[lg policy] public lecture: Languages and language policy of Timor Leste

[Harold Schiffman]

Languages and language policy of Timor Leste

August 1, 2012, 6:16 pm by Jane Simpson

Kirsty Sword Gusmão gave a terrific public lecture Language, language
policies and education in Timor-Leste on 20th July at ANU. You can
watch the talk here. Key points for me were:

her passionate commitment to expanding opportunity for Timor-Leste’s
children through education
her belief that mother tongue medium instruction in the early years is
a key to this education
the problems faced in a country with 2 official languages, 2 working
languages – how to create effective multilingualism
the hard question of how you go about mother tongue medium instruction
in a small and poor country which has to start from scratch

documenting languages
training teachers
creating school materials

If you had, as I had, ideas about whizz-bangery stuff on computers
[1], forget them for the moment in a country like Timor-Leste where
kids are lucky to have books.

What to do? This work is supported by some organisations, including
the Alola Foundation which Kirsty Sword Gusmão set up, and we can
support them. She was also urging linguists to help the work on
documenting the languages. And we discussed as well the need for
scholarships for people from Timor-Leste to get training in language
documentation, language teaching methods, etc. So – over to our
readers…

________________________________
[1] Even happens in Australia – I was astonished to learn from an
Australian advocate for community language schools (what we once
called Saturday Schools), that you can’t count on access to computers
for Saturday Schools. Even if they’re allowed to use school premises,
they’re often blocked from using the computers for fear of the
horrible things they might do to them.

http://www.paradisec.org.au/blog/2012/08/languages-and-language-policy-of-timor-leste/

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