Research Masters at University of Cape Town: I’ve begun my Masters research on writing practices at a Mozambican primary school. I’m still awaiting final acceptance and ethics clearance but hope to do my first fieldwork in February 2012.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Tutoring at the SOZO EduCentre: I tutor teens in English (mostly) as well as head up a project in which the teens produce a magazine of their writings and artwork.
Books for African Languages: I’m quite interested in the future (or lack thereof) of books in African languages. Current strategies are not working at the same time that there is a growing “orality” movement (at least in missions circles). I’m convinced that more research is needed in order to determine the effectiveness of oral strategies and also innovations are needed if books in African languages are to have a future. Here’s one example of my writing on the subject: Minority language Bibles are an endangered species
PAST PROJECTS
Library usage by South African students: I did quite a formal research project on two local libraries and how children use them to complete their schoolwork. See these two presentations for results of that research:
Becoming an electronic author: Using old posts from my Lingamish blog, I published a number of books this year using the excellent Smashwords site. I learned a lot about what it takes for an African author to published and the relative merits of paper and electronic publishing. See this series of posts: Ebooks for African Authors.
Scripture Reading in a South African church: In 2011, I did a short study of Scripture reading at our church. I was interested in how much of the service was devoted to reading and also in the interaction between the reader, the listeners and the overhead projection which was often a different Bible version from the one being read. I regret that I haven’t had time to process the data but here is a small sample: Amount of time spent reading Scripture in a church service.
Languages of Mozambique website and CD-ROM: This project involved bringing together publications in more than a dozen Mozambican languages and publishing them electronically on a website (http://lidemo.net) and a CD-ROM. I was coordinator for the project but it was only possible due to the contributions of many, many people including those who originally created the publications and also others who helped format them for electronic publishing.
Audio Scriptures in Mozambique: Between 2007 and 2010 I worked on a number of Scripture recording projects including an entire Portuguese New Testament using Mozambican voices, and Nyungwe and Sena Scriptures. I was also involved in training quite a number of students at Hefsiba in the use of the Zoom H2 recorder which they then used for recording Scripture, songs, sermons and testimonies. In 2011 I organized the ESCUTAI conference in Beira, Mozambique in which representatives of organizations involved in recording and distributing audio Scripture in Mozambican languages met to discuss how we might better collaborate.
Nyungwe Publications: From 1999 to 2007 I was involved in the production of numerous publications including Bible translations and literacy materials. I also ran several writers workshops for Nyungwe in Tete, Mozambique.
