First Language (Dinka) Literacy as a Foundation for English ...

Section 1: Project Report
At the start of the project, ACL met with the DLA to discuss criteria for the Dinka class.
Even though the project steering committee recommended that the student numbers in
the Dinka phase and the English phase be limited to eleven learners, the DLA was keen
for as many people to benefit from the class as possible, and they were happy to take up
to twenty five learners. The DLA proposed to accept learners with varying levels of Dinka
literacy, though concentrated towards the lower end of the spectrum.
For the English phase, eleven learners were selected from the Dinka class. English oracy
varied from ISLPR 0 to ISLPR 1+, but English literacy was capped at ISLPR 0+. Learners
were selected on the basis of their ISLPR (most at ISLPR 0 in reading and writing) and
their availability.
Content and curriculum
The project offered a rare opportunity to work with a needs-based approach, outside
existing curricula. Early discussion with the learners revealed that most felt they had
‘learnt nothing’ from other formal English classes. This may have been due to factors
such as their readiness to learn so soon after arrival in Australia and their expectations of
what they believed they would be able to achieve. To address this it was decided that an
approach which explicitly asked learners for input into course content and methodology
would be worth testing. In practice, this involved interviews with the learners at the start of
the English course, and constant, ongoing consultation throughout the course (made
possible by the presence of the Dinka teachers as bilingual assistants in the English
classroom). The English teacher made initial decisions about content that would probably
be relevant to the learners, and the teacher and the learners refined and changed it as
the course progressed.
The main areas of course content ended up being time telling, date reading and short
biographical stories of ‘famous’ people. There was also a module on cleaning work in
Australia, and on driving (road signs).
Because most of the learners had been in Australia for a long time, the course did not
cover issues typically addressed in early settlement classes such as using money (though
the use of receipts was part of the course), and in order to avoid saturation, there was a
deliberate lack of focus on ‘personal information’.
Observation of the Dinka classes and conversations with the Dinka teachers provided the
ACL with valuable insights into learner preferences for methodology. The most salient
point to emerge from the observations was that the learners expected and wanted a great
deal of simple repetition of written content, including oral memorization, to support their
reading. They also preferred to work with short written texts in a single genre, rather than
dealing with a range of contexts and text types (they reported this was ‘too difficult’). With
this in mind, the English teacher introduced the Language Experience Approach (LEA) to
ensure that the content of the texts was relevant and therefore accessible to the learners
(in the LEA, the teacher elicits content for writing and reading from the learners, rather
than providing texts from an external source). Another feature of methodology that the
course aimed relied on was independent learning through the use of Language Master
machines or ‘card readers’, in order to provide learners with the opportunity to take
control of their own learning. This is a simple technology which was widely and
successfully used in language classes in the 1970s and 1980s but has tended to be
overlooked as computer technology has become more popular.
© Commonwealth of Australia 2009 Dinka-English Literacy Project Page 6