On teaching approaches

[Jon Allan Reyhner]

I have read about several immersion programs focusing on verb based teaching methods. The best rationale and description I have read is Situational Navajo: 
A School-Based, Verb-Centered Way of Teaching Navajo by Wayne Holm, Irene Silentman, Laura Wallace at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/NNL/NNL_3.pdf

The Navajo Nation Language Project published several short pieces of advice on the same topic. Their one page Dos and Don’ts in Language Teaching  is available at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/NNL/NNL_Dos.pdf and their Ten Tips for Teaching in Navajo Immersion Programs is available at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/NNL/NNL_Tips.pdf

Jon Reyhner
Professor of Bilingual Multicultural Education
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, Arizona
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/
________________________________________
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU] On Behalf Of Rudolph Troike [rtroike at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU]
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 4:14 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: [ILAT] On teaching approaches

I concur with Claire Bowern and someone earlier who was commenting on
Apachean. Nouns are prominent in European languages, and awareness of
this leads to emphasis on nouns in early teaching -- even testing, such
as the Peabody test for linguistic maturation. Muriel Saville-Troike
did a comparative study of English-speaking and Navajo-speaking children's
response to picture cards depicting simple scenes such as a child holding
the handle of a wagon. English speakers just said "(a) girl" and "(a) wagon",
merely identifying the objects in the scene, whereas the Navajo children
said (in Navajo) the equivalent of "girl pulling wagon", or less fluently,
"pulling (it)", focusing on the action as the central point. Approaching
the teaching of verb-focused languages by teaching isolated nouns does no
good at all, since it misses what Sapir saw as the "genius" of the language,
and as Claire noted, makes it impossible to formulate even simple propositions
about any sorts of actions or events. Indeed, in context, sentences in many
languages lack nouns as Subjects and Objects, where these are obvious, and
use only verbs, with either attached pronoun prefixes or suffixes, or zero
pronominalization. (This is true not only for morphologically complex
languages such as many American Indian languages, but even for isolating
languages such as Chinese or Vietnamese.) Since pronouns are developmentally
late in appearing, if one wished to start anywhere it would make most sense
to start with verbs.

    Rudy

P.S. In many languages, what translate as nouns in English are often
derived verbal phrases, as "food" would be "what-one-eats" or "one-eats-it".
So even there the verb is primary.