Tom Veatch has developed a concept, preliminary implementation, and plan for further development of a scaleable, low cost, literacy education methodology which has the potential to have a significant impact on the global adult illiteracy.
Here is the basic idea: we create a graphical display of the sound-symbol correspondence, by providing pictures of the mouth, tongue, lips, and their movements, associated with symbols in the target alphabet. This graphical display of the sound-symbol correspondence contains enough information for a native speaker of the language to unambiguously identify the unique sound category associated with each symbol in the alphabet. Arranged in tables, the rows and columns are labelled with pictures, while the symbols of the alphabet occupy the cells of the table. In this way the whole display can be provided in as little as one sheet of paper for a given writing system.
Such displays are phonetic charts, familiar to phonologists and phoneticians who use them in the structural linguistic study of languages around the world. The key difference, the insight at the core of this method, is that the labels of the rows and columns can be phonetic drawings instead of the written names of phonetic features such as place and manner of articulation. No linguist seems to have thought of this and to have taken it to the point of practical application before now.
By using phonetic pictures to label and identify the symbols of a script, the interpretation of a phonological chart becomes accessible to an illiterate person. Once the basic idea of the table is explained - that it indicates a sound for each symbol in the table, which is described by the labelling pictures - then a smart and motivated illiterate person can take it from there, first to guess the sound for each symbol in the chart, then to memorize them, and finally to learn to recognize and use them.
With such an instrument it may be possible to enable a significant proportion of motivated and intelligent, illiterate recipients to develop basic literacy through self-study.
The significance of this method is that it does not require the time-consuming and costly personal attentions of a teacher, and therefore it can be distributed widely, even to the entire native-speaker population for a given language, within reasonable cost and time constraints.
Dr. Veatch seeks funding support of US$20,000 from sponsors to carry out experiments to validate this concept: a pilot study to test, prove, and improve the concept and its implementation for one target language: Tamil. (Tamil is an unusual language in that it happens to lack distinctive consonant voicing, so that the chart of consonant sounds is two dimensional rather than three dimensional; this simplifies the problem so that present concept is more likely to succeed.) If the pilot proves successful, we will seek additional support for increasingly scaled-up deployments of the system, first in South India and Sri Lanka, then, following additional tests, in multiple language areas gradually encompassing the entire world, anywhere illiteracy is widespread and phonetic writing systems are used (i.e., not in China, where ideographic writing is used).
Consider the costs and benefits, if such an approach could be proven effective. There are an estimated 900 million people in India, of which an estimated 48% to 64% are illiterate. Tamil speakers are counted as more than 58 millions in India, and 3 million more in Sri Lanka. (Numbers taken from the SIL 1996 ``Ethnologue: Languages of the World''). We may estimate that there are 28-37 million illiterates in Tamil Nadu, then.
Our pilot project is intended to develop both an effective self-study literacy instrument as well as accurate estimates of the cost of widespread distribution. If the average per-person cost is N cents (US$0.01) per illiterate person, then the full-deployment costs for the Tamil speaking area may be estimated as follows:
58,000,000 * 64% * $0.01 * N = $371,200 * N
If the cost multiplier, N, can be made sufficiently low, then an effective literacy campaign which reaches all the speakers of this entire language may be within the resources of charitable and government institutions. That is, we may be able to really solve the problem at scale.
Looking forward, we hope to apply this method to address other languages throughout the world. There are fifteen official Indian languages, and hundreds of written languages around the world, many of which have a large proportion of adult native speakers who are illiterate and have no access to literacy education. If the costs are low enough, and the method is effective, then we can reasonably hope to have a significant impact on the problem globally.
Your dedication to good charitable projects and your desire to make a positive difference in the world are evident; otherwise you would not be reading this. If successful, much of the credit must go to sponsors and sponsor institutions. Please consider sponsoring this project, so that together, we can change the world.