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

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herself by strapping a cassette recorder around her waist and listening to audiotapes while sheperformed domestic tasks. (The Everetts lived in a thatch hut that was slightly larger and moresophisticated than the huts of the Pirahã; it had walls and a storage room that could be locked.)During the family’s second year in the Amazon, Keren and the Everetts' eldest child, Shannon,contracted malaria, and Keren lapsed into a coma. Everett borrowed a boat from river traders andtrekked through the jungle for days to get her to a hospital. As soon as she was discharged,Everett returned to the village. (Keren recuperated in Belem for several months before joininghim.) "Christians who believe in the Bible believe that it is their job to bring others the joy ofsalvation," Everett said. "Even if they’re murdered, beaten to death, imprisoned-that's what youdo for God.Until Everett arrived in the Amazon, his training in linguistics had been limited to fieldtechniques. "I wanted as little formal linguistic theory as I could get by with," he told me. "Iwanted the basic linguistic training to do a translation of the New Testament." This changedwhen S.I.L. lost its contract with the Brazilian government to work in the Amazon. S.I.L. urgedthe Everetts to enroll as graduate students at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), inthe state of Sao Paulo, since the government would give them permission to continue living ontribal lands only if they could show that they were linguists intent on recording an endangeredlanguage. At UNICAMP, in the fall of 1978, Everett discovered Chomsky's theories. "For me, itwas another conversion experience," he said.In the late fifties, when Chomsky, then a young professor at M.I.T., first began to attract notice,behaviorism dominated the social science. According to B. F. Skinner, children learn words andgrammar by being praised for correct usage, much as lab animals learn to push a lever thatsupplies them with food. In 1959, in a demolishing review of Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior,"Chomsky wrote that the ability of children to create grammatical sentences that they have neverheard before proves that learning to speak does not depend on imitation, instruction, or rewards.As he put it in his book "Reflections on Language" (1975), "To come to know a human languagewould be an extraordinary intellectual achievement for a creature not specifically designed toaccomplish this task."Chomsky hypothesized that a specific faculty for language is encoded in the human brain atbirth. He described it as a language organ, which is equipped with an immutable set of rules--auniversal grammar--that is shared by all languages, regardless of how different they appear to be.The language organ, Chomsky said, cannot be dissected in the way that a liver or a heart can, butit can be described through detailed analyses of the abstract structures underlying language. "Bystudying the properties of natural languages, their structure, organization, and use," Chomskywrote, "we may hope to gain some understanding of the specific characteristics of humanintelligence. We may hope to learn something about human nature."Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, Chomskyans at universities around the world engaged informal analyses of language, breaking sentences down into ever more complex tree diagrams thatshowed branching noun, verb, and prepositional phrases, and also "X-bars," "transformations,""movements," and "deep structures" –Chomsky’s terms for some of the elements that constitutethe organizing principles of all language. ”I’d been doing linguistics at a fairly low level ofrigor," Everett said. "As soon as you started reading Chomsky’s stuff, and the people mostclosely associated with Chomsky, you realized this is a totally different level--this is actuallysomething that looks like science." Everett conceived his Ph.D. dissertation at UNICAMP as astrict Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã. Dividing his time between Sao Paulo and the Pirahã village,where he collected data, Everett completed his thesis in 1983. Written in Portuguese and later© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved20
published as a book in Brazil, "The Pirahã Language and the story of Syntax" was a highlytechnical discussion replete with Chomskyan tree diagrams. However, Everett says that he wasaware that Pirahã contained many linguistic anomalies that he could not fit into Chomsky’sparadigm. "I knew I was leaving out a lot of stuff," Everett told me. "But these gaps wereunexplainable to me."The dissertation earned Everett a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies,and a grant from the National Science Foundation to spend the 1984-85 academic year as avisiting fellow at M.I.T. Everett occupied an office next to Chomsky’s; he found the famedprofessor brilliant but withering. "Whenever you try out a theory on someone, there's alwayssome question that you hope they won't ask," Everett said. "That was always the first thingChomsky would ask."In 1988, Everett was hired by the University of Pittsburgh. By then, Chomsky’s system of ruleshad reached a state of complexity that even Chomsky found too baroque, and he had begun toformulate a simpler model for the principles underlying all languages. Everett faithfully keptabreast of these developments. "Chomsky sent me the papers that he was working on," he said. "Iwas like many of the scholars, in that I made regular pilgrimages to sit in Chomsky's classes tocollect the handout and to figure out exactly where the theory was today." At the same time,Everett says that he was increasingly troubled by the idiosyncrasies of Pirahã. "None of it wasaddressed by Chomskyan linguistics," he told me. "Chomsky’s theory only allows you to talkabout properties that obtain of tree structures.In the early nineties, Everett began to reread the work of linguists who had preceded Chomsky,including that of Edward Sapir, an influential Prussian-born scholar who died in 1939. A studentof the anthropologist Franz Boas, Sapir had taught at Yale and studied the languages of dozensof tribes in the Americas. Sapir was fascinated by the role of culture in shaping languages, andalthough he anticipated Chomsky’s preoccupation with linguistic universals, he was moreinterested in the variations that made each language unique. In his 1921 book, "Language," Sapirstated that language is an acquired skill, which "varies as all creative effort varies--not asconsciously, perhaps, but nonetheless as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, andthe arts of different peoples." Chomsky, however, believed that culture played little role in thestudy of language, and that going to far-flung places to record the arcane babel of near-extincttongues was a pointless exercise. Chomsky's view had prevailed. Everett began to wonder if thiswas an entirely good thing."When I went back and read the stuff Sapir wrote in the twenties, I just realized, hey, this reallyis a tradition that we lost," Everett said. "People believe they’ve actually studied a languagewhen they have given it a Chomskyan formalism. And you may have given us absolutely no insightwhatsoever into that language as a separate language."Everett began to question the first principle of Chomskyan linguistics: that infants could notlearn language if the principles of grammar had not been pre-installed in the brain. Babies arebathed in language from the moment they acquire the capacity to hear in the womb, Everettreasoned, and parents and caregivers expend great energy teaching children how to say wordsand assemble them into sentences--a process that lasts years. Was it really true that language, asChomsky asserted, simply “grows like any other body organ"? Everett did not deny the existenceof a biological endowment for language-- humans couldn't talk if they did not possess therequisite neurological architecture to do so. But, convinced that culture plays a far greater rolethan Chomsky’s theory accounted for, he decided that he needed to "take a radical reexaminationof my whole approach to the problem."© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved21
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 16 and 17: A few weeks earlier, I had called F
Page 18 and 19: “We struggled even getting to the
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
Page 67 and 68: Why Do Nonstandard English-Speaking
Page 69 and 70: Before beginning to teach standard
Page 71 and 72:
• 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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