Lost for words

By CRAIG ALAN VOLKER  
IN this monthly discussion we answer questions about language in Papua New Guinea and beyond. This month we are looking at the problem of children’s poor grasp of their own languages and what schools in an English-speaking education system can do about it.
A Tolai reader wrote recently to comment that while he had grown up with old people who spoke a pure and eloquent form of their language, most other young people in his community mix their own language with Tok Pisin and English and are unable to speak eloquently in public in their own language.
Sadly, this is something that we see in many communities all over the country. It is normal for multilingual people to change between languages. This is called code-switching. But increasingly, young people do this not to be linguistically adept, but because they do not know words in their own language or because they know that when they speak their own language, they do not sound as clever or eloquent as when they speak in Tok Pisin.
In the past, young people would learn to speak their own language in a refined way by listening and imitating older people in public meetings, the haus boi, evening storytelling, or secret societies.
Today these are much less important than in the past and the only older people many young people have extended contact with are their teachers at school.
Those teachers are often not from the same language group and even if they are, schools are conducted in English and teachers will rarely be heard speaking the children’s language at school.
In such a situation one might think that schools have no role in encouraging tok ples fluency. But a project undertaken in New Ireland last year by Cláudio da Silva, a masters student in social education from the University of Coimbra in Portugal, shows how this can be done within the current school curriculum.
In this project a theme was chosen that was related to the local culture. He chose the relationship between birds and clans in the culture of the Nalik-speaking people. Working with community leaders and clan elders, he identified important stories, tok ples vocabulary, and local concepts related to clans and birds.
These were explored with grade 6 and 7 students, who were told that they would have to write a book together about these ideas.
These concepts and ideas were examined in an inter-disciplinary way. For example, students did science research to learn about the scientific description of the birds, developed art skills by learning how to draw birds, learned about English descriptive writing to write the book, and investigated about the local laws related to marriage and clan membership to explain why their bird-clan affiliations were important.
All of these activities supported skills in different school subjects in the national school curriculum.
To give their skills a local context, the students were given homework to do with older people in their families and community. For example, they had to write the local names of the birds that represent the different clans in their society.
Most knew the Tok Pisin name and they were learning the English and scientific names at school, but some did not know the local name.
They also had to ask about the tok ples names for the different parts of clan ceremonies and for the concepts underlying these activities, such as “reciprocity”, “kinship”, and “social network” and how and when it was appropriate to talk about them.
A clan leader (maimai) helped teach the classes, often speaking in tok ples or explaining the differences in meaning between various words in the local language.
Because the children knew that their writing would be collected in a book that would be published, they paid much more attention to detail and accuracy than is often the case in school assignments. Some were very knowledgeable about language and custom, while a couple did not even know what clan they belonged to.
But by the end they had produced a book together in very good English that explained their clan system, important birds in their culture, and important tok ples cultural concepts.
In writing this book they learned to be more accurate in both English and tok ples, and gained a better understanding about how to use adult, learned words in both languages.
Of course, this is not the only way communities can use schools to promote fluency in tok ples. One way is with speech contests, which can have a tok ples section together with the English speeches.
Another is to engage older students in community education, explaining in their own language what they learn in school to older adults who may not know English or be literate.
These activities need good cooperation between schools and community leaders, with teachers who are flexible enough to use new methods to follow the curriculum.
But in schools where all the books students read are from other places, there surely must be a place for students to read and write their own stories and share with others about their rich cultures and languages.
Professor Volker, a linguist living in New Ireland and is an Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland and visiting professor at the University of Augsburg, Germany.
He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at [email protected]. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page.