How To Teach When the Teacher Isn't Fluent.

The majority of the indigenous languages in our country are no longer being learned at home, and the last generation of native speakers are growing older and older. At the same time, there are increasingly strong efforts by communities to keep their languages alive by developing teaching programs of various sorts in the schools and in the community. The problem is, who will teach the language? Some communities are lucky enough to still have young and middle aged adult speakers who also have or can get training in language teaching practices. But as the speakers age, increasingly, the energy and the burden for language revitalization is among the younger adult generations who are not fluent in their language. It is sad, but it is true, and we can do no less than honor and support those with the drive and the bravery to take on this task. This paper is an attempt to support these efforts by discussing the problem that such heroes must face: how to teach a language when the teacher isn’t fluent. It is very easy for a non-fluent speaker (or often, even a fluent one) to fall back on a form of language-teaching that involves word-lists taught through the written word. This, after all, can be done with extremely minimal knowledge of a language. However, learning words in writing, in isolation, translated and explained in English, is not an effective way to learn a language. If the goal of teaching the language is for children to become conversationally proficient, then it is important to teach conversation. Programs that have been effective in actually producing fluent speakers generally use immersion techniques, where no English is allowed in the classroom, and teaching takes place through conversation in the Native language and other forms of discourse embedded in interesting activities. Such models as Total Physical Response, or even just a combination of rich language input and common sense, tend to be the most successful ways of bringing students to conversational proficiency. How can a non-fluent speaker possibly do this form of teaching? In order to approach some possible ways that a non-fluent teacher can teach effectively, I will focus primarily on the situation that many communities are in today: there are elderly fluent speakers in the community—too old to teach a class full of energetic children, but still able to be of great help as a partner in language teaching. These elders can also be the “language mentors” to the teachers who are not (yet) fluent. We will call the non-fluent teachers the “teacher-learners,” since they are both teaching and learning the language. These teacherlearners may also frequently utilize the help of linguistic materials that are available in the language, and sometimes enlist the help of linguists as well. First of all, if it is at all possible, the teacher-learner should be given the opportunity to spend some months or even years attending to the development of his or her own fluency before intensive teaching duties are foisted upon her (or him). Mentored language learning with an elder is a good way for the future teacher to develop her own conversational fluency (Hinton et al, 2002). Working additionally with linguistic documentation can help with increasing vocabu-