Action Against Ebola

One of SELI's principal donors, Edward Davies & Associates Consulting Engineers Ltd, is taking action against Ebola. We're glad to be partnered with them: along with being a health crisis, Ebola is a humanitarian and educational crisis.

Won't you help to fight Ebola?

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.

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. 

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!)

SELI Visits Clubs

Three additional process writing clubs! Here we see boys from the Albert Academy Junior Secondary School rehearsing new topics during my visit, and we see Government Model JSS club conducting a content conference. SELI provides public library cards for club members, but reading skills are developed within the workshop itself, in listening to someone else read aloud so you can respond; in reading your work aloud to a group--even in drafting and revising the students are constantly re-reading what they have written. The Government Rokel Junior Secondary School was doing rehearsing and drafting when SELI visited their club. We credit the facilitators for holding club meetings regularly, because of the shortage of space in these campuses where both morning and afternoon schools operate in the same compound. Attendance is affected by other school events and by personal incidents in the students' lives during these stringent economic times in Sierra Leone. We praise our Leading Young Writers facilitators for staying persistent and positive for the sake of the children!

Young Writers Clubs

Junior secondary school students are busy carrying out the writing process in Young Writers Clubs in several locations now. Most are second-year JSS II students, and they are working on writing their true personal experiences. The students at UM Secondary School for Girls are having a rehearsing session, where everyone is drawing up a list of personal experience topics from her own life that she can write about. The club at Freetown Secondary School for Girls is doing peer content conferencing--one author is presenting her first draft to receive feedback on the content from those listening, to find out if what she has written makes sense to them, or needs more background information, and so on. SELI's Young Writers (most of whom are from Services JSS in Wilberforce) are drafting and revising--some preparing for a content conference, some for editing, but all busy on their own life experience topics.

Club members find that analyzing their life experiences involves exploring their cultural backgrounds. Club leaders try to build confidence in the students, a community of learners, and a positive experience with teachers. We believe that this is the way to nurture responsible freedom of expression.

Leading Young Writers in Progress

Our junior secondary school teachers from five schools in Freetown (Gov't. Model JSS, Gov't. Rokel JSS, FSSG, UMSSG, and Albert Academy) have completed 3 weeks of their 4 week workshop and are looking forward to sharing their enthusiasm about writing with students in their school Young Writers clubs. You can see them here doing an exercise in revising writing; doing peer conferencing, and typing their revisions into netbook computers. Unfortunately, SELI has been able to pay for only 3-1/2 of the netbooks being used for this workshop so their use in the next Leading Young Writers workshop is not certain.

Press Release: Leading Young Writers

Leading Young Writers begins on August 24th! See our press release here! The best writing teachers are teachers who are writers themselves. Short term outcomes we are expecting are an increase in teacher enthusiasm for writing, a desire to share writing and reading with students; an opening-out of both teachers' cultural voices; and the development of a pool of writing workshop facilitators. Longer-term outcomes we expect are improved student academic success in language arts; the sustained and productive use of teaching strategies that promote critical thinking in language arts classes in schools; and a transformation in students' attitudes about, and habits of, critical thinking, writing and reading.

Leading Young Writers

Beginning August 17 SELI plans to train and support teachers to run extra-curricular Young Writers clubs, in which students improve their written language skills as they read and develop as critical thinkers. This project is being planned in coordination with the Childhood Foundation

A workshop of 24 contact hours will be conducted for 10 teachers from five schools (4-week workshops, meeting for 1-1/2 hr sessions 4 times per week) prior to the opening of the school year; with subsequent follow up support visits by the facilitator during club meetings. There will also be periodic support reunions of the participants. The workshops will have teachers writing in process writing workshop settings, using netbook computers which we do not yet have. We especially need 10 netbooks to train writing teachers--$450 apiece including shipping. A $50 contribution will place 1/9 of a netbook at SELI where it's needed Can you help by making a donation toward the purchase of these netbooks? See details in the side panel.

Young Voices

The Young Writers Club has started publishing a newsletter! Young Voices will have a different theme in each issue.

Fire is the theme of Volume I, Issue 1, dated March, 2009. Read it here! Of the final drafts our Young Writers have produced so far, four were about personal experiences with fires and the sorrow they cause. Our club says, fires matter! Take care to avoid them!

SELI's International Mother Tongue Day

On Saturday, February 21st, from 1-3:00 pm, the Sentinel English Language Institute hosted an event for the 10th anniversary of International Mother Tongue (Language) Day, declared by UNESCO in 1999. Admission was free with registration in advance. All participants chose the primary language they wished to write in, and spent an hour writing a poem, story, personal experience, and/or a folktale. Then we all gathered in language groups, with light refreshments, to read our work aloud to others who understand our language. The writers took their work home with them, hopefully to continue writing in their mother tongue. For a few, writing in their mother tongue was not new, but for most it was a very challenging, new experience. The New Citizen newspaper was present, and they wrote along with us! The participants thought this should be an annual event, and proposed that those present--just twelve this year, writing in Mende, Themne, Koranko, Susu, and Krio--keep encouraging each other to write, and be the catalyst unit to publicize the event next year. Wonderful idea!

A Visitor

On Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 19, 2009, the U.S.-based writer, Kewulay Kamara, visited our SELI Young Writers Club.
First he participated in a student content conference, and then he told us all how writing became a part of his life. He wanted to know about all the students' lives, and asked what they meant when they said they had left their villages to become educated. To them, "educated" meant reading and writing in English. He said he considered village people already educated: educated in the ways of the weather and of the harvests; in listening to become wise; in knowing how to protect the water and the land. . . .

He told the students their writing can help other people as much as themselves but only if it is sincere. He said that because their words have the power to change lives, they must take care to end their pieces with a positive message. Many of our members are writing very sad pieces about losing someone who was close to them. Now that we are thinking about how to end these pieces in a positive way, some have realized that the person they lost is still in their hearts, making them stronger.

A student asked our visitor if he had written a poem. Mr. Kewulay recited one for us in Kuranko (which more than half the students present could understand), and explained how he came to write it and what it meant. We were all entranced by the sounds of the poem and its evocative meaning. When one of the students asked if he could suggest a name for our writing club, he answered with a question: do we write only in English, or in other Sierra Leonean languages, too?

In our writing club, skills are taught within the context of solving the problems that real authors encounter when they write. When professional writers visit, they make this authentic connection even more real. Mr. Kewulay left us more aware of the life stories we have in us, and we seem now to have more writing choices than we did before.

SELI Young Writers Club

The SELI Young Writers Club for JSS II (Form II) students now meets at the Sentinel English Language Institute in Tengbeh Town, from 11:30 am -12:30 pm, four days a week (Mon., Tues., Thurs., and Fri.), allowing students to reach their schools in time for the opening bell at 1:00 pm. As usual, this activity is being offered at no cost to the student. We hold our mini-lessons in a 415 sq ft palaver house first (shown here), and then move on to the classrooms to write! We've set up a display board for final drafts, and any member who has produced four final drafts (Whew! They produce 3-5 drafts per topic just to reach the final draft stage!) can choose her/his best to publish in the club's newsletter.

No one doubts the need for developing writing skills in our junior secondary school students. The clubs offer some children their first experience in a cooperative, collaborative instructional setting. It's unfortunate that the problem of facilities in the schools (see previous post) made it too difficult to carry out the clubs in the schools themselves. The presence of community activities such as clubs is vital if our schools are to succeed. The clubs which, decades ago, schools in Sierra Leone used to offer were not frivolous, but played a vital role in broadening and developing our children.

SELI Writing Clubs

Under the auspices of Sierra Leone's Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, SELI is running several writing clubs conducted as writing workshops, in selected junior secondary schools during the 2008-2009 school year. The two goals of the clubs are to improve the written communication skills of participating students, and to attract interest among language arts teachers in using process writing to teach English communication skills. Assessments of learning growth are matched to what we teach. The leader/facilitator for the clubs is SELI's director, whose teaching specialty is teaching English as a Second Language and who has substantial experience teaching writing in Sierra Leone.

In both schools where clubs are being offered during this term, a primary school fully occupies the classrooms during the mornings. The junior secondary school that occupies the compound in the afternoons is an entirely different entity from the primary school and also fully occupies the facility. Since the school day ends for the junior secondary schools at 6:00 pm, our clubs are held at 11:00 and 12:00 am, before school begins and during the time the primary school is in session. Clubs meet two times a week in classrooms provided by the participating schools (pictured here) at no cost to the student or to the school. Schools were selected according to need.

Our writing workshops operate on a set of beliefs about writing and learning:
• writing and reading are recursive activities--we go back and in and out and revise and re-see and re-think things
• our language and literacy develop best when we are carrying out real-life activities
• our backgrounds and experience shape the way we learn and can enrich the learning of those around us
• language and literacy learning is social, and workshops promote it because they are collaborative and supportive

We all need formative evaluation tools to improve instruction in the classroom. They're best when they're descriptive, so students can use them to improve, too. SELI has been consolidating the West African Examinations Council competency expectations for writing with ERB's WrAP rubric, and NWREL's Six Traits writing rubric. The result is the four-trait, five-point analytic SELI Writing Rubric, which we'll refine as we go.

English Lessons for Speakers of Other Languages

If your stay in Freetown, Sierra Leone is your first experience living in an English speaking country, you may need English lessons. We offer English lessons to speakers of other languages, having had many years' experience improving the language proficiency of adults from all parts of the world.

We first administer a placement test to assess your proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing English. Our instruction reflects the fact that English is a major language of international communication. Our lessons explore many countries, regions, and cultures. We feel that English is best learned when used for meaningful communication, in context. With the help of CD support we encourage the learning of natural, conversational, internationally-acceptable language. In addition, SELI has a 1,500-item library aimed at a variety of proficiency levels and reading interests with the intention of stimulating as much reading as possible in our students.

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.

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.