Learning to speak Tlingit

[James Crippen]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 11:01 AM, Scott DeLancey <delancey at uoregon.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 7 May 2008, Ted Moomaw wrote:
>
>
> > I am okanogan from eastern Washington, I have worked at our lang. program
> > 7-8 years, and it is my thought or perception that verb conjugation was
> > thought of as to difficult, also tenses and possesives,  it is from my own
> > experience in teaching that when you teach the conj. as part of your vocab
> > people will be able to communicate, w/out conj. there is no communication.
> > xwistsmxikn
> >
>
>  I completely agree with this.  People have trouble memorizing the
>  conjugations of Spanish or German, and nowadays language teachers
>  agree that that's too hard for most people, and not the way to teach
>  the language.  And in so many Native languages (definitely both Tlingit
>  and Salish!) the verb is so incredibly more complicated than in
>  European languages, there's just no way in the world anybody is
>  going to memorize that.  You have to teach one form at a time--
>  teach folks how to say what they're trying to say at the moment,
>  or for that lesson.

This works for teaching at the beginning and even low intermediate
levels, but once you get to the stage where people want to be creative
with their language use, they've got to learn grammar. The issues of
inclusion of grammar into the curriculum is a well researched topic in
second language teaching, and many of the strongest teaching
approaches and methods incorporate grammar lessons as an integral part
of the curriculum.

In dealing with very complex grammars like we find in North American
languages, grammar needs to be taught even more so than in more
commonly taught languages. However, people have the archaic idea that
grammar is supposed to be taught like old high school Latin classes,
where people memorize long tables of conjugation patterns and recite
them from memory. This type of teaching is highly inefficient as well
as boring for both student and teacher.

Instead, it's better to take one single, specific conjugation pattern
(e.g. 1st/2nd/3rd singular subject perfective for intransitives) and
teach it in the context of a number of different verbs. Show the
students how it works in these different verbal environments, and let
them generalize a rule themselves rather than shoving one down their
throats. If they don't get it at first, give them more verbs with the
same form. They have to learn to see the patterns for themselves.

Learning to make such rule generalizations from patterns is part of
the process of linguistic analysis, and it's also an essential part of
the language learning process. Without learning to generalize from
patterns you won't be able to expand your verbal lexicon. This is the
way I was taught both Russian and Japanese, and I've successfully
applied the same sort of reasoning to my learning of Tlingit.

It takes a while for people to get used to thinking in terms of
patterns and predicted rules, but eventually nearly everyone gets the
hang of it and they get a great sense of accomplishment when they are
finally able to use a word they've never heard before and produce a
coherent, meaningful sentence with it. This is the major step where a
student passes from a beginning student to an intermediate student,
when they have enough grasp of rules to start making novel sentences
on their own. Unless this hurdle is passed, students will remain
beginners no matter how much vocabulary they learn.

James