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delight, fear, laughter, and surprise – and when Kong himself arrived, smashing though the palmtrees, pandemonium ensued. Small children, who had been sitting close to the screen, jumped upand scurried into their mothers’ laps; the adults laughed and yelled at the screen.If Fitch’s experiments were inconclusive on the subject of whether Chomsky’s universalgrammar applied to the Pirahã, Jackson’s movie left no question about the universality ofHollywood film grammar. Kong battled raptors and Watts dodged giant insects, the Pirahãoffered a running commentary, which Everett translated: "Now he's going to fall!" “He's tired!""She's running!" "Look. A centipede!" Nor were the Pirahã in doubt about what was beingcommunicated in the long, lingering looks that passed between gorilla and girl. "She is hisspouse," one Pirahã said. Yet in the reaction to the movie Everett also saw proof of his theoryabout the tribe. "They’re not generalizing about the character of giant apes," he pointed out.They’re reacting to the immediate action on the screen with direct assertions about what theysee."In Fitch's final two days of experiments, he failed to find another subject as promising as thesixteen-year-old girl. But he was satisfied with what he had been able to accomplish in six daysin the jungle. “I think Dan's is an interesting and valid additional approach to add to the arsenal,"Fitch told me after we had flown back to Porto Velho and were sitting beside the pool at theHotel Vila Rica. "I think you need to look at something as complex as language from lots ofdifferent angles, and I think the angle he's arguing is interesting and deserves more work, moreresearch. But as far as the Pirahã disproving universal grammar? I don’t think anything I couldhave seen out here would have convinced me that that was ever anything other than just thewrong way to frame the problem."On my final night in Brazil, I met Keren Everett, in the gloomy lobby of the hotel. At fifty-five,she is an ageless, elfin woman with large dark eyes and waist-length hair pulled back from herface. She is trained in formal linguistics, but her primary interest in the Pirahã remains mission.In keeping with the tenets of S.I.L., she does not proselytize, or actively attempt to convert them;it is enough, S.I.L. believes, to translate the Bible into the tribal tongue. Keren insists that shedoesn’t know the language well yet. "I still haven't cracked it," she said, adding that she thoughtshe was "beginning to feel it for the first time, after twenty-five years"The key to earning the language is the tribe's singing, Keren said: the way that the group dropconsonants and vowels altogether and communicate purely by variations in pitch, stress, andrhythm--what linguists call "prosody." I was reminded of an evening in the village when I hadheard someone singing a clutch of haunting notes on a rising, then falling scale. The voicerepeated the pattern over and over, without variation, for more than half an hour. I crept up to theedge of one of the Pirahã huts and saw that it was a woman, winding raw cotton onto a spool,and intoning this extraordinary series of notes that sounded like a muted horn. A toddler playedat her feet. I asked Everett about this, and he said something vague about how tribe members"sing their dreams." But when I described the scene to Keren she grew animated and explainedthat this is how the Pirahã teach their children to speak. 'The toddler was absorbing the lesson inprosody through endless repetition--an example, one might argue, of Edward Sapir's culturaltheory of language acquisition at work."This language uses prosody much more than any other language I know of," Keren told me."It’s not the kind of thing that you can write, and capture, and go back to; you have to watch, andyou have to feel it. It’s like someone singing a song. You want to watch and listen and try to singalong with them. So I started doing that, and I began noticing things that never transcribed, andthings I never picked up when I listened to a tape of them, and part of it was the performance. So© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved32
at that point I said, 'Put the tape recorders and notebooks away, focus on the person, and watchthem.’ They give a lot of things using prosody that you never would have found otherwise. Thishas never been documented in any language I know." Aspects of Pirahã that had longconfounded Keren became clear, she said. “I realized, Oh! That’s what the subject-verb lookslike, that’s what the pieces of the clause and the time phrase and the object and the other phrasesfeel like. That was the beginning of a break through for me. I won't say that I’ve broken it until Ican creatively use the verbal structure--and I can't do it yet."Keren says that Everett's frustration at realizing that they would have to "start all over again"with the language ultimately led to his decision to leave the Amazon in 2002 and return toacademia. "He was diligent and he was trying to use his perspective and his training, and Iwatched the last year that we were together in the village--he just was, like, 'This is it. I'm out ofhere.' That was the year I started singing, and he said, 'Damn it if I'm going to learn to sing thislanguage!' And he was out. It's torment. It is tormenting when you have a good mind and youcan't crack it. I said, 'I don't care, we're missing something. We've got to look at it from adifferent perspective.'" Keren shook her head. "Pirahã has just always been out there defyingevery linguist that's gone out there, because you can't start at the segment level and go on. You'renot going to find out anything, because they really can communicate without the syllables."Later that day, when Everett drove me to the airport in Porto Velho, I told him about myconversation with Keren. He sighed. "Keren has made tremendous progress, and I'm sure sheknows more about musical speech than I do at this point," he said. "There are probably severalareas of Pirahã where her factual knowledge exceeds mine. But it's not all the prosody. That's thething." Keren's perspective on Pirahã derives from her missionary impulses, he said. "It would beimpossible for her to believe that we know the language, because that would mean that the Wordof God doesn't work." Everett pulled into the airport parking lot. It was clear that talking aboutKeren caused him considerable pain. He did not want our conversation to end on a quarrel withher. He reminded me that his disagreement is with Chomsky."A lot of people's view of Chomsky is of the person in the lead on the jungle path," Everett hadtold me in the Pirahã village. "And if anybody s likely to find the way home it's him. So theywant to stay as close behind him as possible. Other people say, 'Fuck that, I’m going to get onthe river and take my canoe.' "© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved33
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 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 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
Page 73 and 74: New standardized tests and assessme
Page 75 and 76: Each of the behaviors listed above
Page 77 and 78: Article II.3 Hard Work Hypothesis:
Page 79 and 80: each point higher in SES, students
Page 81 and 82: This case does not provide strong s
Page 83 and 84:
Article II.4 Language Acquisition a
Page 85 and 86:
1992, p. XI). These researchers, wh
Page 87 and 88:
comprehend a word within a specific
Page 89 and 90:
more to the truthfulness of the chi
Page 91 and 92:
This idea of “semilingualism” c
Page 93 and 94:
Article III.1 A Brief Description o
Page 95 and 96:
take different lengths of time to c
Page 97 and 98:
example, should involve the same co
Page 99 and 100:
As with all stages of BICS acquisit
Page 101 and 102:
Assessment techniques at stage 3 ca
Page 103 and 104:
different. Therefore, the social di
Page 105:
integrative motivation. Basically,
Page 109 and 110:
(Ellis, 1985; Hakuta, 1986). Howeve
Page 111 and 112:
that sociocultural processes have o
Page 113 and 114:
Article III.3 How Children Acquire
Page 115 and 116:
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
Page 123 and 124:
By focusing on the dialectic betwee
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intergenerational wisdom shared by
Page 127 and 128:
Daily Realities RecappedThe above v
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traditions. At a time in our histor
Page 131 and 132:
We will now look at two examples of
Page 133 and 134:
Speakers communicate fluently, main
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question the effects of such attitu
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Article IV.3 Culture Change: Effect
Page 139 and 140:
and psychological characteristics o
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Contraryto what wewere expecting, t
Page 143 and 144:
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
Page 171 and 172:
As mentioned above, when the transi
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ather than generic adjectives and t
Page 175 and 176:
their imagined points of view. Ther
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English texts and demonstrate progr
Page 179:
using inter-district teams). In the
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