LSA 2006

[Anggarrgoon]

Hi Mia,
quick response, as classes start today.
I absolutely agree with you about there being more than one focus (and
I'm sure Jeff does too) - that's one of the reasons they want to have a
continuing series of workshops at future LSAs. It was never billed as a
revitalisation session, it was billed as a "how to make great audio and
video recordings" session.

> 
> Revitalization has 3 foci, actually. Jeff Good's is only one; from what I
> understood from friends who attended the session, it was about choosing and
> employing different field collection technologies. I don't talk about that
> sort of thing, other than to recommend digital recorders. 
> 

The talks were on a mixture of things, from choosing audio/video
equipment, to what the specifications mean (sampling rates, 16 bit vs 24
bit, etc) to archiving. And there were some software demonstrations. I
can't think of much offhand that would have been relevant to linguists
and not to community members documenting their own language; Elan maybe,
but even that has potential use for communities who want to link film
and video (I think if that's all they need to do there are better
programs to do it with).

> I talk about two other things: 1) deciding what will be collected for STEM
> materials support (right now there is very close to 0 across all
> collections); and 2) how materials can best be presented to the learner to
> facilitate learning. 
> 
> Words on paper with a teacher repeating them individually once or twice a
> week doesn't work. Further, all the rich lexical information is excellent
> for learning MORE ABOUT the language, but interruptive for those who are
> LEARNING THE language. One needs to make sure not to clutter up the
> cognitive paths, and while lots of related information looks good for
> accomplishment reports, it is Really, Really Bad for learners who are trying
> to develop skills in the language patterns. 
> 

yes, I agree. BUT that's not the whole story either, by any means. When
I started work on Bardi there was a great program for beginning
learners, aimed at little kids. There was a lot of time for it at
preschool, they had songs and games, they were learning words, they were
sitting down and hearing stories, and the 5-6 year olds were really
enthusiastic about the whole thing. The grade one classes had language
games and there was a set of lessons that had been developed over a
number of years. It included exercises like going home and asking granny
about something (and a lot of other things). This was before One Arm
Point had computers in the classrooms.

However, there was nothing much for more advanced learners, so by the
time the kids got to fourth grade they were doing the same curriculum
they'd done in second grade. So when I got there we did two things - I
worked as much as possible with the old people (there are now about 25
speakers of Bardi) to get better documentation of a variety of genres,
so there is a community record. If you're interested in all that we did
I can send you a paper that I wrote about it. We did this on the
assumption that we can always simplify materials for the
intermediate/beginner learners, but if we don't have native speakers we
can't recapture the complexity of the language.

Maybe we can discuss this more in another thread, but it is something
that worries me a bit sometimes. Is it just a data presentation issue
(because that is easily fixed) or is it something deeper? You mentioned
data that wasn't collected - could you give me some examples?

> Further, other that what Powell write in 1881, there seems to be little
> written on the importance or method of gathering STEM information. While
> there is overwhelming physical evidence that STEM skills existed and
> flourished, there is no reflection of this in elicitations. 
> 

Could you say more about this?

> And lastly, the process of developing revitalization materials is robust.
> There are lots of components that go into it, given that people have
> realized that dictionary NOT = revitalization (maybe they haven't). 

Um, I think this is a bit unfair.

So I
> talk a lot about the cognitive learning processes, and how the brain will
> use the patterns you give it to develop IT'S OWN understanding of the
> language (as opposed to what someone else thinks is important ABOUT the
> language). Research coming out of psychology (in which I hold a Master's
> degree) is pointing out to people that the brain makes its own decisions
> about what it will learn and how. The attention process in many cases has
> little to do with direct learning, and more and sometimes only to do with
> presenting the buffet of opportunities to the brain so it can make its own
> choices (which it will anyway no matter what you do. . . . if the brain
> doesn't have enough of the right information for it to Learn, it just blows
> you off . . . [people don't realize this. . .]). 
> 

I made this point somewhere recently, sorry if it was here. Linguists
are in a very difficult position here, particularly academic linguists
doing language description or revitalisation and working in communities
(I work in Australia but I think the situation is somewhat similar in
the US). On the one hand there are certain things we have to do in order
to keep our academic jobs (teaching, publishing in academic journals,
advising students), and it's our academic jobs that allow us to offer
our services to communities essentially for free. If communities want to
employ linguists purely as consultants on revitalisation projects, then
the academic model usually won't work. We can't put alphabet books and
talking dictionaries of 100 words in to support our tenure cases as
syntacticians, and if we don't get tenure we can't continue offering our
services to communities.

I fully agree that there's a lot that stinks about this situation, it's
unfair to both sides (I work two fulltime jobs when I'm in the field,
for instance - as an academic linguist and as a revitalisation/training
linguist - I'm lucky that I have a wonderful field site that makes this
doable, and I work with Yolngu people who are keen to see their language
published and written about) and I suspect it's unsustainable, and it
leads to a heap of miscommunication and wrong assumptions about what is
taking place, to what end.

> So I don't think there is duplication . . . do you? If you do, forward this
> along to Jeff and see what he thinks. If he thinks there is potential
> duplication, he can write to me. 

I don't know what Jeff had in mind but a workshop on revitalisation
techniques was raised in the town meeting on Thursday. That was where I
thought the overlap might come in.

Ok, so that "quick response" turned into a much longer one but I will
stop now. There are many different issues and assumptions here and I'd
really like to discuss these in depth.

Claire