The Galela people of the Moluccas are bilingual to a certain extent in the national language, Indonesian. They currently receive all education in the national language, though there are recent efforts by local leadership to promote community-based literature production and use. This paper is a report of a baseline study from a selected sample to
measure the reading and writing ability in both the national and local
languages. The instrument design makes use ·of some locally authored
material and local interviewers.