The recent meeting critically examining the $877,000 three-year funding of the Apsaalooke Preschool Language Immersion Program revealed misconceptions (see Big Horn County News January 2).
Late spring of 2002 I sat with a Buddhist monk in his tiny bedroom in a Tibetan village in the Eastern Himalayas. He was proud to write in Tibetan script the name of his family house where we were guests for the night (I still have the page). He explained that houses in this small village had a spiritual life, and that their names were more important than the names of the individuals who lived there.
He also explained that his writing had only recently become legal. We had just walked to his bedroom from his tiny temple. It had been the only one in the village for years, since the Communists had destroyed the old temple. Here he had persuaded local Communist authorities for permission to teach children to pray. Inside the round domed hut hardly eight feet across was a brass/gold prayer wheel with a trench worn into the dirt floor where little feet had packed down the dirt while little hands rotated individual small prayer wheels. I imagined, as I spun one of the little wheels, the whole apparatus turning, wheels in a wheel. Undetected by the authorities' periodic inspection were the papers tucked between stones in the walls where children, between prayers, had practiced writing in Tibetan and had hidden their treasured work.
Now, he said, the children learn in two languages in school, Tibetan and Hanyu (Chinese). They can pray now at the larger, newer temple. But children still were coming to his tiny temple, and he relished his opportunity to continue teaching them their heritage ways, singing the chants while rotating the prayer wheels, continuing to tread their bare feet in the depressed circle in the dirt.
Tibetan language has become generally more acceptable to party bosses in Western China, but they are still prone to crack down, reflecting the worldwide tendency of hegemonic cultures and nations to denigrate minority languages and culture. We in Big Horn County are, with the new immersion program at Crow, forging an exception.
But we need a better understanding of the research on 2nd language acquisition and its benefit for academic success. We need to know that ethnic minorities do access a unique benefit for academic success in the dominant language when their heritage language gains the respect of the dominant culture. It works by promoting 2nd language immersion instruction for five-year-olds in their minority culture. A most crucial finding is that recovery of a heritage language is a boon, not a distraction, from learning the dominant language. And such instruction improves chances of successful entry into the larger culture.
When we visited Tibetan regions of Western China, ethnic minority language teaching was just being discovered as useful for learning Chinese. Focusing on Tibetan in those tiny dirt-floor huts really did help those children learn how to learn Chinese, contrary to most Chinese Communist Party bosses of the Tibetan region. Needless to say, the battle is not yet won, especially in Tibet proper, where a rebellion against Chinese domination is ongoing.
It's not won here in Big Horn County either, where the report in the paper reflected the prevailing error that learning Apsaalooke in head start will somehow interfere with Crow Indian children learning English, and ultimately retard their academic progress. This is also still a battle in Arizona and California, two states where a sizeable and powerful segment tries to control the research information and the debate.
Fortunately tribal education officials listen to people like Janine Pease, whose research was crucial to win this grant. Her experience and scholarly background helps promote the primary focus of immersion: so that Apsáalooke five-year-olds are grounded linguistically in their heritage language enough to grow and flourish in English skills beyond their peers by age 12. This is the age where the well-known "bilingual bonus" usually kicks in for children learning in two languages at age 5. She knows that successful bilingual instruction is having high quality models of both languages available to children. Adults speaking with children in immersion programs need fluency in both languages used for instruction. They need instructional materials in both languages to make instruction in all subjects a source of language growth. Teachers well trained in skills of 2nd language instruction are essential for five-year-olds to reach their bilingual bonus potential when they are twelve. Even more important is leadership healing from a deprecatory attitude toward Apsáalooke language in our schools, as reflected in the report on this meeting. So yes, we have some real challenges in Big Horn County in achieving the bilingual bonus all our children deserve.
Extending the concept further leads me to wish my own grandchildren, now in elementary school, would have had the benefit of head start instruction offered with immersion in Tsestsestáhes (Cheyenne) or Apsáalooke (Crow). Those are the languages that cry out from the soil of this county. This is where we live, and those languages can become the beneficial 2nd language for children of any ethnic background born and raised here. I'm assuming some parents would join me taking up the offer, but hope no one would promote rigidly mandating a 2nd language immersion instruction for all children, as is now done in China with English, taught by caring teachers with miniscule English language knowledge.
Further information and hundreds of links to online sources can easily be found by searching online or in a library. Use these search words: L2 language acquisition research bilingual bonus.
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
graberdb@gmail.com
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