21/3/2019 0 Comments Are languages part of the brand?A story circulated Facebook this morning about a man, Sydney Heremaia, being made to feel 's... for being Māori', because he was turned down by Air New Zealand recruitment for having a tā moko. This is the kind of story that surprises me (it seems way too blatant a tale of employment discrimination on cultural grounds - although it turns out it’s not the first time the airline have rejected applicants with “visible tattoos”, whether tā moko or … um … Tinkerbell) but also the kind of story I’m not going to comment on too much. I’m not part of the culture, and I don’t have much of a reference point about the true significance of tā moko. I understand Heremaia’s disgust at the use of the term “body art”, dismissing the tā moko as an “accessory”, but I am well aware that I don’t truly understand.
But it made me think back to a story about another airline from the region last month, when it was announced that Hawaiian Airlines had launched a program to increase use of Hawaiian language, providing certification for employees in Hawaiian (following an oral exam and reading test) along the same lines as their certification in languages such as Japanese, Korean and French. This followed their announcement in April last year of their first Hawaiian language flight to Mainland, with eight flight attendants onboard who were fluent in the language. I had posted both stories to our Language Matters in the Pacific Facebook group, commenting that the certification scheme could be a good model for other airlines that serve the region, as well as other public services. I was thinking particularly of Air New Zealand, as this seemed to fit in with what I’ve always seen as relatively visible attempts to portray New Zealand as being open and inclusive, including the ‘Representing New Zealand’ brand of Auckland Airport’s facelift. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all to hear Air New Zealand embracing the value of te reo Māori and other Pacific languages in similar ways. Looking back at the press releases today, I see that the Hawaiian Airlines flight was advertised as “an extension of our airline’s commitment to honor, celebrate and perpetuate Hawaii’s rich culture” according to Debbie Nakanelua-Richards, the airline’s director of community relations: “Over the years, we have mindfully weaved in Hawaiian concepts, language and traditions into our business to create educational, immersive experiences for our guests.” Meanwhile, the certification initiative launched last month was said to be “aligned with the company’s mission and brand. Hawaiian Airlines is known for its efforts to perpetuate Hawaiian culture, both among its staff and to its customers”. Given today’s story, I read these PR comments in a slightly different light. Sydney Heremaia considers Air New Zealand “hypocritical” to reject him for his tā moko “while covering their uniforms and planes with koru designs”. “If they can put it on those things why can't we have it on our skin? It is almost like they are saying we embrace and celebrate te ao Māori, but only when it suits us.” And, of course, Fiji Airways caused huge cultural appropriation controversy when it rebranded itself in 2012 with the help of masi designs, commissioned by a local artist but then trademarked by the airline, despite already being considered a significant part of the iTaukei cultural heritage. So I was curious to see what Air New Zealand had to say about language issues. Are languages such as te reo Māori part of their brand? The first article returned by a search was a press release from 2017 stating that the airline is turning to technology to tackle the language barriers that often arise during travel, noting that multilingual staff can’t possibly be employed to handle all the possible languages of their customers. However, the Air New Zealanders section of their website includes a video about the Waha Tohu pin used to identify its staff members who are fluent in te reo Māori (although unfortunately with subtitles provided by an unsupervised robot that has managed to turn ‘the waha comes from’ into ‘y-chromosome’, amongst other howlers). The website states: “We recognise that Māori culture is an especially important part of New Zealand's identity. We are committed to further weaving Māori culture and language into the fabric of our business, and have collaborated with the Māori Language Commission to develop the "Waha Tohu" pin, a Māori language identifier pin that can be worn by fluent te reo speaking New Zealanders.” I have no idea when this section of the website was updated, but it’s curious that the New Zealand Māori Arts & Crafts Institute has mysteriously chosen today - the same day that the news broke of Sydney Heremaia being denied a job on account of his tā moko - to announce this initiative: Air New Zealand tohu recognises fluency in te reo Māori. I’m clearly not the only one who read Heremaia’s story today and wondered whether the airline considers languages part of their brand.
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12/1/2018 0 Comments Turns out nobody failed after allLast night, the following statement was put out by the Fiji Ministry of Education:
The Minister for Education, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum has apologized to teachers and parents of students for the recent statement given to the media by the Permanent Secretary of Education, Iowane Tiko regarding the results of an English Proficiency test taken by teaching applicants. Sayed-Khaiyum says the statement is incorrect and the test was not administered on the basis of pass or fail. He says the main purpose of the assessment was to provide a benchmark data to help measure the effectiveness of professional development programmes that will be carried out throughout the year. On the face of it, this is a welcome U-turn (although perhaps not welcomed by those who will inevitably be blamed for having to do it quite so publicly). A pass/fail binary runs the risk of insufficient applicants being eligible to fill the posts that do need to be filled, which is what has clearly happened after the first round of testing. However, a scaled approach that essentially allows the top candidates to be selected until all posts are filled enables the Ministry to manage the situation rather more smoothly, even if they initially fill some posts with weaker candidates than is desirable. They can work out what to do to improve the situation over time, rather than trying to come up with a quick-fix solution. It is unclear yet quite how much of a U-turn this really is though. More detailed articles this morning in the various media outlets provide two further insights. Firstly, we learn that only teachers who met the baseline proficiency requirements have been appointed to teaching positions in Term 1. So, although the stance has softened and the remaining teachers haven’t actually “failed” anything, the Ministry hasn’t yet retracted its initial decision that fifty per cent of applicants for teaching vacancies have been deemed ineligible for these posts on the grounds of weak English proficiency. For the baseline approach to work, the Ministry will have to go one step further, recall all test results, admit to a huge blunder, and start again with the allocation of posts. Secondly, we read that one of the main purposes of the assessment is to provide benchmark data to help measure the effectiveness of professional development programs that will be carried out throughout the year. Reading between the lines here, it appears that appointments will be made (as they have to be because we need teachers in classrooms), and then professional development training will be put in place in order to raise proficiency levels of the teachers on the job. Depending on the type of training envisaged, this may be a good strategy to provide some further English courses for teachers. However, a high-stakes system of test-training-retest is unlikely to be of much value, because the training will focus too much on test taking strategies and decontextualised grammar knowledge that may get teachers through the test but leave them unable to USE English any more effectively. (Many teachers on social media have commented that this has been the problem with the school English syllabus that has led to this problem in the first place.) More importantly, until we know far more about the extent to which it is possible to raise the proficiency of second language users of English at this stage in their educational careers - when they have already been operating through English for 12-13 years of formal schooling - we should be very cautious about further promises that are made. It’s not entirely clear why anyone is surprised today by poor results on a test that was implemented in response to the concern that English proficiency of Fiji’s teachers was weak. Indeed, as the Permanent Secretary is quoted as saying a few lines below the headline of English test shock, “It proves what we have suspected all along”.
What is slightly more of a surprise is that the Ministry didn’t think this through. It set a pre-determined pass mark, with a pre-determined consequence (fail and you can’t come in), without having a back-up plan in place to help fill the positions that would inevitably be left vacant, and even serving teachers may now need to pass the test in order to keep their jobs. Well, there is a back-up plan that you can try again this Saturday, but you will then need to think about a different career if you fail for the second time. If teachers do markedly better on the re-test, one week later and with no interim support, it will suggest that they either failed the first test due to lack of familiarity with the testing format (rendering the test invalid), or passed the re-test due to circumstances that altered the odds somehow - such as an exact repeat of the same test items, or an easier version of the test. It would have been more sensible to use a band score system (such as IELTS in which you can score between Band 1 and Band 9 in each skill, but you cannot fail, leaving institutions such as universities and immigration authorities free to determine which bands make the cut). With this type of system, the Ministry of Education could have ascertained the extent of the issue before making rash decisions, excluded those scoring the really low bands, and then put together a strategy for ensuring that they wouldn’t have to keep accepting those with lower-than-desirable bands in the medium to long term. As it is, they’ve slightly shot themselves in the foot, because they’ve announced to the nation (and the region at large, who still seem to look up to Fiji as the beacon of educational progress, if many comments on social media are to be believed) that approximately 50% of new teaching posts will not be filled unless enough candidates pass the second time. What are they going to do if they don’t? Leave the classrooms understaffed or go back on their word and let the teachers in anyway? Meanwhile, none of us really know what ‘failure’ means on this particular test, so the general public is not necessarily any the wiser now than we were when the media was merely reporting that standards were falling. We know nothing about the predictive validity of the test - i.e. whether an ability to do well on the test items translates into an ability to teach English well. This does not necessarily refute the general impressions reported about the recent test. It’s just that these media reports remain just that - general impressions that reinforce what we were fairly sure we knew already. The Fiji Ministry of Education has recently implemented a ‘work test’ as part of its recruitment process for new teachers. With apparently very little notice, applicants were required to attend a test centre on 2 January to sit a literacy test followed by an assessment relating to the relevant job descriptions. This is intended to enable the Ministry to make job offers by 8 January, so that all teachers can be at their schools two days later, as per the recent order that all teachers be in place a week before the students turn up. Early reports stated that there were “more than 1000” test applicants for 1235 posts. If these numbers are to be believed, either the test is uncompetitive and all or most applicants will be offered a post regardless of results, or a number of posts will be left vacant, assuming that some applicants will fail a more competitive assessment.
Neither outcome is desirable, but the scenario illustrates a longstanding dilemma: If so many teachers are considered to have low English proficiency that a test is deemed necessary in order to keep some of them from the classrooms, we know perfectly well that the majority are not going to achieve a high outcome on such a test. In other words, a test is merely going to reveal the extent of the problem. When the initiative was first announced in October 2015, as part of a new set of reforms to enhance teaching, it was stated that: “From 2016, all non-English subject teachers in all our High Schools will be required to undertake online training on Basic English proficiency and sit for a diagnostic test. This test is a diagnostic tool to ensure competency of teachers in both oral and written English. The idea here is for all subject teachers to also check student submissions for proper English.” Ignoring, for the moment, the fact that English teachers would be exempt from the need to display high levels of English proficiency, the issue here is that a test is being referred to as a “diagnostic tool to ensure competency of teachers”. If it is indeed a diagnostic tool, then it is surely diagnosing the specific needs of the applicants, and is not doing anything to ensure that teachers actually ARE competent. No mention has yet been made of what the Ministry of Education plans to do once it has made its diagnosis. Will weak applicants be turned away from the profession, or will they be employed and expected to do something to improve their English on the job? At the root of the matter is a much deeper concern with appropriate timing and type of a language assessment. As a correspondent to the Fiji Sun noted on 3 January, “Assuming teacher training is sound and incompetent students have been weeded out, why is another Government test required? … These matters must worry not just new graduates but those who’ve prepared them.” However, teacher training institutions constantly ask the same question. If they are to prevent applicants with insufficient English proficiency from entering their teacher training programmes, what does this say about the school system that has produced them? Where do we draw the line and say that someone must be prevented from reaching the next level? I applaud the Fiji Ministry of Education’s decision to take the issue of English proficiency of its teachers seriously, but I hope this will be part of a much bigger attempt to tackle the issue. To break the cycle of weak English proficiency, we need an overhaul of the way English is taught in schools, and we need proficient users of the language to be incentivised to enter teacher training programmes. Applicants should be tested on the way into teacher training programmes, not on the way out, and only competent English speakers should be accepted. If teacher training programmes must spend their time teaching teachers to speak English, there won’t be any time to actually train them to teach. At which point, we might as well save ourselves the trouble and just recruit unskilled volunteers and backpackers from Australia and New Zealand who already speak English fluently, and post them directly into the nation’s schools. The Fiji Minister of Education, Dr. Mahendra Reddy, has put languages back in the newspapers this month, this time arguing for the importance of teaching the vernacular, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. However, it is interesting to see how a chain of responses to the original article that appear to be supporting the same viewpoint actually draw on a range of different logics.
The Fiji Teachers Union general secretary, Agni Deo Singh, is quoted as supporting Reddy on the grounds that knowledge of the languages of Fiji will enable the country to fully embrace what it truly means to be Fijian. He explains how iTaukei students used to learn conversational Hindi in the 1970s while Fijians of Indian descent used to learn the iTaukei language, but laments the fact that this programme has languished over the years leaving people only able to understand each other at a very superficial level. Meanwhile, the response by Nishant Singh focuses on Reddy’s point that Fiji’s languages will become extinct if they continue to be excluded from domains such as parliament and if they are still barred (explicitly or implicitly) from schools. Kiniviliame Keteca then adds that restricting the use of certain languages serves to restrict our communication since there are terms in the iTaukei language, for example, that lack equivalents in English, making it discriminatory to prevent Fijians speaking in their own vernacular. My colleague Paul Geraghty supports the points made by Singh regarding the exclusion of vernaculars from parliament and formal education, before reminding us that proficiency in the mother tongue actually assists the learning of second languages such as English. The response that comes closest to rejecting Reddy’s view is a letter by Joan McGoon, who argues that English serves to unify all Fijians (and Pacific islanders), without excluding those who speak one vernacular or the other. However, another of my colleagues, Rajendra Prasad, responds by arguing that it is also rude or exclusionary when non-vernacular speakers insist on speaking English in a gathering dominated by one language group or another. He argues that the two major vernaculars of Fiji have always worked as a unifying factor in the country, bringing us back to Agni Deo Singh’s point about the need to promote the teaching of conversational languages. The Minister of Education started this flurry of correspondence by advocating a firmer place for the vernacular languages in Fiji’s education system. Responses are on the one hand positive by affirming this general sentiment. However, they also demonstrate a very fractured support base for the initiative, since there are a myriad different reasons for including the vernaculars (linguistic, nationalist and pedagogical) that may serve to divide the different groups of supporters who may not realise the value of collaborating for the same goal. 29/3/2017 0 Comments Can we read, or can't we?On 6 January, we were alerted to the “low literacy rate” in Fiji, although we had been told six months earlier that the level of literacy and numeracy was growing. On March 28, we discover that literacy is not improving quickly enough across the Pacific region, particularly compared to numeracy. Depending on where you look for your statistics, Fiji has a literacy rate somewhere between 33.6% and 96%. Why so many different stories?
Some of the figures may actually result from misinterpretations of the data. I believe that the figure 33.6% comes from the Education for All 2015 National Review (Fiji), which states, using 2011 figures, that 33.6% of schools are above the national average in the national Year 8 literacy assessment, and this figure does not represent the number of individuals who are considered literate. However, a more common issue is that different people test literacy in different ways. So census questions tend to ask people to report on their own literacy levels (which they are likely to over-estimate), while school literacy tests intend to check how well children can actually read and write. Another source of confusion is that we tend to use the word ‘literacy’ to mean several different things – do we mean an ability to read and write in any language, or do we really mean the ability to use written English to participate actively in the school curriculum? It may be that some children are literate in one language, but being tested in another. So it’s not particularly useful to argue about the different interpretations of different literacy assessments if those assessments were asking completely different questions in the first place. What is more useful is to focus on the literacy outcomes that we value, and then ensure that teachers, curriculum developers and assessment specialists are all interested in the same outcomes. As an educational linguist, I would always hope that literacy in the vernacular is the priority in the early years. It is obvious that teaching children to read and write in a language that they hardly hear spoken around them makes the task much harder. Literacy (in its narrowest sense of reading and writing) involves understanding the relationship between the letters on the page and the sounds that they represent, but it also requires understanding the relationship between those sounds and the things to which they refer in the world around us. So you can teach a child to sound out that ‘d’ - ‘o’ - ‘g’ spells ‘dog’ but, unless she already knows that the animal running along the road is called ‘dog’ (rather than ‘koli’ for example), she will still have no idea what the symbols on the page are doing there. It is not really surprising in this kind of situation if we find school-age children who are unable to master reading and writing. Unfortunately, literacy outcomes at school are often defined in terms of English only. Of course English is an important language in Fiji and, with good English teaching, we can achieve high levels of proficiency in this language. However, we cannot build new languages on top of a weak foundation. The recently published UNESCO Global Monitoring Report ‘If you don’t understand, how can you learn?’ makes clear that the only way to build a strong literacy foundation is to teach children through the vernacular language (mother tongue / home language) for at least 6 to 8 years. Meanwhile, they show evidence that we can also introduce a second language as a separate subject and achieve high levels of proficiency in this language. If we follow this evidence, we can start to focus our attention on strong literacy and good English, rather than settling for the doomed compromise of uncertain literacy through English. The Fiji Minister of Education announced today: "Next year we intend to introduce linguistics in high school language classes and cut down on literature to improve students' literacy skills.”
This is certainly not the first time that literacy levels have hit the headlines, but it is also not the first time that four words beginning with the letter ‘L’ have been muddled together. ‘Language’ is used here in a general sense to refer to the subject called ‘English’ in the region’s high schools. This is a combined subject that covers a range of elements that includes everything from the mechanics of the language (grammar, spelling and punctuation), to a range of types of writing (creative, formal letters, expository essays), to the analysis of texts (literary, informational, persuasive, and so on). ‘Linguistics’ is generally used to refer to the university-level study of language. Linguists in the Pacific have typically focused on the description and documentation of the region’s languages, as well as applied topics such as translation, language policymaking, and language acquisition. English teachers study Linguistics as part of their training so that they become aware of the structural differences between their pupils’ first and subsequent languages, understand how languages are learnt and taught, and appreciate the way English fits into the multilingual fabric of the Pacific. ‘Literature’ is used here to refer to the formal study and appreciation of texts. In high school, students learn to analyse poems, novels, short stories and plays. Trainee English teachers therefore take this study to a more advanced level, so that they are better able to guide their own students’ understanding of texts. ‘Literacy’ can mean many things. Traditional definitions such as ‘the ability to read and write’ are generally considered too narrow, but the use of ‘literacy’ to refer to a general ability to use a language (or a specific ability to use English) is too vague to be helpful. In the above quotation by the Minister of Education, it is not clear what exactly is meant by ‘literacy skills’, and how these will be improved by something referred to loosely as ‘linguistics’ being added to the high school curriculum. The conflation of ‘literature and language’ or ‘linguistics and literature’ clouds our understanding of what it means to learn English as a second language. Literature is an important curriculum subject that should be retained alongside other core subjects such as Maths, Science and Social Science. However, we need to recognise that English also needs to be taught explicitly as a second language, rather than simply used as the medium of instruction through which these other curriculum subjects are taught. Given the consternation in the region with levels of English proficiency, it would help to treat ‘English language’ and ‘literature’ as separate school subjects, training teachers to teach each of them effectively. 16/8/2016 0 Comments Divided by terminologyAn article in the Fiji Times today reports on an early childhood education conference at which the Permanent Secretary for Education urged the 500 teachers present to use the children’s mother tongue to teach. He cited the Global Education Monitoring report ‘If you don’t understand, how can you learn?’ and explained that the use of an unfamiliar language in the classroom acts as a barrier to learning.
Towards the end of the article, we read “But ECE Teachers Association president, Ufemia Camaitoga said children should instead be taught in their home language and not necessarily mother tongue.” So what is the difference between ‘mother tongue’ and ‘home language’? From a linguistic point of view, absolutely nothing. More importantly, the Permanent Secretary is using ‘mother tongue’ to mean exactly the same thing that the Teachers Association president means by ‘home language’, but they do not realise this, leading to an unnecessary debate that has distracted from what they were both advocating: teaching children to read, write, count and so on in a language that they already understand. Many people use ‘mother tongue’ to refer to the language spoken in the place to which a child belongs in a traditional sense. So someone born in Suva may be considered to be “from Tailevu” or to “be Rotuman”, but they may or may not speak the language from that island. Their linguistic competence will depend on factors such as the amount of time they have spent on the island, the extent to which their parents use this language at home, and so on. From this perspective, ‘mother tongue’ means something like an ancestral language, or a linguistic identity. At the ECE conference, it appears that Camaitoga takes this perspective, believing that many children do not actually speak their mother tongue. However, another definition of ‘mother tongue’ (more commonly used by linguists although many avoid the term altogether) is simply the language, or languages, used in the home from birth. From this perspective, a Suva-born Rotuman might speak Rotuman as the mother tongue, but she might not. She might speak another language such as English or Fijian as the mother tongue, and it is also quite possible that she speaks two or more languages as the mother tongue if these are spoken fluently around her in her formative years before going to school. This is the perspective that the Permanent Secretary clearly takes, while Camaitoga refers to this language as the ‘home language’. It is a shame that an ECE conference that tackled such an important issue ended with the audience perhaps believing that these two influential figures were on opposing sides. Both are aware of the research evidence that children need to learn through a language that they already understand and speak fluently for at least 6 to 8 years, before they will be ready to start learning through a second language such as English. Fiji’s policy officially advocates learning through the mother tongue (or home language or vernacular) for the first three years of primary school, but it appears that there is wide variation in the extent to which this is followed. If teachers feel that their leaders are divided on the matter, it will be even harder to create the conditions through which children can acquire basic literacy and numeracy effectively through a language they actually understand. (Ambaebulu Bilingual Primary School, where Anglophones learn through English and Francophones learn through French, on opposite sides of the field, before meeting in the middle at playtimes to speak Bislama) The new Minister of Education in Vanuatu, Jean-Pierre Nirua, has just announced the trialling of ‘bilingual education’ in Vanuatu, by which he means the classroom use of two languages that children do not speak at home. According to his vision,
“all children will be taught in both English and French, which means that teachers will be handling bilingual classes. Then there is no need to have English and French schools”, thereby moving beyond the dual system that the national government inherited at Independence from the British and the French. Since this morning, when a report of the announcement was posted to the Yumi Toktok Stret facebook group, the post has been ‘liked’ 428 times, ‘loved’ 9 times and ‘wowed’ twice. 42 comments appear to express a sense of relief that this is finally being done, with only 4 comments indicating any reservations. In contrast, when an opposition MP posted a question on the same facebook group on 11 March, questioning the vernacular education policy that is already mid implementation, debate raged for the next two weeks, demonstrating widespread confusion about what the policy was all about and airing a range of objections to the idea (although some strong support was also shown by teachers who are actually following the policy in their own classrooms). In a series of 12 posts last week, I discussed some of the issues that had been raised throughout the 590 contributions to that particular discussion. Aside from the confusion likely to ensue from the latest Minister of Education (at least the seventh holder of the portfolio in as many years) announcing yet another change of tack – just when it had seemed that policymakers, advisors, curriculum developers and donors were finally all heading in the same direction – the latest story is notable for demonstrating the deeply held belief that there is nothing wrong with learning through a language that you have limited exposure to outside school – let alone two such languages at once! The recent UNESCO report If you don’t understand, how can you learn? reiterates the point that the organisation’s been making since 1953 that children who do not speak the classroom language at home will struggle at school. The argument that experts are trying to push in most developing countries is not that education must start in a familiar language (because it is easy to demonstrate that Grade 1 children acclimatise to formal schooling better if you do so) but that this practice must be extended throughout primary school rather than “switching from a mother tongue to English in a random fashion” after only a year or two. The most comprehensive review of the field that we have to date is the review and analysis of theory and practice in mother-tongue and bilingual education in sub-Saharan Africa, based on work in 25 different countries, which demonstrates that 6 to 8 years of education in familiar languages (using relevant curricula) is essential for the provision of quality education. In Vanuatu, however, not only is the argument still having to be made that children find it difficult being plonked without preparation in a foreign-language environment and expected to get on with the acquisition of literacy, numeracy and critical thinking, there are still calls for this ‘submersion’ approach to be duplicated. While we know that teachers often lack proficiency themselves in the classroom language through which they are already expected to teach, the argument is made that they can now be made to teach through an additional language too. While the newspapers have been filled for years with criticisms of low literacy levels and poor educational achievement, the belief is still held that introducing another unknown classroom language will somehow solve these problems. The language debate in Vanuatu is not based on what is best pedagogically, but on a heartfelt desire to move beyond the Anglophone-Francophone divisions that were left behind by two departing colonial powers (or, more cynically, to bolster the use of French in the country, as the current Minister has advocated for years). I’ve been constantly surprised in my research about the desire to maintain and celebrate this version of ‘bilingualism’, even in rural areas where neither language is heard at all outside school, and it is clear that there is nothing to be gained by arguing for the merits of one or the other of the former colonial languages. They are both here to stay, and they will both continue to be taught as subjects – with every chance of producing school leavers who can speak both well, if they are taught properly rather than being used shakily to try and teach everything else. However, if we also want these school leavers to have actually learnt anything, then we really do have to talk about pedagogy. Enitaem we wan gavman i wantem implementem wan polisi blong yusum ol defdefren lanwis insaed long skul, fulap man bae oli talem se bae i sas tumas. Hem i tru se kost hem i wan impoten eria blong yumi tingbaot. Mo tu, ol pablik oli gat raet blong kwestinim gavman blong olgeta taem oli luk se gavman i stap jenisim tumas samting long sistem blong olgeta. Be olsem mi talem finis, tingting ia i no niu, mo naoia ol dona oli stap sapotem polisi finis mekem se i gat ol risos oli stap. Mi no stap insaed long tim we oli stap implementem polisi ia, mekem se mi no save givim ol stret kost blong wanwan pat blong wok ia. Be folem ol risej we mi ridim blong ol narafala kaontri, speseli long Cost-benefits of Multilingual Education: Economics of effective language models mo Cost implications of the provision of mother-tongue and strong bilingual models of education in Africa blong linguist Kathleen Heugh (lukluk long japta 6), mo Using language economics and education economics in language education policy blong ikonomist François Grin, bae mi save toktok smol long saed blong ikonomik blong polisi ia. Blong talemaot stret budget blong wan niufala polisi hem i sud stretfowad nomo. Long andastaning blong mi, budget i stap, mo ol dona oli stap biaen long polisi ia. Bae oli nidim mane blong mekem ol niufala buk blong yus insaed long klasrum, mo blong trenem ol tija long saed blong yusum ol venakyula o Bislama blong tij. So ... sapos yumi satisfae wetem edyukesen sistem we i stap naoia, then yes bae hem i moa jip blong yumi lego i stap nomo. Be i gat tufala problem wetem tingting ia: Fas problem hem i se fulap man oli talem finis se level blong literasi mo kwaliti blong edyukesen i nogud, so yumi no save satisfae wetem wanem we i stap naoia. Seken problem hem i se yumi no mas lukluk long ol kost nomo. Blong andastanem ol kost ia bae yumi mas lukluk long ol samting we yumi save karembak long ol investment blong yumi. Sapos yumi luk se bae yumi save karembak fulap gudfala samting aot long investment blong yumi, hem i wan gudfala investment. Bae yumi mas lukluk long saed blong:
Mi tekem tufala toktok ia i kamaot long atikol blong Kathleen Heugh: Yumi save se sistem we i stap naoia hem i stap westem mane mo i no save givim ‘kwaliti edyukesen’. Yumi no save komperem wetem sistem we i bin stap long taem bifo from long taem ia fulap man oli no bin skul, so sistem ia hem i bin smol nomo. Be yu mi save komperem wetem ol narafala sistem blong edyukesen we oli stap naoia long Pasifik mo long wol. Yumi save luk se hamas pikinini oli stap dropaot o ripitim ol klas; hamas oli no save rid mo raet taem oli kasem en blong yia 4 o yia 6; hamas oli no save ansarem gud ol kwestin blong ol tija taem oli kasem sekondari; hamas ni-Vanuatu long USP oli flop ... ... sapos yumi ademap ol kost blong ol samting ia, bae yumi luk se yumi stap investem bigfala mane long ol skul we oli no stap givimbak ol gudfala risal. Mo tu yumi mas tingbaot se Vanuatu i gat tufala lanwis blong edyukesen finis – Franis mo Inglis. Sapos yumi gat tingting se wanwan lanwis hem i mekem se kost blong edyukesen i go antap, from wanem yumi oraet wetem tufala lanwis ia?! Long saed blong ol kost blong niufala polisi ia, bae yumi save lukluk long ol risos we bae yumi nidim:
Long saed blong benefit blong edyukesen, yumi save lukluk long ol janis blong kipim ol pikinini oli stap long skul, mo blong mek sua se oli lanem gud taem oli stap sidaon long klasrum:
Mi biliv se sistem we i stap naoia i stap westem mane. Mi no save talem se niufala sistem bae hem i save jenisim hem o nogat, be mi save talem nomo se i gat wan bigfala nid blong invest long edyukesen long Vanuatu. Taem we ol dona oli stap sapotem polisi ia, mo oli redi blong pem ol kost blong implementesen ia, hem i minim se investmen ia bae i save gohed gud. Blong kasembak ol gudfala risal blong investmen ia, hem i dipen long sapot we Ministri, ol trena blong ol tija, ol tija, ol peren mo ol komyuniti oli wantem givim.
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March 2019
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