Mother Tongue-based Literacy Programmes: Case Studies of Good ...

All of the NPKOM teachers have associate or bachelor degrees. The teachers themselves receive thestandard stipends and benefits provided through the non-formal system.The NPKOM teachers are greatly valued, and every effort has been made to develop their capacities insuch areas as teaching techniques, desktop publishing, editing, etc.Identification of Learning NeedsResearch revealed that few of the adult villagers in the project sites spend much time reading; a cultureof literacy has yet to develop. While there is some interest in adult education, the realities of hardagricultural work coupled with a lack of readily clear benefits has reduced personal motivation.The situation for children is different. Parents want their children do well in school and master the Thailanguage. Education is seen as a key to the future. At the same time, there are concerns about losingthe Pwo Karen language and heritage. Thus, NPKOM has stressed that the bilingual approach can bothimprove Thai language abilities and help with cultural and linguistic preservation. In this way, communityaspirations and government educational requirements can both be realized.Orthography DevelopmentPwo Karen is part of the larger Karenic language family, a grouping that includes several relatedlanguages spoken by at least 2.5 million people in the Thai-Burmese borderlands (Bradley 1997). Despitesome shared words and common cultural items, many Karenic languages are mutually unintelligible.The largest Karenic group, the Sgaw Karen (300,000 in Thailand), uses a traditional orthography basedon the Burmese script, which is vigorously used throughout the community and is often assumed(incorrectly!) to represent the standard orthography for all Karenic languages. The Pwo Karen groups, bycontrast, have perhaps suffered from an abundance of scripts. In Myanmar alone, nearly a dozen PwoKaren orthographies were developed by Christian missionaries, Buddhist monks, and Pwo Karen leaders,including Mon-based, Burmese-based, and Roman scripts, in addition to the unique “chicken scratch”script that is attributed to divine revelation (Womack 2005). In Thailand, several Thai-based scripts havebeen proposed for both the West Central Thailand Pwo Karen (50,000 in Thailand) and the Northern PwoKaren (60,000 in Thailand), although there appears to be both a lack of consensus on how some soundsshould be written, as well as a lack of interest in the issue among the Pwo Karen community, at large.From the outset, ONFEC expressed a desire to learn about each step involved in building a bilingualeducation programme, beginning with orthography development. For this reason, an SIL Internationallinguist affiliated with Payap University who had experience researching West Central Thailand PwoKaren was utilized as a consultant on Pwo Karen phonology and orthography development. ThreeONFEC Pwo Karen teachers spent five days at the Payap University Department of Linguistics (10-14March 2003), recording and word list-looking for the sounds that were responsible for the differentmeanings of words (minimal pairs) in order to determine the consonants, vowels and tones of NorthernPwo Karen. The word list was later carefully checked with the villagers on-site in Nong Ung Tai village. Inaddition, a folktale was recorded and transcribed to illustrate the various sounds found in the NorthernPwo Karen language.[ 150 ]