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For years, Elizabeth Keyton, popularly known as @eli.kutty on Instagram, has been using social media to not just learn Malayalam, but also teach the language through interactive, creative learning tools. One such tool is her debut picture book, "Davina Finds Her Vowels" (AdiDev Press), which aims to introduce children to Malayalam vowels.
The book, created in 2018 when Elizabeth was living in Dubai, was inspired by her friend’s daughter, Davina. The book takes young readers on a journey through Kerala’s fields, local markets, and buses, with each page teaching a set of vowels. Elizabeth handmade the book, drawing simple illustrations to help Davina explore Kerala through her own eyes.
This is Gurmeet’s first Malayalam-centric book, and he says combing through visuals of Kerala’s people, local culture, and watching Malayalam movies was done for the book’s research. The book’s cover features a marketplace design that took two weeks to color.
Elizabeth adds that the first version of the book took a month of writing, illustrating, and laminating the pages. She started sending the draft to various publishers in 2020 and finally connected with AdiDev. The book is priced at ₹499 and is available on adidevpress.com.
Why Choose Picture Books?
Picture books are wonderful tools to learn language because they open up the context for children and set a stage for them to see a relevance in what they are learning. Many parents want their kids to connect with their heritage language, but often fall into less engaging methods of memorisation, repetition, and frustrating corrections. Children are naturally curious and want to explore new ideas, and using picture books guides their imagination and makes it feel less forced as rote learning.
Future Plans
Eliza has written drafts for future books including all the Malayalam alphabet. She hopes to publish seven or eight books, each focusing on a certain cluster of sounds from the Malayalam language. She has also completed the draft of a Malayalam coursebook for adult beginners, structured to be as engaging and approachable as international texts for learning English, Spanish, etc.
