Category: Current Literature and Research

Highlights research around Native language revitalization, teaching & learning, and preservation efforts in the Northwest, nationally, and internationally

NILI at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

On Monday, March 24, 2014 from 3:35 to 6:35pm at the Portland Marriot Downtown Waterfront, the AAAL Annual Conference will host a special session Supporting Maintenance and Revitalization of North American Indigenous Languages: Collaborations between Communities, Applied and Theoretical Linguists. Several NILI staff will be in attendance and presenting in several different sessions.

Janne Underriner will be co-presenting with Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins from the University of Victoria and Keren Rice from the University of Toronto. Dr. Underriner and her co-presenters will discuss and illustrate language loss, the efforts made by community members, theoretical and applied linguists and educators to reverse this loss, and some of the issues that arise in this work. The partnerships and case studies highlighted in this session demonstrate the region’s exceptionally high level of collaboration, activism and innovation in research methodologies, in research on language loss and reclamation, and in the development and delivery of educational programs within communities and in academic contexts.

Zalmai Zahir will be presenting on Motivation for language learning and use. Motivation is key to language maintenance. If we are not clear as to why we want to learn and speak a language, it is difficult  to establish its use beyond the classroom. This presentation is about how to get learners to discover their own motivations. Joana Jansen and Virginia Beavert will be presenting on community-centered course development for Ichishkiin language classes at University of Oregon. This presentation will describe the Ichishkiin/Sahaptin language course that is taught at the University of Oregon within a framework of mindful collaboration. Tribal language programs and tribal members are stakeholders and partners. Their presentation will discuss how the ongoing development of the course has changed and strengthened due to collaborative partnerships.

Come join them and share your perspective.

Tribal Student Lagging, from the 1/24/14 Register Guard article

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

A recent study points to absenteeism as one major culprit in the underachievement of tribal students in Oregon. Additionally, tribal schools perform poorly in state rankings. The Spirit Mountain Community Fund sponsored this study in collaboration with the Chalkboard Project and ECONorthwest.  Here are some bullet points of the findings:

  • Of the 67,000 students statewide that are solely or part Native American, according to school records, only 3,200 students are enrolled at tribal schools
  • 40% of Oregon tribal students perform at grade level in math
  • 50% of Oregon tribal students perform at grade level in reading
  • In the 2011 class, 59% earned their diploma compared to 72% of all Oregon students
  • In 2011-12, one-third of tribal students missed 10% or more of school – extensive research indicates that chronic absenteeism can have significant negative consequences on attitudes towards school and academic achievement
  • 30% of tribal students are enrolled in under-performing schools compared with 7% of students state-wide

Based on these alarming findings, the study authors urged a community-wide approach to develop solutions and suggested these approaches would need to incorporate the lives of tribal students at home and in school.

Kathleen George, Director of the Spirit Mountain Fund, adds: “It is disturbing to see that so many tribal member kids all across our state are not getting an effective education. We need to help foster a change in culture to help our children understand that showing up in school every day is the path to success in school and later in life.” Perhaps if authentic Native language learning were more prevalent in the educational experience of Oregon tribal students, the desire to attend school regularly would be natural and immediate.

Welcome to the NILI Blog

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

NILI is happy to announce a new online tool to share ideas and information. This email is to introduce you to the new NILI Blog! And we hope you like it and will use it.

For those new to blogs, we’ve organized it so that the newest posts come at the top. Older posts are stored lower down in the pages, and all posts are filed by categories for browsing or later reading. We have been working hard to make categories that the various communities we serve will find useful and interesting. So far we have the following: Current Literature and Research; Curriculum Corner; Feature Projects; Language Activism; Native Language Phrases; and Tech Tips. We look forward to adding more ideas under each category and building a valuable resource. If you think of other categories we might want to add we would love to know.

Our goal is to make this a group effort. NILI faculty and staff will be contributing their various ideas and expertise periodically and over time. However, we hope to also have contributions from *YOU* as well. Feel free to send us any ideas, tips, advice, or interesting things you are working on so we can include your voice to the blog. We are happy to work with you on any article ideas. We’d like to limit the postings to a few paragraphs or roughly in the 200-350 word range.

Send postings and ideas to Ross Anderson at rossa@uoregon.edu. If you are not up for an article, we hope you will at least add a comment to some of the articles in the blog.

We look forward to “seeing you” and sharing ideas online! Please visit our website for more information about NILI: http://pages.uoregon.edu/nwili/

Janne and all of the NILI team

Welcome to NILI!

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

Situated at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR, the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) provides Native language teachers and community members with training in language teaching, materials and curriculum development, benchmarks creation, and linguistics. With tribal partners, NILI supports and strengthens language preservation and revitalization efforts by establishing collaborative, on-going projects which meet the specific needs and desires of each language community.