Linguistic diversity and challenges in Timor-Leste
Dili, February 18, 2020
In last weeks entry I outlined some of the basic principles that are the foundations of good material design. I’ve been here in Timor-Leste a shade over two weeks, and I am finding those principles are even more important than I realized: they are keeping me tethered and focused. I wrote a lengthy email to an outside consultant, who had previously been advising the Ministry on language teaching reforms for grades 1-6, how these principles were guiding me in devising student workbooks/texts and teacher guides for what will be the students third language of study, English, and why I didn’t want to follow her suggestion and write a student book that started with Phonemic awareness (basically the “sounds of English”). I want to structure the book with communicative purposes in mind. But before we get into that discussion (which is next weeks topic) lets look at that sentence I wrote…”guiding me in devising curriculum for the third language of study.” I am finding that what I am discovering in Timor-Leste is a linguistic situation that has deep historic and political roots. And here I thought I was simply writing a 7th grade English text. This is a reminder that language is tied into cultural, political and power dynamics in all societies, but here, a little bit more so.
Think of this: by the time a typical Timorese student enters 7th grade, they will have at least two languages that they are juggling in a formal academic way. Tetun, the national language, and Portuguese, which is considered an official language. Moreover, outside of Dili, the capital, often the L1 or primary home language of a student is a dialect that is an oral language, with little written references, and often from an entirely different language family than Tetun. Plus, the home language is extremely specific to their region of the country and isn’t used to communicate to Timorese from other regions—this is why the Tetun spoken in Dili (Dili Tetun) was chosen as a lingua franca for the entire nation at the time of independence—more people already spoke it. Upon entering kindergarten students are introduced to a formal study of Tetun—reading, writing, language structure etc. For some, this is their first formal exposure to the language. At grade two they are introduced to a formal study of Portuguese, which they will continue studying throughout their schooling. Then, in Grade 7: English is introduced.
In the language curriculum offices at the Ministry of Education, I sit in a room with the Tetun, Portuguese and English teams all of whom are revising the grades 7-9 curriculum and supporting materials. We have fruitful conversations and dialogues, (one side note is how sharing the California ELD standards is proving very beneficial to the Tetun team—a topic for later exploration) but the reality is we are competing for time, and perhaps more importantly, the bandwidth of young people, who not only have to learn 3 languages, they also have to do what all students do: study math, history, science, art, physical education etc. And if what I am learning in these offices and observing on the street, no one but government officials, or older Timorese speak or understand Portuguese, or English very well. So, how did Timor-Leste get to this place of multiple languages being taught but not being used, except by the elite?
In the constitution itself you can see the tension between these languages. There it is stated that: “Tetun and Portuguese are official languages, and Tetun and other national languages (dialects) shall be valued and developed and that both English and Indonesian shall be working languages within the civil society, side by side with the official language for as long as deemed necessary.”
It’s helpful here to understand the role that language plays in both national identity and politics. Timor was a colony of Portugal until 1975. There was resistance to this occupation all through the 20thcentury but it reached a boiling point during the 1970s as Portugal itself was going through political upheavals and the air was filled with revolutionary fervor. Finally, in December of 1975, after Portugal’s own right wing government was overthrown, Timor won its independence from Portugal. The Timorese rebellion was decidedly leftist, and this meant that Indonesia, under the dictatorship of Suharto, could mask it’s own imperialist designs under the guise of anti-communism. Days after independence, the Indonesian army invaded. We have to remember the cold war between the Soviets and the U.S. was at its height at this time. This meant Indonesia would receive the tacit support of the U.S. who, after the victory of Vietnamese communists, and under the leadership of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, was still concerned with communist influence in the region. Neither they, nor any other nation (I’m talking to you Australia) did anything to support the sovereignty of this new nation—despite the serious human rights violations that were well documented by outside journalists and aid agencies.
The Indonesian occupation was not benign. Amnesty international estimated that upwards of 200,000 Timorese out of a total population of 600,000 died from 1975-1999, as a direct result of Indonesian brutality. It is not lost on this writer, who served as an English language fellow in Cambodia, that the same time period witnessed the genocide of ¼ of the population of that country at the hands of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, with no intervention by any other country.
During the Indonesian occupation the use of Tetun, Portuguese and English were outlawed and all business and education was required to be in Bhasa Indonesian. So Tetun, which could be understood across many of the dialects, became a symbol of national identity, so much so that I’ve read that it became part of the Church’s liturgy (another side note, this is a predominately Roman Catholic country, a result of hundreds of years of Portuguese rule). Portuguese, on the other hand, maintained its prominence as a language of resistance, as many of the resistance leaders were educated, and prior to independence Portuguese was the language of schools. So this language held on to that importance and became one of the national languages identified in the constitution that was finally approved in 2002.
All of this leads to a vigorous national debate about which languages actually should be taught in the year 2020. (I haven’t even touched upon the use of Bhasa Indonesian, the dominant language in the entire region and the language of schools from 1975-2002). I believe the focus should be on strengthening the national education system as a whole, using the national language (Tetun) and focusing on critical thinking and academic literacy in that language in the early years. From what I can see the Tetun team is doing that right now. What foreign languages are taught, and how much emphasis on each, is really not my right to say. I know others have stronger opinions on this and they have their right to them. For now I am focusing on trying to create student materials that are developmentally and cognitively appropriate to 7thgraders and take all I have written and continue to learn and think about into account.
Learning and understanding this context is as essential to my work as is the understanding of the basic guiding principles of language acquisition and language material design that I wrote about last week. Today, I am heading out of Dili, to three smaller towns, in the mountains and on the south coast for a three day field trip: Suai, Ainaro and Same. I will be visiting schools and getting a sense of the challenges teachers face in those communities.
Preparing to write materials
Dili, Timor-Leste
Entry # 2
Language offices: Ministry of Education, Dili, Timor-Leste
In a small, squat yellow building with a corrugated red roof, across a narrow road from the Ministry of Education’s main structure, is a cluttered office that will be my work home for the next two months. I share it with members of the three language curriculum teams. There is the Tetun team, one of the official languages of Timor-Leste, of which the 1,308,000 people that live in this small island nation speak some form. Because that language has many regional variations and is predominately an oral language it is introduced as a written language in first grade. Then there is the Portuguese team. Portuguese is the other official language in Timor-Leste, a vestige of Colonial rule that ended in 1975, and is introduced in the schools as a mandatory foreign language in first grade. Much is written and debated about this choice. I will write about the Linguistic complexity of the country in detail in next week’s entry, as it deserves some exploration and informs the work we do here greatly. Plus it’s hell of interesting. Then, there is the English team, of which I am part of along with two Timorese colleagues, and one Peace Corps Volunteer who comes in once a month from his posting in a remote village on the other side of the island. English is introduced in the schools as a mandatory subject, three hours weekly, in grade 7. All three teams (a total of 6 of us most days) are working on the third cycle of language materials as part of the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum reform efforts.
When I received notice that I was hired to join this team as an English Language Specialist with the Department of State’s English Language Programs to assist with reforming the curriculum and write student texts, I began doing some deep thinking about curriculum development and the writing of student materials. I first took stock of what I had already done in my career in this area: “Science at Home”, an outgrowth of my Master’s thesis, which became a manual and curriculum on using narrative writing to teach science for sixth grade throughout my school district in the late 80s, “Food and World War One”, which was a curriculum I wrote for the national WW I museum in Kansas City, Missouri, “Masks of Meso-America”, which was a an original unit I developed as part of a National Endowment of the Humanities project in Mexico, “A Night in Hagia Sophia” a curriculum disguised as an original play that I wrote as a culmination of a Fulbright grant to study in Greece and Turkey. These were the formal curriculums and materials. In addition, there were the countless materials/worksheets/Big Books, etc. that I created with colleagues and on my own for my students in the humanities, drama and ESL classes I have taught over the years at King Middle School in Berkeley, California.
None, in my mind, however, prepared me to create a student book and Teacher’s guide for English that would be used throughout this country. So, I did some research in the month I had before arriving. Googling “How to write English language materials” and other similar inquiries, I discovered that there is a whole subset of research and work within the greater TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) world, devoted to “Material Writing”. So I dove in.
What I discovered was reassuring, in that many of the elements that constitute good teaching, are the same elements that go into creating good materials. Something I could hold onto: my career as a teacher could guide me. In particular, I found these sources most useful: a book by Jack Richard, “Curriculum Development in Language Teaching”, Webinars and Journal writings from Brian Tomlinsin, and much of the materials (webinars and pamphlets) produced by a group based in England called “ELT teacher 2 writer”. I am using the main points I gleaned from these and other references to guide me as I dive into the work here. Here are some of the highlights, and while they won’t surprise anyone that is reading this, it is, I find, helpful to return to basic principles when confronted with what seems like a monumental and daunting task. Kind of like an NBA player who does the same routines when confronted by a foul shot in the waning moments of a game with the championship on the line. Stick to the fundamentals—stick to what got you here. If you don’t want to read all of this here is the key point: good lesson planning principles are the same as the principles involved in good material writing: the writer starts with a learning goal in mind and then seeks to create a set of materials and activities that enable the goal to be realized. But for those that want more specifics here are the ones I highlighted from my research.
• Communication should be the focus of language learning materials
• Materials should create opportunities for interaction and the negotiation of meaning through information sharing, problem solving and role-play activities
• Materials should link grammar and language structures to communicative tasks
• Materials should link different skills of speaking, reading, listening and writing
• Goal should be to build towards communicative competence
• Most texts have the following features, but a good one will be more focused on the third feature of the list
• Mechanical practice
• Meaningful practice
• Communicative practice
• Good materials reduce the amount of grammar-oriented activities and incorporate more practice of the 4 language skills (speaking, listening, writing, and reading
• Good materials get students involved in presentations, role-plays and project work
• Materials fail when they focus on linguistic items rather than providing opportunities for acquisition and development
• Materials should stimulate interaction and be generative in terms of language
• Materials need to move toward purposeful use of the targeted language
• In our materials, we should clearly state our objectives so we develop a progression of skills, understandings and language learning
• Successful materials have clear goals and procedures and produce the kind of learning outcomes they were designed to teach, are at an appropriate level of difficulty, and have value for both teachers and learners in terms of interest, usefulness and relevance
• Too many materials are designed for teaching English rather than learning English
• Good materials provide activities that help learners to activate for themselves salient features of texts
• Good materials are an aesthetically positive experience
• Good materials help learners make discoveries themselves
• Good materials help learners become independent learners (develop autonomy)
All of this is well and good, but the challenge is how to put all of these principles into practice given the cultural and linguistic variables present in the Timorese context, plus within the limitations of creating materials in just a few months time. More on that next time.
On flight from Bali to Dili, Timor-Leste. Sunday, Feb 2, 2020
In this blog I will be documenting my work as an English Language Specialist in Timor-Leste with the U.S. Department of State’s English Language Programs.
Entry #1
On a flight from Bali to Timor-Leste, the final leg of my journey from San Francisco, I look out of the airplane window, catching glimpses through the clouds of the blues and greens of the Indonesian Archipelago. I am reminded of my work in the theatre, but then again everything that flirts with both possibility and anxiety reminds me of the theatre. I have long anticipated this moment. I am on my way to Dili, the capital city of Timor-Leste. A little over a month ago I was selected as an English language specialist by the U.S. Department of States English language programs, to assist the ministry of education in Timor-Leste as they revamp their English curriculum and materials for grades 7-9 schools throughout the country. It is a seven- month assignment. Phase one begins tomorrow. Two months in Timor-Leste learning about the current curriculum, meeting with the local team that has begun the process, and getting started on the writing. Then, Phase 2, four months back in the U.S. continuing and completing the writing, followed by the final phase in August, when I return to Timor-Leste to help develop teacher trainings to implement the new curriculum I have been tasked with creating.
When I described the project to others they have similar reactions: words like challenging, exciting, daunting. My favorite comment was from a recently retired grade 5 teacher that I have known for all 40 years of my career as an educator. He wrote in an email to me that said: “Frankly, Richard, when I look at the job description, I feel a little bit sick.”
When I worked in theatre, both as an actor and a director, I remember those first days of rehearsals. Everything was possible, and yet everything also seemed somehow impossible at the same time. I know from experience what my friend meant when he described his “sick” feeling.
I think about how to create materials for the use of emerging English students in a school system I know very little about. Everything is possible, yet how to begin? In this blog I am hoping to create a narrative of my process partially to help others that might be embarking on a similar journey, but mostly to help me in organizing my thoughts to lead to a successful outcome. The next entry will talk about the preliminary work I did in the month prior to prepare myself for this project.
