2017 Update

The new year has been a busy one at SELI, what with visiting SELI Young Writers club schools and  giving daily Business Writing mentoring classes, an in-servicing we offer to businesses and organizations in Freetown.

In mid-March, we traveled to the Koinadugu District in the northeast of Sierra Leone on a trip made possible by support from Edward Davies & Associates Consulting Engineers Ltd. One of the things we do there is to check up on the progress of the Kuranko Karan (shown here), a mother tongue adult literacy class in Dankawalie Village. We have nothing but praise for this group, that meets three times a week from 8-9:00 pm after a full day's work and was asking for Books II and III of their text. We have been able to send them thanks to the resources of The Institute of Sierra Leone Languages (TISLL) who also trained the teachers (in the back row in orange and white shirts) and are monitoring the program. On its own, the group hopes to revise the text, as well as compile a Kuranko reader: they will soon need Kuranko books to read, and they are very hard to find!

We also go to the Northern Province to visit our writing clubs.

We found most of the schools involved in their annual sports competitions, but we talked with the teachers and delivered supplies they'd fallen short of. Here you can see Dankawalie Secondary School's red house (and supporters) heading off for the competitions.

While they had been practicing, I had been working in the school library SELI helped to set up several years ago with a grant from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives and continues to support, mentoring DSS's teacher-librarian in this very rural setting.

Business English with SELI

We've been busy this term teaching an 18-session ESL course in Business English, and loving it!

It's being conducted during the working day on the organization's premises, to a group divided in two so that during our class time there is always someone in each department's office to take care of business.

Half of our course is devoted to business writing, and half to oral skills. It's a blended course, in that although we meet face-to-face twice a week, there is also an online requirement. Each member of the class is required to submit a number of assignments online at the SRWP Workshop. They post their assignments there (in a section of the page invisible to those not enrolled in the class) and also must respond online to two other pieces of writing posted by their colleagues, commenting on how well they have met the assignment's criteria.

The group is a pleasure to work with and I hope they're finding it as much of a learning experience as I am!

Peace Corps–Sierra Leone Staff Development

During May, SELI has been conducting an eight-session staff development training in Business Writing for the Peace Corps–Sierra Leone staff.

We've all enjoyed the sessions, mixing writing skills (style, cohesion and paragraphs) with genre writing and ongoing job writing requirements.

This is a great group of people to work with and they perform such an important function in Peace Corps–Sierra Leone. Hope we've been able to enhance that a bit.

Discourse Politics

The world is full of discourse politics (otherwise referred to as business communications)—power stances people assume in meetings to acquire control. You can't disregard people's stances and keep reacting to the words they say—as if you're a representative in congress objecting to a telephone number a colleague read from a phonebook while he's filibustering.

Here are a few of the strategies that come to mind: 

• remaining behind your big desk when people enter your room, using the distance the size of the desk provides to gain power; 
• making people wait when they have arrived for a meeting you called, to make it appear as if they are the petitioners; 
• using Krio instead of English to convey that you hold casual regard for a topic someone else takes seriously; 
• asking people to repeat what they've already explained, or account for things unnecessarily; 
• or just asking questions (especially confrontational ones)—question posers are automatically in a position of power, but if you don't answer, or don't directly answer the question, you take some of their power away.

These strategies make it difficult to take minutes at meetings because what is accomplished by the strategies is often unrelated to the content that was discussed. Maybe they were just trying to acquire the upper hand. . . maybe they were trying to make the meeting come to naught so they could take decisions privately instead. . . .