Population
It is common to think that because a language community is marginalized, it must not have many members, but analyzing the populations of the 61 languages involved in the project revealed that many of them were unexpectedly large. Even without including EGIDS 1 level languages, the mean size of the language communities involved was 1.3 million, and the median was 115,000. The disparity between the mean and median shows that a few larger languages weight the mean toward the high end, but even a median of 115,000 demonstrates that the materials created in these projects have the power to affect many lives. In total, the estimated population of all the language communities included in the study was 77 million people.
Characteristics of the Materials
Type of materials
Projects created a variety of materials, with some creating a single book, and others creating sets that included a variety of teaching and learning materials. The table below is mostly useful for showing the wide range of items included in the umbrella term "teaching and learning materials" because many categories overlap. To clarify terminology, "primers" are materials that specifically teach the individual sound-symbol connections in the orthography, and were one of the most common type of materials discussed by the participants. "Readers" include a collection of texts, possibly on a specific topic or with the intention to teach particular educational objectives. Readers overlap with storybooks, as some readers are compilations of stories. A number of projects focused on resources for teachers or whole classrooms, rather than books for individual students. One created a collections of stories to read aloud to children, and others created classroom materials like wall charts, big books, and word lists, while a couple projects created word lists intended to help teachers use correct academic vocabulary from the non-dominant language in the classroom. It should be noted that all of the projects in the study created paper materials; electronic media would have been difficult to manage in many of the contexts the participants described.