attention, for example, to the first language of linguistic minorities, to oral skills as well as written, and to receptive as well as productive language skills. By providing a space for P’urhepecha literacy, the projects described in this chapter have contested established linguistic hierarchies, the historical contexts of which are described in the following section.

History of the P’urhepecha The beginning of a distinguishable P’urhepecha cultural tradition can be traced to the north and central zones of Michoacán in the Late Preclassic period (400 BCE–150 CE; Pollard, 2015, p. 93). In the subsequent period (150–900 CE), a major cultural transformation occurred under influence from central Mexico, leading to greater urbanization. As well as regional interaction, facilitated along the Balsas-Tepelcatepec and Santiago-Lerma Rivers, there may also have been long-distance contact with Andean and coastal peoples of Peru and Ecuador, perhaps mediated by metallurgy (Hosler, 1994). The formation of the Tarascan State began around 1000 CE as a number of competing small state societies emerged in Michoacán. Through warfare and strategic marriage alliances, the Wakúsecha “eagle warriors”

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emerged as the most dominant lineage in the region, fully consolidating their power under Lord Taríacuri (c. 1380–1420 CE), the first cazonci “chief” (Roskamp, 2016), thereby founding the Tarascan State. Through a rapid process of cultural assimilation and political unification, the different groups in the region converged on a Tarascan ethnicity and sociopolitical system, which included use of the Tarascan language and centralized autocratic rule (Gorenstein & Pollard, 1983). By the mid1400s, the Tarascans were the most formidable enemy of the Aztecs, being the only population to resist them militarily. The Tarascan State was successfully invaded by the Spanish in 1523, with Indigenous towns distributed among the colonizers as encomiendas. Spanish rule revolved around the exploitation of these encomiendas and other natural resources (e.g., mines) and the introduction of foreign sociopolitical structures (Warren, 1985). A continued struggle between the Tarascans and the Spanish ended abruptly on February 14, 1530, when the last cazonci was executed. In the first two decades after the conquest, Michoacán, along with the rest of Mexico, saw a huge depopulation due to disease and forced resettlement. The Tarascan population was reduced by half in the first 30 years of Spanish occupation, with many survivors taking refuge deep in the Sierra (West, 1948, p. 12). Integrated into the Spanish colony, the former Tarascan State experienced profound sociopolitical and cultural transformations. One of the most obvious changes was linguistic; with the arrival of the Spaniards came the Spanish language, which quickly led to a situation of bilingualism and an eventual shift away from P’urhepecha for many people. The newly founded village structures were not delineated according to precolonial boundaries, leading to land disputes between some P’urhepecha communities. These disputes were compounded by a number of subsequent land reform acts, which persist to this day in some cases (Roskamp, 2015). Moreover, the rise of drug cartels in the region has compounded land disputes and increased violence across the state. For example, disillusioned by the lack of governmental support to combat various local issues, the P’urhepecha town of Cherán declared independence from the state in 2010, setting up its own local council to govern according to the community’s priorities (Roth Seneff, 2015). Indeed, the past 40 years have seen the development of a clearer, more unified P’urhepecha identity, manifested in, for example, the inauguration of a flag representing the four regions, an anthem, and the motto juchari winapikwa, “our strength.”

Language Structure A language isolate, P’urhepecha is characterized by its agglutinating structure and reliance on suffixation as a principal means of word formation. Four major dialect zones can be identified among the 110 P’urhepecha villages on the basis of linguistic, geographic, cultural, and

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social features: Meseta or Sierra, Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Cañada de los 11 Pueblos, and Zacapu (Chamoreau, 2005). The variety represented in these samples is from the Meseta. P’urhepecha’s strongly agglutinative nature enables the formation of morphologically complex words entirely through suffixation. The core element of any word is the root, which can be either mono- or disyllabic. To this root can be added a sequence of suffixes, depending on the word class and meanings to be expressed. Most roots can also be reduplicated, yielding additional meanings of, for example, intensity, repetition, or multiple distribution in time and place (Friedrich, 1984, p. 66). Two main types of nouns can be identified: fused and derived. Fused nouns comprise a root and suffix that are now inseparable (e.g., tsa=ki “lizard”), while derived nouns add a nominalizing suffix (usually -kwa) to a root (e.g., pire-kwa “song,” from the root pire- “to sing”). Irrespective of their formation method, nouns are pluralized with the suffix -echa/icha. There are seven cases in P’urhepecha: nominative, objective, genitive, instrumental, comitative, locative, and residential (Chamoreau, 2003). The personal pronoun system is a standard six-way system, three singular and three plural, with the demonstratives ima and ts’ïma drafted in to function as third person singular and plural pronouns, respectively. P’urhepecha possesses a base 20 counting system, but it has largely been replaced by its Spanish counterpart. The numeral ma “one” can also function as an indefinite article. There is no definite article. Verbal morphology in P’urhepecha is remarkably elaborate, enabling the speaker to express combinations of location, direction, causative, voice/ valency, mood, desiderative, adverbials, third person plural object, aspect, tense, irrealis, mood, and subject/object person and number through the combination of suffixes, strictly in this order (Chamoreau, in press b). Words can contain up to seven suffixes, but most are somewhat shorter (Friedrich, 1984, p. 65). Members of the same category cannot co-occur, except for certain combinations of locative suffixes in the second slot. In the tense-aspect-mood domain, only mood is obligatory in a finite verb. At the clausal level, word order is generally subject-verb-object (SVO), although historically it was more strictly SOV. The shift away from verbfinal order is likely due to contact first with neighboring Nahuatl (UtoAztecan) and Otomí (Otomanguean), and later with Spanish (Chamoreau, 2007). Coordinate clauses are linked with ka “and.” In certain narrative styles, ka is ubiquitous, linking chain-medial clauses whose verbs take non-finite morphology as the subject has already been established (Chamoreau, 2016; see Section 8).

Revitalization Efforts P’urhepecha has been spoken in Michoacán since well before colonization, but was not a written language at that time. Franciscan missionaries

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encouraged literacy in P’urhepecha during the 16th century, but widespread literacy in the language was never established (Hamel, 2008, p. 313). Colonial education policies focused primarily on forcibly assimilating Indigenous peoples, both culturally and linguistically, through the direct imposition of Spanish in all grades in school (Hamel, 2013, p. 1). A second strategy comprised slow transition to Spanish and a very small number of language maintenance programs, but these were very much the exception, as described below. Consequently, the Tarascan Project, initiated in 1939, represented a long-awaited shift to native language-medium education for P’urhepecha speakers. The project fostered literacy and language maintenance by teaching reading and writing in P’urhepecha, acting also as a bridge to Spanish literacy. Before launching the project, a combined team of Mexican and U.S. linguists and anthropologists devised a suitable, streamlined alphabet for P’urhepecha, as well as a set of primers for pedagogical purposes. P’urhepecha literacy classes were taught by 20 specially selected and trained native speakers. In Paracho, where the project was established, the project team produced additional materials, including instructional pamphlets regarding health and sanitation. Posters presenting the alphabet and contrasting segments were also displayed in village squares for consultation outside of class (Figure 11.1). The project ran for just

Figure 11.1 Example of Tarascan Project teaching material: a mural newspaper bearing the title kerénda ȼiȼʌki “crag flower.” A younger man, probably a teacher, stands by as members of the community read local and national news. Source: Frances L. (Swadesh) Quintana, 1939/1940

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over a year, from 1939–1941, and was reported as being immensely successful. Following its methodologically advanced, linguistic theory-based approach, previously illiterate individuals learned to read and write in 30 to 45 days (Barrera-Vásquez, 1953, p. 83). The project ended abruptly in 1941 due to the withdrawal of all funding. After the Tarascan Project ended, literacy in P’urhepecha advanced little, even with the introduction of bilingual and bicultural education in primary schools across Mexico in the 1970s and the later establishment of intercultural bilingual education (educación intercultural bilingüe, EIB) in the 1990s (Hamel, 2008). EIB is intended to integrate “content matters and competencies from Indigenous funds of knowledge, as well as from national programs, [and] should be integrated in a culturally and pedagogically appropriate curriculum” (Hamel, 2013, p. 1–2). In contrast to earlier Spanish-centered programs, EIB should enable children to know and appropriate their own culture in their own language so that they can form sound competencies, values, and ethnic identity (see also López, 2009). Unfortunately, the reality of EIB is not as positive as its aims suggest. The vast majority of P’urhepecha-speaking children are not schooled in their native language first, or at all. Instead, they continue to work through a system of “Castillanization,” with Spanish as the vehicle for literacy and content instruction for all subjects. Government-run primary schools often provide a mere two hours a week of instruction in P’urhepecha, focusing only on language acquisition, albeit using P’urhepecha-medium materials in the form of workbooks and storybooks. Revitalization efforts also exist in tertiary-level education institutions. The Instituto Tecnológico Superior P’urhepecha offers P’urhepecha language courses, while the Universidad Indígena Intercultural de Michoacán offers a number of Bachelor-level programs designed primarily for Indigenous pupils, notably the Licenciatura in Language and Intercultural Communication. The Universidad Michoacana in Morelia also offers P’urhepecha language classes. The first Diplomado in P’urhepecha language was run by the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS, Mexico City) in Santa Fe de la Laguna in July 2016, stimulating additional courses in legal translation and P’urhepecha syntax. The main online community portal is hosted atwww.purepecha.mx, which also includes a P’urhépecha-Spanish dictionary; Radio Xiranhua; and information regarding language, culture, and local initiatives and events (largely in Spanish). Local radio stations, such as Radio Juchári Uinápekua in Santa Fe de la Laguna, are also promoting the language to a wide audience. The revitalization efforts mentioned here, however, clearly do not constitute an exhaustive list. We focus in the following section on a specific effort to both promote mother tongue education and strengthen the language.

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Language Maintenance in a School Context A unique educational initiative has been developing in two government primary schools in the neighboring towns of San Isidro and Uringuitiro, high in the Meseta P’urhepecha of western Michoacán. A group of committed P’urhepecha teachers were dissatisfied with the lack of attention to the P’urhepecha language under the national Intercultural Bilingual Education (EIB) program, and so began to develop a mother-tonguebased bilingual education program in the early 1990s. The national provisions for Indigenous education mentioned above open up a space for the P’urhepecha language in government schools, but do not provide for comprehensive literacy development in the mother tongue for those children who are primarily speakers of P’urhepecha. The new endeavor required awareness raising in the community, decisions about an appropriate alphabet, and ongoing development of their own materials and curriculum (Hamel, 2008, 2009; Hamel & Francis, 2006). The P’urhepecha educators have continued to improve the program over the last two decades, with support from researchers and experts through the Comunidad Indígena y Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (CIEIB) program, directed by R. Enrique Hamel. The curriculum that the schools are developing attempts to balance external educational demands with the maintenance of P’urhepecha language and culture, emphasizing P’urhepecha-medium instruction. In summarizing the schools’ achievements, Hamel (2008, p. 320) writes that “[d]ifferent from most Indigenous schools in Mexico, P’urhepecha has become the legitimate, unmarked language of all interaction at school, a sociolinguistic achievement still quite exceptional in Indigenous education.” In San Isidro and Uringuitiro, P’urhepecha remains the primary home language. Although in some cases Spanish is entering the home domain through marriages and returned migration, as well as through media and communication, the majority of the pupils start school with very little functional knowledge of Spanish. This is also true for many children in other P’urhepecha-dominant villages who must attend Spanish-medium public primary schools. Thus, the schools in San Isidro and Uringuitiro focus on three important objectives for the bilingual program: (i) supporting pupil content learning through the use of their mother tongue, (ii) supporting pupils in learning Spanish as a second language, and (iii) developing and revitalizing P’urhepecha language and culture. Although often conceived of separately, in this instance the pedagogical and language learning objectives actually coincide with and mutually reinforce the preservation and revitalization objectives in these schools (Hamel & Francis, 2006).

Instructional Writing Practices Writing in the P’urhepecha language forms an integral part of the educational program at these two primary schools. A number of alphabets

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still exist for P’urhepecha, leading to difficulties in carrying out unified literacy initiatives. The educators in San Isidro and Uringuitiro have developed a pedagogical alphabet appropriate for literacy instruction and employ a contrastive method to introduce letters in Spanish that do not exist in P’urhepecha (Hamel & Ibáñez Caselli, 2000), a method reminiscent of the Tarascan Project. As the principal medium of instruction and the “legitimate, unmarked language of all interaction” at the schools (Hamel, 2008), P’urhepecha is naturally used for note taking, learning exercises, and writing assignments throughout the primary school years. According to the overall plan for bilingual instruction at the two schools, grades 1 and 2 emphasize literacy development in P’urhepecha, with introduction to oral Spanish. By grade 3, pupils should be able to read and write in P’urhepecha, after which they learn to read and write in Spanish. The teaching of Spanish follows the principles of content and language integrated learning (CLIL), with selected content instruction in Spanish forming the basis for teaching Spanish as a second language (see Coyle, 2007; Hall Haley & Austin, 2004; Richards & Rodgers, 2001). Classroom observations by the second author of this chapter, including in grade 4 classes, confirmed that P’urhepecha was the primary language for both speaking and writing. Although the program plans for one hour of Spanish-medium instruction per day, P’urhepecha is by far the most frequently used language for communication in the classroom, even when Spanish textbooks are being used. Lessons are usually followed by writing assignments, whether pupils are copying notes, providing example sentences, describing the results of an experiment, or retelling stories from home. When pupils finish an assignment, they bring their notebooks to the teacher for verification and feedback. Building from the requirements of the Mexican education system, the schools have developed a curriculum that is divided into the five school terms and that integrates concepts and vocabulary from the L1 (P’urhepecha) and the L2 (Spanish). Thus, the development of language skills, including writing, is incorporated into the content learning. By grade 5, writing is listed as an important learning goal in the various subject areas, and by grade 6, pupils are expected to be able to write opinions and arguments, as well as informative and descriptive texts in both languages. Observers conducting research at the schools through CIEIB were impressed by the writing abilities of pupils in both languages by the end of grade 3 (ages 8–10). Also significant in the assessment of language skills at the two schools is the clearly parallel development of reading and writing skills in the two languages (Hamel, 2009). One of the primary research goals of CIEIB in the current phase of the project is to explore the process of acquiring and developing P’urhepecha and Spanish literacy skills in the context of primary education. The P’urhepecha writing we analyze in the following section formed part of an assessment

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administered to all pupils at the two schools in 2013, including components for both Spanish and P’urhepecha written expression.

Development of Pupils’ Writing The four writing samples under analysis were written by four pupils completing fourth grade, whose first language is P’urhepecha and whose Spanish proficiency was quite low at the time of assessment. The pupils were selected based on their representative performance in the assessment and on the availability of later writing samples, which form part of our ongoing analysis of biliteracy development. They were asked to re-write a story that had been read to them entitled Tukuru “Owl,” with emphasis placed on their ability to articulate the key points in the story. The global scores given by teachers on the selected essays ranged from 3 to 6 out of 10, indicating that there were fragments of narrativecapturing elements of the story, though the stories lack a full story line. The same assessment was administered to pupils at all grade levels, so a sixth-grade pupil would be expected to score higher, for example, than a fourth-grade pupil. Thus, the mid-range scores achieved by the fourthgrade pupils were not unexpected. An example of one of these samples is presented in Figure 11.2. The writing samples range from 15 to 40 lines of text on the test paper, with the original story comprising 12 sentences (around 620 words).

Figure 11.2 Extract of a writing sample from the P’urhepecha-medium Miguel Hidalgo primary school, San Isidro, Michoacán.

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The writing samples were analyzed with attention to morphological complexity, narrative style, and orthographic accuracy. Our goal in this initial analysis was to identify features of pupil writing that suggest biliteracy development and that could be compared across time and across languages. One of the salient features in all four essays was the frequent use of a very typical P’urhepecha discourse structure. This narrative style relies heavily on the coordinator ka “and,” as well as non-finite verbs ending in -ni, usually after the main actor of a sentence has been introduced (Chamoreau, 2016). See Example 11.1, where these features are underlined. Example 11.1 Analysis of “And the owl could not speak”.

ka tukuru no uxe-ni and owl NEG can-NF “and the owl could not speak, and . . . ”

uanda-ni speak-NF

ka and

Pupils also use Spanish connectors such as komu (como) “like,” pari/para “for, in order to,” and porka (porque) “because,” as in Example 11.2. This is a common feature of spoken P’urhepecha (Chamoreau, 2007) and is also found in other Indigenous languages that are in contact with Spanish, such as Otomí, also spoken in Mexico, as the coordinators sit in prominent positions outside of the clause and are therefore easily replaced with loanwords (Bakker & Hekking, 2012). Example 11.2 Analysis of “And because the owl did it harm”.

ka porka tukuru no sesi jasï uka-s-p-ti and because owl NEG well type do-AOR-PST-3S.ASS “And because the owl did it harm” (lit. “did not do it well”). P’urhepecha verbs can be fairly complex (see section above on language structure), but the pupils have clearly mastered them by grade 4. The verbs in the writing samples generally include up to three suffixes, including aspect (usually in the form of the aorist), tense (past, as this is the only one that is marked), and mood/person, as in Example 11.3. Example 11.3 Analysis of “S/he said”.

arhi-s-p-ti say-AOR-PST-3.ASS “s/he said” Despite being immersed in their native language, with low proficiency in Spanish, the impact of the national language is still observable in the writing samples. While no Spanish loanwords were used in the original essay that was read to the pupils, several Spanish loanwords appear in

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the pupil essays, fully integrated into P’urhepecha morphology. The noun pajarito “little bird” and the verb buscar “to look for” are evident in Examples 11.4a-b. Example 11.4 Analysis of “The people and those birds one by one . . . And that he is looking for (them) the birds”.

a.

kwiripu-echa ka ima=ksi pajaritu-cha person-PL and DEM=3PL bird.DIM-PL “The people and those birds one by one . . . ”

b.

y que busqi-ti=ksɨ and that look.for-3.ASS=3PL “And that he is looking for (them) the birds.”

mantini=ksi by.one=3PL pajaritu-cha bird.DIM-PL

Various orthographic inconsistencies can be identified in the writing samples, such as in the name of the story itself, which is spelled as tukuru, tukurhu, and tuk’urhu, but this is to be expected for various reasons. First, the pupils are still quite young; therefore, one should not expect complete consistency. A low emphasis on orthographic conventions is a currently accepted pedagogical strategy and is not to be censured. Second, given the relatively recent development of written materials in the language, standards are still being developed, and consistency among materials from different sources is yet to be achieved. Third, it can be difficult to distinguish between the aspirated and non-aspirated stops, and also between the tap and retroflex rhotic (/rh/) in everyday speech. However, one does see a certain amount of consistency in the way the language is represented orthographically. The use of /b d g/ for /p t k/ after a nasal phoneme reflects the voicing that occurs in speech, and /l/ for /ɽ/ reflects a regional pronunciation of this phoneme. In sum, these examples show that the children can represent their own contemporary version of the language, which includes some elements from Spanish, in a grammatically appropriate way. More importantly, these essays represent the opportunity that pupils have to demonstrate their skills in written P’urhepecha in a legitimized educational context. Rather than pinpointing a specific method for writing instruction, we emphasize here the legitimate, unmarked use of a minority language in all aspects of these pupils’ primary education. This extensive space for P’urhepecha and for a P’urhepecha discourse style reflects the broader valuing of P’urhepecha cultural norms evident in the two schools, where their language is given as much, if not more, value than the dominant national language. The development of writing skills in a minority language is clearly influenced by contextual factors, and by the content and the media through which biliteracy is being developed. Like the other chapters in this volume, we focus at a micro level on pupil writing samples within

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a classroom and school environment that supports minority language development, even if the more macro level (i.e. national, government) context is unsupportive. In such contexts of biliteracy, the traditionally less powerful orality and bilingualism (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000; see Table 11.1) are given value. The content of biliteracy in the case of the San Isidro and Uringuitiro schools is consciously minority and contextualized. Although the school remains tied to decontextualized, majority curriculum requirements, the development of a P’urhepecha curriculum based on traditional P’urhepecha values and discourse styles has been an ongoing priority. The media of biliteracy in this case emphasizes a gradual introduction of Spanish, which is structurally dissimilar from P’urhepecha and has a somewhat divergent orthography. In terms of the development of biliteracy, we expect that the receptive and productive skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing will be interconnected, especially in a context where these skills are nurtured in both the L1 and the L2. This preliminary analysis shows features of an oral narrative style incorporated into a formal writing assignment and L2 features incorporated into well-structured (“grammatically correct”) L1 sentences.

Promising Directions for Future Revitalization Efforts Much remains to be learned regarding the interrelated development of literacy skills in multiple languages. The analysis presented here forms part of an ongoing exploration of biliteracy development, including analysis of written and oral samples, in both P’urhepecha and Spanish across time and grade levels. Such investigations will also shed light on the language acquisition process and can help to feed back into refining teaching methods. Clearly the transfer of literacy skills is also relevant to contexts in which pupils are (re-)learning an Indigenous language, and have stronger skills in the dominant national language, which is the case for some P’urhepecha children. In some parts of rural Michoacán, P’urhepecha is still fortunate to be in a language maintenance situation, with its associated intergenerational transmission of the language. However, the risk of language shift in the coming generations is great. The use of P’urhepecha as medium of instruction in primary schools is a much needed, longer-term solution to the current low levels of P’urhepecha literacy transmission across the region. The schools in San Isidro and Uringuitiro provide an example of best practice in mother tongue instruction that can be emulated by other schools in Michoacán as well as further afield. These schools provide for the educational needs of P’urhepecha-dominant pupils, and also promote P’urhepecha language and culture in a valued educational context. However, for children to develop full biliteracy skills, the less valued aspects of biliteracy require promotion. This entails continuous support for and development of proficiency in minority languages such as P’urhepecha

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in the spaces where they have been undervalued, including onward into secondary and higher education.

Note 1. P’urhepecha can also be found spelled as Purepecha, Purépecha, P’urhépecha, and P’orhépecha, amongst others. The term ‘Tarascan’ was used to refer to the language in earlier studies but now is generally used only to refer to the precolonial population, as in the Tarascan State.

References Baker, C. (2011). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (Vol. 79). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bakker, D., & Hekking, E. (2012). Clause combining in Otomi before and after contact with Spanish. Linguistic Discovery, 10(1), 42–61. Barrera-Vásquez, A. (1953). The Tarascan Project in Mexico. In UNESCO (Ed.), The use of vernacular languages in education (pp. 77–86). Paris: UNESCO. Carlisle, J. F., & Beeman, M. M. (2000) The effects of language of instruction on the reading and writing achievement of first-grade Hispanic children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 4(4), 331–353.Chamoreau, C. (2000). Grammaire du purépecha: parlé sur les îles du lac de Patzcuaro (LINCOM Studies in Native American Linguistics, 34). Munich: LINCOM EUROPA. Chamoreau, C. (2003). Parlons Purepecha: Une langue du Mexique. Paris: L’Harmattan. Chamoreau, C. (2005). Dialectología y dinámica: reflexiones a partir del purépecha. Trace, 47, 61–81. Chamoreau, C. (2007). Purepecha. In Y. Matras & J. Sakel (Eds.), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 465–480). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Chamoreau, C. (2016). Non-finite chain-medial clauses on the continuum of finiteness in Purepecha. In C. Chamoreau & Z. Estrada-Fernández (Eds.), Finiteness and nominalization (pp. 83–104). Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chamoreau, C. (in press a). Purepecha: A polysynthetic but predominantly dependent-marking language. In M. Fortescue, M. Mithun, & N. Evans (Eds.), Handbook of polysynthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chamoreau, C. (in press b). Purepecha: A non-Mesoamerican language in Mesoamerica. In S. Wichmann (Ed.), The languages of Middle America: A comprehensive guide. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Coyle, D. (2007). Content and language integrated learning: Towards a connected research agenda for CLIL pedagogies. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10(5), 543–562. Cummins, J. (1980). The construct of language proficiency in bilingual education. In J. E. Alatis (Ed.), Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics (pp. 88–110). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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Friedrich, P. (1984). Tarascan: From meaning to sound. In M. S. Edmonson (Ed.), Supplement to the handbook of Middle American Indians, volume 2: Linguistics (pp. 56–82). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. García, O. (2011). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Gorenstein, S., & Pollard, H. P. (1983). The Tarascan civilization: A late prehispanic cultural system. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University. Hall Haley, M., & Austin, T. Y. (2004). Content-based second language teaching and learning. Boston: Pearson. Hamel, R. E. (2008). Bilingual education for Indigenous communities in Mexico. In J. Cummins & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education, 2nd edition. Volume 5: Bilingual education (pp. 311–322). New York, NY: Springer. Hamel, R. E. (2009). La noción de calidad desde las variables de equidad, diversidad y participación en la educación bilingüe intercultural. Revista Guatemalteca de Educación, 1(1), 177–230. Hamel, R. E. (2013). Multilingual education in Latin America. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Hamel, R. E., & Francis, N. (2006). The teaching of Spanish as a second language in an Indigenous bilingual intercultural curriculum. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 19(2), 171–188. Hamel, R. E., & Ibáñez Caselli, M. A. (2000). La lecto-escritura en la lengua propia: Educación indígena bilingüe en la región P’urhepecha de México. Actas de las III Jornadas de Etnolingüística, 44–58. Hornberger, N. H. (1989). Continua of biliteracy. Review of Educational Research, 59(3), 271–296. Hornberger, N. H. (1990). Creating successful learning contexts for biliteracy. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 6(1), 1–21. Hornberger, N. H., & Skilton-Sylvester, E. (2000). Revisiting the continua of biliteracy: International and critical perspectives. Language and Education: An International Journal, 14(2), 96–122. Hosler, D. (1994). The sounds and colors of power: The sacred metallurgical technology of ancient West Mexico. Cambridge, MA & London, UK: The MIT Press. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). (2010). Población de 5 años y más que habla lengua indígena y no habla español por principales lenguas según sexo, 2000 y 2010. In Censos de población y vivienda, 2000 y 2010. México: INEGI. López, L. E. (2009). Reaching the unreached: Indigenous intercultural bilingual education in Latin America. Background paper for EFA Global Monitoring Report 2010. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/ 186620e.pdf Pollard, H. P. (2015). The prehispanic heritage of the Tarascans (Purépecha). In A. Roth Seneff, R. V. Kemper, & J. Adkins (Eds.), From tribute to communal sovereignty: The Tarascan and Caxcan territories in transition (pp. 92–110). Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2001). Approaches and methods in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Roskamp, H. (2015). Visions of the past: The Tarascan kingdom and the late colonial primordial titles from Michoacán. In A. Roth Seneff, R. V. Kemper, & J. Adkins (Eds.), From tribute to communal sovereignty: The Tarascan and Caxcan territories in transition (pp. 113–132). Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Roskamp, H. (2016). Tarascan (P’urhépecha) empire. In J. M. MacKenzie (Ed.), The encyclopedia of empire (1st ed., pp. 1–3). Malden, MA & Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Roth Seneff, A. (2015). Ritual and public spheres in an ethnic celebration of communal sovereignty: The Purépecha transition. In A. Roth Seneff, R. V. Kemper, & J. Adkins (Eds.), From tribute to communal sovereignty: The Tarascan and Caxcan territories in transition (pp. 231–249). Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Thomas, W. P., & Collier, V. P. (2003). The multiple benefits of dual language: Dual language programs educate both English learners and native English speakers without incurring extra costs. Educational Leadership, 61(2), 61–64. Warren, J. B. (1985). The conquest of Michoacán: The Spanish domination of the Tarascan kingdom in Western Mexico, 1521–1530. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. West, R. C. (1948). Cultural geography of the modern Tarascan area. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.

12 Ngäbere An Orthography of Language Revitalization in Western Panama Ginés Alberto Sánchez Arias, Manolo Miranda (Tido Bangama), and Mary Jill Brody Introduction The Ngäbe [ʹŋɔbe] Indigenous people of Kiad have developed an orthography for writing their language. Kiad is a riverside community on the banks of the Tabasará river, district of Müna, Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé, in western Panamá. At the same time as the orthography was developed, Kiad developed a schooling program that complements a broader socioreligious revitalization movement dating back to the 1960s. In this chapter, we come together as three distinct authors to analyze four pieces of children’s writing collected from the school in Kiad in 2017. We combine genre pedagogy theory with a critical literacy approach to tell the story of the development and use of this orthography and the educational program in which it is being used. Co-author Tido Bangama devised the orthography from symbols revealed to a messianic figure colloquially known as Mamachi or Besigó. In 1974, after years of meticulous study, Tido consolidated his system, producing 31 graphemes. There are very few examples of similar revitalization efforts among Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Nunavut and Cherokee in North America are two well-known cases. The orthography and pedagogy developed and used in Kiad, together with these North American counterparts, provide examples of how Indigenous people’s landscapes can become spaces for schools (tödiba), teachers (garebo), and students (jatödigaga) to actively seek a praxis of decolonization. Latin alphabet-based writing systems have also been developed for Indigenous languages in Panama. These are usually known as “bilingual systems.” Typically fashioned by Christian missionaries, these alphabets end up serving the Ministry of Education’s “Bilingual Intercultural Education,” or EIB (Educación Intercultural Bilingüe, 2005), under the premise that they help Indigenous children ease into a future of bilingualism, further lifting their chances of joining the society at large (Ministerio de Educación de Panamá, 2005). However, co-author Sánchez finds that the Ngäbere orthography gives fresh expression to the unique sounds of the language and, as a result, is more precise than the EIB. For the purposes of this chapter, we use the bilingual system to spell words in Ngäbere,

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Figure 12.1 A first effort to create a digitized Ngäbere orthography. Source: Nunama by Tido (Badi) Bangama, 2015

given that the digitized version of the Ngäbere orthography is not yet ready for computer use. Figure 12.1 is an example of the proto-digitalNgäbere written language. Another factor influencing instruction in schools and the learning of Ngäbere literacy is the fact that the banks of the Tabasará river basin are being drastically reduced due to permanent flooding by waters of the Barro Blanco dam’s reservoir. The dam is owned by a Honduran company, GENISA (Generadora del Istmo S.A.), and its construction, which was completed in August 2016, is actively backed by three consecutive Panamanian administrations, who have exhibited a national politics of neglect by way of distraction, diversion, and an all-out rhetorical war between competing parties. All of these, plus outright human rights and environmental law violations by GENISA, leave children in Kiad to dwell in the middle of this political drama from birth. In this chapter, we describe how these contextual factors influence language pedagogy and literacy development in Ngäbere. Through analyzing approaches to teaching writing and samples of children’s writing, we seek a deeper understanding of the genres in the Ngäbere pedagogy and its implications as an exercise in critical literacy. In Tido’s words, “We Ngäbe are finding a means to express our historical and present humiliation.”

Literature Review and Guiding Theory Scholars of Ngäbere (language) include several missionaries, including Alphonse (1956) in the past and Sarsaneda Del Cid (2009) in the present. They have pioneered ways of writing and translating the language. Anthropologists Young (1970, 1978), Young and Basset (1999), and Wickstrom (2001) have looked at the customs and politics of the Ngäbe. Gjording (1991) has studied the political impact of Cerro Colorado, a failed mining project, but today a valuable case study informing the current plight of those living close to the Barro Blanco dam. Anthropologist François Guionneau-Sinclair (1987) did a pioneering study of the Mamatada during its origins. These scholars and others have provided

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valuable documentation and analysis of the Ngäbe culture that guide the study described here. Our guiding theoretical framework comes from “genre pedagogy” of the Sydney School and “critical literacy” from the Paulo Freire tradition. Critical literacy approaches have developed under several rubrics, including New Literacy Studies (Street, 2003), Literacy Ecology (Barton, 2007), and Critical Literacy Theory (Luke, 2012). All of these approaches acknowledge in some way the foundational work of Freire (1970) and his approach to the ways that traditional literacy techniques and approaches tend to favor the powerful and disenfranchise the weak and marginalized. Critical literacy becomes apparent in its contestation of oppressive literacy programs. Empowerment by means of political organization, with the goal of bringing to the surface the rights of formerly disenfranchised people, results in “conscientization” of a people’s right to selfdetermination (Barton, 2007, p. 13). Street (2003) identifies traditional deficit-based “autonomous” views of literacy, where literacy is imposed from the outside upon communities deemed to be deficient, with the goal of “enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, [and] making them better citizens” (Street, 2003, p. 77). This model compares to other traditional “ways of talking about [il-]literacy as ‘sickness,’ ‘handicap,’ ‘ignorance,’ ‘incapacity,’ ‘deprivation,’ and ‘deviance’” (Barton, 2007, p. 12). In contrast, Street advocates an ideological approach to literacy that is “culturally sensitive” and “embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles” (2003, p. 77). In this chapter, we describe a hybrid form of literacy, where autochthonous (internal) ideology confronts external forces of national educational programs. We join in to learn from the community, as any student would, and share epistemologies in a candid way when people inquire. In addition to critical literacy, we employ the “genre pedagogy” of the Sydney School to analyze literacy practices in schools and children’s writing samples (Barton, 2007; Martin & Rose, 2003, 2008; Street, 2003). We differentiate writing genre by identifying and distinguishing recurrent global patterns (Rose, 2010) and identifying local patterns, such as the narrative stages (orientation, complication, and resolution) seen in children’s written responses. As a measure of comparison, Rothery (1994) points out that beyond responses, another key genre in the secondary school curriculum is that of interpretation. An advanced skill in interpreting texts, he writes, involves the ability to “respond to the cultural values presented in the narrative” (Rothery, 1994, p. 156). Furthermore, Martin and Rose (2003, pp. 16–17) describe five modes for analyzing discourse in educational activities: appraisal, ideation, conjunction, identification, and periodicity. We employ the first two to analyze children’s responses to exam questions. Appraisal relates to evaluation of text, where “interpersonal kinds of meaning realize variations in the tenor of text” (Martin & Rose, 2008, p. 30). Ideation focuses on the

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content and students’ classifications of events and their views of them. We complete our analysis with periodicity as a way of organizing the narrative across the writing samples collected.

History of the Ngäbe Culture and People Recorded ethnohistory of the Ngäbe dates back to Fernando Colón’s notes about the Valiente coast of Bocas del Toro (Heckadon, 1994, p. 140). He traveled there with his father, Christopher Columbus, and witnessed the people of that area, describing the women, huts, and social structure. War, disease, and the Spanish colonial legacy forced the Ngäbe to move to their present location in the Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé. Concerning that move, Tido Bangama has repeatedly remarked, “We have re-established ourselves with heavily reduced cultural heritage.” The Comarca is a semiautonomous region, which was established in the 1997 amendment to the Panamanian constitution (Young & Bassett, 1999). It neighbors the provinces of Chiriquí, Bocas del Toro, and Veraguas. The Ngäbe population has grown steadily since the 1950’s, and they currently constitute the largest Indigenous group in Panama, with approximately 260,193 people (INEC, 2010). A smaller population of Ngäbe lives in Costa Rica, around the Talamanca region. In Panama, the Ngäbe share their “ancestral land” with the Buglé, a smaller linguistic neighbor living in the southeastern part of the Comarca. Mamatada is the official religion of the Comarca. It teaches its followers to be skeptical of the government and the Latin people by emphasizing periods in their history of loss, trauma, and humiliation. Mamatada practitioners seek to repudiate the widespread stereotype of Indigenous peoples as stupid, lazy drunkards by renouncing the use of alcohol and participation in traditional Ngäbe games, like balsería. They also take the Bible as truth, but, like the Rastafarians discussed by John Pulis (in Collins & Blot, 2003, pp. 145–149), they believe that the next phase of development ought to be theirs and that it is now their turn to have God’s favor. There are already different sub-sects in Mamatada. In Kiad, the school itself is entwined with Mamatada, which is resulting in challenges regarding acceptance of its pedagogy by Christian Ngäbe.

Structure of the Ngäbere Language The Ngäbere language is called Guaymi by outsiders and early researchers (Alphonse, 1956; Constela, 1989). It is a member of the Chibchan language family (Ruhlen, 1987, p. 202), and is closely related to a neighboring language, Buglere. The UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (2010) ranks Ngäbere as “vulnerable”; it is not in imminent danger of extinction, but it is under pressure, obviously by Spanish, the national language of Panama.

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In terms of structural characteristics, the language is verb-final, with SOV word order. It is a tone language, with two tones: high and low. It has a set of both oral and nasal vowels. There are 15 (oral and nasal) vowels and 16 consonants. Some sounds of the language are shared with Spanish, while others are quite different. Spanish words are borrowed into Ngäbere, with corresponding phonological changes and sometimes changes of meaning. The Comarca is divided into three major regions, each with its own linguistic idiosyncrasies. Here we discuss the Müna variant.

Ngäbere Language Revitalization Efforts A 15-minute hike from Boca Balsa, a town several days by foot to the west of Kiad, would take you to what once was Besigó (Mamachi)’s house (ju). In 1962, she had a divine encounter, in which she received a message indicating how to build a future for her people. The message to her was, in part, three sets of runic inscriptions on the ground around her house, which the Ngäbe would later try to decipher into a writing system. Figure 12.2 shows a transcription of the statement. The inscriptions were copied on paper and reproduced for those Ngäbe who wished to study and develop them. This event initiated the revitalization movement that came to be known as Mamatada. In 1967, Tido Bangama began practicing Mamatada, and in 1971, he started studying the inscriptions. A year later, he successfully interpreted these symbols into workable characters that he wrote down as 163 words, from which the orthography was born. The process he engaged in for developing the Ngäbere orthography is, to Brody and Sánchez’s (co-authors of this chapter) knowledge, unique. Another “revealed” orthography arose among the Western Apache in the very early 1900s, but it was taught only to a few disciples of the prophet, Silas John Edwards (Basso, 1990). This process of lexical to symbolic formalization was inspired by Tido’s personal covenant with God. He promised to teach God’s word and the written system for the rest of his days in exchange for having received the knowledge to decipher the inscriptions. With the help of his bilingual nephew, who had studied in the Panamanian public schools, they established combinations of vowels and consonants into syllables, and then into an alphabet. Tido’s sons and daughters are now trying a new approach to expand their language pedagogy, whereby they separate the literacy program from Mamatada to help disseminate it as a secular tool before attaching to it the politics of their religion.

The Schools Where Ngäbere Is Taught The school (tödiba) is a hybrid place of gathering and learning. Simply put, it is a multipurpose space. In addition to being a place to conduct

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Figure 12.2 Description of the inscriptions around Mamatada’s house in 1962. Source: Sánchez’s field notes, 2015. Translation: You are defenseless, and would have never been able to defend yourselves, you don’t have the means. Now I will give you this (the means) so you can defend yourselves.

classes for students, it serves as a political space for debate and coordination and as a venue for hosting events concerning the orthography (la letra or kugüe) of the language and various government officials and their crews when they visit the area. Given the importance of the oral tradition, anyone who visits will learn that Ngäbe meetings contain very long monologues and seemingly endless afternoons of deliberation. The tödiba also serves to host Ngäbe travelers from other villages, news reporters, and other visitors. “We eat and have conversations about travel, listen to the news on the radio at very precise times, study, and give presentations or declamations” (Sánchez, field notes). The tödiba is about the same size as the church (binana), and these two buildings are the largest in the community.

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There are three tödiba in the Comarca—at Kiad, Krwado, and Keberi. There are also smaller independent study groups in other places, some in close proximity to these three centers. There is another tödiba across the Cordillera Central to the north, in a secluded hamlet in the Ñe Kribo region. Most students are 4–13 years of age. There are also a number of adults who find time to learn to read and write with the new orthography. School buildings are open tin-roofed structures containing a chalkboard and some chairs and tables. The floor is bare ground, and the furniture is multifunctional. The time for learning is all of the time. Tido stresses this point. He says that they have a lot of knowledge to recover, and that learning is not only within the tödiba, but that it is also done out in the world, learning about the ways of the plants, the animals, and the river. Instruction combines strict attention to calligraphy with a relaxed role of the children’s seemingly unrestrained playfulness. In contrast to the structured Western approach to learning, the Ngäbe children work within a more relaxed structure. They seem content to listen and watch as they follow the adults on long mountain hikes, where they learn to harvest and hunt food for their hamlet. After a full morning in the field, they return to the tödiba, where some students are more diligent than others in doing their homework. Classes involve almost all practicing and very little lecturing. More formal and larger classes are held on Saturdays in the school building, from 7:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. There is homework every day, with recurrent visits by the students to the school for individual lessons, targeted to their particular needs. Students do different exercises during class. Some might work at the blackboard practicing arithmetic; others might be assigned to read out loud, while later they practice public speaking skills. Teaching is guided by three small books (maba), which were developed collaboratively by Tido Bangama and his daughters, sons, and friends or colleagues. The first, Maba Kuadi (1974), contains all of the letters and syllabic combinations, plus short sentences about aspects of children’s lives. The second, Maba Kubu (1976), includes the 163 words that were first constructed by Tido with the new graphemes. These words are fundamental to the creation of the orthography, because through them we get the whole Ngäbe phonology. The book also has a sizable number of short stories about fauna, people, and the landscape, including allegories and travel curiosities. Other stories consist of legends about past heroes, place names, and events from oral history. The third book, Maba Tröro (2006), is more similar to a workbook in style. It organizes vocabulary words along with similarities in prefixes and suffixes. The content of these textbooks results in an exemplary emphasis on Ngäbe quotidian life.

Instructional Writing Practice: The Case for Genre Pedagogy At the tödiba, under instruction from teachers and older children, small children (4–7 years old) first learn to write the vowels and then the

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consonants, later joining them in syllabic configurations (e.g., mama, meme). Through repeated practices, children eventually learn to count and do basic arithmetic, to read and write short phrases, and to have good calligraphy. Children (8–14 years old) read and transcribe the stories in the Maba Kubu to learn calligraphy and spelling. They also write answers to questions about their own stories or about the histories of their people taught in the community. The learning of grammar and syntax is a topic for another paper, because its pedagogy is still in its infancy in Kiad. As a result, written texts more closely resemble speech than implementation of a set of strict grammatical rules. Children are constantly tested on their oral presentations, declamations, or singing skills, and on their written responses to all sorts of questions. The following writing samples were selected and sent by Beliyi and Tido-badi to Sánchez from Kiad in June 2017, from a set of 10 samples written by students ages 11 to 13. The students were answering questions asked during an assignment by their teachers. They were translated into Spanish by Sánchez and Tido’s son Tido-badi, and then translated into English by Sánchez. When analyzing them, Brody and Sánchez conjecture that the three questions in Figures 12.3 and 12.4 comprise a cultural chronology of events, and as such we look at their periodicity as a cultural history, and ideation in Figure 12.5 for the children’s internalization of their cosmology. How did our people used to live before the outsiders [colonized] our land? Our people lived in internal conflict between different tribes and against each other across the regions. How did our people live before the message [Mamatada] arrived? Our people were doing balsería, which is one of the diabolic activities that have always been practiced in many places across the regions. Having passed 53 years [since the message] what is our current situation? 53 years have passed since we came to believe in God, but the political system divides us and it creates obscurity for the development of our religious and educational system. The answers to the two questions in Figure 12.3 are short yet assertive. It is important for Tido, and in this case gareba Beliyi, the teacher of these children, that the answers be clear and direct, and the teachers also “evaluate the answers by the degree of creative formulation,” she says. In these examples, it is clear that there is a correct answer, and the large marks show the grades received (44 and 40 in Figure 12.3, and 30 in Figure 12.4). Although these answers are probably correct, the relatively low marks mean that the children failed to provide sufficient detail. Nevertheless, we are looking for the content that reveals the children’s knowledge.

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Figure 12.3 Writing sample from a 12-year-old boy.

To return to our theoretical base in looking at these writing samples, ideation relates to the writer’s experience of “reality.” It can be both material and symbolic (Martin & Rose, 2003, p. 66). In the first response, the child harkens to a past where internal conflict had the people in a state of discord, which in turn paints a bleak picture, far from ideal. This is “real,” both in a symbolic sense, but also, as we know, as a relatable material reality because of the dam that flooded their home. It also represents a déjà vu, because to this day, the leaders of the Comarca seem to remain in discord. The child interprets the question

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Figure 12.4 Writing response from one 11-year-old boy.

as the ideation of his present lived experience, which has grown out of the reality of the past. The second question also reflects both past and present. In the distant past, his people were doing bad things—balsería (playing belligerent games) and drinking—and many are still doing so today. The child classifies the theme as bad and gives a description of what it is composed of, or that bad entails diabolic practice. There is an implicit moral lesson that comes attached to the path toward revitalization, which is embodied

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in the very exercise of writing. Ideation, once more, is the child projecting his knowledge as part of the response, which is the ought to in this micro-genre. The third response, in Figure 12.4, written by a 11-year-old boy, deals more explicitly with political reality; this time, in the absolute present. It is widely accepted that many Spanish conquistadors abducted, tortured, and killed Indigenous leaders to weaken or destroy them. This practice caused the permanent loss of valuable knowledge. These are collective imaginaries that inform us of current Indigenous purpose and drive. Ideation drives the content and the ways that students think about and classify activities. The third response echoes this sentiment by classifying the circumstance of loss as obscuring development that the child is engaged in. These responses show us at least three major periods, otherwise comprising an implicit Ngäbe-Mamatada timeline. We can make sense of them through Martin and Rose’s (2003) concept of periodicity. These periods are, in Figure 12.3, an unhappy situation that otherwise becomes fateful; Figure 12.3, bad practices that prolong God’s punishment; and Figure 12.4, a major shift in moral trajectory guided by Mamatada’s revelations, in a time when most Ngäbe are still falling behind. Periodicity “is built from a flow of information that creates meaning as a whole, making it easier for us to take in” (Martin & Rose, 2003, p. 175). Moreover, periodicity identifies the themes at different levels, which become “new” but traceable. Hence, we see in these samples of children’s writing clear themes of outside forces—i.e., Christianity and nationalist narratives—where genres created in response to those forces throughout time construct a sense of periodicity, which in turn gives meaning to their Indigenous identity. The theme of “divide and conquer” (being divided and conquered) transcends and also connects the periods, while Mamatada is the cohesion needed spiritually, and the orthography, practically. A fourth writing sample (Figure 12.5), written by a 13-year-old girl, complements the analysis by giving us an example of appraisal. God has raised the flag. It is very good for us and the land where we live today. We will reach our dream in this world, alongside the cross and God’s favor. It will be beautiful with the flag and holding each other by the hand here in the world. This will be with the presence of God and his blessing. We will all be together thanks to this blessing. We walk forward. All of this will be avowed on this earth because we study in this place. Taking this flag, we will assert ourselves in God’s blessing. It is what we have been yearning for. Appraisal helps us look at interpersonal meaning, which informs us of the tenor of the user’s register or social context. This piece of writing is much freer in structure than the previous examples, and the content shows a register with a high degree of formality as serious intention.

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Figure 12.5 Writing response from a 13-year-old girl.

Appraisal deals with the strength of the feelings involved, and in the response in Figure 12.5, we find unbounded optimism and confidence. In this case, appraisal shows the “children’s affect, judgement, and appreciation” (Martin & Rose, 2008, p. 31). It appears that lived experience in everyday politics helps to revive the visceral aspects of a troubled history under colonialism. Indeed, experience informs the oral history and guides

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the praxis; here we read of a clear and brilliant future to come. The child demonstrates a confidence rooted in certainty nourished by Mamatada. Thus, social conditions, like the ongoing colonialism in Kiad, inform our analysis of the children’s responses above.

Writing Development in School in Kiad: The Case for Critical Literacy Children’s writing development in the Ngäbere language takes place in a complex social context, that includes the language used in audio narratives, in the newspapers, and on radio stations in Kiad. For example, “Escuela para todos” (School for all) is a popular Central American radio program that people in Kiad have used for decades as a channel to learn about Western culture. Although children listen to it, they often feel distant, not part of the culture described. Therefore, while the focus in tödiba is on the Ngäbere language and Ngäbe culture, continuous conversations with the non-Indigenous world are part of school life, and “Escuela para todos” is central to that. Literacy in Ngäbere meets a local need, and it is used by the community as a way to explore their language in previously uncharted ways. The exercise of becoming literate in the Comarca is similar to that engaged by Sequoyah (George Guess) for Cherokee in the early 1800s. Although illiterate, Sequoyah recognized the power of literacy and wanted that power for his own people. He first tried a logographic system before eventually arriving at the syllabary, which is very congenial to the Cherokee syllable structure (Bender, 2002). This syllabary is still in use today among the Cherokee people. Both Sequoyah and Tido Bangama realized that writing is not a neutral technology, but rather one that is associated with power. For Tido Bangama, his writing system is infused with spirituality. To invent a system from the inside rather than have one imposed by colonialists represents a source of Indigenous soft power. Within even a 21st century literacy ideology, having its own writing system moves a community from being a non-literate Other to participating in the so-called civilized world, with all the rights and respect that that participation brings. An “ideological” approach is embedded in social practices and local knowledge (Street, 2003, p. 78). In the context of their local priorities— rather than what the outside world deems important—in Kiad, teaching and learning relate to contemporary Indigenous struggle as well as to fauna, flora, and other features of the physical environment. As a minority Indigenous people embedded in a national republic, facing ongoing exploitation and the imminent threat of flooding, the school provides both a material and affective reinforcement of identity politics. With a spiritual basis, an orthography of their own invention, and the pursuit of social cohesion, the teachers and language leaders in Kiad are teaching literacy on their own terms. By educating the Ngäbe people to read

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and write in their context of struggle, this Ngäbe pedagogy can thus be described as an Indigenous effort in critical literacy. Many Ngäbe youth no longer speak the native tongue, and one can find many loanwords from Spanish in use. Although Ngäbere is not currently endangered, the question of whether an Indigenous language may disappear is always a possibility, especially in the face of colonialism and rapid culture change. Linguistic anthropologists, as well as Indigenous leaders like Tido Bangama, dread the loss of the language (Thomason, 2001). If Ngäbere were to become extinct, humanity would be more impoverished (Davis, 2009, p. 6). As homogenization to colonial languages and cultures takes hold, humanity loses knowledge systems that contain countless configurations, categories, idioms, comparisons, art, and music. The success of the religious diffusion of Mamatada may depend on, or at least be reinvigorated by, this orthography. Mamatada itself may help or hinder the diffusion of the new Ngäbere writing system. The success of a new orthography may lie in its relative power to convince its users of its own efficacy. If the Ngäbe people continue to promote and develop their culture in the 21st century, this new orthography can form a foundation for legitimacy and innovation. In the words of Collins and Blot (2003, p. 144), it could help “create a new cultural identity which reflects not only a distant historical or even mythic pre-colonial past, but also incorporates the lessons learned as colonized people.” Another consideration regarding what is perhaps a hardship of learning in such a setting of semi-isolation has been raised by Gee (1996, p. 143): “One can substitute for ‘print’ other sorts of texts and technologies: painting, literature, films, television, computers, telecommunications— ‘props’ in the Discourse.” These media are integral to our cognitive functions involved in learning a language and a culture. They diversify the inputs to our curiosity. However, the Ngäbe are a people with very little “soft power.” The future of their success relies, in part, on the general public’s interest in Indigenous knowledge, but with the advent and proliferation of cell phones and laptops, along with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, Indigenous motifs and even the orthography itself become more visible to the world. Indeed, if it was not for Facebook, it would have probably taken Sánchez a much longer time to find Kiad. Critical literacy, as Rockwell (2005, p. 6) describes it, is a “collective cultural process that occurs under conditions of asymmetrical power relationships, as tools or signs of a dominant group are taken up [or, in the case of the Ngäbe, invented] by subordinate groups and incorporated— often with new meanings and uses—into their own cultural history.” As mentioned in the introduction, the orthography of the EIB is promulgated by the Panamanian educational system in the Indigenous Comarca and is a form of “castellanización,” or teaching the Ngäbe people to read and write in Spanish, facilitated by literacy in Ngäbere. For Indigenous

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peoples, it is a struggle to maintain their unique ethnicity in the face of the powerful forces of nationhood carried out systematically through the state’s centralized public education. In other words, “language and literacy are not only the means by which the battle is fought, they are the site of the battle itself” (Collins & Blot, 2003, p. 131). The new Ngäbere writing system is quietly entering into this fray. Tido Bangama’s family, neighbors, and others across the Indigenous territory began to learn his writing and teaching philosophy. While many other practitioners of Mamatada tend to isolate themselves from outsiders, in Kiad, learning is open to the public. Their revitalization movement “departs from religious guidance and takes root in practical life and experience,” says Tido. He reminds us, “We are weak, we are lesser, but is our turn to exalt.” As you read this chapter, he is probably sitting in the tödiba or traveling around the Comarca to promote the orthography, which he believes is perhaps the most crucial step toward a more collaborative Comarca.

Promising Future Directions in Writing in Ngäbere In conclusion, the Ngäbe of Kiad have seized the power of literacy and its potential to help themselves revitalize their Indigenous culture and innovate their methods of resistance against the colonizing paradigm of Panamanian nationalism. In the words of Tido, “We are just beginning, so we are not behind advanced learning methods yet” (personal communication, 2017). The Ngäbe orthography began slowly but steadily to create the rubric for what today encompasses an entire manner of study. The mabas that we use as guides need to be revised to accommodate new vocabulary, punctuation rules, and alpha-numeric standards, while simultaneously entwining these with an increasing compilation of oral histories and legends. By writing Ngäbere, in its own script, the Ngäbe are forging their future idiosyncrasies from their past, via a genre pedagogy informed by periodicity, ideation, and appraisal, as seen in the children’s writing. Thus, the next generation will be able to resist through revitalization. Outwardly, this is done with a unique writing system that is unintelligible to Westerners, until they show interest, care, and respect. Inwardly, Indigenous pedagogy is teaching the Ngäbe, in Ngäbere, the potential of being Ngäbe and proud. The writing system is now directed by the Organización de Lecto y Escritura Ngäbe (OLEN), a non-profit organization and Indigenous initiative to formalize the unique Ngäbere alphabet. OLEN wishes to restore Ngäbe identity in the national and international arena. A Ngäbere computer font and a dictionary are in their “beta” versions. Tido Bangama’s process of devising a writing system for Ngäbere from these inscriptions, and his revelations, are now part of folktales in Kiad. The results, more than a personal achievement, can be a tool for reviving an otherwise shattered Indigenous self-esteem.

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Tido tells us, “This [orthography] is intended to help the Ngäbe come together as a distinctive culture struggling to survive an ever more capable colonization process: national public education” (personal communication, 2017). With the goal of empowering his kin and invigorating his culture, Tido Bangama has worked until this day to expand his knowledge of the world, raise his standard of living, and provide a brighter future for his children and ethnic group.

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Rockwell, E. (2005). Indigenous accounts of dealing with writing. In T. L. McCarty (Ed.), Language, literacy, and power in schooling (pp. 5–28). New York, NY: Routledge. Rose, D. (2010). Genre in the Sydney School. Retrieved from www.readingtolearn. com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Genre-in-the-Sydney-School.pdf Rothery, J. (1994). Exploring literacy in school English (Write It Right Resources for Literacy and Learning). Sydney, Australia: Metropolitan East Disadvantaged Schools Program. Ruhlen, M. (1987). A guide to the world’s languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sarsaneda Del Cid, J. (2009). Ni ngóbe tó blitde ño /Como hablan los Ngóbe. Ciudad de Panamá, Panama: Acción Cultural Ngóbe. Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 77–91. Thomason, S. (2001). Language contact. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. UNESCO. (2010). Atlas of the world’s languages in danger. Retrieved from www. unesco.org/languages-atlas/index.php Wickstrom, S. (2001). The politics of development in Indigenous Panama. Latin American Perspectives, 131(4), 43–68. Young, P. D. (1970). Notes on the ethnohistorical evidence for structural continuity in Guaymí society. Ethnohistory, 17(1/2), 11–29. Young, P. D. (1978). La trayectoria de una religión: El movimiento de Mamá Chi entre los Guaymíes y sus consecuencias sociales. La Antigua, 7(11), 45–75. Young, P. D., & Bassett, T. (1999). Ngóbe adaptive responses to globalization in Panama. In W. M. Locker (Ed.), Globalization and the rural poor in Latin America (pp. 111–136). Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

13 The Global in the Local Young Multilingual Language Learners Write in North Sámi (Finland, Norway, Sweden) Kirk P.H. Sullivan, Kristina Belancic, Eva Lindgren, Hanna Outakoski, and Mikael Vinka Introduction In her introduction to her doctoral dissertation, Multilingual literacy among young learners of North Sámi: Contexts, complexity and writing in Sápmi, Hanna Outakoski (2015) wrote: Writing and reading in one’s own language is a privilege that many Indigenous peoples and minorities have not had or are just starting to enjoy (e.g. Gudhlanga & Makaudze, 2007; Watahomigie & McCarty, 1997). Heiss (2003) notes that “[w]riting for entertainment and education has increasingly become an important aspect of reviving and maintaining Indigenous history and culture, and a logical and necessary move in the development of Indigenous expression” (p. vi). For Indigenous peoples, being literate in one’s own language, and not only in the dominating language, is a step forward in acquiring basic human rights. (p. 1) Colonialization reduced Indigenous peoples’ possibilities to use and learn their languages, yet contemporary globalization trends are creating superdiverse settings (Blommaert, Leppänen, & Spotti, 2012; Vertovec, 2006, 2007) in which young Indigenous people are growing up, learning their language and other languages, and using new media to express themselves, including in their Indigenous languages. This chapter considers the ways in which trilingual children growing up in Sápmi (see Figure 13.1) evidence the superdiversity of their contexts in texts written in North Sámi school settings. The children in our study use the Indigenous language North Sámi (spoken in area 5 in Figure 13.2) alongside at least one majority language (Finnish, Norwegian, or Swedish) and English that has its base “in media, tourism, trade and education” (Lindgren, Westum, Outakoski, & Sullivan, 2017, p. 127). Lindgren, Sullivan, Outakoski, and Westum (2016) attempted to discover traces of superdiversity in an explorative study of English language

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Figure 13.1 Map of Europe showing the location of Sápmi. Source: Rogper, 2004

texts written by teenagers growing up in Sápmi. Their study focused on whether the writers evidenced the super dimensions of their environments in their writing in English, and they concluded that: These writers learn English from different source dimensions—their digital, physical, and school contexts—to express their interpersonal meaning and their ideas. With great integrity, they describe typical activities, features, and dimensions in their immediate context. The texts suggest that the global context with it super dimensions seems as natural to these writers as their immediate context. (p. 66) This chapter, with its focus on young writers of North Sámi, actualizes the question posed by Lindgren et al. (2016) as to whether more local

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Figure 13.2 Current and corrected map over geographic distribution of Sami languages: A map of Sami dialects numbered: 1. Southern Sami, 2. Ume Sami, 3. Pite Sami, 4. Lule Sami, 5. Northern Sami, 6. Skolt Sami, 7. Inari Sami, 8. Kildin Sami, 9. Ter Sami. Source: Ningyou, 2009

Sápmi dimensions of the supercomplexity of the context in which these young writers are growing up will be fronted in their North Sámi writing, or if the interaction of the local, national, and global will mirror that found in young writers’ English writing. Two recent studies suggest language and literacy factors that, on the one hand, will result in these young writers experiencing greater difficulties

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in writing in North Sámi than in English (Hornberger & Outakoski, 2015) and, on the other hand, will result in their having meaning making resources in all of their languages (Lindgren et al., 2017). Hornberger and Outakoski interviewed teachers, who reported that North Sámi speaking school students could express themselves in a richer and more nuanced way in English than in North Sámi. The teachers’ explanation for this phenomenon was that English has become of central importance to these students, as it is omnipresent in today’s supercomplex society. Lindgren et al. (2017) presented a recent case study of three multilingual writers and reported that they found that writing competencies move between languages, and that the three writers in the study used similar ways of expressing meaning in their texts regardless of language. However, differences were found that Lindgren et al. suggest might be due to the supercomplexity of growing up in Sápmi. Some elements of this complexity are the Indigenous fundamental frames by which young people growing up in Sápmi understand their world that are potentially in conflict with other fundamental frames (Barnett, 2000). Two unique fundamental frames for the writers in our study are Sami identity and culture, and learning and speaking a Sami language. Due to national state differences in, among other things, legal rights, we focus some sections of this chapter on the part of Sápmi that is in Sweden, yet with reference to other areas of Sápmi.

The Sami People The Sami are the Indigenous people of Sápmi and traditionally inhabit a region that today is divided across four countries: Norway, Finland, Russia, and Sweden (see Figure 13.1). There are nine living Sami languages (see Figure 13.2 for their geographic distribution) that can be divided into western and eastern languages (Sammallahti, 1998). All of these languages are listed on the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley, 2010) as endangered. Pite, Ume, and Ter Sami are “critically endangered,” and North Sámi, the most widely spoken Sami language and the focus of this chapter, is listed as “definitely endangered.” In Sweden, four Sami languages are spoken: North Sámi, Lule Sami, South Saami, and Ume Sami. The Sami languages are a core element of Sami identity and embed common values, experiences, and knowledge. It is impossible to say how many Sami people live in Sápmi, as no “institution is responsible for collecting Sami demographic data or for producing official Sami statistics in a systematic and regular manner” (Pettersen, 2011, p. 187). However, according to a 1975 survey, 20,000 Sami people live in Sweden (Axelsson & Sköld, 2013), and the consensus among researchers is that this number has not changed since then. The lack of ethnic demographic data can be explained by the race biological research that was conducted during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (Outakoski, 2015). The purpose of these race biological studies was to

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determine that the Sami people belonged to the “mongoloid” rather than white, Indo-European race (Kuokkanen, 2008). Given this history, it is understandable that no ethic demographic data is collected. As of January 1, 2011, Sweden’s constitution recognizes Sami individuals as a people, rather than as a minority (Mörkenstam & Lawrence, 2012). This reaffirmed the status of the Sami as an Indigenous people, as recognized by the Swedish parliament in 1977. Sami people have additional rights, according to national and international law, to be protected against discrimination in school, work, and other arenas (Pikkarainen, 2008). However, many Sami people still experience discrimination, and young Sami report that they have experienced discrimination by teachers and students in school (Omma, 2013). To support the continuation of Sami identity, the Swedish state has pledged to maintain Sami traditions through culture, language, and education. Education is an important pillar that provides Sami pupils with possibilities to learn one or more Sami languages and to become functionally multilingual.

The Sami Languages The Sami languages belong to the Finno-Ugric language family. Given the size of the area in which they are spoken1 (see Figures 13.1 and 13.2), it is not surprising that there are several Sami languages, and that they differ from each other with properties that render them mutually unintelligible. In addition to lexical differences, the languages differ in their phonological, morphological, and syntactic features. To understand what this means, one can say that these differences are of a similar magnitude as those between the various Germanic languages. In spite of the heterogeneous nature of the Sami languages, they all have rich inflectional systems and exhibit, to varying degrees, agglutination. The following example illustrates some of the similarities and differences between two Sami languages, namely South and North Sámi, (1a) and (1b) respectively. Example 13.1 Similarities and differences between South and North Sámi.

a.

South Saami Jååktan, manne tjaste-m yesterday I.Nom ice cream-Acc “Yesterday, I ate an ice cream.” b. North Sámi Ikte, mon borre-n yesterday I.Nom eat.Pst-1s “Yesterday, I ate an ice cream.”

böpmed-i-m. eat-Ps-t1s

lákcajieŋa. ice cream.Acc

First, in formal terms, the inflectional characteristics of the sentences are identical. In both Examples 13.1a and 13.1b, the finite verb inflects

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for both tense and agreement. While person is signaled by an overt concatenative suffix, -m versus -n, the morphophonological realization of tense differs in a conspicuous way. In South Saami, the exponent for past tense is the suffix -i, and it appears at the right edge of the verb stem, in a garden-variety concatenative fashion, as shown in Example 13.2a. In North Sámi, the situation is more complex, where the expression of tense is partly manifested by stem allomorphy (Example 13.2b). That is, a particular stem form is conditioned to appear in a specific syntactic environment, and it is the particular combination of the specifications for tense and agreement that decides which alternant should appear (cf. Nickel, 1994). In other words, tense alone does not provide sufficient information for the allomorphy, and does not always agree, but what is crucial is the combination of the two.2 Example 13.2 First person singular present and past tenses of “eat”.

a.

b.

South Saami byöpmede-m “eat.Prs-1s” byöpmed-i-m “eat-Pst-1s” North Sámi bora-n “eat.Prs-1s” borre-n “eat.Pst-1s”

Overall, South Saami inflection is characterized by being overtly concatenative, whereas North Sámi exhibits a combination of concatenation and stem alternations. The stem alternations primarily affect word-internal consonants and syllable structure, which in turn may influence the vowels. This prosodic alternation is known as consonant gradation (Nickel, 1994; Sammallahti, 1998). The inflectional patterns that we have observed generalize beyond the verbal domain to the other lexical domains as well: Examples 13.1a and 13.1b provide an illustrating contrast in the nominal system. In South Saami, (Example 13.1a), the direct object is morphophonologically signaled by the suffix -m, which has attached to the noun tjaste “ice-cream,” yielding the object form tjaste-m. In contrast, North Sámi (Example 13.1b) signals the accusative by a stem alternation. The nominative of “ice-cream” is lákcajiekŋa, whereas the accusative is lákcajieŋa.3 In addition to morphophonological differences, it can also be seen in Examples 13.1a and 13.1b that there is at least one striking syntactic difference: word order. South Saami strongly prefers objects to precede the main verb, whereas in North Sámi, the object normally follows the main verb. It should be noted, however, that both languages allow scrambling and thus tolerate a certain degree of freedom in word order, contingent on matters pertaining to information structure and scopal relations, most of which have not been subject to investigation. However, one of the sharpest syntactic differences between the languages is found in the context of sentential negation (Julien, 2003; Vinka, 2007).

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Example 13.3 Negation in South and North Sámi.

a.

b.

South Saami Ij/Idtji Piere Neg.Prs 3s/Neg.Pst.3s Piere.Nom “Piere doesn’t/didn’t eat ice cream.” North Sámi Máhtte ij bora/boran Máhtte.Nom Neg.3s eat.Prs/eat.Pst “Máhtte doesn’t/didn’t eat ice cream.”

tjastem byöpmedh. ice cream-Acc eat

lákcajieŋa. ice cream.Acc

In both languages, negation inflects for person. However, as shown in Example 13.3a, South Saami negation also inflects for tense, with the consequence that the main verb surfaces as a bare stem. In contrast, North Sámi negation, (Example 13.3b), inflects for person, whereas the main verb carries the tense exponent but lacks person. The South Saami pattern is also found in Lule Sami, and the North Sámi pattern conforms to a more general Finno-Ugric pattern. North Sámi has a rich and productive agglutinative character. For instance, a causative sentence in North Sámi is formed by attaching a causative formative, -h or -htt, depending on the shape of the morphological host, onto a verb (Julien, 1996; Vinka, 2002). Consider the simple transitive clause in Example 13.4a, where we find a verb logai “read. Pst.3s,” a direct object, girjji “book.Acc,” and a subject, Máret, that serves as the agent of the event described by the combination of the verb and the direct object. When the causative suffix, -h, is attached to the base verb, (Example 13.4b), a larger verb is formed, with the approximate meaning x cause y read something. The direct object from Example 13.4a remains a direct object. However, the subject from Example 13.4a surfaces as an oblique illative object in Example 13.4b, a so-called causee. Moreover, a causative agent has been added in Examle 13.4b, mon “I.Nom.” Example 13.4 Agglutination in North Sámi.

a. Máret logai Máret.Nom read.Pst.3s “Máret read a book.”

girjji. book.Acc

b. Mon loga-h-in I.Nom read-Casue-Pst.1s “I made Máret read a book.”

Márehii Máret.Ill

girjji.4 book.Acc

Agglutination has a prominent place in North Sámi morphosyntax, and it is operative in passive formation and inception construction, for example (Nickel, 1994; Sammallahti, 1998). In South Saami, agglutination is largely non-productive and has undergone grammaticalization. Thus, in

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this language, causativization is periphrastic, which is the result of language change, possibly due to decreased usage. Finally, although Sami languages have lexical foundations, it is important to be aware that the morphophonological differences may often obscure related lexical items. In addition, there are non-trivial differences in lexicon, which are partly due to the fact that the languages are spoken in different geographical areas. Another reason, particularly pertinent for lexical borrowings, is the fact that the languages are spread over different countries. For instance, North Sámi has to grapple with borrowings from Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish. In sum, the Sami languages can be characterized as inflectionally rich. Yet the manifestation of inflection differs sharply in different languages. South Saami employs a concatenative system, whereas North Sámi resorts to a combination of stem allomorphy and concatenation. North Sámi is richly agglutinative, which sets it apart from, say, South Saami. From this brief overview of two of the Sami languages, it is apparent that becoming literate and beginning to write in North Sámi is a challenging activity, especially if the young learner only encounters North Sámi in formal language learning situations and speaks, for example, Swedish most of the time, including as their home language. Providing settings and support for all ages to learn and use Sami languages in and outside of formal teaching and learning settings are central elements of language revitalization.

Revitalization of the Sami Languages The conditions for the Sami have been, and are still primarily, shaped by the policies of the four countries that control Sápmi, and the consequences of these policies cannot be labeled as beneficial for the people and their languages. All of the Sami languages are classified as endangered. In the absence of reliable statistics, it is estimated that North Sámi is spoken by around 25,000 people, with the other Sami languages having speaker populations ranging from less than a hundred to around 1,000 (Rasmussen & Nolan, 2011; Ridanpää & Pasanen, 2009; Sammallahti, 1998; Scheller, 2013). It is safe to say that most, if not all, speakers of Sami as a first language (L1) today are bilingual, regardless of language. They may either be sequential bilinguals or simultaneous bilinguals. Sequential bilinguals were monolingual in a Sami language up until age 6 or 7 when they began school, where they were exposed to and learned the majority language. Sequentially bilingual speakers of a Sami language are, these days, most common among elderly speakers. Among the younger Sami L1 speakers, it is more common that they are simultaneous bilinguals. That is, they acquired both a Sami language and the majority language(s) at the same time. Crucially, these simultaneous bilinguals experience a massive

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increase in their exposure to the majority language from the education system, dramatically developing and strengthening their majority language skills, frequently to the detriment of the development of their Sami language proficiency. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that Sami-speaking children became eligible to receive Sami language classes. While there were differences between the classes offered in the different countries (Finland, Norway, and Sweden), these typically ranged from one to two hours a week. The impact of these particularly few hours of language classes for supporting Sami language skills was strengthened by the emergence of standardized orthographies (the current North Sámi orthography became the official standard in 1978; Sametinget, 2008), media in the Sami languages, and an increased number of publications in the languages. However, a persistent problem in the education system has been, and continues to be even today, insufficient exposure and input due to time limitations, along with a shortage of educators and relevant teaching material. A further challenge for the educational system is the growing number of Sami who are majority language monolingual L1 speakers and learn a Sami language as a bona fide foreign language. The rate of growth in the number of Sami who are majority language monolingual L1 speakers has perhaps been ameliorated by the language policies that emerged in the Nordic countries in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, which emboldened language revitalization efforts. In 1989, a Sami university college, Sámi allaskuvla, was established in Northern Norway, where Sami language teachers are trained and students can receive a college education, with North Sámi as the language of instruction. Stepwise, from there on, revitalization efforts emerged across the entire Sami area. Although revitalization involves activities at several levels, the cornerstone is always that it is fundamentally driven by community activism that involves the speakers. This may seem obvious, but this cornerstone is often overlooked, particularly when authorities are involved in revitalization efforts. Functioning infrastructure is also central, and in the case of the Sami languages, language centers play an important role. Such centers work with, among other things, language planning, training, and consultation. A third component involves the formal education system, and preschools, where the languages are used as the primary means of communication and instruction. Examples of these are growing for the Sami languages and can, for example, be found in the Finnmark region in Norway for North Sámi, and in Finland for North Sámi as well as for Inare Sami.

Schools in Sápmi Sami education programs started in the middle of the 17th century. These programs were run by missionary workers with a colonial perspective,

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which endangered Sami cultural and linguistic characteristics (Belancic, Lindgren, Outakoski, Westum, & Sullivan, 2017). In 1913, a nomad school, nomadskola, for Sami children of reindeer-herding Sami was established to prevent Sami children from assimilating into Swedish society. It was not until 1962 that nomadskola (the nomad school) became open to all Sami children after a decision made by of the Swedish Parliament to restructure Sami education. At the same time, a law issued by the Swedish Parliament increased the Sami school system to nine years of education. The decision allowed all Sami children to choose between a nomadskola and the standard Swedish elementary school, grundskola. However, the educational material that was provided was the same for both schools, and no material was developed in any of the Sami languages. As Jannok Nutti (2010) points out, this lack of teaching material and lack of proper teacher education for Sami teachers hindered Sami teaching and learning. In the 1970s, Sami teaching material started to develop, and teachers started to study the Sami languages. However, Sami teacher training initially followed the Swedish model and its associate values, so it was not culturally appropriate, and it was not until much later that teacher training was developed in Sami, with a focus on Sami values (Corson, 1996). In the 1990s, nomad schools were renamed Sami school, sameskola (Svonni, 2017); these schools function as an autonomous part, or parallel route, of the compulsory school system. These Sami schools teach Sami values, culture, language, history, and religion. Sweden has five Sami schools that are located in Karesuando, Kiruna, Jokkmokk, Gällivare, and Tärnaby, and offer education from grade 1 to 6 (ages 6 to 12). Once Sami pupils finish these six years of Sami school, there is no possibility for them to finish their education in a Sami language in Sweden, and they must attend the last three compulsory years of schooling in a school where the language of instruction is Swedish. In 2012, 132 Sami children attended Sami schools. Since 2011, Sami schools have had their own Sami National Curriculum, an important document that enables Sami people to decide their own education, as part of their right to self-determination. The Sami National Curriculum supports teachers teaching pupils about Sami history, culture, tradition, and language. However, the differences between the Swedish National Curriculum and the Sami National Curriculum are minimal. With the exception of the syllabus for Sami language in the Sami National Curriculum, all syllabi are identical in the two curricula. Further, only the Sami language syllabus brings in Sami perspectives. The exclusion of Sami perspectives is not limited to schooling in Sweden. For example, Keskitalo, Määttä, and Uusiautti (2011) criticized the Sami curriculum in Finland as being based on Western school systems and for not including Sami culture. They argue that a Sami perspective should be central to the entire curriculum and penetrate all teaching.

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Skolverket (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2016) considers Sami schools to be the only schools in Sweden that focus on bilingualism, and the curriculum states that every pupil after completing grade 6 shall be proficient in speaking, reading, and writing in a Sami language and functionally bilingual. In some schools, three Sami languages—North Sámi, Lule Sami, and South Saami—are represented. In all Sami schools, most Sami pupils are bilingual, and some speak up to four languages (Outakoski, 2015). Pupils studying a Sami language in school can choose between first (L1) and second language (L2) classes. Some pupils chose L1 language classes due to a strong home or societal Sami language context, and others chose L2 language classes, as they have little or no access to Sami languages outside the classroom and will learn their Sami language as a bona fide foreign language. Sami children who cannot attend a Sami school have the possibility to receive integrated teaching in Sami in their Swedish compulsory school. This means that the school can apply for special permission to teach music, handicrafts, or arts in Sami (Outakoski, 2015). Additionally, in Sweden, Sami children, as members of one of Sweden’s official national minorities, have the right to receive mother tongue education. This is typically around 45 minutes of teaching per week, that is given outside of school hours and has a special syllabus.

Instructional Writing Practices Our overview of the language and schooling situation for children growing up in Sápmi shows the variation and complexity of the language provision for children acquiring and learning one or more of the Sami languages. Writing instructional practices are intertwined with national state language and educational policies. Here, for illustrative clarity, we focus on the writing instructions in the Sami National Curriculum that are followed in Sweden, specifically the syllabus for Sami as a first language in grade 6. This syllabus is divided in three components—aim, core content, and knowledge requirements—with the core content further divided into sub-categories: reading and writing, talking, listening and communication, texts, language use, and Sami culture. The syllabus is clear that the aim of teaching a Sami language is to stimulate students’ interest in reading, writing, and speaking in Sami, and that the core content for writing requires teachers to instruct students on how to create narrative and factual texts using typical structural and linguistic features of these text types. Further, the syllabus requires that teachers support students to develop the skills to create texts in which words and images interact. The knowledge requirements of the syllabus are that, to pass grade 6, students can write texts that are understandable with some variation in language. These general descriptors of writing in the syllabus need to be considered in light of the findings of Belancic and

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Lindgren (2017), who juxtaposed the syllabi for Sami and Swedish as first languages and located differences in the demands between the syllabi. The Sami as a first language syllabus focuses on oracy (talking and listening), whereas the Swedish as a first language syllabus focuses on literacy (reading and writing). Such a difference naturally has an impact on the writing practice skills that students develop. Yet how this difference affects instructional writing practices has not been researched. In fact, there is little or no research that has focused on the instructional writing practices in Sami first or second language classrooms anywhere in Sápmi.

Young People’s Writing in North Sámi The research presented in this chapter provides a snapshot of young people’s writing in North Sámi across Sápmi, and across its various educational settings, with an analysis that considers the dimensions of the supercomplexity that can be found in these young people’s writings. The research is part of a larger project—Literacy in Sápmi: multilingualism, revitalization and literacy development in the global north (Project nr. 2011–6153), funded by the Swedish Research Council. The data collection presented in this chapter relates only to the collection of the young people’s writing in North Sámi. (See Outakoski, Lindgren, Westum, & Sullivan, 2019, for a description of the full methodology used in the larger project.) All schools in Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish Sápmi that offered North Sámi as a language were contacted and asked if they were interested in participating in the Literacy in Sápmi project. Twelve schools agreed to participate, and detailed information and consent forms were sent to each school two weeks before data collection. All of the information was written in North Sámi and the majority national languages, and the school staff and young people participating could decide whether to speak North Sámi or a majority national language during our visits for data collection. The young people wrote their texts on 13” laptops that we set up as temporary writing studios in each school we visited. The young people wrote their texts using the Microsoft Office Word software, a tool with which they are familiar. Further, this software supports the North Sámi keyboard developed by the Centre for Sámi Language Technology, Sámi Giellatekno, at Tromsø University, Norway. This keyboard is well known and widely used. When the young people were writing, spell checkers and other proofing tools were turned off. As the larger project was collecting writing in English and the majority national languages, a Latin square design was used to control for the variables of language, genre, and order of task. This meant that each young person was individually assigned six peer-oriented writing topics, three descriptive and three argumentative,

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coupled with a language in which to write the text for each topic. Hence, two tasks in North Sámi, one argumentative and one descriptive, were assigned to each young person. About a third of the roughly 820 texts collected are written in North Sámi. Some young people missed parts of the data collection due to illness and other factors. The tasks were to be written for the same audience and were described as follows: A school in a large city in the south is running a project in which they are learning about different parts of the country. This school has asked you and your classmates to write some texts for their project’s homepage. Write around half a page (a full window on the computer). You can write for 45 minutes, but you can decide when your text is ready. Let me know when you have finished. The three descriptive tasks asked the young people to describe what they usually did when: (1) alone, (2) with their family, and (3) with friends. In our discussion of the young people’s writing and our analysis looking for evidence of super dimensions, we had to assure the anonymity of our writers. This was a requirement of the ethical board that approved the project, Literacy in Sápmi. For this reason, we do not tie the texts we discuss to specific schools or school type. We illustrate the evidence we found with pertinent texts from our collection of texts written in North Sámi with identifying information, such as places and names, changed or removed. Following Lindgren et al. (2016), we analyzed only the descriptive texts, and we looked for traces that have their origin outside of formal schooling. To illustrate our findings, we discuss a few texts in their entirety that reflect the traces of super dimensions we have found. This will allow the reader to gain a better insight into the young people’s identity construction than if we presented fragments from many texts with no personal context; these texts contain references to school. The descriptive texts about activities focus on activities that are no different from those of children growing up elsewhere, although some refer to activities that require snow. One young writer wrote the following short text (the English gloss is as close to the originals as possible). Mon laven mánát mu hesta go mon heitan skuvla. Já ruovttus mon orron mu bardni. I usually go my horse when I finish school. And at home I live my son. Any child around the world who lives in the countryside and who owns a horse could have written this text. The text does, however, give us a clear picture of this young person’s primary out-of-school interest, and we get a vivid picture of this young writer’s identity. Another writer presents a

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picture that also could have occurred anywhere, but is clearly influenced by global trends: Go mon lean ieš aktu rouvtun de mon lave spille vai de mon leavsuiid bahrkka. Skuvllas de mon lave čouhkeđđit ja spille veha mobiilain de lave olbmuit mu loussa bouhđit ja viedjat mu. When I am alone at home I usually game or I do my homework. At school I sit and play a bit with my mobile phone and usually people come and pick me up. Here we see how the digital world of games has entered into Sápmi in precisely the same way that it has other areas of the world. Other writers balance the gaming and use of computers with other activities. go mon lean okto ruovttus mon laven spille vai geahča tevá, dálve go lean okto mon lean siste ja go lea geasse mon laven manna olgun ja vaččit, mon in lave leahkki okto meahččis. ja skuovlon mon lave oađđit go lean okto. fridja aigi mon laven spille vai oađđit, i mon lean nu davja okto olgun muhttu go ruovttus lean de mon spillen. ja mon lean siste jus lean dalki. When I am home alone I usually game or watch TV, in the winter when I alone then I am inside and in the summer then I usually go out and take walks, I am not usually alone outside in the woods. and in school I sleep when I am alone. In my freetime I usually game or sleep, I am not outside so much alone but when I am home I usually game. And I am at home when it is bad weather. This writer shows how digital activity is a central part of winter and bad weather, with summer bringing an outdoor activity that could once more be undertaken anywhere in the world. Another writer creates a picture that, although similarly digitally global, includes the climate of winter Sápmi: ruovvtos min láven geahcca tv:a, spella dihtora. Olgun mon láven važžit betagin, čuogat. Dálvin min skoterah vuođđja, slaloma čierastallat. Skovlas min láven čohkat ja vuordit ahte lektiona galga álgit. aastoaigin min geačča tv:a, spella dihtoris, spella spabba. Go da leat juovlla min laven rahpah pakeahta, borrat biebmu. At home we usually watch tv, game on the computer. Outside we usually take walks with the dog, ski. In the winter, we go out on our snow scooter, go downhill skiing. At school we usually sit and wait for classes to start. In our spare time we watch tv, game on our computers, play ballgames. When it is Christmas we usually open presents, eat food.

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Even though we see the north in this picture, it is the global north with activities that could be part of many areas of the United States, Canada, and snowy areas of non-Sápmi Europe. The young writers in our study are fronting the global dimensions of their supercomplex lives in their descriptions of their activities; interestingly, perhaps even more so in these examples than in their English writing. Identity is linked to language, and as Albury (2019) argues, the Sami languages are strongly indexical of Sami ethnic identity, and these young writers may feel no need to write as one girl did in English, “I am a ‘Sapmigirl’.” That is, there is no need to explicitly index being Sami, as this identity is naturally present in the language. In summary, our analysis finds that the interaction of the local, national, and global in the young writers’ Sami writing mirrors that found in their English writing. That is, “the global context with its super dimensions seems as natural to these writers as their immediate context” (Lindgren et al., 2016, p. 66). Further, we argue that the local is present due to the use of the North Sámi language, and texts written in North Sámi require fewer explicit statements of belonging, as this is already indexed by the use of the language.

Promising Exploratory Directions in North Sámi Literacy Development It is greatly promising that the North Sámi texts show that young writers have the meaning making resources to produce texts in North Sámi that express who they are. When placed together with the findings of Lindgren et al. (2016), we see more support for the conclusion, based on the texts of three teenage writers, that young people growing up in Sápmi have meaning making resources in all of their languages (Lindgren et al., 2017). Further, although not systematically analyzed or discussed in this chapter, we find that the writers’ language skills, when we examine the texts in our database, are generally more restricted in North Sámi than in English. This aligns with the teachers’ views reported by Hornberger and Outakoski (2015). These results must inform future directions in North Sámi literacy development. These findings suggest that the young writers are able to transfer aspects of writing and genre between their languages, between their formal and informal learning, and between classrooms. Thus, formal literacy teaching in school has the possibility to focus on explicitly supporting language skill development, per se, so that the language skills increase toward those that these young people have achieved in their other languages. The generic aspects of writing will be supported by the development of these generic aspects in their other languages, driven by both formal and informal learning. We see a number of promising and challenging exploratory directions for improving young people’s North Sámi literacy development. Formal

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language teaching in school is only one small part of an effort that requires action at many levels. Sullivan, Langum, and Cocq (2019) argue that education alone is not sufficient for North Sámi literacy development, and also point out that “[t]he lack of books in the languages of the Indigenous peoples, coupled with the digital divide of access to technology between language groups (majority colonial language versus minority Indigenous languages), furthers inequality in opportunities to read and use technology” (p. 216). Thus, improving young people’s North Sámi literacy development requires change in a society where most written material is in the majority national language and rarely, at best, in North Sámi. Possibilities for exposure to North Sámi need to increase. As Outakoski (2015) argues, it is crucial that the language community itself sees literacy in its own language as a human right and as an important step toward language revitalization without predefining, or having to choose, what literacy contents are preferred and what are not. (pp. 67–68) However, having said that education is not sufficient does not mean that education is not necessary or central to young people’s North Sámi literacy development. Education for literacy development needs to be supported in and by policy documents. One promising direction would be the revision of the Swedish syllabus for Sami, so that it places the same demands on literacy as are found in the Swedish as a first language syllabus. Policy documents, such as syllabi, affect what is taught, and thus affect the skills that young people learn. Another direction is the creation of teaching materials and textbooks for use in North Sámi language and literacy classes; there are a few materials, but more are required. Both of these directions relate to formal classroom education. Yet even here, education alone is not sufficient. More societal and policy structural support is needed to drive promising exploratory directions in North Sámi literacy development forward.

Notes 1. The distance from one end to the other end of Sápmi is approximately the same as the distance between Stockholm, Sweden, and Gibraltar. 2. All Sami languages inflect finite verbs for tense, number, and person. There are two tenses, present and past, and three persons. However, in addition to singular and plural, there is also a dual number. Consequently, a finite lexical verb has 18 forms. On a par with most languages that exhibit dual agreement, its distribution is circumscribed by a number of factors (Vinka, 2001; Nevins, 2011). In Sami, the dual is restricted to [+human] subjects, which additional conditions pertaining to specificity and information structure in general. 3. North Sámi has seven morphological cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, illative, locative, commitative, and essive. The illative is fully comparable to

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dative. The accusative and the genitive are suppletive, but distributionally distinct. The essive is primarily reserved for predicate nominals. South Saami has eight morphologically distinct cases, where the inessive (location) and the elative (direction from) correspond to the North Sámi locative, which is suppletive between location and direction from. North Sámi especially has a relatively wide range of variation in the case system. For example, some dialects have non-suppletive forms for location and direction from. (For details, see Bergsland, 1994; Magga & Magga, 2012; Nickel, 1994; Sammallahti, 1998.) 4. Notice that there is some regional variation in the morphological case marking of the case (Vinka, 2002; Svonni & Vinka, 2003).

References Albury, N. J. (2019). “I’ve admired them for doing so well”: Where to now for Indigenous languages and literacies? In C. Cocq & K. P. H. Sullivan (Eds.), Perspectives on indigenous writing and literacies (pp. 165–185). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Axelsson, P., & Sköld, P. (2013). Indigenous peoples and demography: The complex relation between identity and statistics. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Barnett, R. (2000). University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity. Higher Education, 40(4), 409–422. Belancic, K., & Lindgren, E. (2017). Discourses of functional bilingualism in the Sami curriculum in Sweden. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2017.1396283 Belancic, K., Lindgren, E., Outakoski, H., Westum, A., & Sullivan, K. P. H. (2017). Nordsamiska i och utanför skolan: språkanvändning och attityder. In M. Liliequist & C. Cocq (Eds.), Samisk kamp: kulturförmedling och rättviserörelse (pp. 252–279). Umeå, Sweden: Bokförlaget h:ström. Bergsland, K. (1994). Sydsamisk grammatikk. Karasjok, Norway: Davvi Girji. Blommaert, J., Leppänen, S., & Spotti, M. (2012). Endangering multilingualism. In J. Blommaert, S. Leppänen, P. Pahta, & T. Räisäenen (Eds.), Dangerous multilingualism: Northern perspectives on order, purity and normality (pp. 1–21). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Corson, D. (1996). Official-language minority and aboriginal first-language education: Implications of Norway’s Sámi language act for Canada. Canadian Journal of Education, 21(1), 84–104. Gudhlanga, E. S., & Makaudze, G. (2007). Writing and publishing in Indigenous languages is a mere waste of time: A critical appraisal of the challenges faced by writers and publishers of Shona literature in Zimbabwe. Cape Town, South Africa: Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA). Heiss, A. (2003). Dhuuluu-Yala (to talk straight): Publishing Indigenous literature. Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press. Hornberger, N., & Outakoski, H. (2015). Sámi time, space, and place: Exploring teachers’ metapragmatic statements on Sámi language use, teaching, and revitalization in Sápmi. Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics, 3, 1–46. Jannok Nutti, Y. (2010). Ripsteg Mot Spetskunskap I Samisk Matematik: Lärares Perspektiv På Transformeringsaktiviteter I Samisk Förskola Och Sameskola (Doctoral dissertation). Luleå, Sweden: Institutionen för pedagogik och lärande, Luleå tekniska universitet.

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Julien, M. (1996). An incorporation analysis of Northern Sámi causatives. In A. Green & V. Motapanyane (Eds.), Proceedings of the thirteenth eastern states conference on linguistics. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications. Julien, M. (2003). On the negated past in Finnic and Sámi. In D. Nelson & S.  Manninen (Eds.), Generative approaches to Finnic and Sámi linguistics. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publishers. Keskitalo, P., Määttä, K., & Uusiautti, S. (2011). Toward practical framework of Sámi education. British Journal of Educational Research, 1(2), 84–106. Kuokkanen, R. (2008). From Research as colonialism to reclaiming autonomy: Toward a research ethics framework in Sápmi. In Ethics in Sámi and Indigenous research: Report from a Seminar in Kárášjohka, Norway, Nov. 23–24, 2006 (pp. 48–63). Kautokeino, Norway: Sami Institute. Lindgren, E., Sullivan, K. P. H., Outakoski, H., & Westum, A. (2016). Researching literacy development in the globalised North: Studying tri-lingual children’s English writing in Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish Sápmi. In D. R. Cole & C.  Woodrow (Eds.), Super dimensions in globalisation and education (pp. 55–68). Singapore: Springer. Lindgren, E., Westum, A., Outakoski, H., & Sullivan, K. P. H. (2017). Meaningmaking across languages: A case study of three multilingual writers in Sápmi. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(2), 124–143. Magga, O. H., & Magga, L. M. (2012). Sørsamisk grammatikk. Karasjok, Norway: Davvi Girji. Mörkenstam, U., & Lawrence, R. (2012). Självbestämmande genom myndighetsutövning? Sametingets dubbla roller. Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift, 114(2), 207–239. Moseley, C. (Ed.). (2010). Atlas of the world’s Languages in danger (3rd ed). Paris: UNESCO. Online version: Retrieved from www.unesco.org/culture/en/ endangeredlanguages/atlas Nevins, A. (2011). Multiple agree with clitics: person complementarity vs. omnivorous number. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 29(4), 939–971. Nickel, K. P. (1994). Samisk grammatikk. Karasjok, Norway: Davvi Girji. Ningyou. (2009). Original image: Sami languages large.png. [This version by Misha bb with a modification by Wikarth at en.wikipedia. Corrected sami map 4.PNG]. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACorrected_sami_map_4.PNG Omma, L. (2013). Ung same i Sverige: livsvillkor, självvärdering och hälsa (Doctoral dissertation). Umeå, Sweden: Umeå University Medical Dissertations. Outakoski, H. (2015). Multilingual literacy among young learners of North Sámi: Contexts, complexity and writing in Sápmi (Doctoral dissertation). Umeå, Sweden: Umeå Studies in Language and Literature 27. Outakoski, H., Lindgren, E., Westum, A., & Sullivan, K. P. H. (2019). Researching writing development to support language maintenance and revitalization: Design and methodological challenges. In C. Cocq & K. P. H. Sullivan (Eds.), Perspectives on Indigenous Writing and Literacies. (pp. 165–185). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Pettersen, T. (2011). Out of the backwater? Prospects for contemporary Sami demography in Norway. In P. Axelsson & P. Sköld (Eds.), Indigenous peoples and demography: The complex relation between identity and statistics (pp. 185–196). Oxford: Berghahn.

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Pikkarainen, H. (2008). Discrimination of national minorities in the education system. In DO:s rapportserie, 5–43. Stockholm: Ombudsmannen mot etnisk diskriminering (DO). Rasmussen, T., & Nolan, J. S. (2011). Reclaiming Sámi languages: Indigenous language emancipation from East to West. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 209, 35–55. Ridanpää, J., & Pasanen, A. (2009). From the bronx to the wilderness: Inari-Sami rap, language revitalisation and contested ethnic stereotypes. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 9(2), 213–230. Rogper. (2004). Original image: LocationSapmi-2.png. [This version by Fobos92. LocationSapmi.png]. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LocationSapmi.png Sametinget. (2008). Språkhandbok för förvaltningsmyndigheter. Kiruna, Sweden: Sametinget. Sammallahti, P. (1998). The Saami languages: An introduction. Karasjok, Norway: Davvi Girji. Scheller, E. (2013). Kola Sami language revitalization: Opportunities and challenges. In K. Andersson (Ed.), L’Image du Sápmi II: etudes comparées/textes réunis par Kajsa Andersson. Humanistica Oerebroensia. Artes et linguae 16 (pp. 392–421). Örebro, Sweden: Örebro University. Skolverket. (2016). Läroplan för sameskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet 2011: reviderad 2016 [Curriculum for the Sami School, the pre-school class and the leisure-time centre 2011: Revised 2016] (2nd ed.). Stockholm: Skolverket. Sullivan, K. P. H., Langum, V., & Cocq, C. (2019). Education is not sufficient: Exploring ways to support and research Indigenous writing and literacies. In C. Cocq & K. P. H. Sullivan (Eds.), Perspectives on Indigenous Writing and Literacies (pp. 215–219). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Svonni, C. (2017). Samisk utbildning i förändring: nomadskolan och processen för samer att bli likvärdiga samhällsmedborgare. In M. Liliequist & C. Cocq (Eds.), Samisk kamp: kulturförmedling och rättviserörelse (pp. 223–251). Umeå, Sweden: Bokförlaget h:ström-Text & Kultur. Svonni, M., & Vinka, M. (2003). Constraints on morphological causatives in Torne Saami. In S. Manninen & D. Nelson (Eds.), Generative approaches to Finnic and Saami linguistics (pp. 343–380). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publishers. Vertovec, S. (2006). The emergence of super-diversity in Britain (Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working paper no. 25). Oxford: University of Oxford. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethics and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. Vinka, M. (2001). Impoverishment as feature deletion: Dual and plural agreement in Sámi. Lund Working Papers in Linguistics, 48, 183–191. Vinka, M. (2002). Causativization in North Sámi (Doctoral Dissertation.). Canada: McGill University. Vinka, M. (2007). Verb movement and the morphosyntax of negation in Saami. In E. Bainbridge & B. Agbayani (Eds.), Proceedings of the thirty-fourth Western Conference on Linguistics (pp. 456–465). Fresno, CA: California State University. Watahomigie, L. J., & McCarty, T. L. (1997). Literacy for what? Hualapai literacy and language maintenance. In N. H. Hornberger (Ed.), Indigenous literacies in the Americas: Language planning from the bottom up (pp. 95–114). Berlin, FRG: De Gruyter Mouton.

14 Re-Centering Pedagogy on Oral Traditions Examples From Southwest Indigenous Languages Christine P. Sims Introduction In the southwestern United States, where Pueblo Indian languages have existed as oral traditions for centuries, language and cultural survival in the midst of a dominant English-speaking American society are critical concerns in many Pueblo tribes today. Over the last two decades there have been increased efforts to address a growing shift towards English among school-age generations by initiating community-based language programs and establishing early childhood schools and centers (Benjamin, Pecos, & Romero, 1997; Pecos & Blum-Martinez, 2001; Johnston, 2016); Romero-Little & McCarty, 2006; Sims, 2001). The first and foremost goal of these initiatives has been to maintain and revitalize Indigenous languages solely as spoken languages in these communities. In contrast to the Indigenous literacy efforts described in this book, I present a different perspective about Indigenous languages in this chapter, arguing for a focus on oral traditions as an inseparable part of “cultural literacy” (Benjamin et al., 1997; Romero-Little, 2007, 2010a, 2010b). I draw from Romero’s (2003) research on the socialization of Pueblo children and her use of this term to illustrate how oral traditions employ their own set of literacy skills as part of culture and language acquisition. The continual cycle of daily life in Pueblo families and communities provides the opportunities for young and old to use language in order to unfold the multiple layers of meaning that reside in shared cultural experiences. These are critical skills of oral language use that must continue to be developed if Indigenous languages and cultures are to survive. For minority languages like Pueblo languages, most of which are unrelated to the larger Indigenous language families of North America, this foundational element of Indigenous cultural literacy requires its own important forms of pedagogy and practice. I begin this chapter with a brief overview of Pueblo Indian languages and the ways in which they are integrally linked to cultural identity and place. I then proceed to discuss how family and community are the contexts for learning and acquiring cultural literacy. I draw upon my own

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experiences as a member of a Pueblo community that still maintains an oral tradition and as a speaker of the language of my Pueblo. My work with Indigenous language communities in the southwest also informs my discussion about Indigenous language initiatives that have re-centered oral traditions as their pedagogical foundation.

Pueblo Languages The nineteen Pueblos of New Mexico are located across the north central and northwestern regions of New Mexico. “Pueblo was the Spanish term used by 16th-century Spanish explorers to describe the indigenous agricultural villages they encountered while on their quest for the legendary, fabled cities of gold” (Sims, 2014, p. 202). I use the terms Pueblo and tribe interchangeably in this chapter to reflect both the cultural distinction of Pueblos from other American Indian groups as well as their recognition as individual distinct political entities by the United States federal government (Cohen, 1982). While there are some broad cultural features that are common among many Pueblos, most notably in aspects of their sociocultural and socio-religious life, each tribe maintains its own internal system of governance, distinct language, cultural practices, and traditions. Five different languages are spoken among the nineteen Pueblos: Keres, Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, and Zuni. With the exception of Towa and Zuni, each language family is further comprised of different dialects specific to particular Pueblos, thus adding to the diversity of languages indigenous to New Mexico. New Mexico Pueblo Indian languages have long persisted as oral traditions, despite the intrusion and imposition of Spanish, Mexican, and American foreign regimes over the course of nearly 500 years of historical occupation, conflict, colonization, and oppressive government policies. These languages have functioned within the context of close-knit sociocultural and socio-religious societies that have fiercely protected and kept their native spiritual life private. In order to survive centuries of oppressive policies aimed at eradicating native religious practices, Pueblo people took their spiritual practices and ceremonies underground, practicing them in secrecy (Suina, 1992). Concealing the sacred from outside interference was a means of cultural survival. Today, many Pueblo languages remain unwritten for this reason. Out of concern that this traditional religious knowledge could be accessed through written form and misappropriated by outsiders who have no affiliation with Pueblo communities and their internal social and religious systems, many have chosen not to commit their language to a written form. As with other American Indian tribes surrounded by a powerful dominant global language such as English, the present-day challenge for many Pueblos is maintaining their languages and ensuring that younger generations

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continue to learn the cultural values, beliefs, and traditional practices that have been passed down through oral traditions. As many Pueblos have moved forward to develop and implement language revitalization initiatives in their communities, “learning to speak the language is an especially important focus because of the critical nature of oral language use in the spiritual, ceremonial, and sociocultural life of Pueblo people” (Sims, 2014, p. 208). A Pueblo elder attending a community language forum during the 2016 Native American Language Teachers’ Institute at the University of New Mexico summed up the importance of oral traditions in this way: “We have a circle of life: the family, the plaza, the greater community, the culture. Stories, not books, but oral stories need to be passed down to generations.”

The Importance of Place and Identity As mentioned previously, Cochiti Pueblo scholar Mary Eunice RomeroLittle’s in-depth study about the socialization of Pueblo children (2003) provides important insights about the ways in which cultural learning is acquired. This is also reflected in the work of Gregory Cajete (2000), another Pueblo scholar who has written extensively about Indigenous knowledge, science, and place-based learning. The relationship between Indigenous cultures and their natural environments are crucial elements of identity and fundamental in teaching Indigenous languages. To understand the deeper meaning behind the elder’s statement quoted earlier and what this means in the context of Pueblo concerns for maintaining oral traditions, I begin at a place that is often reflected in oral Pueblo traditions that remind us of our earthly beginnings and emergence often carried in stories and songs. Regis Pecos, a Pueblo leader speaking at the 2018 National Association for Bilingual Education Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, spoke eloquently about this perspective: Elders remind us through these oral re-tellings that our way of life including family, community, and children have been gifted to us by our Creator with laws to govern ourselves and care for each other. Children are gifted to us so that our way of life will continue and our communities as well, to insure the nurturance of the children. All the natural resources with which to sustain us physically as well as spiritually have been provided as well, investing us with the responsibility to be caretakers, protectors, and sustainers of our way of life, not just for the sake of ourselves but for humanity. These are the values that define Pueblo people and why we do the things we do. Linked to these beliefs is the traditional calendar of activities that take place in each Pueblo including collective community work, special feast days, and ceremonial engagements where offerings of prayers and

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blessings are given to sustain the people physically and spiritually. In these cycles is the validation of oral traditions and the language that are essential to sustaining the gifts of the Creator.

The Importance of Place in Oral Traditions Pueblos occupy specific geographical locations along the Rio Grande and in the western regions of New Mexico. The broad topographical landscape of mountains, mesas, rivers, and other physical features serve as points of reference, which are articulated in the songs, prayers, stories, and the socio-religious practices of Pueblo people. Not surprisingly, place names for ancient prehistoric cultural sites such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde in northwestern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado and many other places still exist in Pueblo languages today. These place names, and those of numerous other sites, are brought to life in the oratorical forms and conventions that are employed in ceremonial contexts. Cultural sites are storied places, meaning that a significant site or geographical feature is often linked to specific oral traditions, cyclical retellings of stories, or events committed to memory; they are places that always require offerings of prayer and respect. Special place names impart a strong identity with belief systems and traditional practices that are reflected in different ways in each Pueblo. In some Pueblo traditions, place names can be bestowed on a Pueblo child at birth as their personal Indigenous name, reflecting the special cultural meanings and personal identities derived from and linked to place. Thus, Native peoples’ places are sacred and bounded, and their science is used to understand, explain, and honor the life they are tied to in the greater circle of physical life. Sacred sites are mapped in the space of tribal memory to acknowledge forces that keep things in order and moving. The people learn to respect the life in the places they live, and thereby to preserve and perpetuate the ecology. (Cajete, 2000, p. 77) Other scholars have described the power of place as an integral part of Indigenous identity (Johnson, 2012), the basis for spirituality (Ortiz, 2007), and a source of living energy (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001), as well as cultural wisdom (Basso, 1996). “The pedagogy of place” is therefore inclusive of “people’s experiences, problems, languages, and histories that students and communities rely upon to construct a narrative of collective identity” (McLaren & Giroux, 1990, p. 164). These concepts are helpful in explaining why cultural literacy (Romero-Little, 2007, 2010a) and oral traditions are integrally linked and why these comprise an important expanded notion of multiple literacies and “language learning as ‘meaning making’” (Meyer & Whitmore, 2017, p. 22).

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Place, therefore, reflects spiritual significance in many Pueblo cultures, often including various sites within villages and surrounding locales. In and around Pueblo villages, for example, communal planting, foot races, and ceremonial activities take place in designated areas recognized by members of the community as special, sacred, and sometimes “off-limits” during periods of use. Metaphors in the native language may be utilized for these places depending on their uses. Kivas, for example, are important structures in Pueblo ceremonial life, and young children begin to learn early in their lives what behaviors are expected in and around these important places, and later, as they mature, the significance of these places, their use, and the names by which they are known and referred to by the community. An important link to place is also reflected in the locations where natural resources, plants, and animal life can be found and the proper way in which these are harvested, gathered, and hunted. In these contexts, oral language practices are important aspects of acknowledging through appropriate spoken words or prayer offerings, man’s vital reciprocal relationship to nature (Cajete, 2000). For Pueblo communities, activities that take place during seasonal cycles involving families and sometimes the whole community can include planting and harvesting crops, hunting, and gathering wild plants. Families may also engage in seasonal activities, such as wood gathering, piñon picking, or gathering wild celery and wild tea in nearby mountains and mesas. Pueblo children participating in these activities will likely hear parents, grandparents, or other adults provide mindful observations, explanations, and interpretations of what is observed in the environment. They will be reminded through oral commentary about the appropriate practices of gathering and harvesting only what is needed, leaving enough behind to replenish for future times, and making the appropriate prayer offerings to mother earth in return for the resources that have been provided. Through language, the metaphoric meanings behind how and why these storied practices are an important aspect of a community’s traditions are learned. By engaging children in the “work” of these activities, they learn by observing, doing, and listening to parents, grandparents, adults, elders, and extended members of their families and communities (Cajete, 2000; Romero-Little, 2007). Cajete (2000) refers to these natural ecologies as places where Native peoples through long experiences and participation with their landscapes have come to know the language of their places . . . the ‘nature’ of the places which they inhabit . . . and the ‘dialects’ of its plants, animals, and natural phenomena. (p. 284) He further states that “learning the language of place and using the language to talk that place into being in both the individual and collective

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consciousness of the community is one of the essential functions of Native languages” (Cajete, 2000, p. 284). As seasons change, observing the signs of weather in cloud formations, temperature, plant life, and the movement of wild life, including birds, insects, and reptiles, mark the times when particular traditional activities begin and end. In Pueblo communities, traditional calendars of annual community ceremonials, celebrations, and community observances are driven by cyclical changes in seasons and celestial observations. Wintertime, for example, is the appropriate time for particular oral storytelling traditions; a time for listening to embedded lessons about appropriate behavior, the consequences of foolish actions, or how things came to be in the natural world. In some languages, the storyteller may verbalize a traditional opening that signifies to the listeners that a story comes from an ancient time. It is a verbal opening and invitation to imagining a different time when the world of humans, deities, and animals was very different, but still linked to places and traditions present in the Pueblo world. Listeners, on the other hand, may have their own protocol to follow. This might be a simple phrase that signals to the storyteller to proceed with a story. Thereafter, the phrase might be repetitively used by the listeners during the story-telling event, in effect, signaling the storyteller to continue and that they are listening. Such tales and stories are often rendered in circular rather than linear fashion where elements of a story can be repeated and overlapped, a mechanism used by the storyteller to ensure that listeners do not forget various elements of a story. This engagement of storyteller and listeners is an active process of reflection, metaphoric interpretation, and meaning construction. It is in a community’s oral traditions expressed through story, as well as in songs and prayers, that bring to life the metaphors speakers use to remember, contextualize, and share their cultural knowledge. Philosopher and social activist Paulo Freire, influenced by his work among Brazil’s rural uneducated populations, recognized that reading the world of our experiences (Freire & Macedo, 1987) is a crucial element of “real consciousness” (Freire, 2000, p. 96). As noted in the previous examples of Pueblo community life and the local ecologies that make up the Indigenous learning environment, knowledge systems are embedded in numerous place-based environments of learning, where generations of youth have learned to “read” and derive meaning from their world of experiences, including places, events, and the oral traditions of their communities. As Cajete (2000) explains, “Knowledge is presented in ‘high contexts,’ in which many levels of information are shared at many levels of communication” (p. 66). For long-standing oral-based languages, these lived experiences and derived meanings are part of what the Pueblo elder was expressing in his concern for learning the storied traditions, rather than from “books.” In Leslie Marmon Silko’s work, Ceremony

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(1977), the importance of oral traditions is expressed by a story character in this manner: I will tell you something about stories [he said] They aren’t just about entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. (p. 2) Finally, Jay Johnson (2012) provides an additional layer of meaning to these concepts, arguing that place-based learning and knowing are at the heart of Indigeneity. The conceptualization of place as an integral aspect of Indigenous cultural experiences is part of everyday life and relationships formed among speakers who share in the construction of meaning and the continuity of traditions through the spoken word. As well, the individual and community share a cultural identity developed over a lifetime of experiential learning, while also building and sustaining relationships as speakers of a language community. These are the cultural literacies that are not delivered or transmitted to learners in books, films, or written texts but reside in an array of multiple, continuous cycles of experiences and oral communicative engagement.

The Pedagogy of Pueblo Cultural Literacy What are the pedagogies of cultural literacy that oral language speakers employ in sharing cultural knowledge, language, and storied practices with young learners? Learning language and culture simultaneously through interactions within the cultural community take place throughout the lifetime of a Pueblo person (Benjamin et al., 1997; Cajete, 2000; RomeroLittle, 2007, 2010a, 2010b; Suina, 1994). As noted previously, children observe changes in their surroundings and natural environment. They may also notice the participation of family members in different community preparations that signal important forthcoming events. Whether it is community cleaning of the plaza, re-plastering the mud walls of family homes in anticipation of a coming feast day, harvesting corn or grinding cornmeal to be used for traditional religious purposes—these are all activities marking upcoming community or ceremonial events. Pueblo feast days, for example, are times when family preparations will be made in the home days ahead of an actual event. Perhaps new buckskin shoes are made for the children or new dresses sewn for them in preparation for traditional dances they will participate in with other family members.

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Grandmothers, mothers, and young girls will gather to bake bread in outdoor ovens, preparing feast day foods to be served in the home or to be taken to the plaza for feeding visitors on the day of a feast. Community practices, therefore, are important learning contexts for younger members of a Pueblo when they are allowed and encouraged to participate in or to observe adult family or other community members carrying out these activities. These times of shared participation are learning opportunities Romero-Little (2007) refers to as “teaching by reminding . . . a form of indirect socialization used to teach children appropriate forms of social, cultural and linguistic etiquette and proper forms of interaction” (p. 15). Martinez (2000) describes the intrinsic value of these language learning experiences, as a way to develop not only an understanding about the “beliefs and underlying philosophies of their communities, but also how to interact appropriately with other tribal members . . . learn about their community, its past and its goals for the future” (p. 217). Cajete (2000) describes his own upbringing in his Tewa language community thus: I cannot remember a time when I didn’t learn something through my participation in community; when I did not see something differently; or when I was not shared with in a direct and significant way. I do not remember a time when my community was not involved in teaching something, or when I was not impressed with the strength and continuity of Pueblo community. (p. 89) Romero’s original research (2003) and her later work (Romero-Little, 2007) describe these mentored opportunities as times when children are observers, encouraged to help or interact with adult learners. This might include such activities as making pottery, fashioning a new drum, preparing dance regalia, grinding cornmeal, or preparing traditional foods. In these situations, children receive verbal directions and instructions, listening to adult mentors point out specific things that they should remember or note as they engage and interact with them. “Structured performances” (Romero-Little, 2007, p. 17) may come much later as children mature and are expected to employ particular skills they have learned over the course of time, after they have had the opportunity to observe, participate, and engage in cultural practices. Cultural knowledge and skills, practiced and learned through direct instruction, also provide the opportunity for interactional verbal feedback from adult mentors. This helps learners gage their own progress in coming to know how particular things are done in their community. In summary, the community environment contributes significantly to a Pueblo child’s learning, and in these settings, “learning to read takes on a very different character and process that is tied to developing cultural literacy” (Sims & Meyer, 2017, p. 93).

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Re-Centering Oral Pedagogy: Present-Day Examples In several Pueblo communities where language revitalization efforts have been initiated in community-based and school-based programs within the last decade, a focus on cultural literacy has become the curricular foundation for teaching children in their Native language (Sims, 2009). In one high school Keres language class, for example, where written language is not used, students learn about the storied practices and places in their community through listening and engaging with fluent adult teachers and speakers from the community (J. Yazzie, personal communication, November, 2016). This sometimes involves a return to the village where students walk and learn from adult community members who talk with them about the significance and meanings associated with certain places as well as the proper verbal protocols practiced at these sites. Tribal elders who periodically visit these classes also talk to students about the traditional roles different community leaders play in the life of the community (V. Leno, personal communication, May, 2016) and the symbolism behind the special canes that are passed on to them when they are appointed to these positions. Learning the verbal protocols associated with these individuals and their positions is an important aspect of understanding the important relationship that exists between members of the community and their leaders. In another Pueblo community where the native language is unwritten, Keres language teachers use the traditional calendar of observances in their community as the basis for planning oral lessons and activities (A. Kahee, personal communication, June, 2016). Collaborative student work or individual portfolios of student work allow students the opportunity to talk about their learning experiences as well as encouraging open discussions about upcoming cultural events in their communities or in special community ceremonies in which they will participate. This direct engagement in cultural literacy is also the foundation for younger Pueblo children attending a Head Start program and a recently established Montessori school. In Jemez Pueblo, for example, where the Towa language is unwritten, the Walatowa Head Start program provides a full Towa language immersion environment; the transition to this approach was gradually implemented over the past five years (L. Toya, personal communication, May, 2018). For the children of Jemez Pueblo, the storied places of learning are literally the setting of this preschool, which is located within the village. In prior years, however, this federal government funded program followed the national English-based Head Start curriculum designed for low-income minority children throughout the United States. This meant there was a strong emphasis on early English literacy development introduced to Jemez children at the most critical time in their social, cultural, and native linguistic development. As a result, the program resulted in a shift away from the Towa language by

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Jemez children, and a notable increased use of English. This rapid erosion of the Indigenous language prompted the community to consider a major intervention in their Head Start program. As in many other Pueblos, the Towa language is integrally linked to the continuance of traditional religious life and vital to the sociocultural life of the community. Thus, language shift was recognized as a major threat to Towa language survival, a language that is spoken only in this one Pueblo. A decision was therefore made by the Pueblo’s leadership, along with the support of community elders, program staff, and parents, to transition the Head Start program to a full Towa language immersion program. The content of the program’s curriculum changed as well, with a return to teaching children about their own oral traditions, the storied places of their village, as well as the songs, dances, and sociocultural traditions of their community. One such cultural tradition in Jemez Pueblo involves the traditional spring clearing of the village’s irrigation ditches that are vital to the agricultural fields in the community. This is generally a collaborative community activity that takes place in many Pueblos in which the menfolk are expected to help remove the accumulation of winter debris and dry weeds from all the ditches in order to make way for irrigation water to be released and utilized by individual farmers. The boys in the Walatowa Head Start program were allowed to be present during this activity, listening to and observing their fathers and other men from the community as they went about this important communal work. The girls, on the other hand, were allowed to help the women prepare the noontime lunch for the men and the boys when it was time for them to take their break (L. Toya, personal communication, December, 2016). Thus, learning by observation, as well as the guided learning that took place as the boys and girls interacted with older fluent speakers of Towa, provided opportunities for cultural literacy and development of the Native Towa language. Many more examples of children’s engagement in the Pueblo’s cultural practices such as these have resulted in a heightened valorization of the language among the children as reported by staff, parents, and grandparent observations. Many report that the children themselves now remind adults to speak in Towa or initiate games and activities with their families at home in the Towa language (L. Toya, personal communication, December, 2017). In Cochiti Pueblo, a Montessori school setting provides the contexts for learning cultural literacy in another unwritten dialect of the Keres language. Established in 2012 by Trisha Moquino, a fluent Keres speaker trained in the Montessori approach, Cochiti children, ages 3–6, are enrolled in the Keres Children’s Learning Center (KCLC) where they learn cultural literacy in the daily practices and routines of their school day through intergenerational teaching. “As soon as children step through the door, nothing but Keres is spoken to teach not only Western material, but also to give them fluency and knowledge of traditional skills, values and

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philosophy” (Johnston, 2016, p. 2). The Montessori school reinforces how Cochiti Pueblo children “acquire skills and knowledge holistically, and in the context of family and community activities they are engaged in” (Romero, 2010a, p. 20). For example, the children begin to practice from the first day the manner in which they are to make their daily morning offering of prayer in the Keres language outdoors facing the sun. They learn the significance and meaning of the use of cornmeal during this private prayer time that is a common practice among all Pueblo people. They learn the social verbal protocols for using gender specific language at meal times as well as the cross-gender kinship terms that identify their relationships with their teachers and their peers. Traditional dancing, singing, and storytelling are also a natural part of learning experiences that children regularly engage in while at KCLC where many different cultural materials are available for the children to use. Children engage in learning and understanding the significance and meanings underlying the cultural practices that they engage in, the traditional clothing and attire they dress in, or helping others to do the same. The opportunity for them to learn the traditional songs that accompany different dances are learned alongside community people who come to KCLC. On their own, the children often engage in these dances, with the boys and girls appropriately lining up in the appropriate manner as they have often seen their adult models dance on special feast days. Characteristics of the cultural life of Pueblos such as Cochiti and Jemez Pueblo are true for most other Pueblos, where oral language use is integrally linked to the sociocultural and socio-religious life of the community (Suina, 1992).

Conclusion As described in this book, Indigenous written language literacy development is being introduced to school-age children in many communities around the world, including present-day American Indian tribes. In the case of the latter Indigenous groups, many emerging language revitalization initiatives are increasingly linked to formal education domains, where Indigenous literacy is used to teach basic subject matter concepts and linguistic knowledge about the target language (vocabulary, sentence structure, phonology, and such). These are usually accomplished through the use of texts and increasingly through the use of technology such as video games, digitized stories, and other forms of media. Some contend that the development of Indigenous literacy contributes to the valorization of a language, and serves as a vehicle for asserting “local control over key socializing agencies such as the school” (Watahomigie  & McCarty, 1996, p. 107). In many cases, however, local tribal control of education systems has yet to be fully achieved and thus, Indigenous language instruction, when it is implemented in most public schools, is still

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subject to the prevailing standards and requirements placed on the regular instructional program. In the drive to develop Indigenous literacy, Grenoble and Whaley (1998) raise some important considerations with regard to whether such a development is a necessary step in language revitalization efforts and question what impact this will have on non-literate language communities. Another key question is to what extent literacy will begin to influence more traditional domains of oral language use and intergenerational cultural literacy practices, some of which were referenced in this chapter. Aside from Indigenous literacy use and its application in school-based settings, Bielenberg (1999) also questions how this will affect the internal relationships between speakers and learners and their perceptions about the value of their own oral traditions and practices. As described herein, oral-based languages such as the unwritten Pueblo languages are highly dependent upon the interactive process of talk in order to construct meaning from what is observed, heard, and experienced. Implicit in these practices is making use of language in order to “nurture, and support the in-built human needs to construct and communicate meaning with others” (Meyer & Whitmore, 2017, p. 25). Most Pueblos have tried to hold fast to their goals of re-strengthening and maintaining their oral traditions and teaching younger generations the necessary skills and processes involved in coming to know the cultural knowledge and language of their communities, even as some of their efforts have expanded into school settings (Martinez, 2000; Pecos & BlumMartinez, 2001; Sims, 2001, 2006, 2008). This is a choice that communities make, and such choices are existential decisions. Elders recognize, however, that there are limitations as well as unintended consequences in relying solely on text to “store” and “deliver” linguistic and cultural information as is often the case with subject matter content and instruction in schools. In these latter contexts, knowledge is often objectified, measured, and assumed to be easily “transferred from one human being to another without distortion” (Meyer & Whitmore, 2017, p. 20). This notion is especially prevalent in the public domain where the increased use of technology and instant access to information is readily available to all. Smolkin and Suina’s (1996) counter argument is that “Language used in appropriate styles and contexts for real functions will lead to ‘higher level’ thinking. Only then will children be able to communicate properly with elders at appropriate times” (p. 162). Requirements that stem from national English-based standards assessments can also influence how Indigenous languages are taught in schools, and this too can drive the push for developing written curricula and assessments in the Native language (Sims, 2008). In some cases, for example, Native language teachers struggle to find ways to “fit” their language teaching into current English-based Common Core State Standards and benchmarks.1 Even commercial companies and entrepreneurial assessment

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organizations stand to profit from these developments, in their promotion of native language assessment protocols, development of language grammars, orthographies, online dictionaries, websites, and digital software for Native languages. This raises the question of whether such developments place Indigenous languages in service to English-based curriculums and replications of mainstream education rather than considering the key foundations and functions of Indigenous languages. Do such developments begin to compromise the goals of Indigenous communities who desire that their children learn the language and culture in order to prepare them for the future, and as a means for guiding them in how they should live in appropriate relationship to their family, community, the natural world, and humanity? For Indigenous communities, these are some of the key considerations and choices that need to be made by them, given their own specific contexts, values, and perspectives about language (Grenoble & Whaley, 1998). Re-centering oral traditions as a pedagogy of practice for Indigenous language learners and as a way to re-strengthen the continuation and survival of Indigenous languages and cultures is one such vital choice.

Note 1. Common Core State Standards are the latest iteration of U.S. education standards that public schools are expected to use for evaluating instructional programs and student achievement.

References Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Benjamin, R., Pecos, R., & Romero, M. E. (1997). Language revitalization efforts in the Pueblo de Cochiti: Becoming “literate” in an oral society. In N. H. Hornberger (Ed.), Indigenous literacies in the Americas: Language planning from the bottom up (pp. 115–136). Berlin and NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter. Bielenberg, B. (1999). Indigenous language codification: Cultural effects. In G. Cantoni, R. St. Clair, & E. Yazzie (Eds.), Revitalizing Indigenous languages (pp. 103–112). Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University Center for Excellence in Education. Cajete, G. (2000). Native science: Natural laws of interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers. Cohen, F. (1982). Felix Cohen’s handbook of federal Indian law. Charlottesville, VA: Mitchie, Bobbs-Merrill. Deloria, V., & Wildcat, D. (2001). Power and place: Indian education in America. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishers. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. P. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world, critical studies in education series. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

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Grenoble, L. A., & Whaley, L. J. (Eds.). (1998). Endangered languages: Current issues and future prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, J. T. (2012). Place-based learning and knowing: Critical pedagogies grounded in Indigeneity. GeoJournal, 77, 829–836. Johnston, L. J. (2016). Education self-determination superstars: Cochiti Pueblo takes on language-learning. Published on Indian Country Today Media Network.com. Retrieved from http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com Marmon Silko, L. (1977). Ceremony. New York: Viking Press and Penguin Books. Martinez, R. B. (2000). Languages and tribal sovereignty: Whose language is it anyway? Theory into Practice, 39(4), 211–219. McLaren, P., & Giroux, H. (1990). Critical pedagogy and rural education: A challenge from Poland. Peabody Journal of Education, 67(4), 154–165. Meyer, R. J., & Whitmore, K. F. (Eds.). (2017). Reclaiming early childhood literacies. New York: Routledge. Ortiz, S. (2007). Indigenous language consciousness: Being, place, and sovereignty. In E. L. Gansworth (Ed.), Sovereign bones: New Native American writing (pp. 135–148). New York: Nation Books. Pecos, R., & Blum-Martinez, R. (2001). The key to cultural survival, language planning and revitalization in the Pueblo de Cochiti. In L. Hinton & K. Hale (Eds.), The Green Book of language revitalization in practice (pp. 75–82). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Romero, M. E. (2003). Perpetuating the Cochiti way of life: Language socialization and language shift in a Pueblo community (Unpublished dissertation). University of California at Berkeley. Romero-Little, M. E. (2007, June 9). Language socialization of Pueblo children. Paper presented at the Reclaiming Our Children through Language: A Native Language Symposium, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. Romero-Little, M. E. (2010a). How should young Indigenous children be prepared for learning? A vision of early childhood education for Indigenous children. Journal of American Indian Education, 49(1&2), 1–25. Romero-Little, M. E. (2010b). Best practice for Native American language learners. In G. Li & P. Edwards (Eds.), Best practices in ELL instruction (pp. 273–298). New York: Guilford Press. Romero-Little, M. E., & McCarty, T. (2006). Language planning challenges and prospects in Native American communities and schools. Language Policy Research Unit, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Sims, C. P. (2001). Native language planning: A pilot process in the Acoma Pueblo community. In L. Hinton & K. Hale (Eds.), The Green Book of language revitalization in practice (pp. 75–82). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Sims, C. P. (2006). Language planning in American Indian Pueblo communities: Contemporary challenges and issues. Current Issues in Language Planning, 7(2&3), 251–267. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Sims, C. P. (2008). Assessing the language proficiency of tribal heritage language learners: Issues and concerns for American Indian Pueblo languages. Current Issues in Language Planning, 9(3), 327–343. Taylor & Francis. Sims, C. P. (2009). Maintaining American Indian languages: A Pueblo Indian language immersion program. In P. Richard-Amato (Ed.), Making it happen: From interactive to participatory language teaching. London, England: Longman and Pearson Education.

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Sims, C. P. (2014). Pueblo languages of the southwest. In T. G. Wiley, J. K. Peyton, D. Christian, S. Moore, & N. Liu (Eds.), Handbook of heritage, community, and Native American languages in the United States (pp. 202–211). New York: Routledge. Sims, C. P., & Meyer, R. (2017). A year of rich learning for a child. In R. J. Meyer & K. F. Whitmore (Eds.), Reclaiming early childhood literacies: Narratives of hope, power, and vision (pp. 92–94.) New York: Routledge and Taylor & Francis. Smolkin, L. B., & Suina, J. H. (1996). Lost in language and language lost. Language Arts, 73, 166–172. Suina, J. (1992, January). Pueblo secrecy, result of intrusions. New Mexico Magazine, pp. 60–63. Suina, J. (1994). From natal culture to school culture to dominant society culture: Supporting transitions for Pueblo Indian students. In P. M. Greenfield & R. R. Cocking (Eds.), Cross-cultural roots of minority child development (pp. 115–130). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Watahomigie, L. J., & McCarty, T. L. (1996). Literacy for what? Hualapai literacy and language maintenance. In N. H. Hornberger (Ed.), Indigenous literacies in the Americas: Language planning from the bottom up (pp. 95–113). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

15 What Matters for Indigenous Language Writing Kendall A. King

Of the estimated 6,000–7,000 languages that exist on the planet, roughly half (3,900) have established writing systems (Simons & Fennig, 2018). Literacy, here meaning the technologies of reading and writing, in relative terms, is a new and recently acquired human skill. While the earliest forms of written communication likely date back to about 3,500–3,000 BCE, for many centuries, literacy remained a highly restricted technology, used only by elites and closely associated with the exercise of power. For instance, Egyptian hieroglyphs (3300–3100 BCE) depicted royal iconography, and Olmec and Zapotec civilizations in Mesoamerica (900–400 BCE) used glyphic writing and bar-and-dot numerical notation to represent calendar systems. These early uses of literacy were linked to management and administrative practices, and as literacy was confined to the ruling elite, probably less than 1% of the population used this technology. It was only in the Middle Ages that book production grew, and literacy among the general population became important in the Western world. Although the ambition of universal literacy in Europe was a fundamental reform stemming from the Enlightenment, it took centuries for reading and writing to become commonplace. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries did rates of literacy approach universality in early-industrialized countries (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2018). The technologies of literacy are now spread across much of the world. While only 12% of the people in the world could read and write in 1820, these proportions are now reversed: Approximately 17% of the world population remains non-literate today (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2018). Although the expectation of literacy is now widespread around the world, much of the research base about how children and adults acquire reading and writing skills in schools is based on investigations conducted in North America and Europe, in relatively wealthy, early-industrialized countries with high literacy rates, often in contexts that make use of well-established Latin scripts. In many cases, monolingualism, rather than multilingualism, is the norm for daily life and education. Furthermore, much of this work tends to emphasize intake, or passive skills, that is learning to read, rather than the active, productive skills of learning to write.

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Much less is known about literacy in many other contexts around the world, and in particular, about learning to write in Indigenous contexts where scripts, orthographies, dictionaries, and curricular materials are not always established or widely available; where the language of literacy instruction is officially unrecognized, has low status, and is possibly endangered; where literacy rates overall, and in Indigenous language in particular, are often low; and where structural and material conditions limit access to quality formal schooling. The 13 chapters in this book take a huge step toward filling this gap by providing close analysis of the goals and processes for teaching reading and writing skills to children in Indigenous languages.

Why Write in Indigenous Languages? Teaching writing in Indigenous languages is of importance and interest for many reasons. At the most basic level, in most instances, teaching Indigenous language writing means teaching literacy in and through students’ mother tongues. Data from many contexts worldwide have shown that this practice dramatically improves student-learning outcomes, lowers school-leaving rates, and improves the quality and quantity of classroom interaction (Benson, 2002; Hornberger, 2011; Thomas & Collier, 2002; World Bank, 2005). Indeed, over 60 years of empirical research and international proclamations provide support for the rather obvious, common-sense fact that children learn to read and write most effectively in a language they understand and speak (UNESCO, 1953). Nevertheless, many students, in both rich and poor countries around the world, do not experience mother tongue literacy instruction, but instead are required to learn the skills of reading and writing in a language that is not their strongest, or is perhaps completely new and unknown to them. This extra burden is disproportionately experienced by students in economically poor countries, and by immigrant, refugee, and Indigenous students worldwide, whose languages are typically unrecognized or systematically excluded from formal schooling. Significant worldwide inequalities exist in who enjoys meaningful literacy instruction. For instance, while many children have access to education in their first language in high-income OECD countries (87%) and in Latin American and Caribbean nations (91%), estimates of access to education in children’s mother tongue languages are much lower in Sub-Saharan African countries (13%) as well as in East Asia and the Pacific regions (62%) (Young, 2015). As is evident in many of the chapters here, teaching writing to children in their mother tongues, often in and through Indigenous languages, entails a fundamental pivot toward more productive and efficient literacy pedagogy. More broadly, teaching children to write in Indigenous languages is often an integral aspect of language revitalization projects. In principle,

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the development of literacy skills and the creation of a body of literature in the endangered language are not essential to language revitalization (Fishman, 1991). Intergenerational transmission is largely an oral, interpersonal, family, and community-based enterprise, and the mechanism through which languages have survived and thrived for centuries. However, in present practice, instruction in (and ideally through) the Indigenous and threatened language in formal schools often occupies a crucial avenue for language revitalization activity in many contexts (Hornberger & King, 1996). Indeed, scholars have clearly documented how schools that make productive use of Indigenous languages in instruction elevate “the scale or status of Indigenous languages in contemporary contexts and demonstrably chang[e] expectations for Indigenous languages as vital, dynamic carriers of distinct Indigenous knowledge systems” (McCarty & Lee, 2015, p. 341). Thus, while literacy instruction is not technically essential to or necessary for language revitalization, it is a powerful and important tool for many communities. Finally, as is richly evident in many of the chapters in this volume, teaching children to write in an Indigenous language is a political act. In many (former) colonial contexts, schools were sites of linguistic and cultural destruction for Indigenous children, who were often physically punished and verbally abused for using their language (Hermes, 2012). It is no small irony that Indigenous leaders seek to remake, undo, and decolonize these same educational spaces by using the technologies of literacy to grow communities of speakers and writers in non-dominant languages, ones often in danger of extinction as a result of colonial and postcolonial violence. Literacy instruction was a common mechanism for language shift toward the dominant, majority language, but it is now taken up as a powerful tool of language revitalization and as essential to the struggle for self-determination more broadly.

What Matters for Children Learning to Write in Indigenous Languages The 13 chapters here investigate, from a range of theoretical perspectives, the sharply varied ways in which the instruction of writing in Indigenous languages takes place and with what outcomes in a remarkably rich set of contexts around the world. These chapters rest on extensive, grounded empirical work, often through long-term collaboration with community members and deep knowledge of community norms, histories, and practices. As a result, each chapter forefronts the context of literacy instruction in the community across scales of time and space, including the historical trajectory, changing language practices over time, and the immediate school context as well as the material constraints of teaching and learning in that context. Most of these chapters take a qualitative if not ethnographic approach, and thus provide rich description and close

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analysis of the everyday practices of teaching and learning to write in an Indigenous language. With an emphasis on documenting and analyzing the everyday writing practices of children, none of the chapter authors experimentally manipulate the contexts, for instance, to compare particular methods or to test specific curricular approaches. Rather, what emerges from these 13 collective case studies of the teaching and learning of writing in Indigenous languages is a powerful and robust set of findings concerning attempts to engage in novel instructional practices, often with limited institutional or curricular support. While each chapter presents a particular “deep dive” into a specific cultural world, collectively, these chapters offer a shared set of findings about what matters in the instruction of writing in Indigenous languages. I highlight these collective findings below to allow for greater insights into the academic, policy, and pedagogical efforts needed to support this important project. Writing Systems Matter Indigenous languages, like all languages, can be written in many different types of systems and scripts: alphabetic, logographic, syllabic, and consonantal. In developing a new orthography, scholars have stressed that learnability, acceptability, and transparency are important criteria in decision-making and support optimally effective instruction (Grenoble & Whaley, 2006). Multiple chapters in the volume highlight how and why the choice of writing systems for Indigenous language writing instruction matters. For instance, Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla and William H. “Pila” Wilson detail the implications of use of the Hakalama, the Hawaiian syllable chart or syllabary, by Hawaiian Language Medium Education (HLME) and language nest preschools. This syllable-based literacy approach, the authors argue, suits the Hawaiian language well, in part because it corresponds to its basic syllable structure: optional onset (single consonant) followed by nucleus (vowel)—and a few or no consonant clusters. The Hakalama, as a perfect syllabary, provides a tool in which pronunciation is transparent, and in which there is no ambiguity with respect to phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Once children acquire the ability to decode and encode (the 45 basic, or 90 expanded, units, known as huahakalama), they can read and write any existing, written Hawaiian word. This tool is further enhanced by a pedagogical approach that emphasizes chanted “reading” of the huahakalama. Rather than learning to name the letters and then learning what sound each letter “stands for,” as is common in the instruction of English and many other languages, the huahakalama is that sound. The one-to-one correspondence across the huahakalama and specific sounds, in conjunction with the regular orthography, facilitates children’s acquisition of literacy skills, according to the authors and also as suggested by historical

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research. With this huahakalama-based approach, children are able to write their names and to engage in spontaneous writing without guided assistance at much younger ages than children who are learning to write alphabetic languages. The Hawaiian case can be productively compared with the challenges to learners presented by the Cherokee syllabary, an orthographic system developed by George Gist or Guess (in English), known more popularly as Sequoyah, in the early 1800s. In their chapter, Lizette Peter, Tracy Hirate-Edds, and Ryan Wahde Mackey describe writing practices within one Cherokee immersion school in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. Here, English-dominant students are immersed in content and literacy learning through the medium of Cherokee and the Cherokee orthography, called the “syllabary.” The syllabary is nearly 200 years old, and learning to use it, for many Cherokee, is integral to the broader mission of Cherokee language revitalization. The syllabary consists of 85 moraic characters (each representing one syllable, rather than a phoneme), using Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic letters. This is the main orthographic system learned by English-speaking children in the immersion school initially. Early grades are dedicated to tracing, producing, and memorizing the syllabary characters, and in later years, children work on producing academic reports and narratives. While symbolically very important to Cherokee renewal efforts, the syllabary is somewhat complicated to learn for novice writers, all of whom are also concurrently oral Cherokee language learners. These challenges for learners result from the lack of standardized written form; dialectal and idiolectal variable pronunciations of words; and perhaps most importantly, the characteristics the syllabary itself. As an underdifferentiated system, meaningful phonemic contrasts (e.g., in aspiration, vowel length) are not always represented in the orthography; furthermore, Cherokee morphological forms do not always correspond to the pronunciation of syllabary characters. As Peter, Hirate-Edds, and Wahde Mackey note in their chapter, while the syllabary is an effective tool for Cherokee speakers with high levels of oral proficiency, it is challenging for second language learners to use. More broadly, taken together, these chapters illustrate the importance of the characteristics of the writing system utilized in teaching Indigenous languages, and together offer powerful evidence that the balance of learnability, acceptability, and transparency greatly matters. Pedagogy Matters A large number of pedagogical approaches to teaching writing are described and evaluated in the current international research literature, including but not limited to process writing, communicative writing, writing strategy instruction, and transcription practice (Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara, &

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Harris, 2012; Rietdijk, van Weijen, Janssen, van den Bergh, & Rijlaarsdam, 2018). While the chapters in this volume do not attempt to evaluate the merit of particular pedagogical approaches such as these, many do point to the importance of effective pedagogy and teacher training more broadly. Collectively, the papers underline the point that while teaching children to write in Indigenous languages is pedagogically valuable and important, high-quality pedagogy is also critical, and in some contexts, in short supply. For instance, Gertrude Nicholas examined instructional practices for Papua New Guinea children who were learning to write in their language, Notsi. Her analysis indicates that instructional practices were dominated by traditional rote learning. Furthermore, teachers lacked the support and training needed to implement the curriculum, and instead, for instance, relied on tasks that demanded penmanship (e.g., copying from the board), but not creative writing or the comparison of or active use of writing systems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the pedagogical approaches identified, students’ writing samples indicated that cognition in early writing was disconnected from students’ phonemic awareness; letter formation skills; word, phrase, and sentence building; and creative story writing. Based on her findings, Nicholas recommends greater teacher training and professional development that supports teachers’ abilities to model, encourage, and sustain student writing in Notsi. In another Papua New Guinea context, Samuel Saleng and Gertrude Nicholas analyzed teachers’ instruction of Numanggang, a language spoken by about 2,300 people. In their chapter, they describe student writing and teacher instruction within a community context in which learning through observation is central. Numanggang-speaking students tend to learn via observation and practice, both at home and in school. The authors suggest that this cultural preference, in conjunction with a longstanding preference of rote teaching style, impacted writing development. In particular, Saleng and Nicholas argue that students’ “level of writing development seems to depend on how much the teacher ventured away from traditional rote teaching practices and began to encourage children to think of words, phrases, and sentences on their own,” and, for instance, allowed for invented spellings and multiple means of representing text. Their chapter thus suggests that moving away from established schooling norms, even if long-standing and grounded in local cultural practices, is linked with student writing gains and development. High-quality instruction at the classroom level matters, but it is largely dependent on institutional and curricular support. Tintswalo Manyike and Nkidi Phatudi describe the case of Xitsonga, one of the official Indigenous languages recognized by the government of South Africa, as a medium of instruction and language of literacy in early childhood education. Their work points to the importance of curricular and institutional infrastructure in supporting Xitsonga writing instruction. While nine languages (in addition to Afrikaans and English) are recognized by the

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South African state, this official status does not translate into their use as a medium of instruction in the education system (Heugh, 2014). As a result, children who speak one of the official languages learn in that language to only a limited extent in grades 1–3. Manyike and Phatudi report inconsistent implementation of the language policy, such that some supposedly Xitsonga-medium schools are actually English-medium schools, particularly in traditional White suburban areas of South Africa. In their chapter, Manyike and Phatudi focus on teaching practices in township schools where Xitsonga materials are used, and children learn to read and write in Xitsonga. Their analysis of student writing reveals the need for more extensive training in the teaching of writing. They argue that teaching writing requires the management and coordination of multiple cognitive-linguistic processes simultaneously. Thus, it requires explicit, systematic, and sustained instruction in all of the languages taught to develop learners’ proficiency. They explain that these types of challenges can only be overcome if the differences between the spoken language and written language are made apparent to learners. Their chapter highlights the need for teacher training that emphasizes how writing skills and vocabulary can be cultivated through exposure to books, and how learners should be allowed to read independently and allow for the ideas and vocabulary gained from this reading to transform their own thinking about life itself, so that these insights might be reflected in their writing (Rogoff & Wertsch, 1984). While these points are well established in international literacy literature, the need for institutional support for effective pedagogy is central to many of the chapters here. The Ecology of Literacy Matters The ecology of literacy refers to a theoretical and empirical approach meant to understand the literacy events relevant in the everyday life of a community; who engages in what literacy practices, in which ways, for what purposes, and with what meanings attached (Barton, 2007). The importance of such local ecologies is abundant in many of the chapters here. For instance, Kirk P.H. Sullivan, Kristina Belancic, Eva Lindgren, Hanna Outakoski, and Mikael Vinka report on the case of multilingual youth learning to write in North Sámi in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. This analysis of 126 young writers’ narratives across 12 schools points to the capacities that children possess for meaning making in North Sámi; simultaneously, their work underlines the need for greater exposure to and structural support for North Sámi beyond the classroom. More specifically, the authors report that student writers’ language skills are generally more restricted in North Sámi than in English. Based on these findings, they suggest that “formal language teaching in school is only one small part of an action that requires action at many levels.” Quoting

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Sullivan, Langum, and Cocq (2019), they note that “the lack of books in the languages of the Indigenous peoples, coupled with the digital divide of access to technology between language groups (majority colonial language versus minority Indigenous languages), furthers inequalities in opportunities to read and use technology.” Also emphasizing the role of local language and literacy ecologies, Christine Sims underscores the importance of writing and literacy pedagogy that is centered on oral traditions. She describes the case of the Pueblo languages of the U.S. state of New Mexico. These efforts depart from traditional Western technologies and approaches, and instead focus on oral traditional and community-based interaction. As Sims notes, “learning language and culture simultaneously through interactions within the cultural community take place through the lifetime of a Pueblo person.” She offers a broader vantage point on pedagogy that emphasizes the need to place school-based literacy within the language and literacy ecology of the community. Here, “oral language use is integrally linked to the sociocultural and socio-religious life of the community.” Hannah Sarvasy and Eni Ögate demonstrate how the language and literacy ecology, and in particular, dialect diversity, matters for writing instruction of Nungon, a language of Papua New Guinea with about 1,000 speakers. While the language has an orthography based on the closely related Yau language, each village speaks a distinct Nungon dialect, and children speak multiple dialects at home. One dialect, that of the Towet village, the relatively high-status variety of the founding teacher of the program, is used as the main reference dialect for instruction. According to the authors, this is unfortunate, as in many communities this leads to conflict between students’ native phonology and that used in the classroom. Multiple minimal pairs exist across the varieties, resulting in challenges for students to distinguish in writing specific sounds that appear identical or are not meaningfully salient in their variety. While such opacity is not uncommon in orthographies worldwide, the challenges are exacerbated here by the limited preparation for teachers to address the syntax of Nungon (which features clause chains), low school attendance (given long and dangerous commutes faced by many students), and lack of need for literacy in everyday community life (and correspondingly low adult formal literacy rates). Sarvasy and Ögate’s findings, together with those of many of the other chapters here, underline the importance of the local literacy ecology in shaping the nature of instruction of Indigenous language writing with children. Ideology Matters Language ideology generally refers to sets of beliefs or feelings about the languages used in one’s social world (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994). Many of the chapters suggest that language ideology matters for

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Indigenous language writing instruction. Ginés Alberto Sánchez Arias, Monolo Miranda, and Mary Jill Brody, for instance, powerfully demonstrate the role of ideology in their discussion of Ngäbere, a language and new orthography used by Indigenous people in western Panama. The Ngäbe people developed their own religion, known as Mamatada, which teaches followers to be skeptical of the government and of Westerners; emphasizes past injustices, trauma, and humiliations; rejects negative stereotypes of Indigenous people as lazy or stupid; and encourages abstinence from alcohol. While followers take the Christian Bible as truth, they believe the next phase in development will be theirs. While new religions are not uncommon in the Americas, what is remarkable is that this religion resulted in an original orthography. According to the authors, in 1962, a follower received a message concerning how to build a future for her people. This came in the form of three sets of runic inscriptions on the ground around her house in novel characters, which would later be deciphered into a novel writing system. The message read: “You are defenseless, and would have been able to defend yourselves, you don’t have the means. Now I will give you this so you can defend yourselves.” This message and the resultant orthography were foundational to the Ngäbe language revitalization movement. For many leaders and teachers of this effort, the “writing system is infused with spirituality.” As the authors of this chapter note, “Literacy in Ngäbe meets a local need, and it is used by the community as a way to explore their language in previously unchartered ways.” As Sánchez Arias, Miranda, and Brody report, “To invent a system from the inside rather than have one imposed by colonialists represents a source of Indigenous soft power.” Their chapter points to the divergent, context-specific meanings underlying print systems, and the power therein. Katherine J. Riestenberg and Raquel Eufemia Cruz Manzano’s chapter further highlights how ideology matters in their analysis of Zapotec revitalization efforts in Oaxaca, Mexico. Zapotec writing instruction is imbued with “patterns of privileging and relations of power” (Ivanič, 2004). As the authors note concerning contemporary discourse surrounding Zapotec revitalization, in this context, “languages are only important if they are written, and only important languages are written.” While this ideology is pervasive, simply creating a standardized orthography and dictionary does not immediately result in a culture of literature and writing in the language. For this to emerge, “new spaces for writing must be opened in which writing has sociocultural and communicative functions.” Here, task-based-language-teaching (TBLT) plays an important pedagogical role in providing functional, rather than purely pedagogical outlets for writings that would otherwise not exist, given Zapotec’s longstanding exclusion from formal educational spaces. TBLT, by creating a space for Zapotec writing, works toward building a culture of reading and writing in the language.

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The role of ideology and the importance of the broader cultural context are also apparent in Zubair Torwali’s chapter on Torwali literacy efforts. Torwali is a language spoken by about 80,000–100,000 people in Northern Pakistan. The alphabetic writing system developed for Torwali is newly developed, and language revitalization efforts, carried out by linguists and local advocacy groups, involved developing the orthography, promoting the language and its use among the local community with materials in the language, celebrating the culture, and promoting a sense of pride and identity among Torwali speakers. However, formal instructional efforts are limited to two years. Children aged 4–7 (beginning in preschool) are taught all subjects through Torwali as the medium of instruction in the first year of school. In the second year, oral Urdu and oral English are introduced as subjects, while the medium of instruction remains Torwali. Students complete two years of their early schooling at these schools in Torwali, and then their parents enroll them in either public primary schools or low-cost private schools, which are exclusively Bahrain-medium instruction. Despite this brief (and early) period of instruction, Torwali’s analysis indicates that children are developing literacy skills in the Torwali language. This is partly due to instruction but cannot be divorced from structural and ideological shifts. Torwali describes how Torwali youth formed Torwali student unions at their colleges; how hundreds of youth proudly write Torwali or Kohistani as their names on social media; and the proliferation of music, dance, and cultural activities celebrating Torwali. What happens in the school is important, but as many of these chapters suggest, the broader context and attendant ideologies are equally if not more crucial. Individual Leaders Matter Many of these chapters also make clear the power and importance of one individual in efforts to develop literacy in an Indigenous language. For instance, Ari Sherris documented the work of one subsistence-farmerteacher-activist, Teacher Samua, to instruct Safaliba-speaking children (in northwest rural Ghana) to read and write in their own language. In light of needs left unmet by governmental bureaucracy and donor funding, which largely has focused on supporting instruction for children who speak one of the nine major Ghanaian languages, language activists must be resilient, determined, and tenacious in the development of their own materials, as Sherris demonstrates. While no one from the Ghanaian Ministry of Education has stopped Safaliba activists, Teacher Samua and others like him have worked independently to “carv[e] a niche for themselves and generat[e] new linguistic and cultural capital [that] opens them to the possibility of building a rich, varied, and helpful set of learning materials for use with students in their schools.” In this chapter, Sherris describes the creative writing practices employed by Teacher Samua,

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many of which disrupted or directly challenged the state curriculum in order to nurture Safaliba language, culture, and literacy. These creative practices, including writing, drawing, and using invented spellings, are all adaptive, dynamic, and entirely appropriate in a language that has no codified spelling and few books. They are also testament to both Teacher Samua and the students’ engagement and creativity. Hannah Sarvasy and Eni Ögate’s chapter likewise demonstrates how individual teachers can matter greatly. In their description of literacy instruction of Nungon, a language of Papua New Guinea with about 1,000 speakers, it is clear that writing in the language would not occur were it not for the efforts of a tenacious group of Nungon elementary school teachers. Their work with the language, including the development of instructional approaches and curriculum, has meant that two generations of Nungon-speaking children, across five villages, learned to read and write in their own languages. Individual educators are likewise critical in the case of P’urhepecha, a language spoken by about 125,000 people in Mexico. Educators in two primary schools have developed a program and curriculum that emphasizes P’urhepecha language and culture, with subjects taught through the medium of P’urhepecha from grades 1 through 6, with initial literacy instruction taking place through P’urhepecha. While Mexico has a national office of Bilingual Intercultural Education, the office failed to support instruction through the medium of P’urhepecha by only offering two hours of instruction per week in the language. A group of teachers took matters into their own hands in the early 1990s, raising awareness in P’urhepecha communities, making decisions about orthography, and developing materials and curricula. Remarkably, largely through their independent efforts, the language has become “the legitimate, unmarked language of all interaction at school, a sociolinguistic achievement still quite exceptional in Indigenous education” (Hamel, 2008; quoted in this volume). In their chapter, Kate Bellamy and Cynthia Groff analyze writing samples to demonstrate the ways in which children represent their own contemporary version of the language, which includes some elements of Spanish, given their bilingual environments, in a grammatically appropriate way, and is testament to these teachers’ efforts.

Conclusion Taken together, these 13 chapters provide an up-close, intimate examination of what it means to teach writing to children via Indigenous languages. Collectively, the chapters reveal what factors seem to be of crucial importance: the choice and nature of the writing system; the pedagogy employed and underlying institutional support for instruction and curricula; the ecology of language and literacy in the particular context,

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including the attendant language ideologies; and, in many instances, the commitment, creativity, and tenacity of particular individuals. These chapters illustrate how and why these factors matter for teaching children to write in Indigenous languages, but equally importantly, how they are interwoven, interdependent, and matter together. These factors likely matter in any context of teaching and learning, but given the endangerment of many of these languages and the institutional, political, and material constraints of these contexts, they arguably matter more, and merit greater policy maker and practitioner attention, here. Nevertheless, the take-away message from this important volume should not be that there is anything particularly risky or experimental about teaching children to write (and read) through Indigenous languages. Indeed, evidence suggests that it is far riskier not to do so. The most salient challenges and risks documented here, such as low formal literacy rates among parents, long commutes from home to school, and low levels of professional preparation and support, are endemic to the context, not to instruction in the Indigenous language. For all of the reasons mentioned at the start of this chapter, teaching children to write in Indigenous languages is a valuable and important goal. The chapters here underline both the possibility and the benefits of implementing efforts to achieve this goal. These chapters also provide further support for the position that there is not one particular, best, or only approach to teaching writing, but rather that children can learn to write in any and all languages via a wide range of pedagogical approaches. Moreover, perhaps the greatest value in teaching children to write in Indigenous languages stems from the ways in which this pedagogical practice has the potential to raise the status of the languages, validating and supporting children’s mother tongues and home and community cultures. As Bellamy and Groff note in their chapter on P’urhepecha, rather than pinpointing a specific method for writing instruction, we emphasize here the legitimate unmarked use of a minority language in all aspects of these pupils’ primary education. This extensive space for P’urhepecha and for P’urhepecha discourse reflects the broader valuing of the language in the two schools. The teachers and students in these chapters are, to use a common metaphor, building the plane while simultaneously flying in it. To extend the metaphor further, they are often doing so with variable training and technical support. These chapters provide deep insight into what this entails in terms of everyday practice for teachers and children, on the ground, around the world. In doing so, the authors and editors have also gifted readers with clarity about what matters for Indigenous language instruction, with insights into the academic, policy, and pedagogical efforts

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needed to support this important work. My hope is that we as readers can use this newfound knowledge and local perspectives to grow this work in both small and large ways.

References Barton, D. (2007). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Benson, C. (2002). Bilingual education in Africa: An exploration of encouraging connections between language and girls’ schooling. In Education-a way out of poverty: Research presentations at the poverty conference 2002 (pp. 80–96). Stockholm, Sweden: SIDA. Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages (Vol. 76). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Graham, S., McKeown, D., Kiuhara, S., & Harris, K. R. (2012). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for students in the elementary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 879–896. Grenoble, L. A., & Whaley, L. J. (2006). Saving languages: An introduction to language revitalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamel, R. E. (2008). Indigenous language policy and education in Mexico. In Encyclopedia of language and education (pp. 301–313). Dordrecht: Springer. Hermes, M. (2012). Indigenous language revitalization and documentation in the United States: Collaboration despite colonialism. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(3), 131–142. Heugh, K. (2014). Multilingualism, the “African lingua franca” and the “new linguistic dispensation”. Language Rich Africa Policy Dialogue, 80. Hornberger, N. H. (2011). Bilingual education and language maintenance: A southern Peruvian Quechua case (Vol. 4). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hornberger, N. H., & King, K. A. (1996). Language revitalisation in the Andes: Can the schools reverse language shift? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 17(6), 427–441. Ivanič, R. (2004). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education, 18(3), 220–245. McCarty, T. L., & Lee, T. S. (2015). The role of schools in Native American language and culture revitalization: A vision of linguistic and educational sovereignty. In J. W. Jacob, S. Cheng, & M. Porter (Eds.), Indigenous education (pp. 341–360). Dordrecht: Springer. Rietdijk, S., van Weijen, D., Janssen, T., van den Bergh, H., & Rijlaarsdam, G. (2018). Teaching writing in primary education: Classroom practice, time, teachers’ beliefs and skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(5), 640–663. Rogoff, B., & Wertsch, J. V. (1984). Children’s learning in the “zone of proximal development”. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Roser, M., & Ortiz-Ospina, M. (2018). Literacy. OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/literacy Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (Eds.). (2018). Ethnologue: Languages of the world, twenty-first edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Retrieved from www. ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0

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Sullivan, K. P. H., Langum, V., & Cocq, C. (2019). Education is not sufficientexploring ways to support and research Indigenous writing and literacies. In C. Cocq & K. P. H. Sullivan (Eds.), Indigenous writing and literacies: Studies in writing. (pp. 215–219). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Thomas, W. P., & Collier, V. (2002). A national study of school effectiveness for language minority students: Long-term academic achievement. Washington, DC: Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE). Retrieved from www.crede.ucsc.edu/research/llaa/1.1_final.html UNESCO. (1953). The use of vernacular languages in education. Paris: UNESCO. Woolard, K. A., & Schieffelin, B. B. (1994). Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 23(1), 55–82. World Bank. (2005). In their own language: Education for all. Washington, DC: Author. Young, C. (2015). Mother tongue education in multilingual settings: Quality education for all. In Language and development: Sociocultural issues and challenges. Denpasar: Trustees of the Language & Development Conferences (LDC 8). Retrieved from www.langdevconferences.org/publications.html

Contributors

Kristina Belancic is a PhD student in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Umeå, Sweden. Her Ph.D. research focuses on Indigenous education in Sweden, where she observed Sámi children’s language use in a school context. Kristina is interested in language policy and, in particular, in students’ access to knowledge and functional bilingualism in Sami and Swedish within the curriculum for the Sami schools in Sweden. Kate Bellamy is Acting Grant Officer/PhD Coach at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. For her Ph.D. in Linguistics, which she obtained in April 2018, she worked on issues pertaining to language contact, classification, and word formation in P’urhepecha. Her research now focuses on bilingualism and code-switching in both speaking and writing among the many P’urhepecha-Spanish bilinguals in Michoacán, Mexico. She is also editing and annotating a previously unpublished P’urhepecha-English dictionary. Mary Jill Brody is the Doris Z. Stone Distinguished Professor of Latin American Studies at Louisiana State University. She has spent her career investigating aspects of Tojol-ab’al, an endangered Mayan language spoken in Chiapas, México. Her interests include discourse analysis, conversation, language and culture, languages in contact, and literacy. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on discourse markers borrowed from Spanish into indigenous languages and on discourse, discourse markers, conversation, and repetition in Tojol-ab’al. Raquel Eufemia Cruz Manzano is director of the project Rescate, preservación, y desarrollo de la lengua indígena zapoteca de San Pablo Macuiltianguis. She taught primary school for 32 years in rural communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. She focuses on preserving her community’s traditional language, which is at risk of falling out of use due to practices of Hispanicization of Indigenous communities. She offers Zapotec classes to children in her community and leads the Grupo

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Cultural Tagayu’, which has produced a series of original bilingual resources in Zapotec and Spanish. They are working with linguists on a workbook for learning the alphabet. Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla (Native Hawaiian) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Language & Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. She taught in Ka Haka ‘Ula O Ke‘elikōlani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawai‘i in Hilo and was the Program Coordinator of the American Indian Language Development Institute at the University of Arizona. Her research emphasizes 1) Hawaiian language and Indigenous languages at the intersection of education, revitalization, digital technology, well-being, traditional and cultural practices, and policy and planning, and 2) decolonizing and Indigenizing the academy to create pathways for Indigenous scholars and scholarship. Cynthia Groff is a researcher at Leiden University, currently under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. After completing her Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, she conducted post-doctoral research in Québec, Canada, through Université Laval and in Mexico through Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, for which she was awarded the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research interests include adequacy of education for linguistic minorities and the experiences and discourses of minority youth. Her book is entitled The Ecology of Language in Multilingual India: Voices of Women and Educators in the Himalayan Foothills. Tracy Hirata-Edds, Multi-term Lecturer at the University of Kansas’ Applied English Center, provides teacher training for international language educators and supervises and teaches courses preparing international students learning English for academic studies. She teaches courses for visiting scholars, including Fulbright grantees and U.S. State Department faculty development trainees. She consulted with the Cherokee Language Immersion School, assisting with curriculum design, lesson planning, teaching techniques, and learning strategies. She was both a Fulbright Scholar and a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal. Through CoLang, Oklahoma Breath of Life, workshops, and publications, Tracy has supported language revitalization and documentation efforts. Nancy H. Hornberger is Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include educational linguistics, linguistic ethnography of education, bilingualism and biliteracy, multilingual language policy, and Indigenous language revitalization. She has taught, lectured, and advised internationally on these topics, beginning from work with Quechua in the Andes in the 1970s. Recent

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publications include Honoring Richard Ruiz and his Work on Language Planning and Bilingual Education (Multilingual Matters, 2017) and Ethnography of Language Planning and Policy (Language Teaching, 2018). Kendall A. King is Professor of Second Language Education at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches and researches sociolinguistics and language policy. Recent publications appear in the Modern Language Journal and the Journal of Language, Identity and Education. She served as an editor of the journal, Language Policy, for five years and advocates for multilingual language policy in Minnesota and beyond. She has written widely on Indigenous language revitalization, bilingual child development, and the language policies that shape Indigenous, immigrant and transnational student experiences. She is currently a Vice President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL). Eva Lindgren is Professor of Language Teaching and Learning at the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research interests include multilingualism, literacy, and young learners. She is the director of literacy research at Umeå University (LITUM) and takes a great interest in the development of research in close collaboration with schools, for example, in Indigenous Sami communities. Another line of research focuses on the ways that society values languages and uses large databases in order to investigate how knowledge of different languages may, or may not, have an impact on future life chances. Ryan B. Mackey ᏩᏕ ᎦᎵᏍᎨᏫ (wahde galisgewi) is a Cherokee Nation citizen who has worked over eleven years for the Cherokee Nation. His previous roles include Cultural and Community Specialist and Cherokee language teacher for Cherokee Nation communities, employees, the Cherokee Language Immersion Charter School, and Northeastern State University students. Currently, he is the Language Curriculum Supervisor and a facilitator for the ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗᎠᏂᏫᏒᏍᎩ, the Cherokee Language Master/Apprentice Program, which creates conversationally proficient Cherokee teachers who teach the language using immersion methods. He works closely with native Cherokee speakers and other Indigenous language programs for Native Language revitalization efforts. Manolo Miranda (Tido Bangama in Ngäbere) became the first indigenous person in Panama to create and disseminate an autochthonous writing system based on an orthography that he also developed. Inspired from the runic symbols of the Mamatada religion and the pre-colonial petroglyphs of the western highlands of Panama, he devised an alternative script to the Latin counterpart. The Ngäbere script is Miranda’s

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Contributors

life work. At 74 years of age, he continues to travel the river valleys and the mountain tops of the Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca, seeking students to teach. Tintswalo Vivian Manyike is a professor of English as a First Additional Language in the Department of Language Education Arts and Culture at the University of South Africa. She has over 15 years of teaching experience in higher education institutions in South Africa, working in the field of language teaching. She supervised masters and doctoral students to successful completion and has published book chapters and articles on the acquisition and teaching of academic English language proficiency, home language teaching, and English language proficiency skills of South African learners. Her interests include bilingual/ multicultural education. Gertrude Nicholas is a literacy consultant with the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Papua New Guinea. She has over 33 years of experience in the field of literacy and education, working with the Papua New Guinea Department of Education at national, provincial, and local levels and with curriculum development officers, teachers, and teacher trainers to use reading methods and produce literacy materials in over 40 minority languages. She is author of Implications of the 2013 Language Policy on the Use of Vernacular in Elementary Schools; Early Writing Among Tigak Children: A Case Study; and Benefits of Effective Elementary Teacher Training in Papua New Guinea. Eni Ögate is a pioneering educator in the Uruwa District, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Originally from the Nukna language area, Eni is a grade 10 graduate and holds Papua New Guinea Elementary School teaching credentials. She was the founding teacher of Yawan Elementary School in Yawan village. She is a longtime champion of the Nungon language as the vehicle for early literacy learning and has worked tirelessly to ensure that two generations of children in Yawan and the surrounding villages acquire literacy first through their mother tongue. Hanna Outakoski is senior lecturer in North Sámi in the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. She is currently doing research on the teaching of heritage language writing at Nordic universities and in Sámi medium primary schools. One of the aims of the research is to examine how to implement Indigenous teaching methods to strengthen the position of Sámi writing among Sámi youth. Apart from literacy studies, her research interests lie on North Sami grammar and syntax, as well as on the possibilities and potential of using virtual worlds and virtual classrooms for language revitalization. Lizette Peter is Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching at the University of Kansas. Her teaching and research examine

Contributors

287

the experiences of multilingual language learners; the settings in which multilingualism exists; and the roles, attitudes, and expectations of educators who encounter multilingualism in the classroom. She has served as an advisor to the Cherokee Nation and other tribal communities on language initiatives and has published with her colleagues numerous articles, book chapters, and handbooks related to the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages. Joy Kreeft Peyton is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Linguistics. She has over 35 years of experience in the field of languages, linguistics, and culture in education, working with teachers and teacher trainers in the United States and other countries to think about and improve their instructional practice. This includes working with curriculum experts, writers, and teachers to develop curriculum and materials for teaching students in their mother tongue. She is co-editor of Heritage Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource and Handbook of Heritage, Community, and Native American Languages in the United States: Research, Educational Practice, and Policy. Nkidi Phatudi is Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Early Childhood Education in the College of Education, University of South Africa. She has taught in the early childhood education field for more than 30 years. She is the founder and Head of the Department of Early Childhood Education at the University of Pretoria. She has authored children’s story books in Setswana, an official language of South Africa and coauthored a chapter, Restoring Indigenous Languages and the Right to Learn in a Familiar Language: A Case of Black South African Children, in Children’s Rights and Education: International Perspectives. Kate Riestenberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bryn Mawr College. She conducts research on language teaching and learning with a focus on language revitalization contexts. Her work has applied and investigated task-based language teaching approaches in collaboration with Zapotec revitalization programs in San Pablo Macuiltianguis, Oaxaca, Mexico since 2014. Her dissertation investigated the acquisition of tone among child second language learners of Zapotec at the revitalization program. She has produced original descriptions of the phonology and morphology of two Zapotec varieties and works closely with Zapotec speakers to document, describe, teach, write, and create pedagogical materials in these languages. Samuel Saleng has over 10 years of experience in the field of elementary school education, beginning as an elementary school teacher, working with linguists to develop his own Numanggang language, and training elementary teachers and teacher trainers in Papua New Guinea. He also has over 6 years of teaching experience in the field of primary

288

Contributors

education. He is an author and illustrator of Numanggang children’s books, such as Indi Niŋ, Ana i na!, and Meŋgiŋ. Ginés Alberto Sánchez Arias received a Ph.D. in Geography and Anthropology from Louisiana State University in 2018. Since 2013, Sánchez began studying with the Ngäbe, their orthography, and cosmology. Amidst coloniality and extractivism, the Ngäbe resist paternalism and encroachment from the larger society. Sánchez’ work seeks the application of scholarship in geography and anthropology which, combined with the visual arts and activism, can deliver cross-pragmatic understanding to an audience outside academia. His latest projects include “Alteridad+ 1.0” (an art installation 2016); “Alteridad+ 2.0” (a short documentary film 2017); and Masochist Earth, a “toolkit” for the Anthropocene (www.masochist.earth 2018). Hannah Sarvasy has conducted immersion fieldwork on Nungon (Papuan), Kim and Bom (Atlantic; Sierra Leone), and Tashelhit Berber languages and ran a pioneering longitudinal study of children’s acquisition of Nungon. Her publications include A Grammar of Nungon: A Papuan Language of Northeast New Guinea, Word Hunters: Field Linguists on Fieldwork, and articles and book chapters on topics in Nungon grammar, fieldwork methodology, Bantu linguistics, and ethnobiology, as well as Kim and Bom language primers. She taught at UCLA, served as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, and currently holds an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Ari Sherris is Associate Professor of Bilingual Education in the College of Education and Human Performance at Texas A&M UniversityKingsville, USA. From 2015–2016, he was Fulbright Scholar at the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana. Prior to that, he was Research Associate at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. He has held appointments at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and at Teachers College Columbia University. His books include Making Signs, Translanguaging Ethnographies (with Elisabetta Adami) and Language Endangerment: Disappearing Metaphors and Shifting Conceptualizations (with Elisabeth Piirainen). His CV and publications are at https://tamuk.academia.edu/AriSherris. Dr. Christine Sims is an Acoma Pueblo Indian tribal member and an Associate Professor in the Department of Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Studies in the College of Education at the University of New Mexico. She directs the American Indian Language Policy Research and Teacher Training Center, providing technical assistance to Indigenous nations in planning and implementing language initiatives, training American Indian language teachers, and advocating for Indigenous languages communities. She serves on the National Advisory Council

Contributors

289

for American Indian/Alaska Native Head Start Programs. She received her doctorate from UC-Berkeley, focusing on American Indian language maintenance and revitalization issues. Kirk P.H. Sullivan is Professor of Linguistics at Umeå University, Sweden. After taking his Ph.D. and working in higher education in New Zealand and Sweden, he realized that he had a growing interest in education and enrolled in the University of Bristol’s EdD programme, taking his education doctorate in 2010. His research interests lie at the nexus of linguistics, education, and cognition, and increasingly Indigenous studies. He has held a number of research grants and has recently co-edited two anthologies, Indigenous Writing and Literacies, and Observing Writing: Insights from Keystroke Logging and Handwriting. Zubair Torwali is a community activist, researcher, author, and educator based in Bahrain, Swat Pakistan. Zubair has published works in English, Urdu, and the Dardic Torwali language. He has authored and supervised a number of books in and about Torwali. His book in English, Muffled Voices, provides insight into Pakistan’s social, cultural, and political issues. Zubair has dozens of research articles to his credit, along with hundreds of articles in the English dailies and weeklies of Pakistan. He founded and leads Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT), an organization that focuses on education and development. Mikael Vinka is Professor in Saami at Umeå University, Sweden. He has a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His research interests center around generative grammar and its applications to Saami. He is currently working on a project that investigates potential heritage effects in the anaphoric systems of South Saami. William H. “Pila” Wilson, professor in Ka Haka ‘Ula O Ke‘elikōlani at the University of Hawai‘i Hilo, is a pioneer in the development of Hawaiian Medium Education (HME) from preschool through the doctorate level. He and his wife, Kauanoe Kamanā, are founding board members of ‘Aha Pūnana Leo, the organization that began the modern movement for HME. They were among the first couples to revitalize Hawaiian as the language of the home. Their two children attended preschool through the Pūnana Leo and graduated from the HME school, Nāwahīokalani‘ōpu‘u. Wilson’s publications focus primarily on Hawaiian language revitalization and Polynesian historical linguistics.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures and in bold indicate tables on the corresponding pages. ϴ, Cherokee language 154–156, 155 DᎴ (ahle), Cherokee language 156–157, 157 ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 2012 148 Acton, B. 107 Adi-Japha, E. F. 106 Africa, revitalization of Indigenous languages of 168–170 Ahamd, A. 50 Albury, N. J. 249 Alphonse, E. S. 219 Ayabe, J. 107 Bandura, A. 105 Bangama, T. 218, 221–222, 224, 230–232 Barth, F. 46 Basic Interpersonal Skills (BICS) 164 Bassett, T. 219 Bayaya, I. 77 Beam de Azcona, B. 129 Belancic, K. 245–246 Berk, L. E. 104 Berninger, V. W. 163, 172, 179 Biddulph, J. 46 Bielenberg, B. 265 bilingualism 144, 203–204, 204, 218–219, 245 Blommaert, J. 10, 11, 14, 21, 86, 235, 247, 263 Blot, R. K. 231 Bourdieu, Pierre 73 Cajete, Gregory 256, 257, 258, 259, 261 Calfee, R. C. 62

Calkins, L. M. 106 Capacity Development, Opportunity Creation, and Desire (COD) 5–6, 9–11 Center for the Study and Development of the Indigenous Languages of Oaxaca (CEDELIO) 133 Ceremony 259–260 Chanquoy, T. 163, 179 Cherokee language 9–11, 17, 230, 273; history of contact and shift in 144–146, 145–146; instructional writing practices in 150–152, 152; introduction to 143; literature and guiding theory on 143–144; promising future directions in writing instruction in 157–158; repurposing DᎴ (ahle) in 156–157, 157; revitalization of 147–149; structure of 146–147; students’ writing in 152–154; Tsalagi Dideloquasdi school for 148, 149–150; verbs in 152–154; ϴ in 154–156, 155 Cherokee Phoenix 145, 148 Cocq, C. 250, 276 Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) 164 Collins, J. 231 Colón, F. 221 Columbus, C. 221 Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities 169 Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy 163, 265–266

Index complex adaptive system (CAS) 74 Complexity theory 9, 13, 22, 27 Comunidad Indígena y Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (CIEIB) program 209 consonants of the Macuiltianguis Zapotec 131, 131 content and language integrated learning (CLIL) 210 Cook, J. 28 Creative Phonics Method 90, 94, 107 Critical Literacy Theory 220, 230–232 Cummins, J. 161, 164 Cutler, L. 162, 176 Darweza, A. 46 diacritics in Torwali 64–65 Dirección General de Educación Indígena (DGEI, Directorate General of Indigenous Education) 202 ecology of literacy 275–276 education planning for the Torwali language 50–51 Edwards, S. J. 222 Erickson, L. 92 Erickson, L. 92 Espin, C. A. 62 Ethnologue, The 3, 4, 187 Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) on 3–5, 8–9 Farr, C. 197 Fennig, C. D. 44 Fishman, J. A. 150 Foreman, J. 129 Freire, Paulo 220, 259 Galla, C. K. 26 Gee, J. P. 231 genre pedagogy 220, 224–230, 226–227, 229 Gilbert, J. 162, 176 Gist (Guess), G. 145, 230, 273 Gjording, C. N. 219 Graham, S. 91, 101–102, 162, 175, 176 Grenoble, L. A. 48, 265 Grierson, G. A. 45, 46, 47 Grupo Cultural Tagayu' (Macuiltianguis Cultural Group)

291

132–133, 134, 140; see also Zapotec language Guionneau-Sinclair, F. 219 Hawaiian Language Medium Education (HLME) 8–9, 13, 272–273; children’s writing in 35–39, 36–37, 39; early and emergent instructional writing practices in 33–35, 33–35; Hawaiian language nest preschools and 31–32, 32; Hawaiian philosophy of education and theory in 25, 26–28; history of Hawai‘i and its people and 28–29; history of the Hawaiian language and 29–30; introduction to 25–26, 26; promising directions in 39–41, 40; revitalization of the Hawaiian language and 30–31 Hornberger, N. 249 Huot, B. 62 Hynum, D. 107 Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT) 44, 50–51 ideology, language 276–278 Indigenous languages: biliteracy development in 203–204, 204; Capacity Development, Opportunity Creation, and Desire (COD) and 5–6, 9–11; dynamics that influence the vitality of 6–11; efforts to reduce endangerment of 11–12, 14; Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) on 3–5, 8–9; factors influencing the status and vitality of 2–6; ideology and 276–278; individual leaders and 278–279; with at least 50 million first-language speakers 24; overview and future of 1–2; take-away message on 279–281; UNESCO Language Vitality and Endangerment Report on 2–3, 6–8; writing in (see writing, Indigenous language) Innovative Learning Model (ILM) 52 Ivanič, R. 62–63, 126–127, 133–134, 137, 139, 185 Jannok Nutti, Y. 244 Jemez Pueblo 262–263 Johnson, J. 260

292

Index

Ka Leo Hawai‘i (KLH) 30, 31 Kamehameha III 28 Karimi, A. H. K. 48–49 Keres Children’s Learning Center (KCLC) 263–264 Keskitalo, P. 244 Kimura, L. 30 Kotobiri, J. Z. 84 Kress, G. 137 Kumu Honua Mauli Ola (KHMO) 25, 26–28 language ecology 74 language ideology 21, 276 Langum, V. 250, 276 Larsen-Freeman, D. 13, 37, 85, 86, 97, 99 Leitner, G. W. 45, 46 Lewis, M.P. 3, 29, 190 Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas 130 Libba Elementary School, Papua New Guinea 93; early writing samples of E-1 students in 97–99, 98; early writing samples of E-Prep students at 95–97; limitations in writing development at 100–101; observations from E-2 early writing in 99–100, 100 Lindgren, E. 235–238, 247, 249 Linguistic Survey of India 46 literacy: ecology of 275–276; technologies of 269–270 Literacy Ecology 220 Lo Bianco 5 Long, M. H. 136 Lunsford, W. A. 47, 48, 50 Määttä, K. 244 Maba Kuadi 224 Maba Kubu 224 Maba Tröro 224 Machanzie, N. M. 62 MacKenzie, N. 90 MacKenzie, N. H. 104 Malone, S. 50 Manzano, R. E. C. 132, 133 Marmon Silko, L. 259–260 Martin, J. R. 185–186, 198–199, 220 Martinez, R. B. 261 McCarthy, J. 92 McLaughlin, D. 91, 102

Mobisa Elementary School, Papua New Guinea 111–113, 112; E-1 117–120; E-2 120–122, 121; E-Prep 114–117, 115; limitations of study on 123; summary of observations of 122–123 Mohlaba Tribal Authority, Limpopo Province, South Africa 170–171 Montessori schools 263–264 Montgomery-Anderson, B. 154–155 Multilingual literacy among young learners of North Sámi: Contexts, complexity and writing in Sápmi 235 Munsic, L. 62 Native American Language Teachers’ Institute 256 New Literacy Studies 220 Ngäbe language 19; case for critical literacy in 230–232; case for genre pedagogy in 224–230, 226–227, 229; history of 221; introduction to 218–219, 219; literature review and guiding theory on 219–221; promising future directions in writing in 232–233; revitalization efforts for 222; schools for 222–224, 223; structure of 221–222 North Sámi language 19–20, 275; instructional writing practices in 245–246; introduction to 235–238, 236–237; promising exploratory directions in literacy development in 249–250; revitalization of 242–243; in the Sami language family 239–242; Sami people and 238–239; schools in Sápmi 243–245; young people’s writing in 246–249 Norton, B. 73 Notsi language 15–16, 274; brief history of Notsi culture and people and 91–92; description of Libba Elementary School and 93; early writing samples of Libba E-1 students in 97–99, 98; early writing samples of Libba E-Prep students in 95–97; exploratory directions for future revitalization of 102; instructional writing practices in 95; instructional writing practices in Papua New Guinea in 93–95; introduction and rationale in 89–90; limitations on teaching practice in 100–101; literature review

Index and guiding theories on 90–91; observations from E-2 early writing in 99–100, 100; phonemic and orthographic inventory in 92, 92; recommendations and exploratory directions for future revitalization of 101–102; revitalization efforts in 93; structure of 92, 92 Numanggang language 16; conventional writing in 117, 119–120; description of early writing in 114–117, 115; description of Mobisa Elementary School and 111–113, 112; early writing in E-1 117–118; exploratory directions for future revitalization efforts for 123–124; history and background of 108; instructional writing practices in 113–114; introduction to 104; letter formation in 115–116; limitations of study on 123; literature review and guiding theory on 104–108; observations and discussion in E-1 117–120; observations and discussion in E-2 120–122, 121; pre-phonemic and early phonemic stages of drawing in E-Prep 114, 115; revitalization efforts for 110–111; structure of 108–110, 109, 109–110; summary of observations on 122–123; transitional spelling in 116, 118–119; writing words in 116–117 Nungon language 18, 276; children’s writing in 194–198; history of 186–187; instructional writing practices in 192–194; introduction to 185; next steps in writing instruction in 199; schools for 191–192; structure of 187–190, 188; theory underlying literacy in 185–186; vitality of 190–191 objectives-based (OBE) curriculum 106 O’Donoghue, T. 91, 102 Ó Duibhir, P. 158 Ögate, E. 192 On Alexander’s Track to the Indus 45 Online Torwali Dictionary 50 oral traditions, Pueblo 255, 257–260; re-centering of 262–264 Organización de Lecto y Escritura Ngäbe (OLEN) 232

293

Outakoski, H. 235–238, 249, 250 overt plagiarism 136–137, 137 Pan South African Language Board Act (PANSALB) of 1995 169 Pecos, R. 256 pedagogy of Pueblo cultural literacy 260–261 Pellegrini, A. D. 144 Peyton, J. K. 5 phonemic and orthographic inventory, Notsi language 92, 92 Piaget, J. 105 Primer Track, Torwali 53–55, 55–56 Pueblo Indian languages 20; conclusion on 264–266; distinct 255; importance of place and identity in 256–257; importance of place in oral traditions of 257–260; introduction to 254–255; as oral traditions 255, 257–260; pedagogy of cultural literacy in 260–261; present-day challenge for 255–256; present-day examples of re-centering oral 262–264 Pukui-Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary 29–30 Pulis, J. 221 P’urhepecha language 18–19, 279; biliteracy development in Indigenous education in 203–204, 204; development of pupils’ writing in 210–214, 211; history of 204–205; instructional writing practices in 209–211; introduction to 202–203; promising directions for future revitalization efforts for 214–215; revitalization efforts for 206–208, 207; school context maintenance of 209; structure of 205–206 Qandahari, Mirza Muhammad Ismail 45, 46 Rahim, S. A. 46 Rama Language Project, Nicaragua 11–12 real consciousness 259 revitalization efforts: Cherokee 147–149; Hawaiian 30–31; Ngäbe 222; Ngäbere 222; North Sámi 242–243; Notsi 93, 101–102; Numanggang 110–111, 123–124;

294

Index

Nungon 190–191; P’urhepecha 206–208, 207, 214–215; Safaliba 76–77; Torwali 48–50, 49, 66; Xitsonga 168–170; Zapotec 132–133 Richards, J. C. 143–144, 158 Riestenberg, K. 133 Rockwell, E. 231 Rogoff, B. 166 Romero-Little, M. E. 254, 256, 261 Rose, D. 185–186, 198–199, 220 Roverty, H. W. 45, 46 Safaliba language 15, 278–279; children’s writing in 80–86, 81–83, 84; grammatical overview of 76; history of speakers of 74–76; instructional writing practices in 78–80, 79; introduction to 70–72, 71; literature and theory 72–74; promising exploratory directions in literacy development in 86–87; revitalization of 76–77; school where observations were done on 77–78 Salish language 12 Sami people 238–239 Sandbank, A. 106 San Pablo Macuiltianguis 128, 128–130; see also Zapotec language Sarsaneda Del Cid, J. 219 Sarvasy, H. 187 Schaefer, J. 70 Schaefer, P. 70, 76 Scull, J. 62 Secretaria de Educación Pública 130 Shah, A. J. 46 Sherris, A. 73 Shute, R. H. 104 Simons, G. F. 44 Smokin, L. B. 265 sociocultural theory in Xitsonga 164–167 Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan 46 Standards-Based Curriculum (SBC): Notsi 93–94; Numanggang 106–108 Stein, A. 45, 46 Story Track, Torwali 53–54 Street, B. 220 subject-object-verb (SOV) structure, Torwali language 47 subject-verb-object (SVO) structure, P’urhepecha language 206 Suina, J. H. 265

Sullivan, K. P. H. 235–238, 250, 276 Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International 50 Sydney School 220 syllables: -based literacy development in Hawaiian 33–34; Cherokee 145, 145–146, 273; Torwali 47 Tarascan Project 206–208, 207 task-based language teaching (TBLT) 126, 127–128, 134, 136, 138, 140, 277 technologies of literacy 269–270 Temple, C. A. 123 Temple, C. E. 90, 105–106 Tok Pisin 190–191, 194 Torwali: An Account of a Dardic Language in Swat-Kohistan 46 Torwali language 13, 15, 278; classroom practice for student writing in 53–57, 55–57; data collection and analysis of student writing in 57–61; diacritics in 64–65; education opportunities in 51; education planning for 50–51; efforts to revitalize 48–50, 49; future efforts to promote revitalization of 66; introduction to 44–46, 45; reflection on students’ writing in 62–66; research on 46; structure of 47; switching between voiceless and voiced bilabial and dental plosives in 64; theory and approach to teaching and learning 51–53; writing system in 47–48 Towarikh Hafiz Rahmat Ali 45 translanguaging 144 Tribes of Hindoo Koosh 46 trilingualism 235 Troila, G. A. 176 Tsalagi Dideloquasdi (Cherokee School) 143, 144, 148, 149–150, 157; see also Cherokee language Tulviste, P. 166 Ullah, I. 50 UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger 221, 238 UNESCO Language Vitality and Endangerment Report 2–3, 6–8 Urdu-Kohistani Bol Chaal 49 Urdu language 64, 66 Uusiautti, S. 244

Index Vernacular Path to English 90, 113–114 Vygotsky, L. S. 18, 161, 164–167 Washington, G. 145 Wegmann, U. 187 Wertsch, J. V. 166, 167 Westum, A. 235–238 Whaley, L. J. 48, 265 Whitehead, M. 172 Wickstrom, S. 219 Williams, C. 144 Willy, H. C. 46 Wilson, T. 107 Wilson, W. H. 25–26 World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium 31 writing, Indigenous language: Cherokee 150–152, 152, 152–154, 157–158; Hawaiian 33–37, 33–39, 39; importance of pedagogy in teaching 273–275; importance of systems for 272–273; Ngäbere 224–230, 226–227, 229; North Sámi 245–249; Notsi 93–95; Numanggang 113–114, 114–117, 115, 117–118; Nungon 192–200; P’urhepecha 209–214, 211; reasons for 270–271; Safaliba 79, 79–86, 81–83, 84; Sámi 6, 8, 19–20, 235–250; technologies of literacy and 269–270; Torwali 47–48, 53–66, 55–57; what matters for children learning 271–279; Xitsonga 173–175; Zapotec 133–137, 137

295

Xitsonga language 17–18, 274–275; classroom observations on 173–175; conclusion on 178–179; history of 167–168; introduction to 161–164; observations of learners of 175–178; revitalization of 168–170; school context for 171; sociocultural theory on 164–167; story read to the learners of 183–184; study background 164; study methodology for 170–171; teacher participants in study on 171–172; writing process for 172–173 Yakubu, E. K. 70, 77, 84 Yawan Elementary School 191, 192–193 Yawan Primary School 191–192, 194 Young, P. D. 219 Zapotec language 16–17, 277; cognitive processes and texts in 137–138, 139; introduction to 126; literature review on 126–128, 127; overt plagiarism in writing 136–137, 137; revitalization efforts for the Macuiltianguis 132–133; in San Pablo Macuiltianguis 128, 128–130; school for teaching 133; sociocultural context and writing event for 133–137, 137; structure of the Macuiltianguis 131, 131–132; summary and future directions for 139–140 Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) 166–167, 174