here - Linguistic Society of America

SymposiumSaturday, 5 Januarytalk, I would like to present some guidelines that can ensure a respectful and ethical approach to contacting native populations andat the same time could be helpful in gaining researchers’ access to indigenous populations. I will illustrate how these guidelineswork with examples from my own fieldwork experience in Quechua-speaking areas of Peru. The topics covered will be: 1)Importance of necessary protocols. 2) Respect for the rights of indigenous populations. 3) Attention to establishing personalconnections. 4) Benefits of research project to community members.Ellen H. Courtney (University of Texas at El Paso)Approaches to gathering Quechua child language dataNaturalistic speech provides a rich source of contextualized data for investigations of child language acquisition. Nonetheless, it isimportant to complement the collection of naturalistic data with experimental procedures carefully designed to probe specificlanguage properties in production and comprehension (Stromswold, 1998). Designing such experiments for Quechua-speakingchildren is extremely challenging because procedures and practices that work in the U.S. and Europe must be adapted to thecultural reality of Andean life. Additionally, successful data collection in Andean communities relies on establishing trustingrelationships with both children and parents. In light of these challenges, I will share practices and recommendations, focusing ontwo issues: (1) the types of materials and stimuli that Quechua-speaking children respond to most readily, as well as ways offamiliarizing children to new materials and (2) successful (and unsuccessful) experimental procedures developed for testingQuechua-speaking children and eliciting story retellings.Antje Muntendam (Radboud University Nijmegen)Methodologies for linguistic research in indigenous communitiesIn this presentation, different methods for linguistic research in indigenous communities are discussed. The first part focuses onmethods for collecting reliable sociolinguistic background information and naturalistic data. A picture-story task used to collectsemi-naturalistic data in Quechua in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru is discussed in detail. The second part deals with experimentalmethods utilized with adult Quechua speakers in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. In particular, four (semi-)experimental tasks arediscussed: (a) a sentence-judgment task designed to study the syntax, morphology and pragmatics of focus, (b) an elicitation taskon question-answer pairs created to study the syntax, morphology and prosody of focus, (c) a dialogue game designed to study theprosody of focus within the noun phrase, and (d) an elicitation task created to study the intonation of yes/no-questions. Thestrengths and weaknesses of the different methods and types of data are discussed and suggestions for future research are given.Susan Kalt (Roxbury Community College)Facilitating access to linguistic training for native speakers of indigenous languagesProyecto Yachay Q’ipi (Kalt and Castillo 2011) is an ongoing project in Bolivia and Peru to engage rural teachers and indigenouscommunity members in documentation of local language and culture. Intentional use of indigenous languages in the Andeanclassroom is rare although legally mandated in both countries. The project offers an opportunity for rural teachers and indigenouscommunity members to contribute to classroom content together by creating and piloting thematic native language curriculummaterials. Based on the model of curriculum kits developed by the Boston Children’s Museum, it integrates written materials withlesson plans, artifacts, games and multimodal experiences. Residencies and in-service visits to classrooms as well as planning andcollective evaluation of lessons integrating Quechua language and culture across the curriculum have allowed dialogue betweenWestern scientific methods and local wisdom traditions in the classroom. Project participants additionally contribute toexperimental studies of children’s L1 Quechua and L2 Spanish.Elena Benedicto (Purdue University)The right of return: How do I know what has been said about my language? Granting access to the results of research to thelanguage communityIn this presentation I focus on how to share the results of linguistic research with the people that provided the data and insights tomake it possible, the speaking community.We usually make the results of our research available in professional circles, but how do we ensure that the language communityhas access to both the linguistic papers produced and the language data themselves, in a meaningful way? This is part of theimbalance of power addressed in Benedicto and Mayangna Yulbarangyang Balna (2007), and is referred to as The Right ofReturn. Three relevant aspects are addressed here: 1. The types of materials (linguistic research vs raw data; of contemporary,recent or remote creation); 2. The notion of ‘meaningful return’ (e.g., the validity of ‘written’ materials for ‘oral’ cultures); and 3.Attitudes (whose responsibility is it to return the materials meaningfully: the linguists themselves, the funding agencies?).107