EDUCATION IS FAR BEHIND IN WRITING SKILLS

In many PNG schools today, students do not talk. They just write. Is this the influence of the cults? Or is it that many students can not speak English? They just copy English from the blackboard.

My time for modesty is finished. Education in Papua New Guinea has never got teaching writing skills right. 

I am the only expatriate with the historical and academic background to lift the standard of literacy in PNG schools.

Far too many amateurs came to PNG over the last 40 years all carrying with them the baggage that had been thrust on the teaching and learning scene in the schools of the 1960s. 

Then there was the vernacular approach pushed on the school by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Professor Tom Dutton of Australian National University. That put English learning behind by 20 years.

Early literacy up to that time in Australia and USA had benefited from the teaching that preceded World War 2. 

But the baby boomers now grown to teachers decided that it was all too academic and had to be redeveloped to remove those aspects that made literacy difficult.

As well in the USA was the pressure that came from the launching of the Russian Sputnik satellite that the US took to mean that Soviet education was far ahead. The US educational system had to catch up. Focus had to be on mathematics and science.

The literacy curriculum in US schools was ravaged and the results came down to spoil Australian education which passed through to PNG education over time.

I was a student in Australian schools and benefited from the old method of learning. We read books, chanted poems and sang songs. 

We studied the rhythm of words and appreciated how words can be fitted into smooth and elegant sentences. There is none of that in PNG schools except in my classes.

The literacy strategy of that time in Australia took students from elementary school to grade 12. As the students advanced in their grades the complexity of words and sentences increased. 

The approach in PNG today takes students all the way to grade 2, particularly the phonics books now on sale. The American approach takes students all the way to grade 2. Then they are on their own.

We in Australian schools learned the words that derived from Latin and Greek. In most Latin words, the strong stress is in the Latin root with the prefixes and suffixes as weak stresses. trans -script -ion, trans-lat-ion and re-vol-ver.

As an English teacher in Papua New Guinea, I use the old style I always knew. I teach students not to needlessly repeat words and to connect simple sentences into elegant complex sentences. 

In schools where I taught English, the standard result in Grade 10 English exams centred on Distinctions and Credits. Examiners were probably amazed at the batch of polished English papers that passed through from our school for assessment.

I used to give essays to write with help on the way. Then I would take up the essays and correct errors. The essays were then returned to students to be rewritten in terms of the corrections. 

Essays became polished. In writing essays, students had to circle words repeated. One repeated word had to be removed or replaced.

In choosing words and phrases I would appeal to the souls of students to sound out the alternatives and choose which sounded smoother and sweeter and framed in terms of weak and strong stresses.

I conducted workshops for elementary teachers in Morobe Province supported and transported by the then senior inspector Mr Keith Tangui. 

Over 800 teachers were massively interested but the Department could not afford to put me on as a permanent visiting advocate for Rhythm Phonics. Bilum books took over to push students through all the way to grade 2.