SKILLS at SMHS Period 1
Monday March 23rd
Oral History Presentations Wrap-Up & Movie Screening
Remaining Oral History Presentations (20 minutes)
- Remind students they’ll have the (optional) opportunity to rewrite and resubmit their
corrected histories for extra points (returned on Wednesday, to be turned in after the
break)
Mid-semester Reflection (10 minutes)
- Pass out reflection sheets
- Remind students that this is a completely anonymous exercise. We’d like to know their
thoughts and feedback on the class so far.
Movie: Our Spirits Don’t Speak English
Depending on time, could watch all 40 minutes, or just the 20 below:
21:30 - discussion of “Christianizing,” cut off after “total institutions” around 41:00
SKILLS at SMHS Period 1
Tuesday, March 24th
Language Death and Revitalization
Warm-up (10 minutes)
Follow-up with “Our Spirits Don’t Speak English”: comprehension questions
- What was Native American education like compared to white settlers’ education?
(Cherokee - 80% educated compared to 10% of local whites)
- Why did the United States want to place Native children in boarding schools?
- What are the methods that schools used to stop children from speaking their language?
- What are the methods that they used to take their culture away? (burning clothes,
cutting hair, making them become Christian)
Facts about Native American languages:
- How many languages do you think were spoken in the US and Canada before European
contact? (~300)
- How many do you think are still spoken today? (165)
- 45% are almost extinct (spoken by only a handful of elders)
- 35% have fewer than 1000 speakers
- Only 8 have more than 10,000 speakers
- Which do you think is the most-spoken Native American language today?
(Navajo). [In Central and South America, Nahuatl and Quechua have more
speakers]
- How many in California? (74, in 18 distinct language families)
- Compare to 3 language families in Europe: Indo-European, Basque, Uralic
Socratic Seminar (existing AVID technique, 30 minutes - 15 for group 1 and 15 for
group 2)
*Students arrange the desks into two concentric circles. The inner group will respond to the first
set of questions for 15 minutes; the outer group monitors participation points for the day’s
classroom grade. (Each member of the outer group tallies one classmate’s comments in the
inner circle.) One member of the outer group can join the inner group (in a “hot seat”/empty
desk) to make a comment or ask an additional question. After 15 minutes, the groups switch and
repeat the same process.
The following questions are projected onto the screen/written on the board for each group’s turn
in the inner circle:
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Latin is called a “dead language,” and in a way this is true: There are no speakers left who
learned Latin as a native language. Latin is survived by its descendants, the Romance
languages, and Latin is taught in schools. Do you think Latin is dead?
- Ainu is a language spoken by just a few people in the far north of Japan. There
are no currently spoken languages that are known to be related to Ainu (it’s what
linguists call a language isolate.) If Ainu stops being spoken, do you think it will
be dead in the same way as Latin? credit
When a language stops being spoken, what else is lost?
Do you see problems in using biological metaphors - endangerment, death, and
extinction - to refer to the loss of languages? credit
- Do you think communities connected to endangered languages might have
problems with those metaphors?
- What are some similarities and differences between those biological processes
and language loss?
What can be done to stop language death?
Do speakers have a responsibility to try to save their language if it is dying?
What if a group decides they do not want to revitalize their language? Why might they
make that choice?
A critical stage in language death is reached when children stop learning the language.
What are the kinds of conditions that would make children want or not want to learn a
language spoken by their parents or grandparents? credit
What role can linguists play in stopping language death?
Should we encourage saving all languages, or should we instead have everyone speaking
one language, such as Esperanto, the international (European) constructed language?
credit
Language Revitalization (10 minutes)
- “Archiving for Speakers and Linguists” - http://www.pbs.org/thelinguists/ForEducators/Video-Extras.html
(only the 3 sections about Breath of Life)
- Languages that have been successfully revitalized = Hebrew, Welsh, Irish, Hawaiian,
Cherokee, Navajo
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“Never Alone” video game trailer/making of clip
- Trailer: https://vimeo.com/97087990
- “The Power of Video Games” https://vimeo.com/101444789
Small group activity: Language revitalization (30 minutes)
- Students divide into 5 small groups of 4 or 5 for discussion (15 minutes)
- Imagine that you belong to a group whose heritage language has been diminished
because of policies that discouraged your ancestors from speaking it, like the
policies seen in “Our Spirits Don’t Speak English.”
- Think about how you would feel if your native language, English or Spanish, was
on the verge of going extinct.
- If you were trying to stop your language from going extinct, what methods would
you employ? Come up with at least two possibilities.
- What might be some challenges in trying to revitalize? How might you combat
these challenges? Come up with at least two challenges and a possible solution for
each.
- Each small group shares their ideas with the class. (15 minutes - 3 minutes each)