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!

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.

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!

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!

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[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. 

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.

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!

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. 

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. 

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 .

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.