Article review by Tracy Williams

Berlin, Lawrence N.  (2000).  The Benefits of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching for Indigenous Language Educators.  Journal of American Indian Education. V39 n3, p. 19-35.

Summary

This article proposes to use concepts in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) in order to teach Indigenous languages and reverse language shift.  First, there is an explanation of what SLAT is and how it is used.  Second, there is a review of the literature regarding the status quo of endangered Indigenous languages taken from Michael Krauss’ works.  Then, Berlin provides some answers to the questions surrounding the issues of endangered languages:  Why should we be worried about language death?  What causes it?  This leads to talk about Reversing Language Shift (RLS) and what kind of efforts are going on now to ameliorate the problem of language loss.  He talks about different community efforts in RLS in California, Alaska, Hawaii and other communities in the U.S.  He argues that SLAT pedagogy parallels the ideas in Indigenous language immersion and bilingual education.  The article states “language learners need to use the language in order to learn it; language should not be taught devoid of its culture; and language learning happens in stages” (p.27).  Finally, he states that SLAT is beneficial to use because of its aim at communicative competence, which is in line with oral tradition.

Analysis

The first time I read this article, it made me happy that someone had wrote about how to tie together the ideas and concepts I had learned at the American Indian Language Development Institute and real life practical uses.  I love the fact that he includes citations from articles written by Indigenous people practicing and researching language teaching in their own communities.  I have cited this article in previous papers I have written for other classes.  The bibliography is wide-ranging and very useful.  Since this is the second time I have read this article, I paid more attention to his writing style and his own choice of words.  I thought that it was well written and possibly written for an audience with ties to the communities he speaks of in the article.  I also thought that in this article he projects a very good understanding of issues involved in teaching language.  Therefore, I concluded that he had presented his thoughts and arguments well.