Diane & Greg Dekker’s work featured in Christianity Today.
The long-term labour of our brother and sister, Greg & Diane Dekker, (along with many others) was featured in a recent Christianity Today [CT] article. Entitled, “First Language First” it highlights the importance of early education in a child’s mother-tongue, typically the first language they learn at home, prior to entering school.
In the context of the Philippines until a few years ago, “teachers were…allowed to teach only in English or Filipino, the country's two official languages. Students who spoke their mother-tongue in school…could be…fined. During this time, millions of students dropped out, or started parroting or rote memorizing, all the while not really learning to communicate in English or Filipino,” CT explained. A national campaign for changes to alleviate these problems paid off in 2009 when lawmakers in the Philippines passed major educational reforms, encouraging mother-tongue teaching for children ages 5 to 17.
The importance of Mother Tongue Education in early education was highlighted by Diane & Greg’s responses quoted in the Christianity Today interview (reproduced in part below).
Reading for Meaning
“Being literate means having access to the Word of God,” says Diane Dekker, a translator and literacy expert with Wycliffe, which has long taught literacy alongside its translation work. With her husband, Greg, and language consultant Catherine Young, Dekker has worked with minority -language speakers in the Philippines.
“Reading Scripture is more than just decoding words on a page,” says Dekker. “For the Bible to take hold in people's lives, readers have to be able to personally connect to the text.”
Scripture—“Christ talking to me, & I should respond."
"It's not just a historical document talking to somebody else," said Dekker. "This is Christ talking to me, and I should respond."
Getting that kind of response is challenging. Beyond the basic problem of illiteracy, oftentimes people in the developing world first learn to read a language they don't speak. That was the case in Lubuagan, Philippines, where the Dekkers [Greg & Diane] worked for 15 years…
Today, 92 percent of the population of the Philippines can read. But people are not always literate in their first language. And that, the Dekkers discovered, negatively impacts reading comprehension—and how what they read affects their lives.
The Dekkers [Greg & Diane] conducted a survey when they first arrived in Lubuagan. They found that children in the community of about 15,000 were not learning to read until late in elementary school.
Children in Lubuagan grow up in a multilingual culture. They speak Lubuagan at home but learn a national language and an international language, in this case Filipino and English, at school.
“In school, they learn to read in a language they don't really understand,” says Dekker. That makes it difficult for them to understand what they are reading.
"When people grow up learning to read first in a language they don't yet speak, they often miss the concept that reading is supposed to be a meaningful activity," she said. "They can learn to decode, but they have no idea what they are learning."
Mother Tongue First
The Dekkers soon became advocates for mother-tongue, multilingual education. Multilingual means people speak three languages: their mother tongue, a national language, and an international language. But children learn to read first in their mother tongue—the language they speak and, more important, think in. Then they learn to converse in a second language and understand how that second language works before learning to read in it.
"It's a step-by-step process rather than a sink-or-swim process," she said.
25% to 40% Improvement
Greg Dekker says that translation ministries have at times overlooked how language affects basic education. In 1999, the Dekkers worked with the school system to teach kindergarten and first-grade students to read first in Lubuagan. By 2005, they had enough mother-tongue classes and comparison classes being taught in a second language to collect data. The children in the mother-tongue classes showed a 25 to 40 percent improvement in test scores across the board.
Quoted from: “First Language First,” Bob Smietana, christianitytoday.com [posted 3/26/2013]
Greg & Diane are anxious to point out that they are part of a much larger team working together and they encourage readers to access the whole article to get a more complete view of their work in the context of Mother-tongue-based, Multi-lingual education initiatives.
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