Taking down the barriers: Accessibility by detechnicalization and minimalist presentation

• Main Author: Quinn, Conor
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Maliseet
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/25268

For marginalized languages, barriers to entry are many. And incentives, pressures, and resources to reach real competence are few. In the case of linguistic re-awakening---for heritage communities having few to no native speakers---the oft-lamented "lack of interest" may actually be a calculation, one that assumes high entry costs to the language due to experiences of opaque or even exoticizing presentations to would-be learners. This can come from linguistic support itself, which still too often provides access only through a dense metalanguage of "linguistese". Which then kindles a false conflict between analysis-heavy presentation vs. naturalistic full immersion---neither being a reasonable approach for the target audience: interested but busy adults. When learners' practical needs and intellectual frameworks are disregarded, the ethical good intent of researcher giveback gets canceled out, as materials provided are inaccessible and off-putting. Entry costs become too high, and potential learners are lost. Drawing from 20 years of work with heritage learners of several Algonquian languages (primarily Penobscot, Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, and Mi'gmaq), we examine two ways to lower these costs: detechnicalization, and minimalism in presentation. Both inform promising innovations in how we present three traditionally quite technicalized and intimidating linguistic features--- (a) polysynthetic stem-building and complex argument-indexing head-marking (b) obviation (c) ±"animate" gender contrasts ---to English-based learners. Looking at each in brief, we derive and describe some general principles by which linguists and language teachers can rethink their technical understandings and keep content presentation to a lesson-by-lesson learnable minimum. Detechnicalization, for example, finds and teaches from real conversations whose core communication hinges on the meaning contributed by a target grammatical pattern itself. Now tools rather than rules, these patterns become core vocabulary, named by concrete real-use ...