Endangerment of Creole Languages
Fabula authoring tool, which can be used to create own stories with text and sound in the two languages of the bilingual pair.
3/9/00
by David Sutcliffe
Good to see that once again we have a question that can really gather momentum.
Regarding the question of education in the local vernacular being isolating. There are so many examples that give the lie to that idea: what about Welsh medium schools in Wales where English is a subject on the timetable like French is in schools in England. How far can you go with Welsh alone? But that is irrelevant since there are now virtually no Welsh monolinguals, just as there are few Dutch monolinguals. Or what about Catalonia where I live, where more than 95% of state schools and most private schools have Catalan as the medium of instruction - even though Catalan is a language without a state (without an army or navy as John Holm once put it) spoken by some 6 million with first-language fluency. People also speak Spanish and a growing number speak English.The local language is thriving, and isolation is not an issue.
But this brings me to a connected issue. The Ebonics in school furore showed that few schools in the USA will be left in peace to use AAVE as the point of departure from which to learn to read and go on to develop standard English. I'd really like to be proven wrong on that point.
Not least because at the present time I am working as a member of a European Union project on the development of multi-media bilingual materials. This is the Fabula project, organized from the University of Reading, UK. Under the auspices of Viv Edwards and Frank Monaghan.
The software developed for this project consists of a CD ROM reader with a very entertaining story ("I've got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts") in full colour with bilingual text - the same text presented in two languages, one of the two languages being a "stateless language". So for example, in one version there is Welsh at the top of the page and English at the bottom, another version intended for Spain has Catalan at the top of the page and Spanish at the bottom , and so on. There is sound also so the text can be heard, bubbles with the words actually spoken can be activated to appear, plus other interactive features.
Then there is the authoring tool, which can be used to create own stories with text and sound in the two languages of the bilingual pair. Illustrations - drawings, magazine pictures, etc. - are then imported into the page format. This software will be available free, and /or installed in the CD ROM (again an extra given free of charge).
So this kind of approach can be very usefully applied to any language (variety) pair that coexist in a given society. I would be very, very interested in seeing this applied
a) to AAVE and standard English
and
b) to Jamaican Creole (or some other Caribbean Creole) and standard English.
Just imagine that, and how effective it would be. It uses the two ways of saying things as a teaching stimulus, secondly, as interactive multimedia it is attractive; thirdly, the vernacular is given "standing". Not only that, but in the US context, such bilingual and electronic-based materials will probably beless "threatening" to parents and authorities than monolingual vernacular materials on paper (conventional readers, etc).
I hope this creates interest, and / or can be passed on to teachers who would be interested.
David Sutcliffe david sutcliffe@trad.upf.es
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Rambla 30-32
08002 Barcelona
Fabula
Is an easy-to-use program which allows children and teachers to create their own bilingual, multimedia storybooks complete with digital photos. Bilingual stories help children learn other languages by using words, sounds and pictures to explore the similarities and differences. Fabula can be used to create stories in any pair of languages, but the five nation team which worked to develop this package – teachers, children, software engineers, translators and researchers – is particularly interested in the lesser used languages of Europe, such as Welsh, Irish, Catalan, Basque and Frisian.
