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Re Bernadette's suggestion, which I heartily endorse: the usual <br>
Eurocentric tradition of language teaching (and even the <br>
supposedly 'scientific' research on language acquisition by <br>
Western psychologists) assumes that the "names of objects" <br>
are universally learned first, since they are "most salient in <br>
the observable context", but this supposed "universal" is shown <br>
to be a false projection from European languages, by the research<br>
of Muriel Saville-Troike and Ellen Courtney on Navajo and Quechua,<br>
respectively -- both verb-centered languages -- in which it was <br>
shown that children learned verb stems first (even though Navajo, <br>
like all Athabaskan languages, is predominantly prefixing and <br>
Quechua, like Aymara, is predominantly suffixing). Young children <br>
are somehow able to sort through the forest of affixes to extract <br>
the verb stem. The Navajo children come to recognize that there <br>
are a large number of prefix positions, even before they are able <br>
to produce appropriate fillers, and just utter an indistinct syllable <br>
for the slot. And of course they learn this all without any overt <br>
direct instruction!<br>
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Rudy<br>
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Rudy Troike<br>
University of Arizona<br>
Tucson, AZ USA<br>
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<div style="direction: ltr;" id="divRpF549904"><font color="#000000" face="Tahoma" size="2"><b>From:</b> ilat-request@list.arizona.edu [ilat-request@list.arizona.edu] on behalf of BSantaMaria [bernisantamaria@gmail.com]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Thursday, August 07, 2014 10:34 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> ilat@list.arizona.edu<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [ilat] colors, numbers, and animals<br>
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<div>Observed the same problem in local schools and I've encouraged some Apache language teachers to get away from these colors, numbers, months, animals, body parts, and to use more verbs in interactional or situational events. In view of the fact that Apache
language is one of the Athabaskan languages known for their complex verb morphologies (more than other types of languages), I would hope that teachers will use more verb teaching and that nouns will also be learned along with verb teaching in sentences.
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<div>Bernadette A. SantaMaria</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 9:13 AM, Peter Austin <span dir="ltr">
<<a href="mailto:pa2@soas.ac.uk" target="_blank">pa2@soas.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">In our Dieri language workshops in Australia we used a variety of methods, like teaching people simple commands, drawing human figures and naming body parts (rather than list format), games like "Simon says" and "Lingo Bingo" -- you can read
about some of this in various blog posts on <a href="http://dieriyawarra.wordpress.com" target="_blank">
http://dieriyawarra.wordpress.com</a>.
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<div>Peter Austin</div>
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