Multilingual Education in Belu,

Jenny Zhang Save the Children – University Partnerships for Educational Research

November 10, 2015

Contents

1. Background and Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..p. 2 a. Purpose of the Report……………………………………………………………………………………p. 3 b. Belu, Indonesia Background…………………………………………………………………………..p. 3 c. BELAJAR program description……………………………………………………………………….p. 4 - Literacy Assessments……………………………………………………………………………….p. 5 - Teacher Training……………………………………………………………………………………...p. 5 - Community Engagement…………………………………………………………………………..p. 6 d. Research Methodology…………………………………………………………………………………..p. 6

2. Historical and Logistical Processes by which BELAJAR has addressed multilingualism a. Findings ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 8 b. Recommendations……………………………………………………………………………………....p. 10

3. Teacher Training and Multilingualism a. Successes and Challenges of Teacher Training………………………………………………p. 11 b. Formative Assessments……………………………………………………………………………….p. 13 c. Best Practices for Multilingual Education……………………………………………………...p. 14 d. Recommendations………………………………………………………………………………………p. 15

4. Partnerships and Multilingualism a. Findings……………………………………………………………………………………………………...p. 17 b. Recommendations………………………………………………………………………………………p. 19

5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 20

6. Appendices a. List of Interviews and Focus Group Discussions……………………………………………p. 21 b. List of Observation Activities……………………………………………………………………….p. 22

7. Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 23

1 1. Background and Introduction1

Imagine you are a student whose parents have migrated to another part of Indonesia or to another country to work, and you live with your grandparents and siblings. At home, you speak the language that everyone around you speaks – Bahasa Bunak. You know lots of stories and songs in Bahasa Bunak, and your friends all speak the same language. You are finally 5 years old and begin attending the local elementary school. It is your first time at school; there is no kindergarten or early learning center in your village. When you start at school, you realize that you must learn a whole other language which your teacher speaks, and which you have only heard occasionally.

Now, imagine you are a teacher in the same village. You speak Bahasa Indonesia but at home you speak Bahasa Bunak. Your village is only one kilometer from the border, on the West side. Each year, you receive 25 new 5-6 year olds who speak very little Bahasa Indonesia, if at all. Most of your students speak Bahasa Bunak, so you can translate for them every aspect of the school curriculum, but there are 5 students who speak Bahasa Tetun Therik. With those children, you will have to use more inventive methods. How can you teach everybody to read and write in Indonesian, when they do not yet understand it? Most of the children have never been to a preschool or kindergarten, because the only early learning center ran out of funding last year. Some of them have never held a pencil or pen.

This describes the situation at School A, a BELAJAR program school in Belu, , Indonesia. BELAJAR is an adapted2 version of Save the Children’s Literacy Boost program, which works to promote literacy skills in the early grades through three avenues: community engagement, teacher training, and literacy assessment. A key difference between BELAJAR and Literacy Boost programs in other parts of Indonesia is that in Belu, there is a high degree of linguistic diversity, even within single communities. The BELAJAR approach is to frame mother tongue language skills as a potential resource for both literacy and content learning in the early grades, rather than as a barrier to learning.

School A is located just over the border from . Several of the teachers at School A moved to the village during the conflict, and speak different languages at home than their students. The majority of students at School A use Bahasa Bunak at home, with their families and friends, and at church. A minority of students speak Bahasa Tetun Therik. Almost none of the students come into their first year of school with working knowledge of Bahasa Indonesia. For students and teachers at School A, BELAJAR has ushered in big changes, especially related to teaching and learning processes in the mother tongue.

1 The research for this report was made possible by the generous and talented staff BELAJAR and Save the Children Indonesia. Katherine Brown, Nikhit D’Sa, and Christine Jonason, from Save the Children USA, provided critical support and feedback throughout the research and writing process. I would like to thank them all for their contributions to this report. 2 Some training modules from the Literacy Boost Teacher Training Toolkit were eliminated while others were added because of local needs. One example is an additional module on School-Based Management (SBM), which is a key change in the operational structures of Indonesian schools.

2 a. Purpose of this report

This report is a case study that highlights the effectiveness and limitations of BELAJAR, Save the Children’s Literacy Boost program in Belu, in addressing literacy skills across multiple languages through in-school and out-of-school interventions. By conducting classroom observations, interviews, and focus groups, and analyzing BELAJAR program documents, I explored three aspects of the BELAJAR program: its approach to multilingualism both in and out of the classroom, its teacher training, and finally, BELAJAR’s relationships with key stakeholders and partners. The three research questions are: 1. What is the process (historical and logistical) by which Save the Children has worked to address the multilingual nature of child literacy in the BELAJAR project? 2. How has teacher training been leveraged to address multilingual education for children? 3. What relationships and partnerships has the project leveraged to address the issues of multilingualism among participants in BELAJAR?

This report also offers recommendations to further enhance the program, at the end of each section.

b. Where is Belu?

Belu is a regency on the Indonesian side of the border with East Timor, in Nusa Tenggara Timor Province in Eastern Indonesia. The 1999 conflict and subsequent exodus of people from East Timor into Belu bears a relationship to the linguistic diversity of the area today; refugees from East Timor and internally displaced peoples from Indonesia settled in Belu, each bringing their own mother tongue. Today, there are 5 major mother tongue languages (in addition to the national language, Bahasa Indonesia) spoken in Belu: Bahasa Tetun Therik, Bahasa Tetun Portu (spoken by many who moved from East Timor), Bahasa Bunak, Bahasa Dawan, and Bahasa Kemak. Additionally, there are smaller linguistic communities in Belu, such as a community from Southeast Sulawesi Island that speaks Bahasa Buton. Because of the remoteness of the area, and the fact that resettlement occurred in recent history, there are not precise statistics on language breakdown in Belu. However, according to the Save the Children context analysis, conducted before the

3 BELAJAR intervention began, approximately 20% of students speak Bahasa Tetun Therik at home, and another 15% speak a different local language at home. In reality, those percentages mask the radical variability within the regency. Though students in , the capital city, may speak only Bahasa Indonesia at home, 100% of students in other areas may speak Bahasa Dawan, or 70% Bahasa Bunak and 30% Bahasa Kemak in yet another area.

“Bahasa ibu… itu bahasa budaya” is a phrase I heard repeatedly in many interviews. It means, “the mother tongue is the language of culture”; without the mother tongue, many cannot imagine conducting important cultural rites and rituals. Whether in connection to the preservation of cultural traditions or simply to more effective learning, many in Belu agree on the importance of mother tongue language usage.

The multilingual context affects the teaching and learning process in and outside of schools. At many Literacy Boost sites around the world, students may use different languages at home and at school. In Belu, however, nearly all students use a different language at home and there is a superdiversity (Goebel, 2015) of languages in the region.3 Thus, there may be two or more local languages spoken by the students and the teacher in one classroom. The languages and linguistic compositions of classrooms vary widely across the regency.

The situation in classrooms is further complicated by the fact there is widespread confusion about government policies about language of instruction. The National Education Law of 1989 specified that Bahasa Indonesia should be the language of instruction in all classrooms. However, the National Education Law No. 20 of 2003 specifies in article 33 that: “local languages may be used as language of instruction in early grades if necessary in order to deliver knowledge and/or certain skills.” Though the national education law has been amended to allow the use of local languages, many teachers and principals stated that before the BELAJAR training, they felt that they must use Bahasa Indonesia at school. Further, as several Save the Children Indonesia staff pointed out, there is a political valence in the push to use Bahasa Indonesia in Belu. Given Belu’s proximity to the national border with East Timor, the use of Bahasa Indonesia may seem more nationalistic than the use of Bahasa Tetun, the national language of East Timor.

c. What is BELAJAR?

BELAJAR is a modified version of Save the Children’s Literacy Boost program. As with all Literacy Boost programs, BELAJAR is comprised of three major components: literacy assessments, teacher training, and community engagement. Each aspect of BELAJAR has been adapted to the multilingual context in Belu. In particular, BELAJAR staff

3 Goebal (2015) defines superdiversity as “a setting constituted by strangers from multiple backgrounds who never share the same language but only some semiotic fragments. These fragments are used in interaction to build common ground” (8). This is a useful way to understand the linguistic situation in Belu – and to grasp the confusion many students might feel when they enter school as first graders.

4 place extra importance on introducing strategies for teaching while using the mother tongue.

Literacy Assessments

The Literacy Boost assessment is a one-on-one assessment administered to second graders. It is both an intake form, in which students are asked various questions about their socio-economic status and literacy practices, as well as an assessment of 5 component skills of literacy: alphabetic knowledge, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. The test is administered to at least 20 students at each program school at the beginning of the intervention period, at a middle point, and at the end of the intervention period. During my research in Belu, I observed the baseline testing at School Y, in which 20 children (10 girls and 10 boys) were assessed on Bahasa Indonesia literacy skills by a small team of enumerators.4

Teacher Training

BELAJAR organizes teacher trainings throughout the intervention period in a cascade model. First they organize master trainer sessions, which are attended by selected school headmasters and school supervisors.5 Then, the master trainers teach modules at the teacher training sessions. The goal of this cascade model is to ensure sustainability. Once the master trainers fully comprehend and teach the training material, they will be able to support and train teachers in their schools and districts even after the BELAJAR program ends.

The teacher training modules are based largely on the Literacy Boost Teacher Training Toolkit. Going forward, Literacy Boost programs in Indonesia will offer general teacher training in the first year of the intervention. This includes classroom management, student-centered learning (as opposed to traditional models of teacher-centered classrooms), and principles and practices associated with positive discipline. Only after this first year of training will teachers learn about the nitty-gritty aspects of the literacy curriculum.6 Many of the specific teaching strategies shared at the training sessions were developed by BELAJAR and/or individual teachers based on their classroom experiences.

4 Though the assessment was to test students’ knowledge of Bahasa Indonesia, it was conducted wholly in Bahasa Tetun Therik by the enumerators. The students could not understand nor speak Bahasa Indonesia at the time of the assessment. When I asked the enumerators how they handle situations in which they do not speak the same languages as students, they say that they try to always plan the testing according to the language situation. Thus, when they know which elementary schools they will visit, they ask first what languages are spoken there, and then plan to have at least one enumerator out of the team of three or four speak that language. 5 School supervisors are in charge of monitoring and supporting teachers and headmasters at schools in their district, which usually number around six schools in their district. They are employed directly by the education department of the local government. 6 The Save the Children Country Office in Indonesia realized that teachers were ill-equipped to absorb new material related to literacy, when they did not yet have a strong foundation of other important professional development skills. Many teachers in Belu have had little or no formal training, as few have post-secondary education experience.

5 Community Engagement

BELAJAR works with many remote schools that are located up to three or four hours outside of Atambua, the capital city of and where the Save the Children Belu office is located. Because BELAJAR staff cannot visit each program school frequently, community engagement is vital to the program’s success and sustainability. One major community engagement program is Pos Membaca, or Reading Camp, which engages not only young learners, but also community volunteers and parents. At Reading Camp, students have access to storybooks provided by BELAJAR, short stories printed in some local languages, play games that build literacy skills in mother tongue and national languages, and are read to by the Reading Camp facilitators, who are often community members trained by the program.

BELAJAR also supports program schools in organizing an annual Festival Membaca, or Reading Festival. This reading performance event is popular and well-attended by parents, grandparents, and others in the community.

d. Research Methods

The research relied on four research methods: document analysis, focus groups, interviews, and observations. The full list of research activities can be found in Appendices A and B. During each interview and focus group discussion, I audio-recorded the discussion, jotted notes, and wrote full field notes afterwards.

I began the research by analyzing documents from the BELAJAR program, including the training toolkits for teachers and community engagement volunteers, the project implementation plan, and monthly reports written by the BELAJAR project manager. For the field research, which took place in July and August 2015, I visited each of three focal elementary schools twice. Each of these schools was a BELAJAR program school, and I observed classroom lessons in the 2nd and 3rd grades, Reading Camp, and interviewed teachers, school headmasters, and parents. The schools were selected based on the differences in the linguistic composition in the student and teacher bodies.

School A: the most remote of the three schools, School A is located nearly 2 hours to the southeast of Atambua, at the base of the mountain range on the border with East Timor. Nearly all of the students and teachers here speak Bahasa Bunak, which continues through the third grade. Many students’ parents have migrated to other regions of Indonesia or Southeast Asia in search of work, and children often live with their grandparents or other relatives. School A has been a BELAJAR program school for two years.

School B: located about an hour to the south of Atambua. At this school, the majority of students speak Bahasa Tetun Therik, with a sizable minority of Bahasa Bunak speakers. Use of mother tongue language is present through

6 the third grade. Most parents farm in this community. School B Has been a BELAJAR program school for two years.

School C: located in the port city of , also home of the border crossing with East Timor. Though teachers used the mother tongue language as the language of instruction, which in this case was largely Bahasa Tetun Therik, in the first year, by the second year teachers and students used Bahasa Indonesia in classroom settings. Most parents in this town remain in the town, working in the fishing or shipping industries. School C has been a BELAJAR program school for three years.

School C is one in which students have largely transitioned to Bahasa Indonesia from the mother tongue by the 2nd and 3rd grades, School B is one in which students use a mix of mother tongue languages through the 3rd grade, and School A is one in which students use a single mother tongue through the third grade. During the school visits, I interviewed 16 early grade teachers, 24 parents and grandparents of students, 2 parent committee leaders, 4 school headmasters, and 5 school supervisors. Finally, I made two visits to School D, a BELAJAR program school located in Atambua, in order to observe a first grade class where all the students speak Bahasa Indonesia fluently. School D has been a BELAJAR program school for three years.

For a comparison, I visited two schools that are in the third, and newest, implementation phase of the BELAJAR project. At the time of my visits, there had been no program intervention yet. At School Y, where all the students speak Bahasa Tetun Therik, I observed Literacy Boost baseline assessments of 2nd graders and spoke with the teacher. At School Z, where most students speak Bahasa Dawan, I observed 2nd grade classroom teaching, interviewed four teachers from the early grades, and interviewed the school headmaster.

Three focus groups were held at the Save the Children Belu office. The first two focus group discussions focused on teachers’ experiences: the first group was comprised of 14 teachers who had been to BELAJAR teacher training, and the second was comprised of 12 teachers who had yet to attend a teacher training. The teachers were selected to join the focus groups based on two characteristics: the distance of their school from Atambua, and the language demographics of their school. At each focus group, all of the mother tongue language groups were represented, as well as a variety of language make-up in classrooms (the discussions included, for example: teachers who taught 50% Bahasa Dawan speaking students, 50% Bahasa Tetun Therik students, and teachers who taught 90% Bahasa Bunak and 10% Bahasa Kemak). The third focus group discussion was comprised of four community engagement facilitators who organize and run the Reading Camps, all of whom are also early grade teachers or teachers-in-training.

To gain insight on the historical processes of Save the Children’s approach to multilingual education, I interviewed seven BELAJAR staff members, as well as two advisors from the Save the Children Indonesia Country Office.

7 There are limitations to the study. Because the focal schools were in remote areas, I was only able to visit each school two times. More significantly, I was not able to speak or understand any of the local languages detailed in this report. My BELAJAR interlocutors were able to speak many of the local languages, and they provided useful in-time translations during classroom observations and interviews. My interview subjects were also gracious in translating and explaining the many differences between their mother tongues and Bahasa Indonesia.

2. What is the process (historical and logistical) by which Save the Children has worked to address the multilingual nature of child literacy in the BELAJAR project?

a. Findings

The project manager of BELAJAR says that early on in his tenure he realized, “how many days, months of learning would we miss if we used only Bahasa Indonesia?” In other words, he realized if students start first grade with little or no knowledge of Bahasa Indonesia, they must be taught in the mother tongue language if they are to learn any content knowledge. Otherwise, if teachers use only Bahasa Indonesia, students will only learn Bahasa Indonesia.

Thus, from the very first year of implementation in 2012, BELAJAR planners have carefully distinguished between learning a new language – Bahasa Indonesia – and learning the content material of the curriculum. With this orientation, BELAJAR has always encouraged teachers, administrators, and master trainers to use the mother tongue when needed, especially in the first grade. Though a seemingly obvious strategy, it was novel in many communities because of the 1989 National Education Law, which stipulated that Bahasa Indonesia should be the language of instruction in schools. Some teachers and headmasters initially felt uncomfortable using the mother tongue as the language of instruction, but were soon pleased to see how happy, curious, and talkative the early grades students are when not fearful of using their mother tongue language.

Beyond encouraging attitudinal shifts in teachers and headmasters about using mother tongue languages in the early grades, BELAJAR has addressed multilingual education in several ways: by linking literacy skills with mother tongue instruction, by introducing printed materials in the mother tongue language for some regions, and by incorporating mother tongue language usage into Reading Camp activities.

The most immediate impact in the classroom is that teachers are equipped with a set of strategies for teaching Indonesian language literacy using the mother tongue. One strategy which Ibu Klara, a first grade teacher at School D, shared was that she uses both words in mother tongue (Bahasa Tetun Therik, in the case of her community) and animal sounds when teaching Indonesian letter sounds. For example, the “oooo” of a birdcall is used to teach the letter “U”, and the Bahasa Tetun Therik word for salt is used to teach the letter “E”. Several teachers from the focus group discussion mentioned that they often play word and letter games using both Bahasa Indonesia and the local language. For example, a

8 teacher might ask children to think of words that start with the sound of “B” in both their mother tongue language and Bahasa Indonesia.

At Reading Camps, facilitators are also equipped with strategies to build on mother tongue language knowledge, in order to build up Indonesian language skills. One experienced Reading Camp facilitator likes to begin the sessions by having the students sing a song in the mother tongue, and then immediately afterwards, one in Bahasa Indonesia. Several community engagement facilitators who are both elementary school teachers and Reading Camp volunteers shared their techniques for engaging children from different language backgrounds. They work on building phonemic awareness by playing games with children—asking them to identify the onsets of syllables in a simple sentence like “Saya makan nasi”, or “I eat rice”. Then the volunteers ask children to find syllables with the same onsets (such as the sound of the letter “s”) in their home language. In this way, the community engagement facilitators promote learning while playing, or “belajar sambil main-main”.

BELAJAR has also worked to provide written materials in some mother tongue languages. Short storybooks in Bahasa Tetun Therik are now available and BELAJAR is in the process of publishing storybooks in Bahasa Dawan. A significant challenge is the dearth of printed materials in local languages; there are few people who know the standard orthography, or writing system, of Bahasa Tetun Therik, Bahasa Dawan, and even less so for Bahasa Bunak and Bahasa Kemak.7 Many parents mentioned in interviews that there are some church materials (hymns and Bibles) available in Bahasa Tetun and Bahasa Bunak, but that even those materials often use non-standard orthographies. Thus, in working to provide materials in local languages in Belu, the most significant challenges are finding authors, copyeditors, and other logistical challenges.

A promising avenue is the provision of short, one-page stories in mother tongue languages with a Bahasa Indonesian translation on the backside. These one-page stories are simply placed into a plastic sleeve or laminated, and require less work and time than creating storybooks. Because the stories are in both Bahasa Indonesia and a mother tongue language, students can easily look back and forth, translating for themselves.

At the same time, the primary aim of BELAJAR is to boost students’ literacy skills in the language—Bahasa Indonesia—that they must use in school. All Indonesian students must take national examinations in Bahasa Indonesia, and accordingly, there are no curricular materials offered in languages other than Indonesian. For the BELAJAR program, this means that children should feel comfortable using Bahasa Indonesia after a year or two of transition with mother tongue instruction. Thus, a key aspect of Save the Children’s strategy for addressing multilingual learning remains in its trainings and specific, concrete

7 Some teachers I spoke with reported feeling strange while reading the storybooks in Bahasa Tetun Therik, as they consider it an oral language and had never seen it written before. Students in the schools sampled in this report do not know how to read in any language before starting school. Parents, by and large, do not know how to read in Bahasa Tetun Therik or in other local languages.

9 strategies for teaching Indonesian language literacy skills using mother tongue knowledge of phonemic correspondence, vocabulary, narratives, and oral comprehension.

Currently, the literacy lessons offered by BELAJAR focus primarily on reading and listening, rather than writing and speaking. The emphasis on consumption rather than production is underscored by the Literacy Boost assessment, which tests reading comprehension, as well as component reading skills, but does not have a writing component. Furthermore, comprehension in the test is measured by students’ responses to a series of questions based on the reading passage, all of which have correct and incorrect answers. On both the Literacy Boost assessment and in classroom activities, there are few opportunities for students to give non-standard answers or to interpret texts creatively.

Students from minority language backgrounds appear to be more at-risk for developing reading difficulties with this approach. Because answers are often chanted in unison, individual students who may have difficulties with the reading or indeed, in comprehending the question, may not be noticed by teachers. In my observations of third grade classrooms, I noticed that nearly all students, when asked to by teachers, could read with fluency. In focus groups and interviews, however, teachers readily admitted that students from minority language backgrounds were facile decoders by the third grade, but sometimes did not understand what they were reading.

Recommendations

 Increase focus on vocabulary building and oral comprehension. Oral comprehension, which in turn relies on a strong vocabulary base, is critical to reading and writing ability. Underscoring the importance of vocabulary building and oral comprehension, Nagy and Scott (2000) found that reading fluency and comprehension are dependent on a reader already knowing 90-95% of the words in the text. Oral language exposure is the foundation for academic language and curricular access, and a limited vocabulary is a root cause for reading comprehension difficulties (Hibbing and Rankin-Erickson, 2003, Biemiller, 2005). The findings show that students may be facile decoders and fluent readers, but struggle with higher-order skills like comprehension and analysis.

 Offer more opportunities for students to practice speaking and writing. The research findings show that BELAJAR’s teacher training, literacy assessment, and community engagement strategies focus more on reading (or receptive) skills, at the expense of concurrently developing writing skills. A more balanced approach can be achieved both inside and outside the classroom.

o One way to boost writing skills is to organize a Writing Festival alongside or in addition to the annual Reading Festival. A Writing Festival would generate excitement about writing, much like the Reading Festival has done for reading. A module of the BELAJAR Teacher Training would focus on teaching free or creative writing activities which could be geared toward the Writing

10 Festival. As with other training modules for teachers, it is best to introduce concrete activities to teach creative writing.

o Build on students’ diverse language repertoires by encouraging writing in their mother tongue languages. In addition to building literacy skills, writing in the mother tongue can connect school skills with students’ cultures and traditional knowledge. Three master trainers (who are also school supervisors) suggested that students be encouraged to write in their mother tongues, even if they use “incorrect” or non-standard orthographies.

o Story banks for Reading Camp can be supplemented with student-created stories, especially as BELAJAR programming ends and program schools lose access to new printed materials. Like the simple one-page stories that are already in circulation, student-produced work can simply be photocopied and laminated.

3. How has teacher training been leveraged to address multilingual education for children?

Teacher training has been incredibly important for the success of BELAJAR. Many teachers are “honor” teachers (who are paid only an honorarium), many of whom have no more than a high school education. At a focus group with 16 teachers, I asked the participants to compare their teacher training experiences with Save the Children and with other organizations, or the district level education office. After a few moments of silence, one teacher explained that they have gotten no training aside from the BELAJAR program in the last 5 years.

The difficulties faced by students in such a learning environment are exacerbated when children are unfamiliar with Bahasa Indonesia. In a teacher-centered classroom in which the teacher stands at the front and reads from the textbook, there are few, if any, opportunities for students to show that they do not understand the material.

a. What successes and challenges has the program faced in teacher training?

Classrooms at BELAJAR program schools looked very different than classrooms at School Y and School Z—two schools that served as comparison schools. At the BELAJAR program schools, students often sat either in small groups of 4-5 desks, or their desks were arranged in a horseshoe shape. On desks, seats, and bookshelves there were labels which spelled out the word for desk, seats, and bookshelves in Bahasa Indonesia (me-ja, kur-si, le- mar-i) by syllables. On the walls there were posters—with classes of fruits, traditional home structures in Indonesia, instruments, human anatomy—as well as student-made creations: pictures with words written underneath, landscapes of their areas, cutouts of the letters of the alphabet. In Pak Feliks’s 3rd grade classroom at School A, there is a “tree of knowledge”, which was an actual big branch propped up in bucket, and students made the “leaves” of knowledge hanging off the tree—recent words they learned, or new facts.

11 At the comparison schools, the walls were bare. The only materials with any writing in the classroom were the curricular books that teachers used. Students sat in groups of two desks, all facing the front of the room. At School Z, when Pak Alfonsius asked his 2nd grade students to write “nasi”, the students who were unsure about how to form their letters had no examples to look at, aside from a peer’s notebook.

Creating a print-rich environment in classrooms, particularly in parts of Belu where children have little exposure or no access to print at home, helps students from all language backgrounds. Ibu Linda, the 1st grade teacher at School B said that “the displays are really useful; before, students were so eager to run out of the classroom to play, and now they are curious, they ask questions like ‘what does that say? M-o-t-o-r, motor—they want to learn, they want to read because they are curious.” Ibu Klara, the first grade teacher at School D, uses her Velcro board of letters each day through the 1st grade. She says that with these letters, she has a much easier time engaging students at all levels; before, if she asked them to simply copy them down, children who were struggling gave up more easily.

The benefits of providing a print-rich environment have been well-documented by researchers. Of particular relevance is Ng and Yeo’s (2013) study conducted in multilingual households in Malaysia. They found that providing a print-rich environment in the home becomes a “cornerstone” for early literacy success in school settings. In Belu, it is simply not possible for many parents and grandparents to provide access to print materials at home, given a widespread lack of expendable income. Additionally, there are few libraries and bookstores in Belu, even in Atambua. Thus, providing a print-rich environment in schools is even more critical for students in much of Belu.

Teacher training resulted in not only drastically different classroom environments, but also reshaped the relationship between teachers and students; in the shift from a teacher-centered learning process to a student-centered one, teachers acted more like facilitators of learning activities than directors. One teacher told me about how teacher training changed her teaching practice: “My educational background is only at the SMA (high school) level, so I never learned how to teach. When I started, I just picked up the book and read each lesson to the student. Now I have a lot of strategies to teach: singing songs, asking questions, using alphabet cards.”

Each of these changes greatly impact student learning outcomes. For children who do not speak or understand Bahasa Indonesia in the early grades, student-centered learning offers teachers the chance to see which students are struggling with language comprehension. When teachers use alphabet cards, students have something physical to look at, or even touch, when they learn letters. For students who already understand little of what their teacher says in Bahasa Indonesia, learning props like alphabet cards are extremely useful.

Parents and grandparents are quite aware of how teacher trainings, and the effects stemming from them, create a better learning environment for their children. Grandparents of students at School A said that they love coming to school and peeking in their child’s

12 classroom at the end of the school day. They see the classroom displays, how the teachers interact with the students, and how happy their children are now.

Even with these great strides, BELAJAR still faces several challenges in teacher training. A senior program officer at BELAJAR, puts it this way: “There’s both an awareness issue and a knowledge issue of applying teaching techniques in practice. Sometimes teachers are not aware of new teaching methods—and this can be changed through trainings. However, even if teachers come to the training, they may not have a teaching background or much education, so they still lack understanding and knowledge of the teaching methods, and how to apply them in the classroom.”

Thus, teachers may leave trainings feeling energized and full of new ideas, but encounter difficulties later on applying these new teaching methods to their daily teaching practice. Teachers and BELAJAR staff alike remarked that there is not enough follow-up mentoring and support for teachers; there are limited staff and resources, as well as a limited timeframe for project implementation.

While some teachers do a wonderful job of teaching literacy skills using mother tongue language knowledge, others have a more difficult time. For example, some teachers who have little formal education themselves struggle with teaching the 5 literacy skills, and “phonemic awareness” stands out as particularly technical. Some teachers, like Ibu Agustina at School C and Ibu Elfrida at School B, mentioned that though they know teachers should read expressively, so that students can better understand the story, they have difficulty doing it in practice. Pak Thomas, a 2nd grade teacher and Reading Camp facilitator, pointed out that some students are able to read fluently but without any comprehension. This is particularly important for children who are unfamiliar with Bahasa Indonesia and lack the vocabulary to understand storylines, even if they can read it fluently. One major challenge, then, is to ensure that teachers have strategies to teach not only lower-order decoding skills, but also strategies to teach vocabulary and other skills associated with reading comprehension.

b. How effective are formative assessments in helping teachers address their teaching practices?

Several teachers at the focus group discussion reported using formative assessments regularly: they adjust the upcoming week’s lesson plans according to the students’ results. Ibu Agustina, a third grade teacher at School C, is one such teacher, saying that the formative assessment results help ground her discussions with parents and with school supervisors who want to check on students’ progress. One teacher at the focus group said that she repeats the lessons which most of the students did not understand, gauged by formative assessment scores.

Importantly, even the teachers who report using formative assessments regularly did not explicitly make the link between the assessment results and changing their teaching practice. At best, teachers thought they could simply repeat lessons; they did not point out that they could try a new teaching method in order to reintroduce or review the

13 material. The expectation is that the students will absorb and understand the lesson through repeated exposure through the same teaching method. Teachers also did not draw connections between students’ formative assessment results and home language use. In sum, it does not appear that formative assessments are helping teachers to adjust their teaching practices for a multilingual classroom (or even a monolingual classroom).

The challenges stem from two major issues, then: first, the teachers who do use formative assessments regularly do not yet connect them to their teaching practice, and second, many teachers simply do not use BELAJAR formative assessments at all.8 From interviews and focus groups with teachers, as well from insights provided by BELAJAR staff, I identify some challenges in promoting formative assessments:

 Teachers are already overburdened with administrative tasks and have little time to administer more formative assessments.  There is already a formative assessment mandated by the government, which, in accordance with the national curriculum tests four competencies: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. One BELAJAR project officer found that many teachers were confused about how to connect these 4 competencies with the 5 literacy skills emphasized by BELAJAR.  Teachers at the non-program school focus group reported that they found the form to record student scores on BELAJAR formative assessments to be confusing.  Some teachers also did not know how to test specific literacy skills, such as phonemic awareness. Interviews and classroom observations showed that teachers are more accustomed to teaching phonemic awareness within syllabic constructions. Teachers at both focus group discussions noted the difficulty of enunciating “dead letters”, or consonants. They prefer instead to teach letters and contrasts between similar phonemes by pairing them with vowels.

c. What best practices in teacher training has the program developed to address multilingual education?

The Literacy Boost Teacher Training Toolkit and the Community Action Toolkits both attend to teaching in multilingual settings. BELAJAR has adopted many of the strategies in both toolkits, including advocating the use of the mother tongue in the early grades, offering printed materials in local languages when possible, and pairing students who speak the same language for the Sahabat Membaca, or Reading Buddies, program.

8 The self-report rate of formative assessment use, from focus groups and interviews, is close to 100%. At focus group discussions however, there was evidence that teachers struggle with formative assessments even when they report using them. When I asked teachers to describe how they use the assessments, they had a difficult time doing so. Nearly all had difficulty describing how to assess each particular literacy skill. It is important to note that teachers may feel compelled to say that they do use the assessments—at least to their superiors (school principals and supervisors), and to Save the Children—for reasons relating to saving face, compliance, and reluctance to garner negative attention.

14 However, the multilingual situation in Belu differs from many other contexts in which Literacy Boost programming is offered; there is a superdiversity of languages, even within single communities, and most of the languages are oral languages with no script. Owing to these characteristics, BELAJAR and its stakeholders have come up with strategies to promote learning using multiple languages.

In places like School C, in which students all speak the same mother tongue language, teachers use that local language consistently in the first years of school as a transition language. They take care to explicitly point out language differences, by saying things like “In Bahasa Tetun you say it like this” and then “In Bahasa Indonesia, you say it like this.” That way, students begin to learn the phonological, syntactic, and vocabulary differences between the two languages. Students in Ibu Agustina’s 3rd grade class are facile codeswitchers: they sing a song in Bahasa Indonesia, and then immediately afterwards, sing another song in Bahasa Tetun Therik.

In places like School B, in which some students speak Bahasa Tetun Therik and some speak Bahasa Bunak, teachers use more creative methods to engage their students. Teachers reported creating pictorial dictionaries with the help of their students and some parents, in order to draw on this resource with students speaking a different mother tongue language. Teachers also rely on help from “guru kecil”, literally “little teachers” or student helpers, who can translate into other local languages for their classmates.

Teachers in both cases introduce literacy skills in Bahasa Indonesia by building on mother tongue language knowledge. They might use vocabulary familiar to the students, drawing on local resources (such as local plants, animals, and practices), or they might teach alphabetic letters based on words or sounds familiar to the students. Some Reading Camp facilitators also encourage students to find the same syllables in both Bahasa Indonesia words and in words in their local languages.

All of the practices noted here are currently taught in BELAJAR teacher training sessions. There is a constant feedback loop between the BELAJAR team and teachers, principals, and school supervisors. Practices developed by individual teachers are passed along to BELAJAR, and then shared with other teachers at training sessions. It is clear that many of the great teaching ideas for multilingual classrooms are generated by teachers themselves. Many teachers expressed their desire for more opportunities for sharing these tips, and collaboration. At the focus groups organized for this study, teachers left saying that they learned much from their collaborators when we broke into small group discussions—so much so that they considered the focus group a training session.

d. Recommendations

 Reassess and promote the use of formative assessments in multilingual classroom settings. The Literacy Boost formative assessment, as it stands, does not appear to be useful for or used by teachers in Belu. Next steps for BELAJAR:

15 o Conduct a workshop with teachers focusing specifically on formative assessments. Get their feedback on the following issues: design of the formative assessment tool, the five literacy skills which are the focus of the assessment, activities used to assess each of the skills. After the workshop, synthesize teachers’ recommendations to create a formative assessment training module tailored for Belu.

o Highlight the connections between 4 competencies of literacy (reading, writing, listening, speaking) as emphasized in the national curriculum and the 5 literacy skills taught by BELAJAR. There first needs to be analysis done by BELAJAR on how best draw the connections between the two sets of skills. Then, in teacher training sessions, these connections need to be made explicit, such that it is possible for teachers to incorporate the Literacy Boost skills into their national curriculum formative assessment.

o In teacher trainings, stress that formative assessments need not take much time, that they can be done informally, and that the tools for recording scores can be adjusted as needed.

 Offer more opportunities for teachers to meet and exchange ideas, aside from teacher training sessions. Teachers themselves generate “best practices” for pedagogy in multilingual classrooms. Providing the time and space for teachers to share amongst each other, and with BELAJAR, is important for professional development, teacher morale, and overall improvements in the teaching and learning process in classrooms. At teacher training sessions, set aside time dedicated to small-group work, horizontally organized and led by teachers, rather than master trainers or BELAJAR staff.

 Conduct a reevaluation of the 5 literacy skills for Bahasa Indonesia. I observed that teachers often taught phonemic awareness with syllabic constructions, rather than with individual letters. Syllabic knowledge is the “salient unit” in Bahasa Indonesia which predicts later reading achievement. Furthermore, Bahasa Indonesia has a relatively transparent system of affixes, so the morpheme is another important linguistic unit for early readers and spellers (Winskel and Widjaja, 2007). It is important to consider grain size in designing both reading curricula and assessments. Phonemic awareness is unquestionably important, however, it may be subsumed under another, more familiar and linguistically appropriate, literacy skill in the BELAJAR curriculum and formative assessment. The next step should be a linguistic analysis of the 5 literacy skills with regard to Bahasa Indonesia—a project that falls outside of the scope of this report.

16 4. What relationships and partnerships has the project leveraged to address the issues of multilingualism among participants in BELAJAR?

a. Findings

BELAJAR has been oriented towards building strong relationships and partnerships, especially given the short timeline of implementation (as few as one year of programming for phase three schools). Thus, it is important that from the very beginning, BELAJAR is carried out by many partners to ensure its sustainability after the program ends.

In addressing multilingual learning, BELAJAR has built strong relationships with teachers, school headmasters, master trainers (who are often school headmasters or school supervisors), community engagement facilitators, and in communities, with parents. Several of these partnerships directly impact the learning and teaching process: strong partnerships and collaborations with teachers and community engagement facilitators ensures that students from various language backgrounds are supported.

Other relationships, such as with school headmasters and school supervisors, are geared toward shifting attitudes about multilingual education. Once these partners’ perceptions of multilingualism in schools and classrooms have changed, they can then use their positions as a platform to teach others, such as teachers and parents. School supervisors and school headmasters are selected to become master trainers, receive the training themselves, and then lead training modules for teachers. Thus, even those teachers (such as those in the upper grades of elementary school) who did not attend the training can get mentoring and support from their school headmaster or school supervisor. This is the case with Pak Simon, a headmaster at School A and also a master trainer, who shares training content with teachers from his school and across the district at teacher working groups.

In the areas of educational advocacy and policy, BELAJAR works with the government at several levels. Key goals for these partnerships are to effect large-scale changes in policies, perceptions, and practices (such as through formal, government- sponsored training sessions) related to the teaching and learning process, particularly in multilingual settings. On the subdistrict level, BELAJAR works closely with the pengawas, or school supervisors, in another way too: BELAJAR has created a classroom observation monitoring tool for the school supervisors to use on their classroom visits. Several school supervisors I spoke with said that this monitoring tool helps them better mentor teachers.

On the provincial level, BELAJAR worked closely with representatives from the LPMP, or the Educational Quality Assurance Board, to develop a set of indicators to measure the quality of the teaching and learning process in classrooms. BELAJAR then organized a week of classroom visits to 63 schools in Belu with seven LPMP representatives, seven school supervisors, and seven representatives from the DINAS Pendidikan, or the provincial Department of Education. With the LPMP, BELAJAR will carry out master trainings together, thus ensuring that the messages about multilingual education reach the governmental, policy level. According to Pak Agus, the manager of the

17 Save the Children Belu office, working closely with the LPMP is important to establishing credibility for the project: “Why did we pick the LPMP? We had to pick an organization that is accredited. If the results [from BELAJAR] are good, it’s good if they come from LPMP to the government, rather than from Save the Children.”

There have been some challenges in establishing partnerships with the government. According to Pak Agus, staff turnover at DINAS Pendidikan poses a barrier to effecting long-term, sustainable educational programmatic change in Belu. Though DINAS Pendidikan is always supportive of BELAJAR programming, they have only lent verbal support. To date, they have not yet increased the budget for education or become more involved in BELAJAR’s project activities. Similarly, the Bupati, or Regent, of Belu Regency is very supportive of BELAJAR. However, these verbal commitments have not yet translated into long-term policy or programming changes in the education department. Thus, one major challenge for BELAJAR is to strengthen and leverage partnerships with governmental actors, to ensure long-lasting impact in Belu.

Pak Agus and the BELAJAR team have learned from these experiences. They have ideas about how to better co-design and co-implement programs with government actors, so that there is a higher degree of government contribution and ownership over the program. Some concrete plans include holding a series of half-day workshops for program design with key governmental stakeholders.

BELAJAR is largely implemented directly by the BELAJAR team. Though local non- governmental organizations (NGOs) exist in Belu, there is limited space to involve them in BELAJAR. Currently, local NGOs are involved only with carrying out baseline surveys. Pak Agus acknowledged the need to incorporate local NGOs—another important group for the long-term sustainability of practices introduced by Literacy Boost programs, and indeed, all Save the Children programs.

While partnerships with government actors are critical to the success and sustainability of BELAJAR, relationships with parents and grandparents are very important to the success of the program in the day to day outlook. The role of parents and grandparents is often minimized by teachers and school principals, particularly when family members have few years of formal education. For the headmasters of Schools A, B, and C, grandparents are considered vital for non-academic tasks: making sure their grandchildren have bathed and eaten before going to school, laundering their school uniforms, and walking them to school so that they arrive on time. When I asked the headmasters to consider how grandparents might contribute to students’ learning, they each responded that grandparents should call over neighbors or nearby middle school students to help their grandchildren with homework.

This conceptualization of grandparents’ and parents’ role is unfortunately limited. Grandparents and parents, even with limited formal education or literacy skills, can still do very much for their children’s learning—particularly in areas of oral comprehension, storytelling, critical thinking, and logical reasoning (Freadman, 2014, Storch and Whitehurst, 2002). In some program school communities, BELAJAR has successfully

18 organized regular, monthly meetings of parents and grandparents, led by parent volunteers. Volunteers are equipped with a list of topics for group discussion. However, in many communities this model has not been successful. BELAJAR staff have suggested that this is due in part to logistical reasons (far distances between homes), and suspicions that the volunteer leaders of the groups are monetarily compensated.

One way to reach parents and grandparents of students from all language backgrounds is to strengthen relationships and communication channels with religious leaders and village leaders. The role of the church is very strong in communities throughout Belu—a fact underscored in many of my interviews with parents, grandparents, teachers, and principals. In these interviews, teachers and principals were often likened to pastors or priests. In other words, teachers, like pastors and priests, are figures accorded immense respect and authority in communities across Belu. In the current project implementation plan, information about Reading Camp and other BELAJAR activities is given to pastors only when BELAJAR team members run into them; there is no organized effort to reach pastors systematically. Similarly, Pak Agus acknowledges the importance of involving village heads in the project design, implementation, and advocacy stages. In Year 3 of BELAJAR, village heads are a prominent target in the community socialization strategy.

b. Recommendations

 Increase the social acceptance of BELAJAR. Religious leaders and village heads play important roles in social life in BELAJAR sites. If they know about the project and its activities, such as details about and the purpose of Reading Camp, they can publicize it at public forums. When conducting “community socialization,” whereby BELAJAR staff members introduce the project in new communities, it is important to invite local religious leaders and village heads.

 Boost parent participation in BELAJAR activities and active engagement with children. Caregivers who do not speak or write Bahasa Indonesia, for example, can be encouraged to tell more oral stories in home languages. Oral comprehension is linked to literacy skills, building a child’s vocabulary and logical reasoning skills. In some schools like School A, where grandparents effectively parent the children, it is important to emphasize to grandparents themselves, as well as to teachers and administrators, that all caregivers have a critical role in helping children learn to read and write. Next steps include:

o At teacher and master trainings, emphasize the critical roles that parents and grandparents play in children’s learning processes. Shift principals’ and teachers’ perceptions about grandparents and other caretakers— highlight that they can do much more than just deliver children to school.

o Build stronger relationship with parent committees at schools. Several BELAJAR staff members mentioned that relationships with parents

19 committees at schools can be strengthened. At some schools, like School C, the partnership is already strong and communication between the committee and BELAJAR is good. At other schools, BELAJAR can work more closely with parents committee because, as one BELAJAR staff member says, “they control the process of learning at school, pay attention to all other school stakeholders, as well as school’s physical needs.” BELAJAR should prioritize heads of parents committees (ketua komite orang tua) at schools when conducting community socialization, and also consider inviting heads of parent committees for a workshop in Atambua—similar to teacher training or master training sessions, but with more time for reflection and small group discussions.

5. Conclusion

By significantly shifting perceptions about mother tongue language use in schools in Belu, BELAJAR has boosted literacy skills in early grade students. Through teacher trainings, teachers are better equipped to build on mother tongue language knowledge, and feel comfortable using mother tongue language as a medium of instruction with the support of their school headmasters and school supervisors. Reading Camps and other community engagement activities have piqued students’ and parents’ interest in reading, and the initiatives have proven to be so successful that students are running out of new books.

The approach of the BELAJAR program to multilingual learning is exemplary. There are even more steps it can take to promote writing skills, to include grandparents and other caregivers, and to ensure the sustainability of the program’s achievements even after BELAJAR ends. In this way, BELAJAR and the communities it works with in Belu can provide even more innovative strategies for teaching literacy skills in multilingual settings.

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6. Appendices

a. List of interview activities

Role Number School or Organization Date 2nd Grade Teacher 1 School Y 7/28/2015 3rd Grade Teacher 1 School C 7/29/2015 School Supervisor 1 School C 7/29/2015 Focus Group Discussion: Parents 10 School C 7/29/2015 Religion, Physical Education, and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Grade 5 School B 7/30/2015 Teachers Parents 6 School B 7/30/2015 Headmaster and School Supervisor 2 School B 7/30/2015 1st, 2nd, 3rd,, and 5th Grade Teachers 4 School A 7/31/2015 Parents and Grandparents 7 School A 7/31/2015 Headmaster and School Supervisor 2* School A 7/31/2015 Master trainers (also School Supervisors) 3 -- 8/3/2015 Parents (2 are also Reading Camp Volunteers) 6* School B 8/4/2015 1st and 2nd Grade Teachers 2* School B 8/4/2015 Headmaster 1* School B 8/4/2015 Headmaster 1 School Z 8/5/2015 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Grade Teachers 4 School Z 8/5/2015 Focus Group Discussion: Teachers from BELAJAR 14 -- 8/6/2015 program schools Focus Group Discussion: Teachers from new BELAJAR 12 -- 8/7/2015 program schools Save the Children, Indonesia 1 8/7/2015 Literacy Boost Specialist Country Office Headmaster 1 School C 8/10/2015 Parent (also Head of the Parents’ Committee) 1 School C 8/10/2015 Program Manager, BELAJAR 1 Save the Children, Belu 8/10/2015 3rd Grade Teacher 1* School A 8/11/2015 Headmaster 1* School A 8/11/2015 Reading Camp Facilitators 4 -- 8/12/2015 Program Officers, BELAJAR 4 Save the Children, Belu 8/12/2015 Program Officer, BELAJAR 1 Save the Children, Belu 8/13/2015 1st Grade Teacher 1 School D 8/14/2015 Senior Program Manager, MEMBACA 1 Save the Children, 8/18/2015 Line (Office) Manager 1 Save the Children, Belu 8/19/2015

21 Save the Children, Indonesia 1 8/19/2015 Education Advisor Country Office TOTAL:

Number of responses 102 *Indicates respondents who were interviewed two 89 Number of unique interview respondents times

b. List of observation activities

Event Class Level Place Date Enumerators Training --- Nusantara Dua Hotel, Atambua 7/27/2015 Baseline Assessment Observation 2nd grade School Y 7/28/2015 Classroom Observation 3rd grade School C 7/29/2015 Classroom Observation 2nd grade School B 7/30/2015 Classroom Observation 2nd grade School A 7/31/2015 Classroom Observation 3rd grade School B 8/4/2015 1st and 2nd Reading Camp Observation School B 8/4/2015 grades Classroom Observation 2nd grade School Z 8/5/2015 Classroom Observation 3rd grade School C 8/10/2015 Classroom Observation 2nd grade School C 8/10/2015 Classroom Observation 3rd grade School A 8/11/2015

22 7. Bibliography and Further Reading

Au, K. and Jordan, C. (1981) Teaching reading to Hawaiian children: Finding a culturally appropriate solution. In H.T. Trueba, G.P. Guthrie and K. Au (eds) Culture and the Bilingual Classroom: Studies in Classroom Ethnography (pp. 139-52). Rowley, MA: Newbury House

Biemiller, A. (2005). Size and Sequence in Vocabulary Development: Implications for Choosing Words for Primary Grade Vocabulary Instruction.

Bronson, M. & Watson-Gegeo, K. (2008). The Critical Moment: Language Socialization and the Re(visioning) of First and Second Language Learning. In Duff, P. & Hornberger, N. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education (pp. 43-55). New York, NY: Springer. Cummins, J. (2001). Instructional Conditions for Trilingual Development. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 4(1): 65-71.

Ehri, L.C., Nunes, S.R., Stahl, S.A. and Willows, D.M. (2001) Systematic phonics instruction helps students learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel's meta- analysis, Review of Educational Research, 71(3): 393-447.

Freadman, A. (2014). Fragmented memory in a global age: The place of storytelling in modern language curricula. Modern Language Journal, 98(1): 373-385.

Goebel, Zane. (2015). Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hibbing, A.N. and Rankin-Erickson, J.L. (2003). A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Using Visual Images to Improve Comprehension for Middle School Struggling Readers. The Reading Teacher, 56 (8): 758-770.

Hornberger, N.H. (1995) 'Ethnography in linguistic perspective: Understanding school processes', Language and Education, 9(4): 233-248.

Madda, C.L., Griffo, V.B., Pearson, P.D., Raphael, T.E. (2011). “Balance in Comprehensive Literacy Instruction” in Morrow, L.M. and Gambrell, L.B. (Eds.) Best Practices in Literacy Instruction, Fourth Edition. New York City: The Guilford Press, pp. 37-63.

Nagy, W. E., & Scott, J. A. (2000). Vocabulary processes. Handbook of reading research, 3(269-284). Nation, P. (2013). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ng & Yeo (2013). Emergent Literacy in a Print-Rich Multilingual Home Environment. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 3(13): 146-155.

23 Sneddon, J.N. (2003). The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

Sterponi, L. (2011). Literacy socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs, & B.B. Schieffelin (Eds.), Handbook of language socialization (pp. 227-246). Malden, Mass.: Wiley- Blackwell.

Storch, S. A., & Whitehurst, G. J. (2002). Oral language and code-related precursors to reading: Evidence from a longitudinal structural model. Developmental Psychology, 38(6): 934-947.

Verhoeven, L. (2007). Early bilingualism, language transfer and phonological awareness. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 425-439.

Warriner, D. (2007). Introduction: Transnational literacies: Immigration, language learning and identity. Linguistics and Education 18 (3-4): 201-214.

Winskel, H. and Widjaja, V. (2007). Phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and literacy development in Indonesian beginner readers and spellers. In Applied Psycholinguistics, 28: 23-45.

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