Scarce resources hobble Dene native language efforts

[Susan Penfield]

Thanks for this, Rudy...
I'd like to add offer a similar reminder concerning the construction of
dialogue-based language lessons. The temptation and all-to-common approach
is to take English conversational patterns and plug in native language
lexical items. This ignores what might be important cullturally-determined
rules for conversation -- for instance, something as simple as 'How's the
weather?" (introducing a conversation with a question) would not be the norm
among many of the elders I have worked with.
Susan
----- Original Message -----
From: "phil cash cash" <cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU>
To: <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 3:24 PM
Subject: Re: [ILAT] Scarce resources hobble Dene native language efforts


> ----- Forwarded message from rtroike at U.Arizona.EDU -----
>
> Mia, Jan, et al.,
>
> What Mia is doing sounds fascinating. Since you are using Lakoff &
> Nunez' embodied perspective, I imagine you know about the big
> ethnoscience
> project of Ozzie Werner some years ago on the atlas of Navajo
> terminology
> for the human body. That seems relevant to this approach.
>
> One caution in general about adapting or translating materials
> from English/Spanish/French etc. to native languages is that these
> Eurocentric materials assume a universal categorization of the world
> that
> needs to be problematized and subjected to ethnographic examination for
> each case. A couple of examples are pertinent. Some years ago when
> Muriel Saville-Troike was working on a Navajo kindergarten curriculum,
> she found that although Navajo has a term for the hexagonal shape of the
> hogan 'house' (how many English speakers are readily familiar with
> 'hexagon'?), there was no term for Plato's supposed universal triangle,
> which available math and reading-readiness materials took for granted.
> In visiting schools on the reservation, she found that teachers had had
> to make up their own term for 'triangle' (after all, the code-talkers
> made up terms for tanks and airplanes), but each teacher had come up
> with a different expression. If off-the-shelf materials are to be used
> which presuppose the universality of certain categorizations, it should
> be checked and established first whether there are native categories
> and recognized labels which correspond to these, or whether these will
> have to be introduced as "foreign" categories/concepts, and labels
> invented and standardized for them.
>
> One cannot always be sure that just because native speakers are
> developing or consulting on materials development, their intuition will
> securely flag problems such as this. The difficulty here is that most
> native consultants or developers have themselves been educated largely
> through the dominant language, and have unconsciously internalized the
> categories of the dominant language/culture and have accepted the
> (unrecognized) ethnocentric assumption that these categories are
> 'natural'
> and universal. Thus an ethnographically-oriented examination of the
> native lexicon may be necessary/desirable to raise consciousness as to
> the differences between native conceptualizations and Eurocentric ones.
> (Even fluent bilinguals are rarely conscious of comparative differences
> between their own language and the second language, and most speakers
> of most languages are largely unaware of the structure and categories
> of their own language. Someone -- perhaps on this list -- recently
> remarked on the surprise of a German speaker when it was pointed out
> to him that the German word for 'glove', Handschuh, was literally
> "hand-shoe", i.e. shoe for the hand.)
>
> A few years ago when I was consulting on a project to develop
> materials for Mayan languages in Guatemala, I found that native speakers
> were taking the standard Spanish-language materials and, without
> changing
> illustrations, supplying Mayan (Mam, Quiche, Kekchi, etc.) labels for
> them. In one lesson devoted to practicing recognizing groups and giving
> appropriate numbers for them (three trees, two houses, etc.), I found
> that the categories presumed by the Spanish texts were not being
> questioned by the developers, who were themselves all elementary school
> teachers who had been teaching the materials in Spanish. After some
> discussion, it emerged that the distinction between 'arbol' (tree) and
> 'arbusto' (bush) did not fit the native categorizations of types of
> plants, and that to apply the native labels in teaching sets (without
> distorting the application of these labels by mapping them onto the
> Spanish ones), it would be necessary to come up with different pictures.
>
> Especially labels for parts of the human body, which might seem
> self-evident, need to be questioned. The 'foot', for which we have a
> lexicalized distinction in English, is often not separated
> terminologically from the 'ankle' or 'lower leg'; even English 'ear'
> does not distinguish by itself the outer ear and the inner ear,
> lexicalized separately in Spanish as 'oreja' and 'oido'. Thus whereas
> "My ear hurts" is ambiguous in English, in Spanish it would not be.
> Since most traditional math educators are predisposed to accept without
> question the universality of mathematical concepts, they need to be
> sensitized to the cultural embeddedness of instructional media, and
> the need to examine ethnographically the appropriateness of categories
> usually taken for granted in instruction.
>
>    Rudy Troike
>    University of Arizona
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----