Our new email address...

jim.n.tania@gmail.com

Be sure and make a note of it and add us to your 'approved senders' list!


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Australia Wildlife

I dont know the names of most of these things but they are interesting pictures anyway. These are from an afternoon at Australia's Dandenong National Park. I went for a walk there with a couple other girls last Friday after class.

this is a small kangaroo type thing about the size of a small dog. I have asked around but still dont know what it is called...

Austrailia's famous Kookaburra Bird...

the forest was full of tall straight trees and these big tree fern things...

this is a Liar Bird (about the size of a chicken), evidently they copy the sounds of other birds...

We also saw Black Cockatoos but they took off before I could get a picture. That will have to do for now. Must get to bed, morning comes early.

Love,
Tania


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What is Literacy?

As one of our first assignments we were asked to write up a personal belief statement answering the question - What is literacy? Does it necessarily have only to do with reading and writing? What about 'computer literacy'? There are no wrong answers, it is basically just a survey of the understanding of literacy.

So, what do YOU think... How would you define literacy?


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What We Learned in Summer School

This post doesn't have any photos,
but the previous one does...
scroll down to see it

We've been wanting to give you an update to let you in on what it is we learned during our first six weeks here. The summer course was hard work, but we learned so much. I don't know how interested you are in the details but in case you are, here goes...

The six week course mainly gave an introduction to linguistics and cross-cultural work with a focus on language learning. In 'Language Learning' we learned strategies and methods of learning any language but particularly helpful if the only resource you have is a language helper and nothing else, even if you and the language helper do not know the same language. It was actually a lot of fun. For our practice language we worked on 'Whitesands', one of the languages of Vanuatu. It was very interesting. At the end of six weeks (12 sessions) we were able to carry on a conversation talking about things we had learned and eliciting new material too. Can you believe it?! I would never have thought it was possible. This was also a great chance for us to get to know our language helper. We will be working with him in Vanuatu as he is the chairman of the Vanuatu Bible Translators (VBT).
Another of the courses was 'Language Awareness/Intro to Linguistics' (aka Grammar). Using languages from around the world we learned how to break down and analyze language data to figure out how the language is structured - clauses, phrases, words, morphemes, tense, mood, aspect, pronouns, noun classes, and so on... I don't know how they did it, but they made this class very interesting. By the end of the six weeks, we were taking what we learned from this class and eliciting material in 'Whitesands' to analyze. We found some very interesting stuff including either four or five noun classes, and a very complicated pronoun system.
Another of the classes was Phonetics. We learned the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was like learning another language. We learned to read, write, and produce it. This was tied into our language learning in that we transcribed what we were learning in 'Whitesands' in IPA, and we were also assessed by transcribing some longer discourses. What we learned in Phonetics and Intro to linguistics was further applied in a research paper on our target language group. We each had to make a presentation about the language we would be working in. Because we don't know exactly which language we will go to yet, each of us on the team either picked one of the possible future languages, or a neighboring one.
So much of what we learned in the past six weeks are things we had never even thought about before.
So there are the highlights. Of course there was more to it than what is here. We also had a course in Anthropology. As part of the course we had two field trips to make cultural observations. We visited a Coptic Orthodox Church for the Epiphany service, and we also visited a Mosque to observe prayer and interview people. The focus of this course was to help us know about aspects of culture that we should keep in mind in cross-cultural ministry.
We definitely feel like we have a much better awareness of the complexities of language than what we came here with. We also feel like this course is practically equipping us for the work to be done. It isn't just head knowledge, but practical skills.

Our one week break before the first semester starts is just about over. First semester will include Introduction to Literacy, Phonology, Grammar/Structure of Languages, Ethnology, Sociolinguistics, and Orthography. We are told it isn't as treacherous as the six week course because it is spread out over more time. They tell we will actually have weekends and evenings free, but we will see.

Thank you for your prayers and support that make it possible for us to be here.


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