There are a lot of strong points one could comment on - the CGI, the subtitles, and the humour, for instance - but what particularly draws my attention is the way he combines the two languages. To introduce the words he's teaching, he usually speaks in English - but he doesn't just gloss, much less lecture (contrast, say, the more conventional approach used in this Ojibwe video series). When speaking in English, he throws in Cree discourse particles and sometimes even content words, gives the sentence a distinctly non-mainstream English intonation pattern which I assume reflects Cree, and even pronounces the English with a Cree accent. In different contexts, the maker of these videos speaks English like any other Canadian academic, so this appears to be a deliberate teaching strategy. The beauty of this is that, before the learner can even formulate a full sentence, they're already getting a chance to acquire some aspects of language - discourse structure and intonation - that are super-important for actually making yourself understood, yet play a minor role or get left out entirely in many traditional curriculums and textbooks (not to mention grammars!).
Have you ever encountered such a teaching method? If so, did you find it effective?
2 comments:
Still no comments here? There are several over there.
Just a random thought:
It makes a lot of difference if you have some idea (even if completely off) of the target language, as an English speaker would have of Italian or Japanese, or if you have to create an impression of the language first ...
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