Te reo Māori could launch on Rosetta Stone thanks to work of Auckland school, but it needs funding

Friday, 2 October 2020

An Auckland teacher has a plan to advance te reo Māori teaching “by 20 years” by getting it on one of the world’s leading language learning platforms.

Alwyn Poole of Villa Education Trust has been talking to American company Rosetta Stone for more than a year, and says the technology could be in classrooms within 12 months of securing funding.

He says it would bulldoze the roadblock that stands in the way of schools offering te reo and children learning it: the lack of teachers.

Students Jherikyng Ieremia (left) and Cassius Tuimaseve (right) already use Rosetta Stone for language learning.

While the Government has poured millions into Te Ahu o te Reo Māori, its te reo training programme for teachers, getting a significant chunk of the workforce through it is still years away.

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Alwyn Poole says getting te reo on Rosetta Stone could bring teaching forward by 20 years.

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“Sometimes you’ve got to hit things with a sledgehammer,” Poole says.

The sledgehammer is ready to swing, he says, just as soon as it’s got funding.

Poole plans to approach the Ministry of Education for funding once stakeholders are on board. The programme will cost about $1 million for each of the four levels, plus $100,000 in annual maintenance.

Rosetta Stone supports more than 30 languages, including seven endangered languages, which were developed for the platform in collaboration with indigenous communities in North America.

Every language in the endangered programme is a custom project, and they are all unique, Paul Franklin from Rosetta Stone says.

Te reo would be developed in conjunction with Māori language experts. It’s not a case of “Americans running the show from afar”, Poole says. All the aural elements will be spoken by Māori, images will be sourced locally and cultural background will be built into language learning.

Students Melemafi Tou’anga (left) and Kenneth Reddy (right) work on their language skills using Rosetta Stone.

It will be available to business and the public as well as schools and would allow the language to expand “exponentially”, Franklin says.

The plan is for Rosetta Stone to sit alongside a suite of video tutorials developed by Te Mete Lowman (Te Arawa, Tainui).

Lowman heads the Māori bilingual unit of Villa Education Trust and was one of the faces of lockdown learning, leading te reo lessons on TVNZ.

He’s seen Rosetta Stone used for language learning at schools and is adamant technology doesn’t replace the role of the teacher.

What it does do is let teachers learn alongside students. That takes away the need for time-consuming professional development courses that often stand in the way of teachers improving their te reo.

“In 10 years time if you have a programme like that running you’ll have a load of teachers with newfound confidence and competence when it comes to te reo Māori, and that can only be a good thing.”

Ministry of Education data shows three-quarters of students aren’t learning te reo Māori beyond basic words, greetings or songs. And while the Government aims to “integrate” te reo into schools by 2025, reports indicate that won’t necessarily mean students are able to hold a conversation because teachers lack the skills to get them to that level.

Learning te reo online and through video tutorials isn’t being held up as the ideal. “The tough thing is I still believe te reo Māori is an oral language that is best used and taught face-to-face,” Lowman says.

But that’s happening for less than a quarter of students.

The main challenges Lowman identifies are around making the language relevant to students in different parts of Aotearoa, both in terms of dialect and cultural context, and not having a dialogue of questions and answers between students and the teacher.

But despite these fish hooks, he says innovative solutions like this were needed.

“If we had a silver bullet all our teachers would come out of teacher training college and be able to facilitate the learning and teaching if basic te reo Maori, but I don’t know when that’s going to become a reality.

“So in lieu of that, we have the potential with the advancement of technology […] to really support at least a basic foundational understanding of and competency in te reo Māori.”