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

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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
Section 1: Project Report Methodology 1. Preparation phase November 2008 The Dinka and English teachers developed a Dinka literacy assessment tool (see Attachment 1) designed a course plan and conducted placement assessments. 2. Dinka phase 6th November – 19th December 2008 The Dinka literacy class ran for 8 weeks. The class was 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. Teaching was shared among 4 Dinka teachers. 20 – 25 learners regularly attended the class. The course mainly focussed on learning the Dinka alphabet, through the use of a text book – the Dinka Alphabet Book. This book started with letters and pictures, then gradually introduced very short reading texts. It was the core text book for the course. The teachers also introduced some basic numeracy eg reading prices using pages from shopping catalogues. During the course the English teacher worked with the Dinka teachers two days a week, observing and assisting with teaching methodology, and developing teaching resources. At the end of the course, 20 Dinka learners were assessed using standardised language and literacy assessment tools from the English Language and Literacy Placement Assessment (ELLPA) Kit, a set of validated LLN assessment tasks produced by NSW AMES. The 11 learners assessed as having the lowest levels of literacy were enrolled in the English phase, as the community identified this group as having the greatest need. 3. Transition phase January 2009 The Dinka teachers attended 2 days of specifically designed professional development on teaching numeracy and literacy teaching methodology. These sessions gave some background to different approaches to the teaching of reading and writing and then focused on the Language Experience Approach (LEA) as an effective method for teaching learners from an oral language background. The English teacher also prepared material and planned content for the English course. 4. English phase 27th January – 4th April 2009 The English literacy class ran for eleven weeks for four hours a day, four days a week. In response to requests by the DLA, the Dinka teaching continued for one day a week for those eleven weeks. 11 learners continued from the Dinka phase to the English phase. During the course the Dinka teachers provided bilingual support, teaching support and bicultural expertise in the class, for 2 of the 4 hours each day. Outside class hours, the Dinka teachers also worked on producing a Dinka version of some of the materials used in the English class (See Attachment 2). Throughout this phase the ESL teacher provided ongoing teacher training in an informal way, by fully engaging the Dinka teachers in the teaching activities and discussing the rationale and delivery method of those activities. © Commonwealth of Australia 2009 Dinka-English Literacy Project Page 7
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