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Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Course in Workplace English, Feb.–May, 2014



SELI's next intensive Course in Workplace English will be offered at the Sentinel English Language Institute in Tengbeh Town from 10th February to 23rd May 2014.


This intensive English-for-Special-Purposes course meets the needs of beginning-proficiency English language learners who have pursued tertiary education in another language than English but need the communication skills expected in a professional English-speaking workplace. Students about to enter university who embrace this goal can also be accommodated.

CWE applicants are assumed to be non-English speakers. The course develops basic-user level competencies in speaking, listening, reading, writing and presenting in English. Classes meet mornings only, fifteen hours a week for fourteen-week terms. There are still 15 places available in the coming term. Sessions are participatory and interactive, requiring prompt and regular attendance.

SELI's Course in Workplace English helps to make SELI's charitable work possible. Please contact us for enrolment information.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Yay! Certificates!


SELI's first intensive ESOL Course in Workplace English came to a close today with a certificate ceremony.

This beginning proficiency class was very rewarding to teach. All the participants were university students or working professionals from francophone West Africa who feel that English will give them an advantage in the workplace in their own countries. The class met three hours a day, five days a week for fourteen weeks at the SELI facility in Tengbeh Town. Nearly all the participants were in Sierra Leone specifically to take the course, so attended promply, regularly and actively; as such, significant progress took place.

SELI developed the curriculum for the Course in Workplace English in real time throughout the fourteen weeks. The director used *
interactions with the class and formative assessments to pace activities and adjust the scope and sequence of lessons. Although this is an English for Special Purposes course, it could also be said to cover competencies described in CEF's Basic User level (A1 and A2). We would be pleased to hear in the future of some of the participants taking advanced degrees in English; opportunities to do this are rapidly increasing in continental European universities.

Registration is now taking place at SELI for the next session of the Course in Workplace English scheduled to begin 10 February 2013.


* The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Adult Mother-Tongue Literacy Class

The Dankawalie Secondary School Library (in Dankawalie, Sengbe Chiefdom, Koinadugu District in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone) is a community library. One of its community services is offering an adult mother tongue literacy class in Kuranko.

I was glad to have the opportunity to meet with 7/10 of the class this week. Just for me, they gathered at the odd hour of 8 am on Monday morning before they headed out to their farms where they are harvesting rice and planting groundnuts. Although most of the class members have had a Koranic education (and can therefore read and write in Arabic) they have had no formal schooling so cannot read and write in the Roman script. Their days are already full with all the work they do.

Although Kuranko is not one of the mother-tongue languages The Institute of Sierra Leone Languages is currently working with, SELI arranged for two teachers from DSS to be included in TISLL's literacy-teacher training workshop in May, 2013. In June, the class began, and you can see from these short videos here that there have been results! TISLL monitors and certificates the program, and is a wonderful collaborative partner.

This SELI Heritage Writers program is expanding and needs your support. The current members keep pointing out that the materials (originally written in the '70's and revised in the '90s) are outdated and would like to revise them. New members of the community want to join the class as beginners. Some current members are ready to go on to Book Two. Although the members pay, by installment, a cost price for the books, the supplies need to be bought and brought to the village.  The two teachers have been doing this work without any stipend at all as encouragement. When class members have completed Book Two we would like to a) encourage those interested to go on to second language learning in Krio or English, and b) start them into a writing workshop where they can record their stories, which will become Kuranko readers to add to the DSS Library collection if we can pay to have them printed. The two teachers, Mr. Balla M. Kargbo and Mr. Alusine H. Kamara, would like to see the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology accept appeals for new Sierra Leonean languages to be added to the current four examination languages at junior secondary level.

If you are able to make a small contribution toward this Heritage Writers project, please click on the DONATE button to the right!

Update on Dankawalie School Library

SELI spent this weekend in Dankawalie, where the Dankawalie Secondary School Library still has many more books to catalog. One of the two librarians, Amara K. Tarawallie, began entering books this time, interacting with me about the decisions that need to be made about each book, such as:

Is this book fiction or nonfiction—folklore or biography?
Is this an "Easy" book or a transitional, middle level book?
Is this the name of the title, or of the series?
Did this author write the original, or this adapted version?
Does this book have an author at all?

Meanwhile, two students were helping another teacher, Ishmael K. Mansaray, to stamp the books and put pockets and cards in them in preparation for entering them. These particular books were donated by Books for Africa.

I also took a peek through the window into the new library building, which was brought to near-completion last year thanks to a grant from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. It is built in the same circular shape as the classrooms in the school. As soon as everyone is satisfied that it is as secure as it needs to be for a library, the collection, furniture, etc. will be moved from its temporary quarters in a classroom into this building.

During June and July of 2013, four university students from the U.S. were in Dankawalie doing community service. One of the students, Ariana Lutterman, elicited library rules from Dankawalie teachers and students, to develop this poster, which we love! Armed with these new rules, the librarians have agreed to resume circulation of the books, which they had suspended at the end of the last school year. The DSS Library thanks you, Ariana!

Stands for a solar array are being erected outside the library, the adult mother-tongue literacy class has been going on since June, and more books are waiting to be catalogued—the DSS Library is showing all the signs of growing into a truly vibrant community/school library. If Dankawalie weren't eight hours of hard riding on very rough roads from Freetown, I would spend a great deal more time there, myself!


Thursday, November 21, 2013

My Prized Possession


SELI's 14-week Course in Workplace English for beginning English language learners is now about 80% complete. This week was presentation week, during which everyone prepared a 3-minute presentation on "My Prized Possession." It was an exciting day for all of us!


Here are the opening segments of Fanta's and Mohamed's presentations. We all thought they did beautifully—do you? Everyone learned a new expression today—butterflies in your stomach. They thought it was a very apt description of how they felt!

Sunday, November 10, 2013

On the Freetown Peninsula

Mohamed Samking is the sole facilitator of the SELI Young Writers club at Goderich Comprehensive Junior Secondary School in Funima, in the hills of the rural Freetown Peninsula.

I always enjoy the way the members of this club are fully engaged. The students hold all their content conferences with the entire group, and good discussion takes place. All the materials are out for all the members to use and everyone knows the writing process well.

Here, Mr. Samking is showing the students the My Life booklets they will prepare, and be able to take away with them, as soon as they have completed five final drafts of personal experiences.Two students from this club earned My Life books in the 2012-2013 school year.

We appreciate the dedication of such facilitators of SELI's afterschool Young Writers clubs. The MacEwan Global Education Fund has been covering stipends for these facilitators. We need your contribution to continue! 

Saturday, November 9, 2013

TGIF

Here's how we spend the end of our Friday classes now in our Course in Workplace English at SELI: playing Scrabble!

The members of the class are all avid bilingual dictionary users (we allow the use of dictionaries, since doing so makes it a learning activity in this beginning-proficiency class). At first I gave some support to the lower performing students but they, themselves, stopped me—everyone's too competitive to tolerate that!

The whole session is taken up with discussions about new words and what they mean. Since the words remain on the board throughout the game, participants repeatedly revisit them and recall their meanings.

This is a noun, isn't it, and not a verb? He's trying to add -ing to it!  That's an uncountable noun—you can't put an -s on it!

Friday, November 1, 2013

Conferencing at LPK Memorial JSS

I enjoyed my visit to the SELI Young Writers club at Lady Patricia Kabba Memorial JSS in Goderich today.

The students all made a great effort to write nonstop for ten minutes on the topic of whether they like or don't like Nigerian movies. Then two volunteers, one for each opinion, read their work aloud. Our emphasis was on content, as always with first drafts. Later, in responding to their journals, I saw that despite all their errors in mechanics and expression, everyone had good reasons to back up whatever they chose to say.

The students all went on to whatever they were doing next: peer editing, self editing, starting a first draft, writing a second draft, teacher editing, and content conferencing.

This content conference group was particularly good. Several of the participants were new members of the group who had drawn up a list of topics to write on, but had not yet done first drafts. They didn't really understand during the first reading during the conference that each one of them was going to have to draw up content questions. So they requested this second reading, and notice how attentive they are to the reader (with her back to us)! Their questions were the type that provoked discussion. They all enjoyed the session, and the authors got help for their second drafts.

Thanks, LPKM JSS Young Writers! And thank you to the MacEwan Global Education Fund, which has been covering SRWP facilitator stipends for the past two years. The project needs your help to continue!

Saturday, October 26, 2013

It's a Mystery


I'm one of millions of readers of mysteries. We don't passively absorb books. We interact actively from the first page. We use nuanced clues to keep changing our hypotheses. At the end we weigh the resolution against alternatives we'd been considering.

It's never surprised me how much the kids up our street like to play soccer, because starting a game is like opening a new mystery. So that's why I'm finding reading Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World odd, because neither in the book nor in Amy Gonzalez's National Writing Project review at http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3654 , is game playing compared to mystery reading.

Yet McGonigal's defining features of a game are so characteristic of the experience of mystery reading: a goal which is often redefined as you go, and is enhanced by a good story; limitations (cultural, subplot- or information-based, etc.) imposed on ways the goal can be achieved stimulating you to stretch your thinking; a feedback system that lets you know your progress; and voluntary participation, meaning we agree to the goal, limitations and feedback system we're given.

I wish we could develop a whole set of quality children's mysteries in Sierra Leone.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Why Teaching is Fun

"This is the email Carla sent," I told my beginning-proficiency Workplace English adult class.

Our lesson was about emailing, and attaching, and the various kinds of attachments there can be. The students were not only getting lost in the new vocabulary in Carla's list of documents—a bar chart of stocks in the warehouse, a graph of products for last month—they also had had little experience with computers. One fellow looked particularly bewildered.

I realized that Carla was naming five documents in her email. Impulsively, I took off my necklace and handed it to him. "This is the email Carla sent," I said. "She sent it to Tim just as I am handing this to you."

"The main necklace of handmade glass beads is the email, and you can see the five attachments. Name them for me."

Using the necklace forced the class together to isolate the five items in the text, and to see how they all moved together with the main email to the recipient when they were sent. Using concrete objects is common in ESL classes, but in addition I have learned that I'm not alone among adults in needing concrete objects to make the abstract clear, and this is just one more example. Barbara Tuchman said it very clearly:
History written in abstract terms communicates nothing to me. I cannot comprehend the abstract, and since a writer tends to create the reader in his own image, I assume my reader cannot comprehend it either. No doubt I underestimate him. Certainly many serious thinkers write in the abstract and many people read them with interest and profit and even, I suppose, pleasure. I respect this ability, but I am unable to emulate it.

Tuchman, B. (1982). Practicing History. New York: Ballantine/Random House, p. 37.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

When Teachers Learn, Everybody Learns

Professional development is essential! And it's fun. It's great to stop being a teacher and be a student again. I was part of another CODE/PEN workshop this month with Charlie Temple, university professor and children's book writer from the US, and Mohamed Sheriff, president of the Sierra Leone PEN chapter. Our shared interest is the development of children's literature in Sierra Leone.

Sometimes an awakening occurs before the stories inside us can appear. Really good teachers can pass on the strategies that draw out our stories. They connect us. They get us listening to ourselves as we are in other contexts--to our voices in other languages and to other age groups; to our voices in music; to our behaviors as we sing and walk and talk. And somehow by their magic as teachers, they get us putting that language and those behaviors onto paper.

Charlie has a 10-string charango that he brought for us this time, and that literacy lesson really brought it home for me. It's great to take a break from being a teacher, and learn from other teachers again.


Sunday, September 29, 2013

Handing Over SRWP Supplies

This weekend SELI traveled north to hand over Seli River Writing Project supplies to eight schools in the Koinadugu District. Here you see supplies being received by the principal, Mr Sorie Ibrahim Sesay, and the two club facilitators, Sheku Bilo Conteh and Mohamed Ato Koroma, for the new Young Writers club at Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School's senior school. The same school's junior secondary school has been operating a club successfully for three years now, and their supplies were replenished today, as well.

These Koinadugu schools also received new Young Writers Club supplies this weekend for the coming academic year: Heritage United Methodist High School, Dankawalie Secondary School, Loma JSS, Loma SSS, and Kabala Secondary School JSS and SSS.

Ten of the facilitators of these clubs are newly trained, having attended SELI's week-long workshop the last week in August this year. We so much appreciate their enthusiasm, and look forward to visiting the clubs during this coming school year!

Thank you to the International Reading Association, which has been covering donated supplies for the Seli River Writing Project. The project needs your help to continue!

Thursday, September 26, 2013

What's so great about writing clubs?

A student from the Koinadugu District in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone wrote about his experience in the SELI Young Writers club this year. You can read his work here. He has just finished his first year in junior secondary school. Reading the students' work lets us know what they feel they gain from the club. It's not always academic achievement and not always about writing--peer respect is important, too! Students like that they gain the ability and confidence to express themselves orally in English.

If you're able, please make a donation to the Seli River Writing Project by clicking on the DONATE button to the right. SELI really needs your support this year, now that it has added a senior secondary component to the after-school Young Writers program. As our young writer explains in his essay, the club facilitators play an important part in making the clubs work. They certainly deserve the minimal stipends we pay them.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

A Reading Activity in our CWE

We're learning English in all kinds of ways in SELI's intensive Course in Workplace English. The fourteen-week course is now 20% completed.

Here you see groups of students carrying out a reading activity, which emphasizes reading comprehension. Students in this course also gain reading skills in our usual lessons, in our daily dialogue journaling, in our writing workshops, and by reading books from the SELI library.

Already we're seeing progress in the English of these beginning- / semi-beginning-proficiency English learners. Keep it up!


Sunday, September 8, 2013

Cultural Writing Skills

One thing we do in our Leading Young Writers workshops is to differentiate speech and writing, as this teacher is doing here. It's a vital distinction for all teachers to make as they prepare to facilitate writing clubs, and it emphasizes why it is worrisome that students do so little writing (as opposed to copying) in schools in Sierra Leone.

We should make another important distinction in the Leading Young Writers workshops--a cultural one. West African cultures are listener-responsible, and Western/first-world cultures are speaker-responsible[1]. Since interactions between the two began, this difference has caused misunderstandings between them. It is common for members of both cultural groups to form judgments and prejudices about the other as a result of this difference. The point where it becomes tragic is when one with such misconceptions has the means and will to publicize them as if they were fact, or has the power to take decisions about a person in the other cultural group that will affect his/her livelihood.

The native English-speaking world's nature as a speaker-responsible society is one of the factors that drives ESL process-writing workshops in Sierra Leone. It is true that the target spoken English in schools in Sierra Leone is in most cases, that spoken by educated Sierra Leoneans. However, the target written English is standard English. The final draft in our Young Writers workshops should be clear and in most cases, unambiguous. All the members of the club have well-developed cultural insight, and sometimes they understand each other too well to be critical--their ability to intuit unexplained feelings and gaps in cause-and-effect actions can be a detriment when they are giving feedback. We have to keep encouraging them to ask for explicitness that sometimes to them seems silly--like stating the obvious. 

The same cultural skill brings a richness to their writing. A standard tenet of writers' workshops is the advice, "Show, don't tell." Good writers often don't say that they felt emotions; they show what they looked like. It is a delight to throw this "Show, don't tell" concept out to a group from a listener-responsible culture, such as our recent Leading Young Writers workshop who have all spent their lifetimes reading unspoken meanings. The day I asked the group of ten teachers what SAD looked like, immediately, in silence, without any questions, I had in front of me ten different postures evoking sadness. If I'd taken a photo, it would have been a poem--to the listener-responsibles out there!


[1] Similar to the distinction John Hinds made about languages in 1987 when he wrote "Reader Versus Writer Responsibility: A New Typology" in Connor & Kaplan (Eds.) Writing across languages: analysis of L2 text. 

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Course in Workplace English

SELI's new 14-week intensive beginning-ESL Course in Workplace English got underway this week!

The enrollees are university level or working adults who gained their education in some other language, and would like to develop the skills they need to apply for bilingual jobs in their countries.

All the current enrollees are French-speaking, and most of them are from Guinea. This is a SELI ESL class that contributes toward funding SELI's charitable work in secondary schools in Sierra Leone.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

New Leaders of Young Writers

Yesterday the Seli River Writing Project concluded a week-long, intensive Leading Young Writers training at the Ahmadiyya MA Secondary School in Yogomaia, Kabala, in Sierra Leone. After this week we spent together I am excited that these talented people will be helping our students to write! Some will be facilitating in ongoing junior secondary (JSS) clubs, some will be opening new JSS clubs, and some will be opening new senior secondary clubs.
The schools represented in the workshop were Loma Secondary School, Kabala Secondary School, Ahmadiyya Muslim Agricultural Secondary School, and Heritage United Methodist High School.

The Seli River Writing Project is made possible by many treasured donations from individuals, as well as grants from the MacEwan Global Education Fund and the International Reading Association.
With more funds, we could do so much more. Would you like to help? Please click on the DONATE button on the right!

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Dankawalie Secondary School Library

Now that the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives has funded setting up the library at the Dankawalie Secondary School (Sengbe Chiefdom, Koinadugu District), SELI has an ongoing commitment to its development. We are pleased to see digital development appearing from other sources. These photos tell the DSS library story through June, 2013. 

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Learn English at SELI!

This year SELI had a beginning, low intermediate, and upper intermediate ESL class. Here the beginners are concentrating on a listening activity. The class members are from Côte d'Ivoire, Niger and Mali.

SELI's director is a U.S.-qualified ESL teacher, and instruction in English for speakers of other languages is an important part of its service.

During the coming term (September to December, 2013) SELI is also offering a beginning intensive course in workplace English for adults who have attained university degrees in another language, if there is sufficient enrollment. 

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Young Voices 3.2

The June 2013 issue of Young Voices newsletter is out! You can now read more of our young authors' writing, and learn more of what's going on in the Seli River Writing Project. Great news!

Read all four pages of the newsletter by clicking on this link .


Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Five Writing Lessons: A New Take

SELI presented for a few hours at TISLL's (The Institute for Sierra Leonean Languages) Literacy Teacher/Facilitator Workshop, held Monday-Friday, May 27-31st in Freetown. The workshop trained people to teach literacy to nonliterate people in their mother tongue. Five different languages were represented.

On Wednesday, SELI introduced the idea that all classes are diverse: even in basic literacy classes there are always advanced learners that need to be challenged, and process writing can do this--a form of differentiated instruction. In this photo I'm presenting concepts, but then we went on to the practical: each participant drafted a personal piece of writing in his or her own language and then shared it in language groups in a content conference. It did not surprise us that many of the participants had never written a personal experience in their own language before. For nearly all Sierra Leoneans, the only road to literacy is through English. But the hardest part of the presentation was stopping the content conferences! Everyone was having such a good time being writers in their own language and having writing to share and discuss, that they didn't want to stop!

Five Writing Lessons (FWL)  Collaborating with TISLL has shown SELI how to make its Five-Writing-Lessons project work. This project been a struggle. After the first two successful units, in Kuranko and Krio, we could not seem to move forward. Even repeated radio announcements did not attract educated Sierra Leoneans to this opportunity of becoming writers (and potentially one day, authors) in their own languages.

By way of contrast, TISLL already operates literacy centers in six languages where adults and young people gain literacy in their mother tongues. TISLL also has literacy materials and the expertise to teach literacy. It is the only organization in the country that works exclusively with indigenous languages. The difference is that unlike the SELI FWL program, TISLL literacy classes teach initial, beginning literacy.  But what a great opportunity this provides us!  Literacy that is not maintained, can be lost.  What better way to empower and motivate TISLL's newly literate students than to include them in a writing workshop?

SELI is excited to be partnering with TISLL, and hope our contributors to the Five Writing Lessons project agree.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Reading Sierra Leone

On May 10th, eight Reading Sierra Leone books were officially launched--hooray! You see here one of the eight.

To quote from the inside back cover, "Reading Sierra Leone is a collaborative initiative of PEN Sierra Leone and CODE, a Canadian NGO supporting development through education. The goal of Reading Sierra Leone is to produce locally written and illustrated books that engage children and invite them, through reading and writing, to think, to learn and to improve their lives."

The books are aimed at lower, middle, and upper primary reading levels and are part of a program providing huge numbers of books, as well as teacher training in reading instruction, to primary schools in Sierra Leone, beginning with schools in the eastern part of the country.

You can look through, and learn how to purchase, all the Reading Sierra Leone as well as the Reading Liberia books in this catalog. 

Sales will help finance a second round of locally-produced books under Reading Sierra Leone. Let's make this happen! (P.S.: We're told Reading Liberia is in its third round!)

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Collaborating with Five Writing Lessons

The Sentinel English Language Institute's Five Writing Lesson program has so much in common with The Institute for Sierra Leone Languages (TISSL) that the two organizations are looking into how we might collaborate and maximize our efforts. Today I visited a Limba adult literacy class conducted by TISSL's Limba coordinator, Mr. Gibrilla Kamara. It was held in a Quonset-hut building of a municipal school. Here we show a photo taken of the class (which meets five times a week) at 6 pm, and another photo taken two hours later when the lighting was provided by class members who brought LED flashlights or mobile phones. This class is one of three Limba literacy classes offered by TISSL in the Freetown area. TISSL's aim is to develop readers (who also write), while SELI's aim is to develop writers (who also read).

Friday, March 8, 2013

Can't stop reading!

We gave out issue no. 3.1 of the Young Voices newsletter when we visited Young Writers clubs this week. These photos are from Lady Patricia Kabba Memorial Junior Secondary School in Goderich. We couldn't get anyone to stop reading and get on with their own writing until they'd finished the whole paper! 

Get your own copy here, and let us know how you like it. The Young Writers authors would like your feedback. Appropriate reading materials are SO needed in Sierra Leone! There is no doubt that education is in a dire state in Sierra Leone as you can see in this article, but when reading materials are appropriate and when reading materials are available, students everywhere in the world will do their best to read.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Reading Sierra Leone


Lε Wi Ɔl Lan ("Let's all learn!") aims to improve learning outcomes for girls and boys in Sierra Leone. One of the strategies is to train at least 40 teacher trainers and 160 teachers in teaching reading and writing by the end of the second year. Trained teachers will receive regular professional support. Lε Wi Ɔl Lan hopes to improve the reading and writing performance for students in class one to junior secondary school. A complementary project, Reading Sierra Leone, provides students and teachers access to a variety of high quality reading materials. During the first year, CODE Canada brought in more than 200,000 reading materials for the project while conducting workshops in partnership with PEN SL to train writers and illustrators to tell inspiring local stories. Eight books from these local stories have now been published (pssssst: the SELI director wrote one of them!) The launching will take place soon! Here's where you can get your catalog of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean titles.

Lε Wi Ɔl Lan is coordinated by the International Rescue Committee. CODE Canada leads the teacher-training components of the project, and CODE is also the lead for Reading Sierra Leone.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Young Voices 3.1


The four-page March 2013 issue of Young Voices newsletter is out!  Read here what members of Young Writers clubs in rural schools on the Freetown peninsula and in the Koinadugu District in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone have to say about things that have happened to them.



Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Seli River Writing Project

The photo on the left is from the SELI Young Writers workshop that meets at SELI twice a week. It has turned out to be a mix of junior and senior secondary students. Mr. Allieu Sheriff, a workshop facilitator from Services Junior Secondary, Wilberforce is doing content conferencing with students here. You also see a student doing self editing at Goderich Comprehensive Secondary School in Funima.
Would you like to know more about the aims we are working toward in the Seli River Writing Project? Many of them are brought out in this article in the February 2013 issue of TESOL International's SRIS Newsletter.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Tutors Needed in Sierra Leone Languages


On International Mother Language Day 2013 (February 21st), a meeting was held at SELI of tutors interested in teaching potential mother tongue authors to write in their own mother languages.  Here are the details:

The Sentinel English Language Institute (SELI) is resuming its Five Writing Lessons programme, in which five writing lessons are offered free of charge in each Sierra Leonean language. The students in this programme are educated adults who wish they could write stories or poems in their mother tongues but do not know the correct spelling.

SELI is seeking tutors for the Five Writing Lessons programme in all Sierra Leonean languages. If you feel that you are qualified to teach native speaking adults to write in your language and would like to participate in the Five Writing Lessons programme, please call SELI at 076 547540 or email jackie@seli.co . The students will already speak the language well; they just need to learn how to write it.

Five Writing Lessons supports mother tongue literature, whose importance is celebrated throughout the world every February 21st on International Mother Language Day. As a tutor in the Five Writing Lessons program, you will be doing a great service to your culture by enabling authors to write in your language. An honorarium will be paid to the successful tutors upon completion of the initial student interview and the five lessons.

Again, contact the Five Writing Lessons programme at 076 547540 or jackie@seli.co .

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Conferencing at Sengbe Pieh

We have hopes that soon we will start seeing final drafts from the Young Writers club at Sengbe Pieh Memorial Secondary School in Hamilton, on the Freetown peninsula.

Many of the members of this club, such as the group doing content conferencing here, are senior secondary students. This ups the ante! We are setting higher standards for seniors in the Seli River Writing Project, as is appropriate for their abilities and academic needs.

Stay posted!