Abstract

Cultural literacy is individuals' and communities' ability to communicate within ethnic groups, countries, religions, or national traditions to preserve culture. Indonesia is rich in the diversity of regional languages as a cultural heritage. One of them is Kaganga Language as the ancestral language on Sumatra island. This paper investigates the Kaganga mobile application on the Android platform as a source of cultural literacy and learning media that supports local wisdom of regional languages in Indonesia. The application menu teaches the history of Kaganga, letters and numbers, punctuation marks, word exercises, and proverbs. Qualitative data collection involved 50 respondents in elementary schools. The feasibility testing from students said that the application was excellent in usability, effectiveness, and satisfaction. The experiments showed that the Kaganga mobile application had improved students' language skills and motivated students to learn the Kaganga language as part of cultural literacy. Furthermore, the application has been able to preserve the Kaganga language as a cultural heritage of the Indonesian nation to achieve cultural literacy skills as one of the life skills of the 21st century. Further studies, mobile applications can be integrated with learning outcomes measurement on the e-learning website to monitor learning progress continuously

Key words: cultural literacy, mobile learning, language skills, elementary schools