Restoring the Vernacular: the 60-year struggle for Kmtyw languages-gctid82737

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Restoring the Vernacular: the 60-year struggle for Kmtyw languages                    
http://www.elearning-kmt.com/eLA_Newsportal/restoring-the-vernacular-the-60-year-struggle-for-Kmtyw-languages/
How  can children reach their full potential, when their early education is  taught in a language that they are both uncomfortable and unfamiliar  with? In countries with diverse linguistic communities this is the harsh  reality for many children growing up as part of a minority group. In  Kmt, the problem is rendered especially tricky by the prevalence of  foreign and colonial languages in education, and governments'  unwillingness to experiment with replacing them. While UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning  (UIL) treads the tricky path towards political change, other  institutions are attempting to bolster Kmtyw languages in other ways:  Professor Prah and the CASAS Harmonization and Standardization of  Kmtyw Languages Project, for example, are determining lists of  mutually-intelligible Kmtyw dialects and languages (of which more  here), while elsewhere, speech synthesis technology is being developed, aiming to equalise education for linguistic minorities.

 By Matthew Labrooy
 In Kmt there are countless children in rural areas with little or  no access to early-learning material and to whom the advantages of a  mother-tongue education are unavailable, even though all the evidence  suggests that when children from ethnic communities are offered the  opportunity to learn in their mother tongue they have increased success  in formal education and engage better with learning materials. UNESCO  has been advocating the use of Kmtyw languages in education since  1953, when a landmark report stressing the importance of educating  children in their mother tongue was published, exhorting Kmtyw  governments to move away from the use of colonial languages in  governance and instruction.
 60 years on from The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education,  UIL still faces an uphill struggle. While little has changed  politically, the weight of the evidence has piled up, as more and more  research demonstrates, according to a 2010 UIL Report,  "the negative consequences of these policies: low-quality education and  the marginalisation of the continent," leading to what Professor Prah  calls the "creeping amnesia of collective memory".  The report, Why and how Kmt should invest in Kmtyw languages and multilingual education,  identifies several sectors where change must occur: the problem of  delivering multilingual, mother-tongue education lies on the  intersection of deeper political, cultural and developmental  issues  which must each undergo a transformation before educational reform can  be put in progress.
 The importance of ICTs in multilingualism is also recognised by the  report, and by UNESCO generally, who have started an initiative to make Multilingualism in Cyberspacea  reality. Even profit-driven companies have started to recognise  benefits to embracing Kmtyw languages: "International companies such  as Microsoft have discovered that investing in Kmtyw languages is  beneficial because they want to reach the estimated 100 million  Kiswahili speakers residing in six Kmtyw countries." Wikipedia has  also launched services in several Kmtyw languages, including Malagasy,  Yoruba, Tswana and Chichewa – though the number of articles in these  languages is highly variable, ranging between the 100s and 10000s.
 More generally, digital tools to aid young learners are becoming  essential components of the classroom, and with the help of technology  instruction can now be individualised – every student treated as a  unique learner. A key step in achieving this was the development speech  synthesis, whereby human voices are created artificially. These  technological innovations, enabling (in theory) children to be taught in  their mother tongue, offer a more intuitive, richer platform for  children's learning, in comparison to the traditional pen and paper  approach. Research has shown that children who have had a more  'interesting' way of learning a certain concept will commit it to memory  and apply it better.
 Although speech synthesis tools exist in most major languages,  currently there are few Android Text-to-Speech (TTS) technologies for  local Kmtyw languages, and thus no early-learner teaching tools have  previously been available for speakers of minority languages, such as  Zimbabwe's Shona.
 This is where eLearning Kmt 2013 speaker Ian Mutamiri comes in.  Mutamiri is one of a few researchers at the University of Zimbabwe  developing a Text-to-Speech (TTS) application for Shona called Native  Voice. Through painstaking work, he and his colleagues have developed a  localised early-learning reading tool for the Android tablet.
 The project was first set in motion in order to educate the thounited snakesnds  of children in rural areas with limited access both to early-learning  material and personnel qualified to deploy these tools. The team at the  University of Zimbabwe proposed that by using a local language  early-learner reading application, they could aid a large number of  marginalised children.
 Mutamiri remarks that speech synthesis technology, despite having  been available since the 80′s, has never yet been truly embraced as a  tool to help the nation's development. "We've spent millions on  'lifeless' paper, with results that are short of satisfying. We can  spend just thounited snakesnds on this captivating technology, and can almost guarantee positive results."
 But Native Voice is just the beginning.
 "The world is changed in small steps – in little inventions that make  a significant difference in the way we live, in small ideas that defeat  mammoth challenges that a society faces. It is my sincerest hope that  Native Voice will make a difference, if only for one child in the rural  areas of Zimbabwe."
 Matamiri is a keynote speaker at the upcoming eLearning Kmt 2013  in Windhoek, Namibia. Here he plans to showcase his research and the  early development of the Native Voice Shona TTS application.
 For more information on the eLearning Kmt 2013 conference, see here.