Linked Activity: English for the Office

During my frustrating first year of teaching post-secondary students preparing for a British examination in Business Communications using their "made simple" textbook, I wrote a 56-page Workbook in Communications to support my lessons. The workbook aimed specifically at the difficulties my students were having gaining communicative competence with a native variety of English. Using SELI materials, in February of 1990 I provided a workbook to each student. I gave pre-tests and began ESL instruction in office communications one period a week.

One period a week was not nearly enough. In my view, these students needed the skills I was teaching them "yesterday," long before they reached the tertiary level. In West Africa, the higher one reaches in school, the more multicultural/global are the academic expectations; in the wider context, many reports have been written about the misfit between communication skills taught in secondary school and those required for tertiary education.

There's no "made simple" way to acquiring communicative competence. You have to be carefully taught, and effective teaching takes time.

Pilot Project: Facilitating an Elderly Person's Recollections

On page 39 in The History of Sierra Leone, C.M. Fyle says that Kent village, on the extreme southern tip of the Freetown peninsula, was among the seaside peninsula villages founded by Governor Charles MaCarthy in 1819 to settle "disbanded African soldiers who had been fighting in the British army against the French. These soldier-settlers were joined in these villages by recaptives with whom they intermarried and soon became one people." "Recaptives" refers to those persons from along the coast in West Africa released into Sierra Leone from slave ships intercepted before they crossed the Atlantic by the Courts of Mixed Commission in Sierra Leone. The "one people" to whom the author refers are today called the Krio, one of Sierra Leone's ethnic groups. Kent village today is ethnically a highly diverse community, but the ruins of a gated wall from those early days and the proud awareness of the history of this unique village (which in the late 1800's provided two principals to the Sierra Leone Grammar School) remain.

Between the years of 1989 to 1994 at SELI in Tengbeh Town I intermittently recorded the recollections of an employee in the SELI compound in Tengbeh Town named William Africanus Beckley. Mr. Beckley was born in 1916 in Kent village, a century after its founding and nearly a century ago. He lived there until 1934 when he moved to Freetown. Although he never returned to the village to live, he always thought of himself as a "Kent boy" and wanted this to be the title of his recollections. I recorded many conversations between us, many describing his accompanying his grandmother on long river trading trips among the Sherbro. As is the nature of conversations, topics would appear, disappear, and reappear again, unpredictably. I typed out the scripts, and then organized his recollections into chapters. In January, 1994 I finished a dummy of Kent Boy and read it aloud to Mr. Beckley, who was an avid reader in English but did not read Krio. He suggested some changes. I attempted not to put any of my own words into his book, with the idea that a native Krio speaker with some knowledge of the period of history he was referring to would later help us edit his text.

Mr. Beckley often used proverbs, and we also recorded these. Over several years he would come to work in the morning with one written on a scrap of paper to ask me whether I'd included it. I identified two key words in each proverb, and alphabetized his list according to these words; this meant that the over 400 proverbs in his list became a book called Krio Parebul containing more than 800 items, each proverb listed twice. He was not one to explain proverbs, and was opposed to the idea of including any translation in the book apart from the occasional word that had fallen into disuse. I agreed with not translating the proverbs because I thought it wouldn't be helpful: anyone who has spent time around a proverb-user knows that they are explained in terms of the situation that they enlighten and not by the words they contain.

In 1994 I gave copies of both books to Mr. Beckley. He left work not long after that time, and died in January of 2001, at the age of 85.

Linked Activity: Second Language Methodology (SLM) Courses

While director of the American International School of Freetown, I taught three sixty-hour courses in second-language instructional methodology to teachers of Sierra Leonean languages in fifteen junior secondary schools in the Freetown area. The duration of these courses were: September 15, 1997 - January 5, 1998 (SLM I); April 20, 1998 - June 29, 1998 (SLM II); and April 19, 1999 - June 23, 1999 (SLM III).

There were ten participants in each course, two from each of five schools. All were teachers of either Mende, Themne, Limba, or Krio in their schools. We met two or three times per week. Each session began with 10 minutes' dialogue journal writing. At the beginning of the course, we set up journal partners that were maintained throughout the course. In the first journal session, participants began writing in their own journal in a Sierra Leonean language--in most cases, the language they were teaching. In the next session, the partners would exchange journals and reply to what their partner had written, in the same language.

The lessons each day consisted of theories of second language acquisition and how to set up a class environment in which second language learning happens. Everyone learned seven teaching methods, or structures, which have been found effective in second language instruction. We used teacher training videocassettes borrowed from SELI to demonstrate the methods; I demonstrated the methods in class; and then each participant chose a method to teach the group one aspect of his/her language of instruction. Once we used this drawing one of the teachers made of her language class as a symbol when I demonstrated Freire's Problem Posing method.

We maintained a class library of literature that is available commercially in each of these four Sierra Leonean languages, and participants borrowed from the library during the course. To emphasize that literature only expands if there are authors, and that each of us can be an author, we dedicated part of each session to a writing workshop. We wrote in one language (English) to make it possible for us all to conference together, but kept emphasizing that we hoped they would begin to feel like authors and launch out into writing in their languages of instruction. The SLM courses were held during a period of extreme civil unrest in Sierra Leone when schools were not operating normally. This prevented our carrying out follow-up instructional support in the teachers' own schools; however, we all took courage from being able to share what was happening around us through our writing.

Pilot Project: Community Adult Project in Education (CAPE)

From February - May, 1994 SELI conducted a pilot project teaching ESL literacy to a class of ten women living in the Tengbeh Town area. Our group was mixed in terms of education (from preliterate to semiliterate) and age (teen to middle age). The class wanted to gain literacy in English, not in the language we all were speaking to each other (Krio).
Our problem was community-based beginning reading materials in English. Could a beginning literacy class prepare a book, not knowing how to read? By cooking in Sierra Leone one develops a sharp eye for identifying different kinds of leaves. I brought a lot of cooking leaves in to class one day, and we spread them out on the table. Before more than a few moments had passed, I realized the conversation had moved from cooking to medicine! This was a better topic, because although we all knew how to prepare the same dishes, each one of us had different herbal knowledge to share. To my surprise, many of the women had admired the rich assortment of useful herbs in the SELI compound as they had come and gone from classes. We all went out collecting. Here you see four leaves that we found: mango (common), fig nut, guava, and sour sop.
In subsequent classes I taped these discussions, and recorded who offered each bit of herbal knowledge. We agreed on short medicine-preparing recipes. I recorded them in English and printed up a booklet which I brought to class and pantomimed my problem. I'm sick, and I need to find the right recipe! How should we organize the book so I can find what I need quickly? We talked about organizing it by the suggestor's name, by the leaf, or by the sickness, and they decided it would be most useful to organize by the sickness. In that session, we drew up our table of contents, and settled on Keep Well as a good title.

Couldn't we draw on students' acute visual leaf discrimination skills to enhance literacy learning in a community-based project? What if we drew up a beginning literacy book in which each letter had a different array of + or - distinctive features? It would be far less complicated than what they use every day for recognizing leaves: shine, curvature, veining, hue, shape, margin, texture. . .!

Student goals changed in these few months. Some who'd said their main goal was to learn to write their names, now could see a future when they could read a book they had written. They were all sorry to see the end of this project. Learning had become a possible and important thing for them, and they did not want to give it up.

Pilot Project: Writing Workshop I

From July to December, 1999, class 4-6 children from several primary schools in Freetown took part in SELI's Writing Workshop I pilot project.
Were you in Sierra Leone at that time? Those were the days of the "Intervention" of February, 1998 and the "Invasion" of January, 1999, and the students' dialogue journals and writing drafts were full of their personal contact with these huge events. We focused on personal experience writing, in multiple drafts just as adults do their writing. In these draft records, you can find pieces called "Fire Balls Passing Over the House," "February 13," and "January 6."
The gate from one draft to the next was through peer conferencing. In their pieces about conflict, the children were writing about astonishing violence. We first had to recognize the authors' turf of knowledge; that they knew what they saw and heard, and that we could help them explain it better by asking questions about it. However, stating to everyone what they were going to do in their next draft was a different question altogether--now that they'd explained it to the group, why put it on paper? Publishing was the answer to that! Publishing what everyone looked forward to. What excitement! We had a good-bye party on December 23, 1999 with a hope that we could continue our workshop at some later date.