Many Indigenous language communities in North America are working hard to reclaim and revitalize their languages, with efforts often focused on developing oral proficiency among adult second language learners. These learners are extremely motivated to learn ‘accent-free’ pronunciation in languages with complex sound systems, with very little resources to help them achieve their goals. Based on our experiences with Hul’q’umi’num’ and Blackfoot, we argue that incorporating phonetic analysis into teaching pronunciation is very effective as a pedagogical approach, and also contributes to developing capacity within the community for conducting much needed phonetic documentation work.
Cite as: Bird, S., Miyashita, M. (2018) Teaching phonetics in the context of Indigenous language revitalization. Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018), 39-44, doi: 10.21437/ISAPh.2018-7
@inproceedings{bird18b_isaph,
author={Sonya Bird and Mizuki Miyashita},
title={{Teaching phonetics in the context of Indigenous language revitalization}},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018)},
pages={39--44},
doi={10.21437/ISAPh.2018-7}
}