Module 4: Activities

Activity 1: Literature Review:The Reverse of Language Shift and Language Maintenance

Activity 2: Language Shift- Tove Skutnabb-Kangas vs. Sue Wright

           The purpose of showing this video is to provide the opinions of internationally acclaimed experts about language shift and how it can be reversed. This video is a debate that was held on September 13 in 2013 during the event Multilingual Fryslân: The Key Debates in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.

            In this debate, Sue Wright from the University of Portsmouth and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas from the University of Roskilde discuss diverse issues, such as how language works, or what language really is. These two scholars argued what you can do when a speech community starts to turn their backs on their own language? If it is really worth spending time, money and effort on saving the language, or should one accept that the group has made their decision to abandon the language and the cultural and personal histories that lie embedded therein? They also debated if it is even possible to reverse the trend when a speaker group has started to language shift? 

Activity 3: Examples of Reversing Language Shift

               The purpose of showing this video is to provide an examples of how language shift might be reversed. This video shows a lesson that forms part of Story-Based Language Program that aims to reverse the language shift of Hispanic students. The aim of these programs is to reach conversational fluency and be able to read most junior fiction novels in the heritage language of Hispanic children.