Indigenous languages won=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=99t_?=survive if kids are learning only English (fwd link)

[Heather Souter]

Taapwee!

You speak the truth as I see it as well!  Immersion programs for
all--infants, children, youth and adults!  Learning
experientially--holistically and in context--is the most natural and in the
end effective way of actually 'learning' a language.

Heather


On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 9:29 PM, Wayne Leman <wleman1949b at gmail.com> wrote:

>   As someone who grew up in an Alaskan Native village where our
> indigenous language was being lost during my language learning years and as
> a linguist who has worked since 1975 with a Native American language
> community that is losing their language, I feel terrible about indigenous
> languages being lost, but I don’t think schools can rescue a language.
> Languages are not learned at school. They are learned at home during the
> formative language learning years. Schools can provide one more
> disincentive for children to speak an indigenous language, but they can’t
> teach a language to children if children are not being taught the language
> from their primary caregivers at home. If children are being taught their
> language at home, then schools can reinforce that teaching. The problem is
> societal. Entire societies feel great pressure to discontinue use of
> indigenous languages in favor of dominant languages. one. It is very
> difficult for parents and other caregivers to teach indigenous languages to
> children if they have been taught to believe that children will be harmed
> by learning indigenous languages. It’s a difficult situation, but we must
> be careful not to put an unrealistic emphasis on the role that schools have
> in teaching language. Schools can create a great incentive for children not
> to continue speaking their indigenous languages, through coercion and even
> punishment which has been the case in the U.S. and some other countries,
> but I don’t think schools can do the converse, namely teach languages.
> (High school, college, and university programs seldom teach languages
> either. They typically expose students to languages and their structures,
> but not actually teach them the languages other than perhaps a few words,
> some elementary phrases, and grammar. People typically learn language when
> they are immersed in it, either at home or in cross-cultural experiences,
> study-abroad programs, etc.)
>
> People don’t learn languages from modern technology either. Technology can
> make language learning more interesting, but it can’t do what primary care
> providers and other fluent speakers of a language must do, namely, expose
> people to language in context so much that they begin to understand and
> speak it.
>
> I think that we linguists and others who have some professional training
> and lots of care for indigenous peoples and their languages can assist in
> language preservations efforts, but I have also concluded that we cannot do
> so by doing what I was trained to do and love to do, analyzing languages
> and writing up descriptions of them. Instead, we professionals need to
> learn how to encourage the development of language immersion programs. We
> can advocate for learning of indigenous languages, but it will fall on deaf
> ears if primary caregivers have concluded that their children are better
> off learning a dominant language.
>
> I would like to see empirical evidence for any claim that schools can
> teach indigenous languages to children if the children are not also being
> immersed in those languages at home.
>
> I hope that I am wrong in my claims but after many years of wrestling with
> this issue, it’s what I conclude.
>
> Wayne
> -----
> http://www.cheyennelanguage.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20140821/fa867816/attachment.htm>