Become Pacific

Spc English Books

Bestsellers

A set of four short books, the first of a series of 11 in con trolled English with coloured

pictures inside, has recently be

come a bestseller in the South Pacific.

THE sets are sold by the South Pacific Commission Publications Bureau to education departments and missions. In a little more than four months, 17,000 copies of each book have been sold.

In February the SPC had a back log of 2,000 orders for sets. The Commission then planned to print a further 5,000, thereby keeping the price of the books at 15 cents and 25 cents each.

Main sales to date have been to the BSIP (3,500 sets), GEIC (2,800), Western Samoa (3,000), American Samoa (1,600) and the English speaking section of the New Hebrides (1,000).

Sets in hundreds have also gone to Niue, Nauru, Tonga (1,200), the Cooks, Guam and the Marshalls (1,000) and Caroline Islands of the US Trust Territory.

Start of series

The books are the start of a series of school readers produced as a result of the English language-teaching project of the SPC. The series will complement the oral school syllabus and assist the teaching of English as a foreign language throughout the Pacific. Teachers’ Handbooks are being produced to accompany the first few readers.

They consist of short stories about Islands family life told with essential sight-words and basic sen tences. Coloured pictures inside depict islanders, who are not specifically Melanesians or Polynesians so the books hold a regional rather than territorial appeal.

The project is the work of two ex perienced language-teaching experts.

Miss G. M. Tate (author of the Tate Oral English Course which has been in use in the Cooks and Western Samoa for several years) and Mr.

G. A. Pittman, the language-teaching specialist of the SPC.

During 1963-64, the SPC obtained the approval of its member nations

to start an English language-teaching project which has succeeded in placing language-teaching materials on a regional, rather than a territorial basis. Up to that time teachers in the Islands were using variable methods to teach the Islanders English and language-teaching materials were produced individually or on a territorial basis - Mr. Pittman has visited all main Pacific centres over the last two years and has made recommendations on syllabuses and books which are geared to the linguistic conditions of the region.

“Attention is given to the areas of difficulty of English which produced

errors—the tenses of the verbs and the plurality of nouns,” he says.

“The SPC series of readers is written for all the Islands. We hope to direct the teaching effort so as to avoid error and generally make the language more understandable to the children.

“Orders have exceeded our hopes and initial sales have been encourag ing and indicative of general interest.

Now we intend to go ahead and complete the series with eight readers.

“I think it is a very big step forward because a regional approach to teaching English will result in better and cheaper materials for the schools.”