Storybooks Timor-Leste is a website for teachers, parents, and community members that aims to promote bilingualism and multilingualism in Timor-Leste. It makes 40 stories from the African Storybook available in the most widely spoken languages of Timor-Leste, in addition to Tetun and Portuguese. A story that is read in Tetun or Portuguese at school can be read in the mother tongue by parents and children at home. In this way, Storybooks Timor-Leste helps children to maintain the mother tongue in both oral and print form, while learning one of Timor-Leste’s official languages. Similarly, the audio versions of the stories can help beginning readers and language learners make the important connection between speech and text.
All 40 stories on the Storybooks Timor-Leste website come from the African Storybook – a groundbreaking digital initiative of the South African organization Saide, which promotes literacy for African children. The African Storybook has hundreds of stories in multiple African languages, as well as English, French, and Portuguese. The stories are openly licensed, which allows the Storybooks Timor-Leste team to repurpose them for a East Timorese audience. We are very grateful to the African Storybook and Saide for making the stories freely available under an open license.
We selected the 40 stories out of several hundred from the African Storybook, and sought to create a collection of stories of different lengths that balance the African origin of the stories with internationally relevant themes. There are traditional animal fables as well as contemporary stories about city life. Some stories cover serious topics like responsibility and gender equality. Others are just written to make you laugh. We hope that the universal values reflected in the stories will resonate with children across Timor-Leste.
Storybooks Timor-Leste has only been possible with the help of a large number of people, including translators, readers, proofreaders, and others who have been part of the process of making these stories available. We sincerely thank all contributors for their time and effort!
We are particularly grateful to the Storybooks Canada project, which has created the modular website on which Storybooks Timor-Leste is based.
Icons provided by FontAwesome (via Fontello) and Elegant Circles.