Fw: [ILAT] grassroots programs

[Cathy Wheaton]

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

-----Original Message-----
From: chimiskwew at hotmail.com
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:05:28 
To: Tammy DeCoteau<tdc.aaia at VERIZON.NET>
Reply-To: chimiskwew at hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [ILAT] grassroots programs

I feel the same-we are a small non-profit organization but are not eligible for the many grants academic institutions obtain. We have produced many hours of audio and video for free distribution to the community, language revitalization guides and other community projects at no cost to the community. We also ensure families who participate have access to our recordings rather than claim copyright and sell our resources for a fee. We priorize speaking and oral activities over writing systems as we feel writing although valuable-is a secondary goal to keeping our languages alive and spoken by new generations . We know few FN can afford to buy these kinds of resources so we do not sell anything-even on a cost recovery basis. However we provide all of this with our own personal resources-we even travel at our own expense to record Elders, attend meeting, teach language to community members and ensure it is all accessible through our own website. We have been contributing since April of 2009 helping other to save and learn their languages. 

But our group is not the only one with this issue. I know others (students, sessional instructors who are volunteers, concerned community members)who do the same and absorb the costs of programs and activities as well. Many fluent speakers are teaching in the community and online as volunteers but have no credentials in linguistics and are faculty members, only contracted sessional instructors so even though they teach courses, they are unable to be funded as they are not faculty. 

I personally feel that because our emphasis is on oral only versus written language are at odds with academic goals of language documentation and publications versus our goals of speaking ability rather than writing systems and no copyright. If we could find an academic who supports oral speaking as the primary approach-it would be possible to partner however we have yet to find anyone not seeking publication potential in our projects. I guess it's the publish or perish issue which ultimately is a barrier-we see academics work on books, editing writing and written translation but we cannot learn to speak solely with written materials. It is difficult-we feel we are making significant contributions to language revitalization with no real support. We are aware that academic institutions know what we do as they often attend our events however they seem to feel that only formal education systems can offer educational programs while we target families in the home and parents along with children as second language learners. I get the impression that many academics think it is futile to attempt to offer courses that enable an adult to speak a FN language while in many European languages, this same  goal is regularly accomplished through ESL and immersion programming at these same institutions. Is this type of activity is not of interest to linguists? I am not sure. We do see however a preference for the grammar approach when teaching FN languages. We sympathize with students who have lamented having completed an expensive university credit course in a FN languages and yet still cannot have even basic conversations with fluent speakers due to lack of instruction. We do see that students are bombarded by a memorized grammar rules from a grammar textbook but little context or applied speaking practice to use these rules before rushing to the next one. This is why we strive to provide oral resources as there are few that exist. We know that memorizing grammar rules is not an effective to learn to speak a living language. 

Cathy Wheaton
First Language Speaking Project

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

-----Original Message-----
From: Tammy DeCoteau <tdc.aaia at VERIZON.NET>
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:00:15 
To: <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
Subject: [ILAT] grassroots programs

Mitakuyapi (My relatives),



Frustrating is the only English word that I can think of that describes how it feels to look at the federal language preservation grant opportunities.  I work in the trenches with, who in our program as known as, "The Treasured Elders."  For us language programs that operate at the grass-roots level, we read the grant opportunities and for me it seems that they are all geared toward academia or other large organizations.  Without professional grant writers, its nearly impossible to get together an application and comply with all of the requirements.  

If any of you have any say, please help people think about some less complicated grant opportunities for smaller grassroots organizations.

 



Tammy DeCoteau
AAIA Native Language Program