David Ker in Africa
I have worked in Mozambique in the areas of Bible translation, linguistic description, materials development and electronic publishing.
I'm currently writing a Masters dissertation in Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. My thesis is "Writing practices in a bilingual Mozambican primary school."
I'm a member of Wycliffe Bible Translators USA serving with SIL Mozambique. The information contained on this blog is my own and doesn't necessarily reflect the position or policies of any of the organizations with which I am affiliated.
Yearly Archives: 2011
African writers writing in African languages
I stumbled upon a very interesting article by Nigerian author, Wale Okediran, on some of the contradictions involved in African writing. In Bashir Tofa and his eight books, Tofa published his books in Hausa, but they failed to make much … Continue reading
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Feriados em Moçambique (Holidays in Mozambique)
Mozambique has an impressive list of “feriados”–holidays that sometimes pop up unexpectedly if you’re an expat living or visiting there. I’m making a note of these here because I’ll be traveling quite a bit to Mozambique this year and don’t … Continue reading
Posted in Kanyimbe
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Golf clubs and literacy levels
It’s pretty common to read stories on the news about “25% of kids don’t have a single book in their house” or something similar. The implication is that kids don’t have books, therefore kids don’t read, therefore the world is … Continue reading
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LACE: Language and Culture Exploration
I wrote several posts recently about language and culture exploration. They are available on my Lingamish blog: Find a local Elmer Language Acquisition For Humans GLUE: The language learning technique you really need The best language learning activities (and some … Continue reading
Posted in Kanyimbe
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Mobiliteracy: ours and theirs
Yesterday at the YWAM base in Muizenberg I led a session on “Language and Culture Exploration.” I was actually asked to talk about “language acquisition” and “developing a people profile.” But in thinking about those topics I realized that my … Continue reading
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Developer or Researcher
Anna Robinson-Pant has a very interesting chapter called “Women’s Literacy and Health: Can an ethnographic researcher find the links?” in the book Literacy and Development: Ethnographic Perspectives. The issue she is dealing with is the pressure faced by development organizations … Continue reading
Posted in Research
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Trouble all about my soul
Click on the player to listen to the recording: I’m Troubled About My Soul (This rather intriguing photo is several times associated with Lillie Knox but I’m uncertain what it depicts.) The recording is from 1937, Lillie Knox singing Troubled … Continue reading
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Adding an ANT to the New Literacy Studies picnic
Bruno Latour says there are four things wrong with Actor-network theory: “actor,” “network,” “theory” and the hyphen. I think there’s really only one thing wrong and that is Bruno Latour. Or maybe it is his frenchness that renders his every … Continue reading
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Ideological foundations of Mozambican education
In trying to understand the changing ideological aims of Mozambican education, I’ve been greatly helped by Judith Marshall’s Literacy, Power and Democracy in Mozambique and Feliciano Chimbutane’s Rethinking Bilingual Education in Postcolonial Contexts.Marshall gives more detail on the colonial and … Continue reading
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I’m a really fast writer. So working for four hours and only cranking out 740 words is crazy. I guess this academic writing thing must be different from blogging in some way.
October 18, 2011
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