colors, numbers, and animals

[Troike, Rudolph C - (rtroike)]

Re Bernadette's suggestion, which I heartily endorse: the usual
Eurocentric tradition of language teaching (and even the
supposedly 'scientific' research on language acquisition by
Western psychologists) assumes that the "names of objects"
are universally learned first, since they are "most salient in
the observable context", but this supposed "universal" is shown
to be a false projection from European languages, by the research
of Muriel Saville-Troike and Ellen Courtney on Navajo and Quechua,
respectively -- both verb-centered languages -- in which it was
shown that children learned verb stems first (even though Navajo,
like all Athabaskan languages, is predominantly prefixing and
Quechua, like Aymara, is predominantly suffixing). Young children
are somehow able to sort through the forest of affixes to extract
the verb stem. The Navajo children come to recognize that there
are a large number of prefix positions, even before they are able
to produce appropriate fillers, and just utter an indistinct syllable
for the slot. And of course they learn this all without any overt
direct instruction!

      Rudy

     Rudy Troike
     University of Arizona
     Tucson, AZ   USA

________________________________
From: ilat-request at list.arizona.edu [ilat-request at list.arizona.edu] on behalf of BSantaMaria [bernisantamaria at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2014 10:34 AM
To: ilat at list.arizona.edu
Subject: Re: [ilat] colors, numbers, and animals

Observed the same problem in local schools and I've encouraged some Apache language teachers to get away from these colors, numbers, months, animals, body parts, and to use more verbs in interactional or situational events. In view of the fact that Apache language is one of the Athabaskan languages known for their complex verb morphologies (more than other types of languages), I would hope that teachers will use more verb teaching and that nouns will also be learned along with verb teaching in sentences.

Bernadette A. SantaMaria


On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 9:13 AM, Peter Austin <pa2 at soas.ac.uk<mailto:pa2 at soas.ac.uk>> wrote:
In our Dieri language workshops in Australia we used a variety of methods, like teaching people simple commands, drawing human figures and naming body parts (rather than list format), games like "Simon says" and "Lingo Bingo" -- you can read about some of this in various blog posts on http://dieriyawarra.wordpress.com.

Peter Austin



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20140807/a4bc4589/attachment.htm>