Kirsty Sword Gusmão gave a terrific public lecture Language, language policies and education in Timor-Leste on 20th July at ANU. You can watch the talk here. Key points for me were:
- her passionate commitment to expanding opportunity for Timor-Leste’s children through education
- her belief that mother tongue medium instruction in the early years is a key to this education
- the problems faced in a country with 2 official languages, 2 working languages – how to create effective multilingualism
- the hard question of how you go about mother tongue medium instruction in a small and poor country which has to start from scratch
- documenting languages
- training teachers
- creating school materials
If you had, as I had, ideas about whizz-bangery stuff on computers [1], forget them for the moment in a country like Timor-Leste where kids are lucky to have books.
What to do? This work is supported by some organisations, including the Alola Foundation which Kirsty Sword Gusmão set up, and we can support them. She was also urging linguists to help the work on documenting the languages. And we discussed as well the need for scholarships for people from Timor-Leste to get training in language documentation, language teaching methods, etc. So – over to our readers…
[1] Even happens in Australia – I was astonished to learn from an Australian advocate for community language schools (what we once called Saturday Schools), that you can’t count on access to computers for Saturday Schools. Even if they’re allowed to use school premises, they’re often blocked from using the computers for fear of the horrible things they might do to them.
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