Curt's entry

After reading “Second language writing up close and personal: Some success stories” by Tony Silvia, Melinda Reichelt, Yoshiki Chikuma, Nathalie Duval-Couetil, Ruo-Ping J. Mo, Gloria Velez-Rendon, and Sandra Wood, I began to examine some of my own experiences of working with languages other than standard English. For the sake of brevity, I will focus upon my teaching experiences in Alaska while working with middle school and high school Eskimo children and my struggles in learning to work with the language of linguistics this past year after arriving here as prompted by Sandra Wood’s narrative. When I taught Yupik Eskimo Natives living on the Alaskan tundra I had found some of these same language issues to be at times problematic, since I was working with a younger age group of students who, in effect, seem to function between two languages. These two languages function as an articulation of their partial existence in part of two worlds, the English speaking school and the Yup’ik speaking village life of their elders. Code-switching had enabled these students to interact within both social environments, which have differing social values. My part of adapting to the language usage of this environment includes examples such as learning the difference between Yupik and Yup’ik. Yupik, which by the way is considered to correct on the word program, actually refers to the Yupik Natives still living in the Easternmost regions of Siberia, while the Yup’ik refers to the Yup’ik Natives who are living in the Westernmost delta regions of Alaska. The apostrophe’ exemplifies the pause of the spoken word as pronounced by the native speakers of the region. The agglutinative linguistic structure of the language had also presented a very formative challenge for a non-native speaker to actually be able to communicate effectively in such languages. I did advance beyond learning a few simple words and phrases. Unfortunately, I cannot count this situation as any sort of language success story. Other language learning situation is still occurring for me during my current endeavors to learn the language of linguistics. Like Sandra Wood, I too, see the language of linguistics as another form of communication that is to be worked out on separate terms from my daily discourses. Even the organization of ideas seems to be at times to be organized by aliens from another world, possibly the Cromulents from Cromula, representing a linguist’s humor. Linguists are represented as beings from another world dissecting the anatomy of human languages as though scientists studying the anatomy of insects with the use of a dissecting microscope. For example of the phrase “that is a perfectly crumulent word” when a character on the television program, The Simpsons, has a character inventing a new word that only the character knows its meaning. While, the humor may seem odd at first, the written discourse in linguistics seems to require a doctorate degree in linguistic to understand it to a level required to compose written thoughts in it. Sandra Wood states, “I had to learn to write for a linguistic audience, using correct terminology and following standard conventions of linguistic writing. It was almost like learning a new language for me” (Silvia et al, 106-107). I too have found that many conceptual ideas are to be reformulated while expressing them in linguistic terminological conventions.