LING 574! Seminar in Applied Linguistics! Instructor: Dr. Peter Jacobs! Summer 2013!
! Discovering Deeply Together! !
In these final courses of our program there was a renewed excitement which exuded new levels of creativity and deeper thinking. Although the focus of our program is on language revitalization I’ve come to realize that the web of our learning is strengthened by the wisdom, sharing and feedback of topics which at first seem to be unrelated. ! We were tasked with forming groups to choose research articles which represent different aspects of applied linguistics and presenting them in a class seminar. Apart from sharing summaries of the articles we discovered that we have all come to this place for different reasons and in different ways. We honoured each other and the work of those researchers whose work we had chosen in this sharing. In discussions about our articles we realized that we had significant amounts of personal experience which were validated in our topics and added depth to our understanding of them. ! Our seminar provided for feedback from the cohort which was critical, encouraging and offered wisdom from years of experience in indigenous language education and leadership. The critique provided clarity in areas I felt confused about and insight into new ways of looking at the research. This venue provided for a value added experience of unexpected outcomes that can be treasured for the process as much as its purpose. ! The article which I contributed to our group provided an element of research whose aim was to study the role of technology in indigenous language revitalization. The aim of the research was to determine if this new technology would promote the use and transfer of language outside of school, with the interaction of children and their parents at home. Typically, possible routes for effective use of technology by the community are communicative, production of materials and documentation. However, this study generated new considerations, such as the possibility of language use beyond the domain of the technology. As I embark on my own research project I find this interesting and ambitious as this is a problem which is not new, especially when referring to theoretical frameworks and models which attempt to re-establish intergenerational transmission of language. This course left me thirsty for more, especially in exploring the role of spirituality in our language revitalization work.