An English Unicorn

Unicorns might conjure an image that’s too pretty for my mug, hence a more apt term is probably “odd duck”.  That’s what I felt like a few weekends ago when I presented “Using Functional Exercises to Increase Student Accuracy and Confidence” at the ACTFL Annual Convention and World Languages Expo in New Orleans.  I’ve presented that particular title a number of times at conferences, but it hadn’t occurred to me until I was there meeting language instructors from around the United States and planet Earth that virtually all of them were teachers of other languages commonly taught in a K-12 setting, such as French, Spanish, and Mandarin. In fact, I attended an outstanding presentation by a Latin instructor who had 5 Latin instructors at his high school of 3,200 students. “Id non expectavi.”  There was also an instructor who is keeping the Ho-Chunk language alive–it has 120 native speakers remaining. Being from Wisconsin, we struck up a conversation and I found out she teaches a Ho-Chunk course at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, one of my alma maters.  This put me in geekout mode because I got to use the terms “polysynthetic” and “agglutinative”*. 

The F in ACTFL stands for “foreign”. Understandably, ACTFL is trying to deemphasize that, and you won’t find the acronym spelled out on the website. KFC did the same in order to get away from “fried”.  I guess F has some bad luck. (That’s F’ed up, amiright?)

With all the presentations available at ACTFL, I wasn’t sure if anyone would come to mine. After all, my presentation was about language training in English.   As confident as I am that my approach to language training is cross-linguistic, I was not explicit about that in my proposal.   Behold, Hermes smiled on me and I had a solid showing.  Of the attendees, almost all taught a language other than English.  Surprise numerus duo, it was one of the most satisfying iterations, primarily because these teachers recognized the cross-linguistic value of the approach and the potential effectiveness and efficiency it provides.  The conversations I had afterwards and have continued to have on Zoom were about the adaptability to their respective language and how they could and would try the same in their French and Spanish classes. These are K-12 instructors, making it even more intriguing to see what the next year of collaborations will yield. 

Ducks of a feather…
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*Polysynthetic and agglutinative languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio.  Many Native American languages are polysynthetic, which often creates long sentence-words. A commonly cited example is the Inuktitut “tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga” =  "I can't hear very well".