Suchergebnisse

The importance of mother-tongue literacy cannot be overemphasized. Regrettably, contemporary language literacy in Nigeria is fraught with constraints, such as the lack of orthography for a large proportion of Nigerian languages. The prospects for mass literacy are not encouraging, unless the federal government of Nigeria directs its efforts to developing orthography and literature in many unwritten indigenous languages. Moreover, there is a need to clarify, in terms of policy, what it means to be literate locally, regionally, and nationally. The newly established Commission for Adult and Non-Formal Education is charged with working out language policy for an adult literacy program in the country. The hope is that the commission will soon provide a realistic solution to the problem. Nigeria could thereby present a model program for other countries in similar circumstances to emulate, as necessary and appropriate.

Saba arrives in an East African refugee camp as a young girl, devastated to have had to abandon her books as her family fled. In this crowded and often hostile place, she must carve out her new existence, always protecting her mute brother Hagos. A moving portrait of a woman of courage and intelligence, an insider's view of the textures of life in a refugee camp, and a compelling story of exile, survival and love, Silence is My Mother Tongue bears vivid testimony to the power of imagination and illusion and the infinite reach of human minds to reinvent themselves. Both intimate and epic, Sulaiman Addonia's extraordinary, subversive and sensual second novel dissects society's ability to wage war on its own women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

The main aim of this study is to develop a valid and reliable measurement scale that can be used to identify the bilingual individual's attitude towards a mother tongue that is undergoing attrition due to a dominant second language. Scale research was applied to a total of 439 Kurdish-Turkish bilingual participants aged from 17-35 living in Turkey. An exploratory factor analysis and a reliability analysis were performed to determine the validity of the scale. The scale developed according to the results of exploratory factor analysis consists of 12 items in total from three dimensions, behavioral, cognitive and affective. KMO measure adequacy was found to be 0.874 and the strength of the relationship among variables by the Bartlett test was found to be 2047.005 and Chi-square output was statistically significant (p<0.05). The item factor loadings of the scale ranged from 0.845 to 0.613, and item total correlation values ranged from 0.671 to 0.478. In addition, the total Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was 0.874; accordingly, the Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficients for the sub-dimensions of the scale were estimated to be between 0.801 and 0.8769. Moreover, the fit indices of the model were examined and the Chi-square value (x2 = 256.01, N = 439, do = 51, p = 0.00) was significant. The fit index values of the scale were: AGFI=0.86, RMSEA= 0.096, SRMR=0.066, CFI=0.90, IFI=0.95, NFI=0.94, NNFI= 0.94. It was concluded that the scale developed for this study is valid and reliable, theoretically providing a basis for evaluating the attitude of individuals towards their mother tongues.

Leila Sebbar grew up in French colonial Algeria where her parents taught French to the indigenous children. The daughter of a metropolitan French woman and an Algerian, Sebbar is a croisée. At the height of the Algerian War, Sebbar left her homeland to pursue her university studies in France. She became a French teacher and made France her home. Sebbar writes in her mother tongue, but she treats it like a foreign language. Although she never learned Arabic and left Algeria, her paternal identity haunts all of her writings. Anchored by the notion of exile, Sebbar drifts between two shores as she seeks to personally come to terms with both a pied-noir and Algerian identity bequeathed by her parents. This dual and contradictory identity allows Sebbar to explore the colonial legacy inherent to immigration in France. Continually on the move or on the run, Sebbar's eccentric protagonists follow a geographical itinerary which acknowledges the common history and cultural heritage of Europe and the Arab world. In forging a new identity for the France of tomorrow, this génération métisse attempts to work through the torturous relationship between France and its former colonies that continues to mark cultural manifestations and political events in France.