21 • Tamang literacy class would help the Tamang people identify letters.
• The program would help Tamang people preserve the Tamang language and would make it easy for them to understand the subjects taught in the
language. • Once the Tamang people can read and write in their own mother tongue,
they will be able to learn the national language more easily. When Tamang villages recognize the necessity of running a literacy program in
their communities, the ETLT helps them form a class management committee and train facilitators whom the committee selects. The committee provides facilities for running a
literacy class in their village and raises at least fifty rupees equivalent to 0.68 US dollars from each participant of the class to send to the ETLT office in Kathmandu ETLT
Progress Report July-September, 2010. Since November, 2008, the ETLT has been running three different kinds of MT-
based adult literacy courses: basic, advanced, and transitional courses. The basic course is run for seven months, using the ET Primer 1 and 2 which uses the Key Word approach.
The advanced course teaches functional skills for five weeks using the advanced
Arithmetic workbook
. The transitionalbridging course is run for three months to teach Nepali literacy to the finishers of the basic course.
By 2010, ETLT had run seventeen literacy classes in the villages of five different districts in Nepal and produced 397 graduates in total ETLT progress report April-June,
2010. Based on the result of the second baseline survey, ETLT plans to run another twenty literacy classes in 2011 ETLT progress report July-September, 2010.
1.4 The Problem
This study aims to investigate various aspects of literacy assessment, to develop
22 suitable standards and descriptions of skill levels of adult literacy, and then to propose
guidelines for developing a literacy assessment instrument, which can be generalizable cross-linguistically in the context of Nepal, by devising the first sample draft of a direct
literacy measure for the Eastern Tamang adult learners. Despite the many shifts of policy adopted by the different Education Plans of
Nepal and the unstable political situation, some of the MT-based adult literacy programs have made good progress in program management and material productions in the
context of the ethnic cultures especially in the 2000s. Both the NFEC Policy in 2007 see Appendix D and the SSRP in 2009 promulgated by the MoE under the GoN employ the
new strategies of NFE for adults and out-of-school youths to learn literacy and life skills in their first language or mother tongue. Thus, more MT-based adult literacy programs
are likely to be planned and implemented by additional indigenous language communities and local government agencies in accordance with the new NFE Policy and the SSRP.
The Eastern Tamang language community has been increasingly motivated to learn how to read and write in their own language due to the positive results of the MT-
based literacy classes run by the ETLT. Many other Tamang villages have asked the ETLT to facilitate literacy programs for them. The increasing demand for literacy classes
among the Eastern Tamang communities has led the ETLT to prepare not only for expanded programs with more teacher training and material production, but also for the
evaluation of program effectiveness. In July 2010, the ETLT invited an external evaluator, Mr. Ari Vitikainen, who is
working as a MLE consultant in Laos, for their first program evaluation. According to
23 reports Varenkamp, personal communication, July 2010, the ETLT received a positive
report, in general, of their literacy program. The evaluation was, however, about general program organization and management. It did not include specific measurement of their
program participants ‘ literacy performance level as an indicator of the impact of the
program. Recently, Milan Tamang, the ETLT literacy program coordinator, devised a
simple evaluation sheet to measure the participants ‘ mastery of reading and writing in
ET. It contains four major testing elements: 1 writing the names of five objects pictured; 2 two reading comprehension questions from a short passage with thirty words in four
sentences; 3 building four words out of sixteen syllables given in a table; and 4 four arithmetic questions
– two of addition and two of multiplication. It is a written test similar to the examination for school pupils. However, it is too simple to measure the
more general literacy skills of program participants. Therefore, ETLT still needs to construct a specific evaluation system and research methodology to measure more
precisely the learning outcomes of their participants. In recent years there has been a growing need for a more objective and systematic
evaluation of educational achievement of adult literacy programs in Nepal. A report of the South Asia EFA Mid-Term Policy Review Conference June 16-19, 2008,
Kathmandu, Nepal presented recommended policies, strategies, and innovative approaches based on the lessons of successful examples in the context of the respective
target groups. One of the strategies of the allocation of the education budget is directly related to objective literacy assessment, stated as follows:
24 ―In order to demonstrate that allocating funds to adult literacy is effective and
valuable: • Advocate and mobilize communities mass media – TV, Radio, various
ICT, print, including digital; • Mobilize communities through Community Learning Centers CLCs and
community based learning programs to provide life long learning; • Providing relevant content for literacy, life skills, and skill training; ….
• Utilizing literacy assessment rather than self-report to provide a more accurate picture of literacy development in the country;
• Provide literacy in workplaces‖ UNESCO, 2008. Unfortunately, as Wagner 1990:112 has noted, evaluation resources are least
available in the Third World societies where illiteracy appears greatest. According to Comings et al. 1992:212-213, seven evaluations
– five adult literacy programs and two out-of-school child programs
– have been conducted under the National Literacy Program in the rural villages of Nepal between 1986 and 1990. The evaluations collected
data of drop-out rates, female participation, language of instruction, skill acquisition, skill retention, changes in attitudes and knowledge, effects on the primary schools, and costs.
The tests for the level of literacy skill included tasks ranging from simple word or number recognition to more difficult comprehension, writing, and math problem solving
in Nepali. However, those tests were not normed to standards, thus were not an exact measure of learning or general skill development even though they gave an indication of
learning Comings et al., 1992:221. The central problem is this: how do the graduates of the Eastern Tamang MT-
based adult literacy program know whether they are literate or not and if they are, what level of literacy have they attained? These questions lead to subsequent questions as
follows: • What are the competencies skills they should acquire to be called
25 ―literate‖?
• What are the criteriastandards which correspond to different levels of literacy in minority languages?
Therefore, the problem of this study is 1 to investigate types of literacy
assessment, key elements, and test components of literacy skills, 2 to develop suitable standards and performance levels of adult literacy, and 3 to propose a cross-linguistic
guideline for developing a literacy assessment instrument in the context of Nepal by devising the first sample draft of such an instrument for the Eastern Tamang mother
tongue-based adult literacy program in Nepal.
1.5 Significance of Study
