A local woman from Simbu Province has a vision to set the standard of the English language in the country, through publishing education material.
Matilda Dimo, a participant of the Women in Business Expo, is an English teacher by profession. She has set up an organisation, which specialise in producing local curricular materials.
The Simbu English Teachers Association was established in 2007 and has already produced three books with one currently in its last process of editing.
The Simbu English Teachers Association, Director Matilda Dimo, says she began the organisation to make English become a Papua New Guinea languag,e in a PNG context, without changing the fundamentals of English.
Dimo said all education materials produced by the organisation gets screened and vetted by the Department of Education before publication, this is because all the topics in the education materials are all chosen by the Education Department.
The books are endorsed and produced by the Education Department’s Board of Studies.
The Simbu Education Teachers Association has produced three education materials, the Grade 9 English Resource book, Grade 9 Teachers Guide and the Grade 10 English resource book.
The organisation also publishes other education material, such as phonics and mathematics charts, and distributes a range of international documentaries and e-books.
Dimo says publishing the education materials has also been quite a challenge for the organisation.
“One of the biggest problems is that schools, headmasters, principals, and people who are in the position to make decisions to buy books, they are not.
Or if they are buying it, they are buying at a low cost. They do not budget enough for books, so if they do budget they do not look at education materials like this
These books are nationally accepted by Education Department for them to be in classrooms because students are examined on the contents of these books,” said the English teacher.
There are currently about 50,000 Grade 9 English books and 10,000 grade 10 English books in circulation around the highlands region.
Dimo is currently at the Women In Business Expo to promote her education materials.
