AN intensive native language program for adults: The instructors' perspective

McGill Journal of Education, Fall 2002 by Merle Richards, David Maracle

2. How did the language program work?

The program for Cohort II had two parts: a nine-month daily language program developed and directed by Owennatekha over the school year 2000-2001, and a six-week follow-up in the summer of 2001 led by Kanatawakhon, and supported by several speakers from the community. Several young men, who had already had years of previous Mohawk study in school and university, joined the summer group and continued on into the following school year; with a few additional students who arrived in September 2002, they constituted Cohort III.

The groups met daily in a house where the presence of different elders created a conversational context. Occasional group outings and activities also provided content to discuss and review. One regular situation that involved conversation was preparing, serving, and eating lunch together every day. Students took turns in the kitchen, with fluent speakers from the community overseeing and describing the operations. Even the shy or slower students were able in that setting to relate vocabulary and sentence forms to the experiential context.

During the first term, the students were introduced to the basic grammatical structures of Mohawk, with practice and drill in all the common sentence and word forms. In the second term, the focus shifted to developing oral and written proficiency. Owennatekha explains:

The first half of the program is delivering grammar, a body of information that's got to go out there in certain sequences. Then once we're at that stage ... we break the group into two.

Well, some of them had a lot more language when they came here, and some of them did a lot more with it once they were here and the gap is even more pronounced now. In both groups, everybody advanced quite a bit, some more than others, but that distance in terms of functional language is light years apart now - they both learned the vocabulary and the rules, but some learned a lot better and they're just much more functional in the things that they want to know, and much more complex and sophisticated, while some people are still in the basics.

... We say, 'Let's take you who've got this stuff in your head, and let's hone that, [moving ahead and manipulating] sentence structure, word order, syntax, expressions . . .and let's take you who don't have it yet in your head and let's get it into your head [reviewing and drilling] basic word construction . . .

Owennatekha also works on study strategies with the students:

It's now 'develop it, refine it, get better at it, using it,' which means - well, we say if you're at home and you are watching TV, just try and translate in your head what those people are saying - watch TV and say, 'How do I say this, how do I say this?' and translate as you go along. . . Or if you're driving along on the road, try and describe what you see out the window: 'There's this bird sitting on a fence; how do I say "a bird sitting on a fence," how do I say, "There's a tree lying down in the middle of the yard"'- so we say that this is the kind of "homework" that they have to do.