The material for the Greek language courses of Minority schools has been designed in such a way as to teach Greek as a second language and to address the special conditions of these schools: bilingual education; pupils with distinct cultural characteristics; whose mother tongue is not Greek and whose knowledge of Greek is limited or even nonexistent; lack of pre-school education; and a large number of small schools.

Basic Features of the New Material for Teaching the Greek Language

• It requires no prior knowledge of Greek, and it teaches systematically the structure of this language, together with its use, through texts illustrating various communication situations.
• It acknowledges the special cultural characteristics of the Minority.
• It has been designed to be friendly and attractive to pupils; it makes learning appear almost like a fun game, and emphasizes the practice of communication.
• It contains a large number of pictures and illustrations.
• It benefits from the presence of many Turkish words in the Greek language.
• It uses texts about, and pictures of, the children’s surrounding environment.
• It often has an interdisciplinary character, combining texts from various areas of knowledge.
• It is adaptable to various levels of knowledge of the Greek language, with texts and exercises of various degrees of knowledge, thus allowing the educators to do the appropriate adjustments for the needs of their pupils.
• It includes workbooks with the same type of exercises as those found in the textbooks, which are especially suitable for “quiet work” in cases where children from different grades are taught together, in the same classroom, due to the small size of some schools

The books of the Program for Educating Muslim Children are used, since 2000-2001, as books of the governmental “Organization for Publishing Instructional Books” (OEDB) at all Minority schools of Thrace, having before been tested by volunteer teachers for two school years.

Description of the New Books

For each grade, there are three to five basic books, which are supplemented by workbooks and material suggesting written and oral activities. Instead of the usual “text anthologies”, the program recommends the use of extracurricular books which were sent to, and are available in, the libraries of Minority schools. 

In the books for the first three grades, stories with children from different cultural groups as protagonists unfold episode-by-episode. The goal of these stories is to familiarize the pupils with the basic vocabulary and structure of the Greek language and to establish some motives for the comprehension and production of speech and for exercises in reading and writing. 

In the third grade, the books introduce the conjugation of nouns and verbs, in a way that children could understand from the context of the text how the same words take various forms. 

The books of the other three grades include thematic units --similar to the ones the pupils will encounter in secondary school -- where various types of texts are employed (from newspapers, from literary texts, from advertisements, from cartoons, etc.). These texts are accompanied by exercises intended to enhance their reading comprehension and induce them to speak and write. There are also grammar exercises and word games (crossword puzzles, hangman, scrabble, etc.) 

The terminology (meta-language) of grammar is introduced judiciously and gradually from the third grade onwards (e.g., the parts of speech, the tenses of the verbs, etc.).