by Geoffrey Churchman
As people are aware, the Jacinda regime wanted all government departments including local councils to include Te Reo Maori headings as well as the English ones in all signage and documents. In KCDC’s case, “a change to the agenda and minutes template to include te reo Māori headings was implemented in September 2021. The change was initiated by an independent organisational review conducted in 2019 by Martin Jenkins which triggered a review of all governance documents.”
This inclusion resulted in KCDC placing Maori translations ahead of the English versions in headings in agendas and minutes, which implies that is the most important language in the country when as everyone knows, only about 1% of the population are fluent speakers and only about another 2% have a working knowledge of it.
While irritating for most people, the practice of putting the Maori translation before the English original creates a big problem for those who suffer from dyslexia.
In his most recent article, Mike Styles says that about 10% of the population suffer from it. The impact of it for sufferers who have difficulties reading English with which they have difficulties to start with, is amplified with a language that they can’t comprehend anyway. They need to make their way along a line of text until they come across something that they can start to make sense of, and that takes a while.
There is actually a United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) that governs this sort of thing. It is an international human rights convention. Its principles include ‘Full and effective participation and inclusion in society” and “Respect for difference and acceptance of persons with disabilities as part of human diversity and humanity.”
There is an obligation “to promote the availability and use of new technologies, including information and communications technologies, mobility aids, devices and assistive technologies, suitable for persons with disabilities.” In the definitions, “Communication includes languages, display of text.”
So does the Council care about its breach of this? Apparently not.
One of our readers, Gerard Black, has engaged in lengthy correspondence on the subject with KCDC which has skirted around this issue. “I would like to make Council aware that I have discussed this issue with many people that don’t have my specific challenges and they all agree that separating the two languages would greatly improve their ability to read and assimilate Council news and other matters as provided by Council.”
Initially he proposed that the KCDC produce two sets of documents, one in English and one in Maori. Unsurprisingly, the KCDC rejected this (response below).
As our editors see it, the simple solution is just to place the Maori translations of headings after and not before the English. This should keep Wokesters happy.
As an example of a functional, accessible website that caters for two languages, we need not look further than one of our own Government websites, that for petitions where there is a big bold heading in English and underneath a smaller Maori translation; and people can opt for either English or Maori for the rest: https://petitions.parliament.nz
I agree with you Geoffrey, English should be our first language and that being so it should be taught thoroughly and effectively in our schools. But this is currently not the case. The result is too many children not achieving proficiency in literacy and hence having a two thirds chance of ending up on welfare or jail. We in NZ have the longest tail of underachievement in the developed world.
My main issue is the complexity Te Reo is giving beginning readers. Whereas Te Reo is totally transparent meaning there are no exceptions to the sounding out of the letters in written words . In contrast English ,recognized as the most difficult European language , takes at least twice as long to learn to read compared with the other languages because of the many words from various languages it has it has absorbed over the centuries.
Take for example the pronunciation in English of the vowel ‘u’ which has nine ways of being sounded out. Consider words bury, busy, bush, truth, umbrella, ukulele, quick,failure and also a silent u in build. All the ‘u’ s have different sounds. This makes English spelling fiendish.
Adding in , for example , the Maori vowel u long and short, pronounced differently , I have found adds great confusion for an already struggling beginner reader. The end result of this campaign to swamp our land with Te Reo is an even higher rate of English illiteracy which in NZ is now already the highest in the English speaking world.
Dyslexia is a complex condition with many causes, but it is recognized included highly in the causes is ineffective teaching methods which specifically fail to include early , systematic , explicit, phonics and sight words and backed up by revision, reinforcement and consolidation. This is proved by cognitive and neuroscience. As I have stated I know of no school in this Kapiti area which is teaching phonics as thoroughly as my mother Doris did. Her failure rate in achieving literacy with dyslexia or other various reading problems were close to one or two percent. Ten percent , of dyslexics , is much too high a figure and indicates wrong teaching methods.