Why I love Red Zebra Project - 2

Yesterday I shared about how I believe Nyungwe RED ZEBRA BOOKS will have a positive effect on all literacy skills of Nyungwe children studying in Tete schools where Portuguese is the medium of instruction. Today I'll talk about how these Simple Nyungwe booklets are giving teachers confidence and adding reading comprehension strategies to their lessons. Just having the books published increases the connection between home culture and literacy. Knowing that Nyungwe is a "real" language is a good start in helping people feel that what they know is valuable.

Through RED ZEBRA BOOKS, the younger generation grows curious about the knowledge their elders can share. City kids see that the language they hear at home is a valid means of communicating in writing, too. 


Back to how RED ZEBRA BOOKS fit into the picture. Teachers are mandated to teach kids about local culture and use the local language,* but it is complicated to make up lessons that integrate with national curriculum. RED ZEBRA BOOKS give teachers a chance to jump into reading and writing in Nyungwe. They tell traditional stories in a traditional way. There are currently six titles in Nyungwe. The "Bean Book" with counting in Nyungwe and "Wild Animals of Tete" fit in directly with many of the lessons already being taught. The four folktales give people a chance to read for meaning while learning traditions and values from their own culture.

Several schools invited me to share RED ZEBRA BOOKS with teachers one Saturday. Together we discovered many ways the booklets can be used. They had creative ideas about how to use the famous "Bean Book" for teaching colors and addition. Since fancy posters don't exist around here, they used books to create their own posters.

I've seen eyes light up as someone HEARS a RED ZEBRA BOOK read in Nyungwe and he is amazed that he understands something from the written page. We take it for granted that a story makes sense. Unfortunately, reading comprehension is very weak in most schools where only Portuguese is used. People have learned to pronounce Portuguese words on the page without thinking about the meaning behind them. In many Mozambican schools, that is what passes as reading. Strengthening the link between meaning and the written word is an important step in training comprehension (pretty obvious to those of us who have grown up reading in our own language).  RED ZEBRA BOOKS give teachers confidence in using written Nyungwe in lessons strengthen the link between meaning and writing. Instead of writing only foreign (Portuguese) words, teachers could write the children's own words on the board to reinforce the idea that written words MEAN something.


*The education policy in Mozambique is very strong in the area of considering the mother tongue of children in their early grade education. There are two parallel curricula: monolingual and bilingual classes. Monolingual classes have Portuguese as the language of instruction. There is an integral component called curriculo local which calls for the use of local language and culture to comprise 20% of each subject in grades 1-7. The content of curriculo local is to be determined by a local council comprised of teachers, community leaders, parents and students. Bilingual classes have mother tongue as language of instruction for the first three years while adding Portuguese as a second language gradually until fourth grade Portuguese becomes the language of instruction. The policy is interpreted in different ways in different provinces, districts, and even at the school level. I find that in Tete Province, most teachers will tell us that "We teach in Portuguese, but with younger kids we can use Nyungwe to explain things." Not a perfect system, but it recognizes that isolating learning from intelligible input is wrong.

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