The Kovol team has just reached a significant milestone with the completion of the first draft of their literacy materials. They spent two weeks of focused time working on them with the help of two literacy consultants and they now have 87 lessons that teach all the syllables needed to read in the Kovol language. Some lessons introduce new syllables and some lessons are practice lessons that use syllables that have already been introduced to tell short stories for practice reading.
As the number of syllables available increased through the programme, telling good stories became easier and easier. They were able to add morals into stories too. Near the end of the books, they had all the syllables for the whole language. Steve went to a Kovol friend and asked him to think up a story. Steve used a voice recorder and then wrote it down to go in the book.
Another way they included the Kovol community was by asking them to illustrate the stories on sheets of paper using pencils.
Primers 1-4 and readers 1-4 are now drafted.
What’s next?
They have been given a big list. Checking, rechecking and formatting the primers and readers is one thing. They need to produce and translate a teacher’s manual which is a Kovol language step-by-step guide for teaching these lessons. It is quite a translation project as they will be working with new concepts and new items.
Once the program is ready, they will want to start teaching. They are aiming for June for the first Kovol literacy class. They will need to figure out who attends the first class, where it will be, what time it will be and what they will provide and not provide.
Reproducibility is important for future Kovol literacy teachers to be able to replicate it in other Kovol villages? The teams desire is for literacy and the Gospel to spread to all of the Kovol villages. Whatever they start to model now, the Kovol people will expect going forward.
The team has a lot to discuss as they figure out the best way to implement the new course.
There is lots to do, but the last two weeks have been exciting. The momentum towards taking their roles as literacy and Bible teachers has started. It is a six month course so the literacy and post-literacy programmes need to be finished and ready for use in the next months.
Their Kovol friends have been with them every day for the last few weeks. A highlight was a mock lesson they taught on the first pages of Primer 1. They invited some people to participate and the beaming smiles on their faces as they learned to read and called out sounds they had learned were amazing.