Today was a big day for the students in the STEP literacy course, Matthew and Jecobeth (who you met in an earlier post) included. For the past two weeks we have been working on first writing stories in tok ples (the local language) and learning how to edit them. Then each language group chose stories to put into a book. They drew illustrations, and then they copied both stories and drawings carefully onto stencils, because these books would be silk screened. Yesterday and today we did the actual silk screening of 15 copies of each book, and then in the afternoon we collated the pages and bound the books. There was quite a buzz of excitement around the room as each language group saw the final product of all their hard work – literacy materials they could take back to their communities.
Research has shown that in order to become a fluent reader of a language, you have to read about 800 pages of material. Practice builds fluency. But what do you do if there simply aren’t 800 pages of printed material in your language? This is the problem that many language groups in
Why do we teach them to use silk screens instead of computers? It’s time-consuming, and the result isn’t as professional. There is no spell checker. One of the main reasons is that in many places in