LITERACY IS A MESS IN PNG SCHOOLS

I have been a teacher of English in Papua New Guinea schools for many years. I work hard to lift the standard and do achieve this in many ways.

But literacy has been spoiled not in this country but by the teachers in Australia and the USA who were poorly taught themselves. 

The skill of literacy was castrated by education systems in the 1960s  when the decision was made in the USA to lift the standard of Science and Mathematics to compete with the USSR that had just put the satellite Sputnik into space.

I am a teacher of 74 years of age and passed through the Queensland education system in the early 1960s. 

Up to that time, there was a holistic view that saw Literacy as a combination of reading, writing, speaking, reading aloud, learning poetry, singing songs, chanting rhythm, writing out words that have been spelt wrongly and recognizing Greek and Latin roots.

Sentences were seen to contain stressed words and connector words that were learned in mastery sequences.

I have been a teacher of Literacy in PNG schools and promote the basics of sentences from elementary school. I take young students through the reading, writing, chanting, asking questions and answering question for hundreds of basic sweet sentences. We start with the rhyme and rhythm of nursery rhymes. 

Teachers are to proceed from (1) simple to complex and (2) known to unknown.

Students usually passed through my classes to grades 10 and 12 with Distinctions and Credits. I am sure that examiners are shocked by the level of elegance and polish in our papers being assessed. The work has a high level of white man polish.

Students learn the beauty of weak and strong stresses in hundreds of sentences. They learn to put sentences together from memory and the polish in their souls. I have taken students through writing skills to grade 12. There is a continuum from elementary to grade 12. No other PNG teacher has any idea.

All PNG teachers and curriculum writers have no idea of how to prepare sequences of mastery exercises. They think that students learn the basics by small sentences, nouns, verbs, adjectives, phrases, clauses, tense and active/passive voice. They think these come together by magic. Not so.

Students are never taught to put the broad range of sentences together with elegance, smoothness, simplicity, complexity and style.

I have conducted workshops for over 800 elementary teachers in Morobe province and at present trialing a rhythm phonics course for elementary students in a Port Moresby church school. A labour of love.

I have been described as the top English teacher in Papua New Guinea. That is because I still focus on the colonial style of teaching English. It has stayed with me from the 1950s and 1960s.

We assume that the old fashioned approach is the inferior way. Not with teaching English literacy. 

Papua New Guinea students will struggle with a low standard of writing skill forever as they have never had continuity of approach from teachers and skill in teaching polished English. All the expatriate teachers have gone probably except one.

Only 20 years ago, some foolish expatriates pushed vernacular literacy that destabilized and ruined English literacy teaching. They were interested in setting up their own language empire. Some students have never recovered but come back as semi-literate teachers.

I hope this website is written in polished English.