Indigenous languages won=?WINDOWS-1252?Q?=92t_?=survive if kids are learning only English

[Troike, Rudolph C - (rtroike)]

Sadly, Wayne is 100% right in most of the typical circumstances
which occur in most schools and communities today. Schools can
valorize native languages and values, and perhaps incentivize a few
individuals and families to undertake the dedicated effort to learn/
maintain the native language. But unless there is the commitment
in the community among parents and grandparents of children, and
a corresponding commitment in the school to institute a true and
full bilingual program, most efforts, no matter the good intent with
which they are undertaken, are doomed to failure. Wayne Holm
showed at Rock Point, Arizona, that it IS possible to develop a
full bilingual curriculum through high school, and I have met some
of the very successful bilingual AND biliterate graduates of the
program as students here at the University of Arizona. But part-
time "feel-good" efforts which do no more than impart a few
isolated words or phrases will not maintain or develop anything
approaching full functional competence in the language.

     That said, I should point out that through the required study
of Spanish in our public schools in south Texas, which entailed
entirely grammar-translation competence in the language for six
years, beginning with grade 6 (with NO social/interpersonal spoken
use), I was able to pursue graduate study in linguistics and anthro-
pology in Mexico, completely in Spanish. But without an enormous
dedication to building a multi-year curriculum and implementing it,
and undertaking the tremendous task of corpus planning to create
advanced text materials in the language in all of the content areas
of history, science, etc., for most native communities such an
outcome as I experienced would be an unlikely dream. The message
I would like to leave is that it IS possible -- and the dramatic stories
of a few dedicated efforts by individuals to teach themselves the
language even as adults demonstrate this -- but it will take the long-
term enlightened dedication of communities and schools to achieve
this dream.

    Rudy

    Rudy Troike

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From: ilat-request at list.arizona.edu [ilat-request at list.arizona.edu] on behalf of Wayne Leman [wleman1949b at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2014 7:29 PM
To: ilat at list.arizona.edu
Subject: [ilat] Indigenous languages won’t survive if kids are learning only English (fwd link)

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
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http://www.cheyennelanguage.org
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