The CBB

I've been thinking about producing material for teaching my conlang, such as dictionaries, text books, guides, lesson plans etc. that I can use to teach my conlang to others, but I'm missing some rather vital information and understanding: I'm not a teacher and have no training in such a task, nor do I have any understanding of what makes such resources work and how to teach a language well.

So I ask those that have delved into such a task: What—of what you have tried—works? What doesn't work? What order would one teach a language in?

Thanks for any help

Not actually going into an educational pedagogy course of study, huh?
Bummer.


Well, for starters, think about what some memorable langauge classes/lessons/teachers you have had.
What were they like?
Why do they stand out (style, presentation, visuals, activities)?


Then, see how much you could do to replicate that in your conlang.


BTW, like how developedare your conlang(s)?
Do you have much realia in your conlang?

E.g. newspaper/journal/magazine articles (translated or invented), poems, plane/train/bus/movie tickets, greeting cards, songs, video segments?

Realia goes a long, long, looooooooooooooooooong way in teaching any language.
Did I mention how long a way realia goes in teaching a lang???


One of the best language lessons I've seen was Daily Videos in Kozea (which I think you can still access on Youtube, but you need permission) by Princessa (a.k.a. Skogvur, Skomakarn). To me, these go very far to show not only vocab and structures, but language choice, syntactics, and con-cultural cues as well, which a drier, "today were going to look at the urlup conjugation in the irrealis mode..." lecture-style video short does not.

They interviewed ole Skogvur on Conlang Podcast #12
http://conlangery.com/2011/08/22/conlan ... nal-names/


Hey! I'm not saying that the lecture-type talks by yer Jacques Cappretz-types aren't interesting, but try to throw in a little Mireille and Robert interaction from time to time.

Ouais. I was talking about French in Action. Et quoi?

On another note:

Do you have anything like a lexicon/dictionary/chrestomathy online?

Have you been regularly participating in conversation threads?

Langs like masako's Kala, Xingoxa's Wakeu, and Khemehekis' Kankonian are prolly my goto conlangs that aren't my own b/c

a) They have straightforward (IMHO) lexica/dictionaries/grammar chrestomathies
b) they already have posted tonnes of examples of utterances to help get a grasp of how to do things (though, addmittely, I often manage to cack things up in spite of this).
c) masako, Khemehekis, and (until recently {?!?}) Xing regularly continue to churn out utterances on a variety of topics.
d) They provide prompt, constructive feedback.

BTW, I have to also mention the utterly impressive work of MONOBA's Siwa and Lao Kou's ongoing juggernaut that is Géarthnuns. The stuff these fellows have made are like Augra's Orrey in The Dark Crystal... I don't even know where to begin...marvellous to behold (?) There. That's a start.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5I-R7ZM3sU

Lambuzhao wrote:ongoing juggernaut that is Géarthnuns.

Aw, shucks <kicks a divot>. "Ongoing juggernaut" is overstating the case, but I like it just the same . Multas gratias ago.

Wow! How could I forget clawgrip's Sprachbund? Just some awesometacular stuff, and he's also quite good with feedback.

Lao Kou wrote: Aw, shucks <kicks a divot>.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/04/ ... 70x541.jpg

"Ongoing juggernaut" is overstating the case, but I like it just the same .

Tut, tut - I think not! And there's more from the wolves where that came from!

Multas gratias ago.

Libenter!

Lambuzhao wrote:Tut, tut - I think not! And there's more from the wolves where that came from!

I've been tut-tutted?! And at four in the morning, local time?! Someone needs to be in bed. That Sunday (Saturday) brunch kiwi ain't going to peel and slice itself; nor will the French toast French-toast itself.

Edit: Oops, it's Saturday for you. I'm off because we had a six-day work week this week to recompense for the Tomb-Sweeping next week.

Lao Kou wrote:

Lambuzhao wrote:Tut, tut - I think not! And there's more from the wolves where that came from!

I've been tut-tutted?! And at four in the morning, local time?! Someone needs to be in bed. That Sunday (Saturday) brunch kiwi ain't going to peel and slice itself; nor will the French toast French-toast itself.

Edit: Oops, it's Saturday for you. I'm off because we had a six-day work week this week to recompense for the Tomb-Sweeping next week.

My son sweetly sleeps. [ ¯ ͜ ¯ ]

I am up, cleaning, CBBing, brewing mint tea, peeling the celtuce, dusting the queso fresco chunks with garnet-red sumac powder, grinding the flaxseed, millet, sunflower kernels, and pumpkin seeds for my gruel (and his Pfannekuechen).
Y'kno. The (un)usual.

Lambuzhao wrote:I am up, cleaning, CBBing, brewing mint tea, peeling the celtuce, dusting the queso fresco chunks with garnet-red sumac powder, grinding the flaxseed, millet, sunflower kernels, and pumpkin seeds for my gruel (and his Pfannekuechen).

靠！ Such expression(s) of love. But go ........ to .......... sleeeeep!

I fear I cannot.
For I had a good seven six hours sleep,
and much laundry and 3rd QTR grades await me.

Lambuzhao wrote:I fear I cannot.
For I had a good seven six hours sleep,
and much laundry and 3rd QTR grades await me.

And grades to go before I sleep ...

Lambuzhao wrote:

Lao Kou wrote: Aw, shucks <kicks a divot>.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/04/ ... 70x541.jpg

Really? We should be financing the Daily Mail now? It's a racist, misogynist, proto-fascist propaganda tool, and it's financed by people sharing links online.

Lambuzhao wrote:Well, for starters, think about what some memorable langauge classes/lessons/teachers you have had.
What were they like?
Why do they stand out (style, presentation, visuals, activities)?

The only ones I've had were French and Spanish - and—personally—they didn't really work too well for me. It was based around the idea that we'd cover a single construction and practice by replacing the words, using negatives, and saying it aloud in class. What I found was that nobody got very good at the language, they could only use this very limited number of constructions with different words swapped out.

As for presentation, we used text-books that would cover certain topics such as school, work, travel, holidays, food etc. and would start with a big vocab list, and then go through a selection of constructions using these. Then it would give us a few paragraphs to read through or some comments by people and ask questions on it.

All in all, not very good imo. There was pretty much nothing on pronunciation and stuff so everyone said "Je suis grand" as /ʒɛ swi ɡɹɒnd/ which was absurdly un-convincing. It was all quite limited, and the teacher kept talking about the 5 tenses: "Present, Past, Future, Habitual, Conditional", 2 of which aren't even tenses!

Lambuzhao wrote:BTW, like how developedare your conlang(s)?
Do you have much realia in your conlang?

E.g. newspaper/journal/magazine articles (translated or invented), poems, plane/train/bus/movie tickets, greeting cards, songs, video segments?

Realia goes a long, long, looooooooooooooooooong way in teaching any language.
Did I mention how long a way realia goes in teaching a lang???

I have lots of grammar, but no vocab or realia yet. I'm mostly asking now so that I can go forth into translation knowing what I'm doing or what I should translate that would be helpful for when I go on to try and teach it to someone.

UPDATE: I have done lots of reading and have gained a reasonable understanding of good teaching practices and how to approach teaching specific information.

NEXT CHALLENGE: What order do I teach what in? My GCSE French went through real-world topics like Greetings, Family, Work, Directions, My town, Social issues etc. but I found that somewhat limited. It worked well as an organisation tool, but I'd need hundreds of chapters or really huge chapters to cover everything I'd want to cover and after the first few chapters, it would be almost entirely vocab. Of what I read, it is better to teach grammar and bring vocab along with it instead of the other way around.

So what ideas do people have? What should the first topics be? And how should it progress?

Just found this thread. It's really cool what you're trying to do. In terms of the actual content and order to teach it, I'm not sure to be honest what the best way is. However probably the way to get it out to as many people as possible is with a website/blog. There's a few different ways and platforms, when looking at the different options I would recommend Wordpress. It's easy to edit and update.

Let us know how it goes! I would be interested to see where you get.

OTʜᴇB wrote:UPDATE: I have done lots of reading and have gained a reasonable understanding of good teaching practices and how to approach teaching specific information.

NEXT CHALLENGE: What order do I teach what in? My GCSE French went through real-world topics like Greetings, Family, Work, Directions, My town, Social issues etc. but I found that somewhat limited. It worked well as an organisation tool, but I'd need hundreds of chapters or really huge chapters to cover everything I'd want to cover and after the first few chapters, it would be almost entirely vocab. Of what I read, it is better to teach grammar and bring vocab along with it instead of the other way around.

So what ideas do people have? What should the first topics be? And how should it progress?

Consider Order of Acquisition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_acquisition

What natlang(s) is your most like? What is the order of morpheme acquisition by L2 learners of that/those lang(s) {insofar as it's documented in the literature}? Comparatively, that may give an idea of what to teach first, next, later.


To give you some idea of what this looks like, here's a paper comparing/contrasting Orders of Acquisition for L1, L2, and Spanish L2.

Most text series I use nowadays focus on speech acts of increasing complexity, with grammar and vocab that uderlies those acts taught along side and reinforcing. That is not the only way I do things in class, but that's th overarching methodology of the last three series I have used over the past 7 years or so. It certainly goes back farther.