Contents

From https://bethskelton.com

Beth Skelton recounts a recent experience in which she struggled to use her Spanish skills to navigate a challenging situation in the Dominican Republic, until she remembered to use strategies that she knew would help her. In this case, she asked the taxi driver and hotel receptionist to write down what they were saying on paper in simple sentences. Using her strength in decoding reading, she was finally able to understand what the situation was. This blog post is an excellent reminder of the importance of teaching communication strategies to our students.

Read the blog post at https://bethskelton.com/what-language-learners-can-do-with-supports-and-scaffolds/

UNESCO has added twenty-nine new sites to its list of designated World Heritage Sites. Learn about fascinating places in Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Australia, Bahrain, Spain, Canada, and more: https://whc.unesco.org/en/newproperties

From https://www.britishcouncil.org

David Petrie describes activities that your students can do so that they collaborate together rather than focusing on competing against each other. Some suggestions are simple adaptations such as challenging the class, divided into two teams, to earn a certain total number of points in a given amount of time rather than simply tallying the score for each team. Other suggestions are examples of fully collaborative activities, such as information gap activities that can only be completed with successful collaboration.

Read the article at https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/collaborative-games-competitive-english-language-classrooms

Gabriela Pérez Báez is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Oregon, director of the University's Language Revitalization Lab, and co-director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages. Her research centers on linguistic diversity and strategies to sustain it, most specifically through her work documenting, analyzing, and revitalizating Zapotec languages in Mexico and her collaborative work on archives-based research for language revitalization.

Diidxazá is a Mesoamerican language belonging to the Zapotec branch of Otomanguean languages and spoken by the Binnizá in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. While it is estimated that there are around 100,000 speakers of the language, Diidxazá is largely not being learned by children. This is the result of a number of factors including discrimination, marginalization, and Spanish-only education.  

In an attempt to contribute to the sustainability of Diidxazá, I have worked on the documentation and analysis of the language since 2003 with the goal of producing an extensive dictionary of the language. This effort, as rigorous and extensive as it has been, has not been a catalyst, in and of itself, for language revitalization. However, a module of the dictionary that centered on the documentation of plants, their names and the knowledge associated with them, quickly engaged children in language revitalization.  

The project was designed to document over two hundred plant names in such a way as to identify the species designated by each name and document the interaction with these plants by the Binnizá living in the town of La Ventosa. The project was designed to be collaborative and included numerous consultations with the Binnizá members of the research team and with other members of the community including authorities. One of the objectives of the project was to make the work as visible to the broader community of La Ventosa as possible. Therefore, much of the work to process the documented plants –that is to collect and dry small samples of the plants in flower and fruit for identification and preservation– was done in the open where community members could see it. The project drew the immediate attention of children who wanted to know the names of the plants in Diidxazá and what they were used for. The project team was always surrounded by children! 

Upon seeing this, one of the community collaborators and the main knowledge bearer in the team, Fernando Sánchez López, proposed that the project find ways to share the documentation with children so that children would become engaged in understanding the many benefits that plants provide to humans, and therefore in learning about them and protecting them. In response the team developed a series of workshops and educational materials centered on the revitalization of Diidxazá through learning about plants. These workshops ran for three years from 2014 to 2017, generally once a month, and sometimes offering week-long camps during school breaks. The workshops were interrupted for a few months and restarted in March 2019 in La Ventosa.  

La Ventosa had never had a language revitalization effort before. However, the interest of children in plants motivated a long-standing effort that over three years offered dozens of children the opportunity to engage with Diidxazá for a significant portion of their childhood. The technical documentation of the Diidxazá dictionary has yet to have a fraction of the impact that the engagement with plants had for the Binnizá of La Ventosa. 

By Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor

One of my hobbies is having opinions about things. How about you? One of my passions is teaching and learning languages. I bet this is one of your passions, too! How much would you bet that we both have some passionate opinions about language teaching and learning, informed by research, our own experience, training by and observation of respected colleagues, and intuition? I would bet you an equal amount that we don’t have exactly the same opinions.

• How much target language should we use in language learning experiences?
• How important is production for language acquisition, and how does this change depending on proficiency level?
• How important is accuracy relative to getting a point across, and relative to a student’s affective disposition toward using a new language?
• How closely is intercultural communicative competence linked to language proficiency?

As InterCom editor, my job entails following endless listserv threads debating methodological approaches, and reading endless blog posts advocating for one approach or another. Although some language is quite heated, in many cases I am inspired by my colleagues’ ability to find common ground and arrive at helpful insights. One of my favorite examples is Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell’s post from three years ago, “Where are the points of agreement in language teaching?”

What helps us to elevate our discourse so that our exploration of diverse, strongly-held opinions leads to growth and gives us fresh inspiration? I believe that the advice that CASLS director Julie Sykes offers in our July 1 Topic of the Week article holds a key. The three elements she lists are these:

• Cultivate a gracious internal dialogue.
• Practice generous assumptions with others.
• Tend to your own side of the street and mind your own business.

In order to be open to divergent ideas, we must start from a place of comfort with our own teaching. Remember that you are a good teacher and will continue to be so even if you change your practice in ways that you would never have done five years ago.

The most generous assumption that you can make of your colleagues is that they are as passionate about languages as you are. If you are truly interested in growing from an exchange of opinions, listen carefully to your colleagues as they connect their “how” (implementation decisions) with their “why” (everyone deserves to be multilingual).

While I was looking for specific advice for elevating discourse, I came across these six rules for meaningful conversation by Holly Vradenburgh. I encourage you to read this thoughtful post, where Ms. Vradenburgh reminds us several times of conditions that must be in place in order to have a Meaningful Conversation. If they are not in place, then now is the time to focus on your own practice rather than to question your colleagues on their practices.

Many of us recharge partially through time alone, and partially through meaningful interactions with others. I hope that this post and the accompanying Activity of the Week will help you to get the most out of your collegial interactions this summer and throughout the school year.

This week, we invite you to use the Professionalism domain of the TELL Framework to guide your reflection on elevating the discourse, as discussed in Lindsay Marean’s Topic of the Week article. We also invite you to use the Catalyst platform to share your reflection with colleagues.

Begin by printing out this reflection template, which asks you to explore an opinion about language learning from different perspectives.

If you have a blog or other platform for sharing your thoughts, we encourage you to convert your reflection into a blog post for wider dissemination.

Next, we encourage you to create a Catalyst account at https://catalyst.uoregon.edu. Once you’ve done so, from the Profile page, click on the My Goals tab and click on Set Goals to enter the TELL framework. Select PR (for Professionalism) and consider the following indicators:

• If your greatest strength in the reflection is a gracious internal dialogue, selcct PR4a. as the place to upload an image of your completed reflection, a typed summary of what you wrote, or a link to your blog post as evidence.
• If your greatest strength in the reflection is the generous assumptions you make of others, then select PR6a.
• If your greatest strength is to recognize that now is a good time to “tend to your own side of the street,” then consider the two indicators under PR1.

Once you’ve uploaded your evidence, you have the option to share it with a group. We invite you to join the Catalyst group called CASLS InterCom-Elevate the Discourse! and to share your evidence there. You’ll also have a chance to read colleagues’ reflections and to engage in dialogue around them (and you can also add people you meet as members of My Community on your profile page).

From https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/applied-linguistics-and-second-language-acquisition/cambridge-handbook-language-learning

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning
Edited by John W. Schwieter and Alessandro Benati
Published by Cambridge University Press

Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge work on second language learning, this Handbook, written by a team of leading experts, surveys the nature of second language learning and its implications for teaching. Prominent theories and methods from linguistics, psycholinguistics, processing-based, and cognitive approaches are covered and organized thematically across sections dealing with skill development, individual differences, pedagogical interventions and approaches, and context and environment. This state-of-the-art volume will interest researchers in second language studies and language education, and will also reach out to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in these and other related areas.

Visit the publisher's website at https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/applied-linguistics-and-second-language-acquisition/cambridge-handbook-language-learning

From http://lincom-shop.eu/LSLAB-03-Acquisition-of-Russian-as-L1-and-L2

Acquisition of Russian as L1 and L2
By Hristo Kyuchukov, Oxana Ushakova and Valentina Yashina
Published by Lincom

The new book in the Lincom Studies in Language Acquisition and Bilingualism series is dedicated to the acquisition of Russian in monolingual and bilingual contexts. The first two chapters cover a wide range of topics from speech development in infancy, formation of language personality in preschool age, the learning of the deixis, the acquisition of shifters to the development of the lexicon. The focus of the third chapter is on the acquisition of Russian in Germany and Sweden. The fourth part of the book contains papers on the impact of the educational environment on the speech development of young children, the role of ethnopedagogy in the process of language learning of Russian bilingual children, and how Russian is used in the process of psychotherapy.

The volume constitutes an excellent, thought-provoking collection of articles and presents new research findings. It will be very useful for linguists interested in Russian linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychologists and the educators of Russian speaking children.

Visit the publisher's website at http://lincom-shop.eu/LSLAB-03-Acquisition-of-Russian-as-L1-and-L2