Uniskript in action

Koriki Uniskript Alphabet

Teaching literacy to kids using a new alphabet in a language I do not speak was always going to be a full on but fun time… and it was! Over 18 days of classes, we played games, practised writing using water on the floor (finger painting!), built words with flash cards and read books to the class. We covered eight of the sounds in the alphabet and were working on building and recognising words, with surprising success. I had to leave before the summer school ended (Highlands meetings and transport challenges), so am still waiting to hear the final report from Debbie and Robbie who finished the sessions with my class.

The primary idea behind Uniskript is to make the connection between sounds and symbols easier for beginning learners to grasp. This is done through the bridge of what your mouth is doing and the shape of the symbol on the page. The Koriki Uniskript alphabet uses familiar shapes from local life.

Instead of talking about vowels, we taught about arrows. Other shapes were based on bows, fish traps and an armband. The number of arrows in a symbol reflects how wide open your mouth is when you say a sound. [i] is one arrow  as the mouth is long and skinny when you say [i], skinny enough to be covered by one finger and [e] is two arrows as it can be covered with two fingers. In teaching these sounds we taught the children to use their fingers to measure their mouths and used stories about one arrow in the ‘ivi’ (local fruit) to help make the connection between the [i] sound and the sounds in ‘ivi’. Along the way I learnt how to count to three in Koriki as well as assorted other helpful words. We also all ended up talking with our hands, as we mimed sounds and connected them to symbols.

Writing practise... or fingerpainting

We created sentence length ‘stories’ for all the letters, to hopefully help beginning learners build the bridge between sound and shape. The goal was to connect the item the shape was based on, the sound in the word and to sometimes include what the mouth is doing when it makes that sound. The prime example of this is the sentence which meant ‘When I put the mango on my lips, it got on my nose’. Ma’a is the word for mango and [m] is a sound (and a shape) made with the lips and the nose… a bilabial nasal for the phonetically inclined. These stories, and others we’d used in the teaching process, all came together in a locally illustrated book, created to encourage further reading and given out as a gift at the final graduation.

Home office... the generator must be off,
as all the people have disappeared!

We spent a lot of time creating books for the language group, as what point is literacy without reading materials? Most of the books we created were from a framework known as shell books. These come with illustrations and a story in place, we ‘just’ had to translate them. Robbie had several pre-translated books on file, but we also worked with our trainee teachers to translate, check and edit several more. The other books we made were the stories-for-teaching and an alphabet dictionary. As we worked on these books, we were incredibly thankful for the people behind shell books and clipart, as well as for software, laptops, scanners, printers and generators that made book production possible and fans that stopped us workers from melting down. In a few weeks we created over ten titles and several hundred printed books.

When working at a beginning level in a new programme, it can be hard to see what we achieved. We can count attendance days and books printed. We can record training hours for both our teachers and our students, but the long term impact on literacy in Koriki, and eventually in English, is as yet unknown. I can see great potential for Uniskript, as long as teachers continually make the symbol-sound-mouth connection that is the strength of this approach. If they do not, it is just another alphabet and justifies the questioning by those who ask how an additional step in learning can possibly by beneficial in becoming literate.

Weighed down by generosity

One benefit of Uniskript that I did not expect was the community pride in having their very own script and being the first in the country to have a Uniskript programme in place. This community from the jungle-swamp of Gulf Province held their heads up and their language in high regard.

One overwhelming thing, which cannot truly be measured, was the generosity of  the parents towards us. Melanie* and I were weighed down with gifts when it was time for us to depart. Bags, spoons, pineapples, coconuts, bananas, head-dresses, pig tusks… so many things that were given to us to say thank you for giving our time, skills and resources to helping their children become literate and their language be unique. It is a subjective assessment, but I think the parents liked what we did with Uniskript. The kids certainly enjoyed the books!

*Somehow I have failed to name Melanie until nearly the end. My fellow swimmer in the literacy/Uniskript deep end, she looked after one of the more advanced classes, mentoring trainee teachers and working long and hard on book production. She was the fourth member of our team, the people behind the ‘we’ in this blog post.