Day 1
The Vision and Methods
of Language Revitalization
Introduction and Chartering
9am-10am
Building the Vision of Community-Driven Language Revitalization. Evan Gardner, Willem Larsen, and Dustin Rivers introduce the the methods used in their work to save endangered languages. With the group of participants, we build a ‘charter’ to map out what every participant seeks to receive out of the weekend. This way, everyone can set their intentions and achieve their goals for the 2-day event.
Where Are Your Keys?
10am-12pm
Language Games, Teaching, Learning using American Sign-Language
Evan and Willem begin teaching their “Where Are Your Keys?” learning-game. The WAYK method uses American Sign-Language to act as a memory device to help language-learners remember words, syntax, and grammar by applying hand-signs to every word in your target language. This follows a kinesthetic learning style for those who learn by movement and physical interaction. The game itself incorporates elements on “Total Physical Response” in that we learn action-words or noun-based learning approaches to language. It focuses on talking about objects, events, and things taking place in front of our eyes.
This workshop introduces “The Fluency Roadmap”. A 4-stage road-map to identify where a language-learner is in their abilities as a speaker, and where we can all go with fluency. The four stages are Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior. The “Where Are Your Keys?” game becomes a platform for other learning-techniques to use in language revitalization strategies. It’s design is constructed of hundreds of ‘techniques’, which are marked using sign-language, to introduce rules or guidelines of the game, but also act as accelerators of the learning environment.
Lunch
12pm-1pm
Language Hunting
1pm-3pm
Applying language-learning methods to role-played scenario to ‘hunt’ a fluent-speaker.
Languages cannot simply be documented. They must be spoken! In order to achieve this, language-learners need skills and techniques to approach and ‘hunt’ the language from fluent speakers. This workshop covers how we can use ‘techniques’ learned from the “Where Are Your Keys?” game to pull language from a fluent-speaker.
Save Your Language Conference 