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

the project ensured that community members were actively involved in mobilizing learners. The Rabhaprimers were developed following the pattern suggested by the National Literacy Mission. The curriculumincluded such components as skill up-gradation, legal literacy, women‘s empowerment, Rabha culture,and local folk stories, as well as larger issues of relevance to the adult learners. Facilitators for the literacyclasses essentially consisted of volunteers from within the community.The Tharu language, which follows the Devanagari (Nepali) script, has the status of a national language inNepal. The project focused on conducting literacy programmes for adults. The choice was prompted bythe fact that considerable work had already been done by NGOs in preparing Tharu language textbooksand curricula based on an empirical survey in selected villages of Tharu-speaking people. Also, despitepromotion of Tharu language use in primary education by the Government, literacy levels of adults hasremained quite low. Thus, the action project was designed to capitalize on the existing policies andprogrammes, and not to develop a parallel programme for imparting mother tongue literacy for adultilliterates.The Indonesian project carried out in Westrern Java with the Sundanese people faced a unique situationin the choice of the orthography. This is because Sundanese has a well-developed orthography- a writing system derived from the ancient Indian Sanskrit language that is known as Aksara Sunda(Sundanese script). However, Aksara Sunda is no longer being taught in formal schools and youngerSundanese people no longer recognize it. After a serious consideration of options available for a writingscript – a choice between the original Sundanese script or the Roman script – a conscious decision wasmade to adopt the Roman script. There was a need to reaffirm the Roman script for writing activities(which also forms the basis for Bahasa Indonesia’s writing system), while at the same time helpinglearners to recognize and be fully aware of the fact that an ancient script had been in use. Thus, learnerswere exposed to the Sundanese script, too, which had the effect of inducing greater enthusiasm andappreciation for their Sundanese cultural identity.A unique method was adopted to develop orthography in the Thai project, which took into considerationmore than a dozen Pwo-Karen scripts available pertaining to different regions. The scripts were largelybased on the sounds of the words, rather than following a single style of writing. The project thereforetook up the task of preparing a word list and recording them, looking for the sounds that were responsiblefor the different meanings of words (minimal pairs) in order to determine the consonants, vowels andtones of Northern Pwo Karen. Later, an appropriate Thai script representation for each Pwo Karen soundwas chosen (including several sounds not found in Thai which required special symbols). This uniqueapproach of deriving a script for the native language has created enthusiasm among communitymembers for learning and preserving the language. The complex technical procedure also broughttogether the Office of Non-formal Education and Payap University in production of learning material.[ 16 ]