[from Margaret Florey, Research Network for Linguistic Diversity]
Linguists, Students of Linguistics, Community Language Activists!
InField 2010: INSTITUTE ON FIELD LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION is now open for registration. It will be held at the University of Oregon (Eugene, Oregon USA)
The Institute on Field Linguistics and Language Documentation is designed for field linguists, graduate students, and language activists to receive training in current techniques and issues in language documentation, language maintenance, and language revitalization.
Workshops: June 21st – July 2nd
Laboratory week: July 5th – July 9th
Field Training: July 5th – July 30th
You can download a poster [.pdf] here
Follow3L Summer School 2010
The 3L Consortium (comprising Lyon, Leiden and London (SOAS) Universities) has been running an annual series of international summer schools on language documentation and description. The first was held in Lyon in 2008, and the second was in London in 2009. This year the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) will host the third 3L … Read more
Contact..
.. is showing TONIGHT on ABC television 9.25 pm. It describes how in the 1960s Martu people of the Western Desert of Australia first encountered non-Indigenous Australians. It’s based on the book Cleared out by Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson and Yuwali, who appears in the film. Yuwali has lived through contact, missions, remote settlements, Native … Read more
“Let us love native language and make it lovely” – International Mother Language Day – 21 February
Today is UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day (IMLD) which is intended to “promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism”. The UN have just launched UN Language Days, “a new initiative which seeks to celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity as well as to promote equal use of all six of its official working languages throughout the … Read more
Fishing
For a beautifully organised site run by a small group, check out Sarah Colley‘s new site: the Sydney fish project. What fish have been found in archaeological sites in Sydney? What do the bits look like, what does the whole fish look like (i.e. a reference skeleton)? What fish did Aborigines eat at what period? … Read more
Random locations of grammars and dictionaries
Further to the discussion of making online material discoverable (using standard metadata or via a more elaborate infrastructure proposed by ELIIP), other useful sources of free online grammars or dictionaries include ‘Online Books’ and the Project Gutenberg sites. These are ‘free’ as in unencumbered by intellectual property or copyright concerns, typically because the authors have been dead for over 50 years, not because they were placed in an open access archive. A sample of the files available follows, but wouldn’t it be great to have a way of announcing these items using standard metadata terms so they could all be searched via a dedicated language service? For example, the entry for Sgau Karen below is followed by Sgaw Karen, so google searching on Sgaw will only give you one of these three items.
Bypassing written documentation – oral annotation of recorded text
A large corpus of recorded oral tradition can be created using two recording machines, one playing back the spoken texts and the other used to capture an oral annotation. Recording speakers who are commenting on earlier recordings is a method for providing annotations that bypasses literacy.
Speaking Gamilaraay
Sydney University students – your chance to study an Indigenous Australian language this semester! KOCR2605 – Speaking Gamilaraay 1 – University of Sydney Gamilaraay is an Indigenous Australian language from the mid-northwest of NSW that is currently undergoing revitalisation. This unit of study will provide students with a basic competence in speaking, understanding, reading and … Read more
Revisiting the bilingual education figures
In Australia, there’s been a lot of downplaying recently of the fact that young kids understand what’s happening in the classroom better if they hear it in their first language – from the NAPLAN tests which don’t factor this in, to the MySchool comparisons which ignore it, to the English literacy push expressed recently by … Read more
Literacy isn’t just literacy in English
On Ockham’s Razor (24/1/2010) a psychologist, Margot Prior, talks about the need to do something about Indigenous children’s literacy. There’s some good stuff in it – the need for more Indigenous teachers, for partnerships between schools and communities, for teachers to be sensitive to the differences between non-standard English and Standard English (note that this is NOT limited to Indigenous children – there are plenty of other children in Australia who don’t speak Standard English as a home language).
Prior’s overall solution?
If preschool education at a minimum of 15 hours per week was universally available, and every child had at least a year of programs which focused on enhancing language and pre-literacy skills, provided by committed preschool teachers, many more children would begin school well prepared for reading and writing.
I expect politicians will welcome this solution. Why should we treat it with caution?
First, for Prior “language” = “English”. But her talk shows some basic misunderstandings of languages and how children learn languages and reading and writing. The distinction between speaking a traditional language and speaking a non-standard variety of English are treated as if they presented the same difficulties for children attempting to learn standard English. They present rather different challenges – the methods of teaching English as a second language have to be different from those of teaching English as a second dialect.
As worrying are remarks such as the following: