ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces children’s writing in Nungon, a Papuan language with 1,000 speakers in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Nungon is the first language of all children of Nungon speakers in the region. The Nungon orthography is based on one developed for the closely related Yau language in the 1990s. Tireless efforts by Nungon elementary school teachers since the late 1990s have meant that two generations of Nungon-speaking children first learned to read and write in their own language. Among the challenges for children and educators is the fact that every village has a distinct Nungon dialect. Unlike English, Nungon syntax features clause chains, which educators are not trained to deal with. Eight writing samples were collected from students in grade 3 at Yawan Primary School who had their initial literacy instruction in Nungon at Yawan Elementary School. Five additional samples were collected from older students and adults for comparison. Results indicate that while genre theory is relevant to Nungon children’s early writing, two overarching discourse organization types actually determine syntactic structures within texts. Educators would do well to incorporate both meta-genres into curricula.
