Subject: Re: [lojban] pedagogy and lojban

From: "G. Dyke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 15:06:59 +0200

la .eduard.tcerlyn cusku di'e sera'a lei xe ctuca be fo la lojban.

> I had some TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) training in
> the Peace Corps, including a taste of the Defense Language
> Institute's "wavelet" teaching system. It takes the concept of
> structure drills a step further. Instead of trying to teach whole
> branches of grammar at once, it divides the task into a succession of
> small steps, each of which is drilled to the point of mastery before
> proceeding further.
>
> A structure drill uses a sentence form with variable parts. The
> instructor gives some cue, and the student utters a sentence in the
> same form but with some part changed. For example,
>
> I: "You are a student."
> S: "I am a student."
> I: "I am the teacher."
> S: "You are the teacher.
>
> In the example above, the teacher varies the person of the pronoun
> and the description. Then the student makes a transformation of the
> pronoun and copula.
>
> A sequence of wavelet drills on this form could start with third
> person pronouns, then do first and second person singular, then mix
> all three, then do each case of the plural, then mix all of the
> forms. In Lojban there are more pronouns but no problem of verb
> agreement, so the sequence would be rather different.
>
> I started to make a list of Lojban language features suitable for an
> introductory set of drills, but I haven't gotten far enough to
> present anything.
>
> Is anyone interested in pursuing this?
>

I would like to see what this looks like when applied to lojban, I can think
of such things as:

I : "mi tavla do"
S : "mi se tavla do"

but that hardly needs to be done more than twice, as lojban has a regular
grammar.

> > - pronunciation
> > - three categories of lojban words
> > - names (practice in phonological adaptation)
>
> Don't try to teach all of pronunciation or adaptation of names at
> once. Start with the easy cases, so that the student has the
> experience of success to begin with, and introduce more difficult

You think I should just start with words like 'tavla' (which have very easy
pronunciation) and introduce the rest of the pronunciation later?? It is
true that one of the big problems of teaching Lojban is that the usual: {coi
mi'e greg .i doi ma} is not really possible: my student was Nicolas
(/niko'la/), which has no last consonnant and a forbidden morpheme.

The only drill you used as an example can be easily taught to any SAE
speaker. I'm not all that sure that similar methods can be applied for
Lojban if we are to avoid people speaking "malropno lojbau". It uses
people's ingrained language patterns to assimilate the structure of a new,
but similar, language. This is an obvious example of sapir-whorf as to
native language patterns influencing foreign language patterns.

I'm not sure we are aiming for the same thing, although I agree that my
order is not a very good start (the first chapter is long and boring), I
would just like a natural introduction to the grammar, without hiding the
fact that I am saying "here is this chunk of the language, now let's move on
to something else": my favorite being the introduction {se} as a means of
extracting the second place of a {tavla} with {le} and then moving on to {le
se tavla} also being the extraction of the first place of {se tavla}, hence
the place structure and effect of {se}.

How would you propose the introduction of {le}? I like the mini-lesson
saying that le is the x1 of [bridi].

Thinking about all this, I have become convinced that my having introduced
the terminology (sumti, brivla, selbri, cmene, cmavo, gismu) was not good
and I'm working on how to do it better. I find I'm having a lot of trouble
conveying the exact sense of what I mean (this is exemplified in my saying
"I'm not sure we are aiming for the same thing" which I haven't really
expanded on), so I'll leave off.

I'll be "no mail" until the end of this month (starting Sunday), so please
'cc' any replies to this post.

To lojbab : you said you were making this project officially supported. What
exactly? I personnally would like to have a better idea of what to introduce
when, but I'm not sure my approach will really be what you are after ; I
definately don't go with the "drill stuff", and "fun and games" are beyond
my imagination. I'm wanting (at the moment) to teach as 'a grammar',
introducing concepts at the right time and not as 'a communication', giving
means to communicate quickly. I'm especially worried with problems like
{cu}, which I regularly forget, because of prosumti being the first sumti
taught in the lessons (and they didn't require a cu). What I'm aiming for is
something which doesn't confuse the heck out of people as much as I was when
I started (I didn't find the lessons at first).

mu'omi'e greg