View Content #19412

by Lindsay Marean, InterCom Editor

As a Potawatomi person, I am active in learning and promoting our Potawatomi language. One time an elementary teacher, who was learning Potawatomi as a second language, asked a Potawatomi elder who speaks Potawatomi as a first language for some words and phrases that she could use in classroom management.

“How do you say, ‘May I go use the restroom?’” she asked.

“Well, you just wouldn’t say that,” the elder answered. “If you need to pee or poop, you don’t need anyone’s permission to do that, regardless of your age.  You would just let the teacher know where you were going. But also, you wouldn’t say ‘use the restroom.’ In Potawatomi there’s nothing wrong with talking about body functions, so you’d say either ‘I’m going to go pee’ or ‘I’m going to go poop.’”

This experience taught me the importance of documenting the pragmatics of a language and of drawing students’ attention to pragmatic differences between languages. This week’s activity makes use of a situational questionnaire to discover and then teach appropriate responses to different situations in a typical K-12 classroom.

Procedure:

• Administer the Classroom Situations Questionnaire to fluent speakers of the target language (you can do this orally by asking the questions and then writing down the speakers’ answers).  Compile all responses to each prompt.
• Use the same questionnaire with your students, but talk about appropriate responses in the students’ first language (in my case, English).
• Now distribute the compiled responses that the fluent speakers gave in the target language.  Compare the students’ responses in their L1 with the expert speakers’ responses in the target language, using the discussion questions provided.
• Role-play classroom management situations with students, using the target language pragmatic norms that you’ve discovered using the questionnaire.

From now on, you and your students can manage classroom situations using not only the vocabulary and syntax of your target language, but also its pragmatic norms!