My Students and their Language Context
For my project, my class consisted of 14 first and second grade students. My students were Yup’ik and grew up in a unique cultural context that I describe below.
Village Location |
I taught in the Lower Yukon School District (LYSD), which is located about 500 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska. LYSD is about the size of Oregon and consists of 10 school sites, none of which are connected by roads. The village where I taught and conducted my project was Kotlik, which has a population of about 600 and is located about 2 miles upriver from the Bering Sea (Kotlik, Alaska, 2014).
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Historical Language Influences |
The heritage language in Kotlik and LYSD villages is Central Yup'ik. Kotlik’s location at the mouth of the Yukon River resulted in extended exposure to English through missionaries and fishing industries. Income from fishing has made travel possible, and media has also significantly increased exposure to English and contributed to the language shift away from Yup'ik to English (Marlow, personal communication, December 6, 2014).
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Present Language |
Today there are several Kotlik elders who communicate in Yup'ik and have a limited understanding of English. In Kotlik, adults over the age of fifty generally can understand and speak Yup'ik. Some adults in their early fifties can understand the language but are not comfortable speaking the language. The younger generations in Kotlik speak Village English. Village English (VE) is a variety of English that is influenced by the structure and concepts of the Yup'ik language. Like Standard English, it follows consistent grammar rules. In VE, both present and past tense are communicated through the present tense verb used in Standard American English (SAE). Past tense is understood in VE by context.
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Language Instruction
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Language instruction in Kotlik has been influenced by federal policies such as the Native American Languages Act (NALA passed in 1990, amended in 1992). NALA acknowledges "the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages." This Act encourages the use of native languages down through elementary classes and allows high school credit for Native language courses to meet the required foreign language graduation requirement (Marlow, 2004).
While students in Kotlik do not enter school speaking Yup'ik, they have a right to learn their native language. In LYSD, students spend about 30 minutes in daily Yup'ik instruction. The state foreign language requirement is met by most pupils in the district through high school Yup'ik class credits. |