I got this email from Ralph Wolfe, who directs a native language program in Yakutat, Alaska. I got it on December 6 and just now opened it up, so Ralph please accept my apologies. I know your program started in January and we should have gotten you some answers by now. But it’s never too late. Let’s start the discussion.
Of course, no one is qualified to address the question you raise below except the specialists in Florida and Oklahoma who have embraced comprehensible input as the way they want to approach the saving of their rapidly disappearing languages.
So Ralph, hopefully this blog post will serve as a springboard for further discussion with Jacob Manitowa and his team (Sauk), Kate Taluga (Myskoke) and Josh Hinson (Chickasaw) on how exactly to benefit from the remaining elders in each tribe to keep the language from going to sleep when they do.
I sent emails to those three to ask them to respond here in one place. You and they can and perhaps should establish your own network as well, as the work you are doing can arguably be said to be the most important work in language acquistion being done right now in the United States, by far.
Hi Ben,
I just got the books and the videos in, first of all thank you so much!!! I do have a couple more questions, first of all the stories that we are using are all going to be pre-wrote and will have a bunch of questions wrote out also. So that brings me right into the other question so our team is not by any means fluent in our language, we are all learning but are not fluent. We do have elders who are involved but not teachers, there will be one in the classroom while we teach, and we meet every other week to talk about lessons and translate words and new stories. I know this will work I am just not sure how? Does it seem like it will work to you? Any suggestions on how I could work this out?
Ralph Góos’k’ Wolfe