Art Un ticle I.1 ited Sta In the ates News - Woodring College of ...

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A few weeks earlier, I had called Fitch in Scotland, where he is a professor at the University ofSt. Andrews. "I'm seeing this as an exploratory fact-finding trip," he told me. “I want to see withmy own eyes how much of this stuff that Dan is saying seems to check out."Everett is known among linguistics experts for orneriness and impatience with academicdecorum. He was born into a working-class family in Holtville, a town on the California-Mexicoborder, where his hard-drinking father, Leonard, worked variously as a bartender, a cowboy, anda mechanic. "I don't think we had a book in the house," Everett said. "To my Dad, people whotaught at colleges and people who wore ties were 'sissies'-all of them. I suppose some of that isstill in me." Everett’s chief exposure to intellectual life was through his mother, a waitress, whodied of a brain aneurysm when Everett was eleven. She brought home Reader's Digest condensedbooks and a set of medical encyclopedias, which Everett attempted to memorize. In high school,he saw the movie “My Fair Lady” and thought about becoming a linguist, because, he laterwrote, Henry Higgins's work "attracted me intellectually, and because it looked like phoneticianscould get rich."As a teen-ager, Everett played the guitar in rock bands (his keyboardist later became an earlymember of Iron Butterfly) and smoked pot and dropped acid, until the summer of 1968, when hemet Keren Graham, another student at El Capitan High School, in Lakeside. The daughter ofChristian missionaries, Keren was brought up among the Satere people in northeastern Brazil.She invited Everett to church and brought him home to meet her family. "They were loving andcaring and had all these groovy experiences in the Amazon," Everett said. "They supported meand told me how great I was. This was just not what I was used to." On October 4, 1968, at theage of seventeen, he became a born-again Christian. "I felt that my life had changed completely,that I had stepped from darkness into light-all the expressions you hear." He stopped using drugs,and when he and Keren were eighteen they married. A year later, the first of their three childrenwas born, and they began preparing to become missionaries.In 1976, after graduating with a degree in Foreign Missions from the Moody Bible Institute ofChicago, Everett enrolled with Keren in the Summer Institute of Linguistics, known as S.I.L., aninternational evangelical organization that seeks to spread God's Word by translating the Bibleinto the languages of pre-literate societies. They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Kerenstayed in a hut in the jungle with the couple's children-by this time, there were three-- whileEverett underwent grueling field training. He endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for severaldays deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a rope, a machete, and a flashlight.The couple was given lessons in translation techniques, for which Everett proved to have a gift.His friend Peter Gordon, a linguist at Columbia University who has published a paper on theabsence of numbers in Pirahã, says that Everett regularly impresses academic audiences with ademonstration in which he picks from among the crowd a speaker of a language that he hasnever heard. 'Within about twenty minutes, he can tell you the basic structure of the languageand how its grammar works," Gordon said. "He has incredible breadth of knowledge, is really,really smart, knows stuff inside out.” Everett’s talents were obvious to the faculty at S.I.L., whofor twenty years had been trying to make progress in Pirahã, with little success. In October,1977, at S.I.L.’s invitation, Everett, Keren, and their three small children moved to Brazil, first toa city called Belem, to learn Portuguese, and then, a year later, to a Pirahã village at the mouth ofthe Maici River. “At that time, we didn’t know that Pirahã was linguistically so hard,” Kerentold me.There are about three hundred and fifty Pirahã spread out in small villages along the Maici andMarmelos Rivers. The village that I visited with Everett was typical: seven huts made by© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved16
propping palm-frond roofs on top of four sticks. The huts had dirt floors and no walls orfurniture, except for a raised platform of thin branches to sleep on. These fragile dwellings, inwhich a family of three or four might live, lined a path that wound through low brush and grassnear the riverbank. The people keep few possessions in their huts – pots and pans, a machete, aknife – and make no tools other than scraping implements (used for making arrowheads), looselywoven palm-leaf bags, and wood bows and arrows. Their only ornaments are simple necklacesmade from seeds, teeth, feathers, beds, and soda-can pull-tabs, which they often get from traderswho barter with the Pirahã for Brazil nuts, wood, and sorva (a rubbery sap used to make chewinggum), and which the tribe members wear to ward off evil spirits.Unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon, the Pirahã have resisted efforts bymissionaries and government agencies to teach them farming. They maintain tiny, weed-infestedpatches of ground a few steps into the forest, where they cultivate scraggly manioc plants. “Thestuff that’s growing in this village was either planted by somebody else or it’s what grows whenyou spit the seed out,” Everett said to me one morning as we walked through the village.Subsisting almost entirely on fish and game, which they catch and hunt daily, the Pirahã haveignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking, and they produce only enoughmanioc flour to last a few days. (The Kawahiv, another Amazonian tribe that Everett hasstudied, make enough to last for months.) One of their few concessions to modernity is theirdress: the adult men wear T-shirts and shorts that they get from traders; the women wear plaincotton dresses that they sew themselves."For the first several years I was here, I was disappointed that I hadn't gone to a 'colorful' groupof people," Everett told me, "I thought of the people in the Xingu, who paint themselves and usethe lip plates and have the festivals. But then I realized that this is the most intense culture that Iwould ever have hoped to experience. This a culture that's invisible to the naked eye, but that isincredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the Amazon, nobody has resisted change likethis in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the world."According to the best guess of archeologists, the Pirahã arrived in the Amazon between tenthousand and forty thousand years ago, after bands of Homosapiens from Eurasia migrated to theAmericas over the Bering Strait. The Pirahã were once part of a larger Indian group called theMura, but had split from the main tribe by the time the Brazilians first encountered the Mura, in1714. The Mura went on to learn Portuguese and to adopt Brazilian ways, and their language isbelieved to be extinct. The Pirahã, however, retreated deep into the jungle.In 1921, the anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú spent time among the Pirahã and noted that theyshowed "little interest in the advantages of civilization" and displayed "almost no signs ofpermanent contact with civilized people."S.I.L. first made contact with the Pirahã nearly fifty years ago, when a missionary couple, Arloand Vi Heinrichs, joined a settlement on the Marmelos. The Heinrichses stayed for six and a halfyears, struggling to become proficient in the language. The phonemes (the sounds from whichwords are constructed) were exceedingly difficult, featuring nasal whines and sharp intakes ofbreath, and sounds made by popping or flapping the lips. Individual words were hard to learn,since the Pirahã habitually whittle nouns down to single syllables. Also confounding was thetonal nature of the language: the meanings of words depend on changes in pitch. (The words for"friend" and "enemy" differ only in the pitch of a single syllable.) The Heinrichses' task wasfurther complicated because Pirahã, like a few other Amazonian tongues, has male and femaleversions: the women use one fewer consonant than the men do.© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved17
Page 2 and 3: "Those who arrive by age 12 or 13 m
Page 5: Article I.2 Are Signed Languages "R
Page 8 and 9: Biological analyses of the status o
Page 10 and 11: and beyond, speaking and signing ch
Page 12 and 13: Conclusion: Are Signed Languages Re
Page 14 and 15: Article I.3 The Interpreter: Has a
Page 18 and 19: “We struggled even getting to the
Page 20 and 21: herself by strapping a cassette rec
Page 22 and 23: In 1998, after nine years as the ch
Page 24 and 25: momentary burst of excitement that
Page 26 and 27: can shape core grammar. Because the
Page 28 and 29: The authors compared animal and hum
Page 30 and 31: monkey moved. He followed it with h
Page 32 and 33: delight, fear, laughter, and surpri
Page 34 and 35: Piipaío in a hut: Pirahã huts typ
Page 36 and 37: LEP students, and equitable organiz
Page 38 and 39: 4. Second language development crea
Page 41 and 42: curriculum or "teaching to the test
Page 43 and 44: portfolio work was scanned and stor
Page 45 and 46: experiences of many groups of stude
Page 47 and 48: While not disagreeing that interpre
Page 49 and 50: sound educational practice, however
Page 51 and 52: arises from the efforts to abstract
Page 53 and 54: Article II.2 Cross-Cultural Communi
Page 55 and 56: males who can serve as positive rol
Page 57 and 58: Understanding another culture is a
Page 59 and 60: Pets and AnimalsWhich animals are v
Page 61 and 62: to teach standard English is reflec
Page 63 and 64: Asking personal questions of a pers
Page 65 and 66: Using Cross Cultural Communication
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Why Do Nonstandard English-Speaking
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Before beginning to teach standard
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• Negative attitudes toward low p
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New standardized tests and assessme
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Each of the behaviors listed above
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Article II.3 Hard Work Hypothesis:
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each point higher in SES, students
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This case does not provide strong s
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Article II.4 Language Acquisition a
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1992, p. XI). These researchers, wh
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comprehend a word within a specific
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more to the truthfulness of the chi
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This idea of “semilingualism” c
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Article III.1 A Brief Description o
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take different lengths of time to c
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example, should involve the same co
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As with all stages of BICS acquisit
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Assessment techniques at stage 3 ca
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different. Therefore, the social di
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integrative motivation. Basically,
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(Ellis, 1985; Hakuta, 1986). Howeve
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that sociocultural processes have o
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Article III.3 How Children Acquire
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phonetic units (unique to signed la
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Article III.4 Toward a Sociocultura
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emember is that the fundamental goa
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The best practices models can be th
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By focusing on the dialectic betwee
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intergenerational wisdom shared by
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Daily Realities RecappedThe above v
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traditions. At a time in our histor
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We will now look at two examples of
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Speakers communicate fluently, main
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question the effects of such attitu
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Article IV.3 Culture Change: Effect
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and psychological characteristics o
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Contraryto what wewere expecting, t
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Article V.1 Assessment in ESL & Bil
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vocabulary does the student lack?Is
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whether they are LEP and to provide
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Fourth, ESL and bilingual program s
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competent reader/writer. All versio
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Table 1Comparison of Recent Accultu
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unilinear model, which measures the
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an English-only instructional progr
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Article V.3 Assessment of English L
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8. Change answers only for a very g
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Riles, 1979; Jose P. v Ambac, 1983)
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proficiency is often underestimated
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Finally, when second language reade
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for their decisions, noting issues
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As mentioned above, when the transi
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ather than generic adjectives and t
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their imagined points of view. Ther
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English texts and demonstrate progr
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using inter-district teams). In the
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