 Okay, okay, let's get started. So welcome to tonight's, so I said to a Taiwan studies seminar Tonight, delighted to welcome Douglas Norbot for the latest in our Contemporary Taiwan Indigenous Studies lecture series. The series is sponsored by the Shunyi Museum in Taiwan and what we're trying to do in this series is to run a series of lectures that look at contemporary issues related to Taiwan's Indigenous people. So we've already had sessions on politics related to Taiwanese Indigenous people. And today we're going to switch theme to one that we cover in our teaching and that's language education. But tonight the focus is on Indigenous language and education. It's something that we have kind of touched upon over the last few years. For example in Anita Zhang's documentary Tongues from Heaven, and also back in 2015 at the World Congress, one of our keynote speeches by Lee Renquay looked at Indigenous languages and the degree that they were under threat. One of the things that really stands out in my mind in that lecture was the way that he was telling us, okay, so-and-so language, it's going to be extinct within so many years. And I know for your PhD you're also looking at a language close to extinction on that, it must have been on Lee Renquay's list. Douglas did his PhD at SOAS in linguistics, which kind of makes me feel quite guilty. Normally I get our PhD students who are working on Taiwan to give Centre Taiwan Studies seminars, usually from about year two, year three, but it's taken me too long, I really apologise for this. Because Douglas has already-he's done his PhD Viva in December, and it's in the process of completing his revisions. And in the meantime he's also working full-time in the process of doing a PGCE in language education. So he's delighted that he could kind of find the time after starting work eight o'clock this morning with-is it primary school you're doing? Secondary school, okay, that's even tougher actually. Okay, so let's give Douglas a very big SOAS welcome home. Thanks very much. Is this okay? Can you hear me? Very well, excellent. I actually got my PhD supervisor sitting right there, so no pressure. What has he learnt in the last five years? Not a lot maybe, we'll see. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, I did my PhD on a grammatical analysis of a certain part of the Sakizai language. That's one of the Taiwanese that I learned from most languages, about 300 speakers. So this is what really got me on to-although I looked at it from a kind of a linguistic grammatical analysis, I was very interested in revitalisation processes and how languages were being taught and how these materials were being created, and I found out after living there for a while that there was actually a lot lacking both in the grammatical descriptions of the languages and in the resources that would be used in schools. And so a lot has been written about the process of educational policy in the past and I don't want to focus on that too much. I'd like to talk more about kind of the pedagogical processes that are being used in schools, problems with resource development and issues that are now affecting language learning such as particularly urban migration and not being able to access language teachers and what's being done to kind of solve these problems. Okay, so just a brief outline. I'll introduce the Indigenous people and a little bit about their languages. And then I'll look at the colonial history and its effect on language loss. Then we'll move into the history of Indigenous language education starting from 1990 up to kind of 2001. And then we'll look at the current state of affairs, what are the main problems. With a case study on San La, who's a good friend of mine who's an Indigenous language, she's a Sakizaya Nami's teacher in Hualien, so we'll look at her classes and her methods. And then we'll go on to kind of looking at the future of education in terms of what's the potential to improve the situation in Taiwan and what steps are already being taken to have a positive impact in the future. Okay, so do you want to take a picture? Just a second. It's a nice slide isn't it? So obviously those tattoos are some of the old folks and there are like 90s and 100s still happening but there's a couple of guys that you can see young people in their 30s and 40s that have kind of tried to bring that back but there's not many people. I saw a guy on a train once with one of these tattoos which just means a truco. Me? To what? I think it would be quite insulting if I walked around with an Indigenous tattoo. So the indigenous population of Taiwan are an Austronesian people so they're not related genetically and in terms of the heritage and linguistically to the Chinese to the South Tibet languages. They've been living on the island for at least 5,000 years, if not longer. Currently there are 16 recognized tribes still in existence. Originally I think there are about 26 languages and about 10 are gone. 16 are still spoken and within those 16 there are various dialects that may or may not be regarded as kind of separate diversion that they're on. And they're loosely divided into the plains tribes and the mountain tribes but the ones that are essentially recognized are the mountain tribes. The only plains tribes that have been officially recognized by the government are the Kabbalah. The rest because of assimilation processes are all pretty much gone. They're numbering just over half a million, about 2% of the population of Taiwan and the vast majority are Christian or Catholic of some kind due to a long process of missionary work going back 400 years. So of the 26 no languages, 10 are extinct, 5 are morphomed and several are threatened. In the language I was working on there's about 300 speakers, most of them are 70, 60 years old, 60, 70 years old and above. Very few indigenous speakers below the age of 50 are fluent or have any kind of degree of fluency. The language, oh I don't need to go into this, they're verb-initial, they're morphologically very complex. They're defined by a thing called the voice system, it's just a grammatical, it doesn't matter, I won't talk about it. But the same kind of system is found in languages in the Philippines and elsewhere. Well, no, mainly just the Philippines. And Taiwan is regarded as the homeland of the Austronesian languages which is the largest geographically and in terms of number of languages, one of the largest linguistic families in the world. It stretches from Madagascar all the way across the Indian and the Pacific Ocean over to Hawaii and Easter Island. The Fremorsan languages have a very special place in the history of this and that. Of the kind of, the ten major branches of the Austronesian language family, nine are found in Taiwan. And then one, a long time ago, left and became all the other languages that you see. So in terms of the linguistic complexity and diversity, Taiwan is a real gem. There's a lot of good work that needs to be done there to describe the work that still needs to be done. So I like this picture because you can see the beautiful Aboriginal costumes and then on the far right you can see a little kid wearing a kind of Japanese style school costume. So it's kind of the beginning of the end, not the end, but the kind of the decimation of Aboriginal cultures. As we used to know. So the colonial history goes back about 400 years, starting with the Dutch who were kind of kicked out of China and set up shop in Taiwan. They lasted about 40 years and then they were kicked out by the invading, I call it a military leader under the Ming dynasty who kicked out the Dutch and set up his own kind of kingdom there for about 20 years until they were smashed by the Qing dynasty and taken over the mainland. And then after the invasion of Japan, Taiwan was seceded to Japan, which they had for about 50 years. And then the Nationalist Party came over in the 50s. Under Dutch rule, I wouldn't say it was harmonious, but it wasn't that devastating. There was a lot of trade going on, especially with the kind of hides and timber materials. Funnily enough, apart from the fact that there was forced kind of education and evangelisation was going on with the Dutch they translated the Bible into the Aboriginal language, the one that was there in touch with, which is the Sharia language. Which you can see is the purple bit in Tainan, that's where the Sharia tribe are living. And they translated the Gospel of Matthew and a few other texts into Sharia. And after that language died out, these documents are essentially what kept the language going. So linguists have been working with that data to reconstruct the languages. And now the Sharia community are making their own resources based upon work that was done 400 years ago. And they started this whole rebirth of their language and culture, which is really interesting. That's a little, well it's quite a large monument just outside the village I was living in. And you can see a Sakizaya warrior pointing out across the ocean as the approaching Dutch ship comes into the bay. That's kind of commemorating the first colonial period. I don't want to talk about the meaning because nothing happened. Chingru, you saw a rise in Hokka immigrants from Fujian and later the Hakka, which went on to be kind of the two largest languages on the island before Mandarin was taken over. During this time the Aborigines were classified into what they call the raw savages of the mountains and the cooked savages of the plains tribes. And this had to do with the fact that the plains tribes were living in close contact with the Han and adopted their language, their customs, their taxation policies. And they were regarded as semi-civilized because they had vowed to Ching culture, whereas the mountain tribes refused. This led to the complete linguistic sinusization of the plains tribes, which is like why they have very few rights today in terms of Aboriginal rights. Under the Japanese education in Japanese language was compulsory. Most elderly Indigenous people today have a better grasp of Japanese than they do Mandarin. Yeah, lots of traditional practices like headhunting and tattooing were banned, so kind of forcibly removing aspects of culture that they considered to be dangerous to their colony. And there were lots of forced resettlements of the mountain tribes down to the coastal areas so they could get in and start to mine and cut down trees for timber to build up things for the empire. So a lot of displacement of aborigines happened during this time. But it was really under the Republic of China where the really aggressive language policies started to come in. Obviously you know that Taiwan is under martial law for a very long time, longest in history I believe. And during this time initially it was to get rid of all Japanese influence. So they wanted to impose Mandarin language policy across the island. And this applied heavily to not only the Aboriginal people but also local languages like Hakka and Nanyu, such as Fujiwara and Hokkien. During this time local languages including Aboriginal languages were banned in schools and in public. No media or newspapers of anything other than Mandarin was allowed to be published. There was a widespread confiscation of Bibles from the Aboriginal languages throughout the 70s as well. So it was very aggressive. These are some of the policies that were inflicted. In 1957 you had the Mandarin promotion groups in the mountains, mountain counties. So they sent people to go and educate people in Mandarin. You had after work training programs throughout the 60s so people would come and again be forced to learn handways and hand language. And again improving of the education of aborigines. All of this was just forced policies. And this went right up through the 80s until the Lyft of Martial Law in 1987. After that a variety of indigenous movements helped to push for Aboriginal rights, land rights, rights to culture and language. And which led to the beginning of essentially it's been a very, although it's been kind of up and down, there's been a definite improvement in Aboriginal language education since the 90s up to the present day. So in 1988 the government proposed the first five year plan. And this was implemented in 1993, which was a project about developing Aboriginal education programs. And they dedicate, they put forward $200,000 and NT dollars to developing Aboriginal resources and teacher training. But before that there was a lot of grassroots movements that were still going on previously in 1990. Athayal was being taught in the Ulai Primary School, just outside Taipei. You had the legal recognition of developed orthography. So a lot of these were done by Paul Lee, who is a very famous linguist in our circles, from academia, Seneca. Textbooks were designed and compiled in 1993, 1994. And they were incentives, like annual awards for excellence in education. So the funding would be given for resource development. Yeah, schools that promoted Aboriginal language living were subsidized, so they had tax cuts and things like that. And then it wasn't until, yeah there was a second-variate project, but it wasn't until 2001 that Aboriginal languages were actually implemented into the national curriculum on a compulsory level. But local languages, but included Aboriginal languages. And this is from the elementary through to junior high school. So it didn't necessarily mean that you had to study Amis, but you had to pick a local language, be it Hakka or Hokkien, or an Aboriginal language if you could get access to a teacher. And that was a real problem as well. So the present. It's not that bad. Actually the kids, well some of the kids maybe, but Aboriginal language classes are actually quite fun. So the key points of discussion I want to focus on are participation in decision making of resource development and teaching. The kinds of teaching that was available, pedagogy and methodology that's being used, curriculum design or lack of curriculum design, lack of materials, and then how these things are not assessed. So all of these are negative, but necessary. So the government, although it's easy to criticize, they have, I think the Council of Indigenous Peoples, which is like an Indigenous branch of the government, was set up in 1996 to deal with Aboriginal affairs. And they've been very instrumental in driving Indigenous education development, both through funding and through their ties to universities and through local government to working with public schools. So they've been donating a lot of money over, I mean for example, I said 200,000 NT for the first five year project. Other institutions like Chunchi University, Academia Seneca have been working with communities to develop resources, doing linguistic analysis, editing textbooks. The teaching college, it was called the Teacher's College of Wali and now it's part of National Bung Wai University. They set up courses to teach Aboriginal speakers, speakers of Aboriginal languages how to teach and to help develop resources. And then some more local governments like Tainan City Council have been working with the Sharia to fund, like a small community of people that have been developing their own resources. And because they're not recognized by the national government, they're not given any money, but they are given money by the local government, who also I think they see as kind of a tourist attraction as well. But they've done things like they've started teaching Sharia in elementary schools and even having it broadcast on local buses, which is pretty cool. I'm going to have a look last year. Alongside this, there's grassroots movements, this can't really be emphasized enough, the importance of this. Most local schools and teachers develop their own resources, DVDs, textbooks, materials, music, dances, everything. Some villages got together and had research and editing groups where they would regularly try to see, they would assess what materials were there and then try to kind of develop them and improve on them. The Sharia have been working recently with building and compiling their own dictionaries and e-books with almost no government support. Recently volunteers have developed an app which you can download on your phone called the Moedict Amis Dictionary app. It's mainly a digitized version of an earlier publication, but still it's pretty cool to play around with. And parent and community involvement have been really key in driving this. Now I'd like to play you a short video just to show you kind of how, is there sounds? Yes. Good. To show you kind of how communities are getting involved in education. The Indigenous language teachers say language and culture go hand in hand. In order to learn a language, students must first identify themselves with the culture. That's why the school has partnered with the community and inviting local elders to teach Amis lessons. Other schools are now following BoAi's successful program. They too are attempting to create a language and cultural environment. BoAi has managed to keep its Amis program for six years. The secret of their success is the support of community elders. How do we make it work? Our elders have really contributed a lot. The locals understand that our school is trying so hard to promote such lessons. So they offer us support and help with the promotion. The school has only 21 students, mostly Amis. The school's Amis lessons are so interesting that even the only non-Indigenous students said she was happy to be submerged in the language learning environment. I kind of like it, because sometimes we are learning all their languages. We speak the Indigenous language here. We speak the Amis language. They don't reject it. They even like learning it with me. However, the school was the only place they provided an Indigenous language environment at the beginning. The language teacher said when they first started the lessons, many parents still spoke Mandarin with their children. The school had to spend time communicating with the parents to win their support. It was hard enough to teach the language at school, but at home, some parents used giant erasers to wipe out our efforts. After the children returned home, their family members still used Mandarin for communication. So at every parent's meeting, we have to tell the elders again and again the Indigenous languages were getting popular, that it was not like before when students were punished for speaking an Indigenous language. The teaching program covers six topics including community field studies, oral history on Amis, and overview of the Amis group and traditional arts and crafts. The project has drawn the school and locals closer. Community members have recognized the school's effort in promoting the Amis culture. Now many students are also enforcing their language skills at home. We support the school because the community and school are working together. We support their teaching program. Sometimes my dad told me to fetch something, and I didn't understand. He would question me why I didn't learn our mother language well. Then I replied, oh, so when I have some free time at home, I will take out the language book and study it. Boa Elementary School has successfully created an Amis language learning environment. The lessons cover not only language, but also history and all the cultural aspects of the Amis group. The program has one support of the parents. The students say they identify with the Amis culture, and they must be able to speak their own language. TITV Winkley. It was nice. I should have got a longer one and just walked out. A lot of the elders of the community are called in to step in as teachers. A lot of them are not qualified to teach. At least that was the case at the beginning. Still is, as I've seen myself. A lot of this is also to do with the lack of appropriate teacher training that's available. When it was first opened up, the training program was 72 hours long. I'm now in my, what, how long have I been teaching since October? And I'm still rubbish. And I teach every day in secondary schools, in Croydon and in hybridism. It's hard to teach. It's really hard. And 72 hours is nothing. It's absolutely nothing. So they introduced a short course of 36 hours for the general public. So most of the graduates who went through this course were not accepted to teach in schools. Some of the reasons included that they didn't speak the language fluently. Or that just the training wasn't good enough. The pedagogy wasn't there. And they were yet unsatisfactory in consistent teaching methods. And also most teachers don't go on to continue their learning. They're on kind of continuous training programs. At least until recently. So National Dung Hoi University is now offering a new curriculum developed by Indigenous teachers to help other Indigenous language teachers to advance their studies and their teaching skills. So hopefully things will get better in the future. This was, this is actually a quote from San La Hoi Institute. And she said, I only attended the 36 hour tribal university course. And after passing the Indigenous language proficiency test, I took the 36 hour course commissioned by the Council of Indigenous Peoples and Taiwan National University. I've forgotten almost all of the teaching methods taught by the teachers during the course. I didn't leave an impression on it. Which is great. The teaching methods I adopted today are copied from the English language teaching videos with language, nature, arts and humanities curriculums and teaching materials from National Dung Hoi University's elementary education teacher's training program. I think about what kinds of methods and resources I would like to use as if I were learning the language myself. So it's very kind of, she's really invested in teaching and she's a good teacher but she does offer her own back. So this is just something she's had to do herself. Resources. So I've actually got some resources here that I'd like to hand around and show you. So many of the materials here are limited in that they include the phonetics and also a lot of it is about just kind of speaking, how to make the correct sound in the language, which is really a huge focus and they don't really get past that. So the kids can say like, you know, cow, fantastic, but they can't really make a sentence. They have some vocab items and pronunciation drills. A lot of them have typos and errors and issues with orthography development, so inconsistencies with orthography as well. The books didn't increase in difficulty in an appropriate way. There's no scaffolding as we call it in the trade of teaching. People are not appropriately scaffolded. And because a lot of them are based on existing resources, there's a lot of Chinese influence because they're using Chinese style books to kind of model themselves on. So there wasn't enough Aboriginal input into the design. Yeah, so I'll hand these through. So this one, this was actually developed by a Sakizaya teacher. It's just a vocab list, simple vocab list. This is really useful. These are the things that have been developed by the Council of Indigenous Peoples, which I'll show some examples of. We've got a storybook, a little picture storybook in Sakizaya. Again, the orthography is not the one that you use now, but it's still the one that's in common use, even downloadable from online. And this is kind of a linguistic grammar book on Sakizaya, which is useful for linguists, but not very much for anyone else. So I'll have a little look through those and pass them around while I'm carrying on. Okay. And this is an example of, there's more and more in the books, I believe, in there. So this is just a typical story, Kamun Babadaki, which is the words of the elders, so a lot of it is kind of culturally contextual. There's no O in the Sakizaya orthography anymore. It's been over-replaced by you, but when you download the books, you have this one. This is actually copied from the Amis, which is a related language. I mean, this is your typical layout. So you have a story or maybe a little dialogue. You have a vocab list, and you have some questions. So the first one is like, what noise does the frog make when it rains? And then you answer the questions based on... It doesn't explain how to make those sentences. You have kind of a word-by-word breakdown later on, but they're wrong. For example, in the first line where it says sa, that is not the verb to be. It's an evidential marker. They don't actually have a verb to be. So it's kind of like, if you're learning a language and you turn to that, you'll think, okay, sa is just a verb, but it doesn't work like that. So actually the breakdown of the structure is not correct, and it doesn't really give you any indication on how the words are constructed morphologically, which is really important, actually, in a language like this. So when the languages were kind of added into the national curriculum, they're only compulsory until elementary and junior high, as I said. There are lots of problems with this. One, school teachers are not employed full-time. So most teachers travel between anything up to five to ten schools and teach a variety of classes depending on how many schools need them. There's no official scheme of work. So the teacher plans lessons according to the needs of the student and not to any kind of specified topic scheme, which you would expect in, say, a GCSE level of French or something like that. Most schools set their own kind of curricula. It's really up to the individual teacher. And the curriculum is generally based on the content needed to pass the Aboriginal Language Proficiency Test, which is funded and assessed by the Council of Indigenous Peoples. It's almost like a GCSE, but not, because it's not... Well, I said GCSE for comparison, but it's not equivalent or valued in the same way. A lot of the... This is the main drive for people to study, is to pass the test. Why? Because it gives you the single-to-extra score policy. Because if you pass the test, you get 35% knocked off or added, should I say, to your high school exams. So when you go on to apply for university, they'll add 35% onto your grade, which means you don't have to do so well in your other subjects in order to get the same grade as somebody who got higher scores. There are also scholarships for winners of tribal language competitions. So the reason that they do this is to try to promote fairness. So people of Aboriginal needs who are heavily socially and economically marginalised, it's kind of an incentive for them to learn to get the additional support that they wouldn't otherwise have. There are a bunch of problems with this. There are only a certain amount of scholarships per school. So they can't offer it to everybody who passes the test. It's not valued as qualification in the same way as others, mainly because it's not really applicable afterwards. If you have a degree in English, you can go on to do business. You can have a degree in Amis, or qualification in Amis. You can't really do much with it yet, which is a lot of talk about. There's a standardisation and a homogenisation of certain dialects. So for example, Sakizaya, they have one kind of thing for Sakizaya, but actually there are at least two different dialects in Northern and Southern one. The pronunciation is quite different. If you read one in the standard orthography, and then you learn like I did the Northern dialect, you read it and you wouldn't say it in the same way at all. So there's this kind of like, it doesn't pay attention to the dialect, it'll continue. And students from mixed backgrounds or more affluent urban areas can take the place of rural average who might need the scholarship more. So I mean, I was talking to Winnie about this actually, she's helped me out with this. If your father is, say, Amis and your mother's hand Chinese, you can still have like an Aboriginal card, identity card, as well as a hand one. So you can use either one of your examples. Say I so say I'm pretty good, life's good for me, and then this kid who lives over here in this village, life's not so great for her. We both applied to this school. We both only one of us can get accepted. So there is a degree of unfairness there. It's still not really addressed. This is a sample from the Sakizai, almost exams the Sakizai because I understand them more. So this is the first ones like a reading comprehension and then you have listening tests where they would ask you something and you have to answer the question based on. So yeah, so this is just a practice test that you can do online to prepare for the proficiency exam, but that's the kind of standard testing of the four schools. Because the courses are elective, especially, well, I mean in kind of high school, the non-national standards needs to be met by the school. So say like, if everybody fails maths in a school, there'll be like a serious investigation as to why the school is doing so badly. If everyone fails, I miss, it doesn't really matter. Plus only about two or three kids may have taken the exam. So then there's no assessment and there's no evaluation of teaching standards and that's not fed back into the system. It's just kind of furrow. Also because if you have a bad teacher and you get rid of it, you're going to get an excellent. So schools are not held to account in the same way as other subjects and therefore the assessment doesn't impact the quality of teaching. So schools have taken upon themselves to actually assess. So they take turns in hosting, speaking, listening, and both have tests to test to kind of compete against each other, which spurs on this desire to do well. So again, this is kind of like a grassroots thing coming in there to replace or to fill the space where the authority should be taking some kind of control. So yeah, this is my friend, Samela. She's half Amis, half Saki there. She only did the 36-hour training program and then an additional after that actually. And she's currently, I think she just finished her master's in education at National Bone Point University. So she's carried on her teaching, which is why she's a good teacher. But she currently teaches 30 sessions per week across eight different schools. So she's always traveling around, always in her car. Difficult to get a hold of. She teaches in the six primary schools, one middle school and one high school. So that kind of shows you the drop-off rate. So you might get like a bunch of kids who have to take it in primary. But as soon as they reach junior high and middle school where it becomes optional to drop it. Mainly because of the pressures to do well in English and Mandarin. Outweigh the additional stress around to do an Indigenous language board. So she focuses on four different kinds of methods for her teaching. She has the situational language teaching, the audio-lingual method, total physical response, and the direct method. So situational language teaching is about emphasizing the use of real language situations. So things like, you know, instead of just learning grammar, it's about how to talk to members of the family, how to greet people, how to buy things, how to talk about cultural festivals. Situations where you would use Aboriginal language. Languages. So all of these, there are dialogues, a model by the teacher. So like, hello, you know, how are you, mother? And then the class will drill it until the sentence patterns become familiar. And then they can be revised by the textbooks that you're all holding. So this is kind of like your standard. So the idea is to kind of recreate this kind of real-life situations. The audio-lingual method emphasizes natural language habits and the use of imitation, memorization and repetition. So this is about listening and speaking. So this is very... It's not... All of this leads into the fact that Aboriginal languages are traditionally oral languages. They're not written down. And therefore, there's no need to study the grammar in the same... Well, it's not a need, isn't it? But that's not the way they've traditionally been taught. They've been learned by listening and speaking. So this is kind of the repetition of sentence patterns. So Sang-La might first give... Do a kind of a dialogue, and then she'll explain it kind of line by line. The gist, maybe, or the gist of the dialogue. And then she will... She'll get the kids to repeat and then to come up and to do the dialogue themselves, to act it out. Okay, so it's very kind of hands-on. And then... But it won't be... There'll be a few key sentences that will be repeated. Once they become familiar, once the more of the structures of these sentences are familiar, they'll be assessed through words... What's the word? Substitution. Words of substitution. So for example, this would be like... So Father goes to the mountains to hunt. And then they might change Father, Amma, with Bati. Grandpa goes to the mountains to hunt. So first they would learn the thing and then she'd say, Okay, so if Talalutukci Amma Amyaduk means Father goes to the thing, and you know all the words, how would you say Grandpa goes to the... And they would go, Okay, I'll do this and then I'll just replace the word. So then they can get... It's kind of like this inductive learning approach. And then they might say, How would you say Father goes to the mountain to do something else instead of hunting? How would you stick a verb on the end? So then they would change it. So there's word substitution. You can, with one simple thing, you can then start to build up quite complex sentences, or at least different sentences with the same structure. So the total physical response method, this is kind of... I don't know how popular this is, but it's pretty good, especially for beginning language learning and for kids. That's where, for example, I might say to you all, 站起来, and I would model. 坐下, and I would sit down. So I would model and say in Chinese, and then I would ask you to do the same thing, but then eventually I wouldn't model. I would just say the words, and you would repeat it. And then I would ask you to repeat it and to do the action. So this is what they call total physical response. It's good to think of things like verbs and commandments. It seems that you can just gesture, but it's difficult to do it with abstract concepts, obviously, and animals. I mean, you could make any way of an animal. How would you fish, I don't know. But so this is on kind of passive skills, listening, understanding, and not necessarily reading, writing, or speaking. And then there's the direct method, which is... So this is about kind of the use of target language, where target language is only used in the class. There's no grammar, there's no explanations, there's no translations. It's just me speaking language to you all the time. And this is hard, and some people don't like this method. I don't like the method, but because I think it's important to explain grammatical concepts to the kids, at least in my school. That's not necessarily the way people like to be taught. And again, we're going to talk about that as well, if we've got time. I could like move on. Yeah, so this is a typical language class, it's got like two kids. Yeah, I've been to her classes, there's not many students. This is just something that she said. So she said the students only have 40 minutes a week. 40 minutes to an hour a week of classes to become fluent in whatever, whatever language they're studying. There's not much opportunity for them to speak in daily life, and so she uses the time to practice speaking. So this is the focus of her classes. I hope my students will speak, listen, and read the loudest. It's not about reading, writing, essays, things like that. It's about communication. My method is, first of the start of the lesson, I get my students to take turns to come to the front of the class and greet everyone in the language, introduce themselves, like my name is, and then they count from one to 90. I don't know if they might take turns, because I think if you just got one kid to count to 90 and then sit down and get another kid to count to 90. Maybe I'll do one to 10. They'll do 11 to 20. So the front one leads, and they go around until everyone's done, and then they start their new content of the class. So she'll use this kind of, it's called yi-en-di-lu-yen, which is a website for materials, for support materials for the proficiency test. A lot of it's kind of pictorial and things like that. She'll use pictures for learning individual words, or visual prompts, and then they'll practice that with some key phrases. And then sometimes she'll let the kid, this is kind of like the student teacher, she'll let the kid come in and lead the class while she goes around and checks pronunciation. Again, the kid's to feel that they have some kind of agency that they're learning and it makes them feel good that they can actually teach. Again, just getting the kids to become involved. This is just them drawing some pictures related to the vocabulary that they're learning. It's pretty good. I think the right's just colored in. For the one on the left, it's drawn. So these are a couple of problems that she has in the classes. One is mixed Aboriginal classes, in that if you don't have enough teachers for all the different Aboriginal kids in your class, what do you do, right? So she said six years ago, I was teaching at a primary school, they couldn't find anyone to teach Benun. And so they lumped all the Benun kids into their Amis class. And Benun and Amis aren't related at all, those languages, they're mutually unintelligible and culturally very, very different. So there's no reason for a Benun person to learn Amis. They may as well learn anything else, but there's no link to their culture. So they're all there learning Amis. And then she had a Sakizaya student, his teacher in force that was ill. And so he sat in her class and she would teach her students in Amis and then set them on task and then she'd go over and help him individually with his work. Luckily kind of Amis and Sakizaya are quite similar. So if they paid attention to the grammar, if there is any that she'll teach, that could work. She has a lot of lack of resources. For most of my teaching it's necessary to utilize online resources. The textbooks produced by the CIP have been put on the website. Because schools have no funding to provide the teaching materials, I just have one textbook and the content is really basic, which you can see. And therefore desperately need of other teaching materials. So outside of language learning there's other things that they can do. There's community involvement, the speech singing and dance competitions to make it interactive. We can language lessons, mostly done with elders. And they started this single family training, which is, I don't know if you haven't heard about the Master Apprentice Programs in America, where you have for native language learning, you have like a young guy who basically just kind of hangs around with an older guy who only speaks to him in native languages and they do things together like cooking and gardening and so they learn by just spending time with, and that's actually funded by the government, the local government. So they're paid almost like as employers to learn a language and then they go on to become teachers. So this is one of the weekend classrooms. This is one of the elders' quantum one. He built this kind of classroom onto the side of his house and he teaches kids at the weekends and he was one of my language consultants for my PhD as well. I was working with him closely on traditional stories in that very room getting bitten by Shahiwans, which are like mosquito things. But one of the biggest problems facing Aboriginal language learning is not necessarily resources or teachers, but urban migration. So this started off in the 70s with national infrastructure projects. You had a lot of Aborigines moving to the cities to do manual labour work. If you look at the map, you can see all of the industry and urbanisation is developed on the west coast and almost nothing in the mountain ranges in the north and the coastal region on the east coast, which is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because most of the Aboriginal culture has survived in this place because they're being relatively isolated and it's a curse because there's no development there, there's no jobs, there's high unemployment and a host of socio-economic problems relating to that including there are huge, very high rates of alcoholism, domestic abuse, depression, suicide. I mean, this is the case across all Aboriginal communities in Canada, Australia as well. So current estimates, if you look at... I shouldn't translate to that English, of the 560,000 Aborigines in Taiwan today about 263,000 or just under 50% live in urban areas now. So while we've got all this lovely community development and the elders working with the things, that's not actually the case for half the population. So you've got a lot of kids growing up in urban areas where they come from disadvantaged backgrounds which I've just mentioned. Migrant families are typically of lower economic status than Han Chinese and therefore they're viewed as second-class citizens. There's a lack of cultural awareness in urban areas. There's institutionalized racism from our teachers and students whether or not they acknowledge it. Cultural and linguistic isolation so there's no support network for urban Indigenous people which ultimately leads to low self-esteem and a rejection of Aboriginal heritage with a desire just to fit in. So Cheng and Jacob interviewed 12 different students in Taipei and found the following. Some had never returned to their villages to experience tribal life so they had no idea about the context in which their language is spoken. Most students need to learn at least four languages, Mandarin English, Taiwanese Hokkien and then their language, their tribal language. They're kind of priorities. What are your priorities? Mandarin in English which will give you good socio-economic opportunities or your tribal language which gives you that kind of cultural contact but then gives you no jobs afterwards so it's a real issue for them. The National curriculum has almost no information on Indigenous cultures whether values are of the exception of other histories. As a result, both teachers and students lack cultural awareness and have these long-held stereotypes and prejudice. We talked about the 35% of the score policy. A lot of Hans students feel this is unfair and some of them have been overtly racist to their average on-campus classmates so this is a quote from a girl in grade 10 who says, my elementary school peers were frequently running around my table and yell, I'm not going to do it but do that, you know, like American Indians. So, Chou wrote his PhD dissertation on teaching attitudes in urban areas and he found that Chinese teachers overwhelmingly had these kind of culture-blind perspectives and didn't acknowledge that there was any racism happening in schools at all. They believed that all students should be treated the same regardless there should be no differentiation there should be no allowances. If you fail, it's your fault. You didn't work hard enough. And Indigenous cultures were taught in a very tourist kind of perspective. There was no depth to what they said. Indigenous teachers on the other hand they reflected the importance of promoting cultural diversity and challenging social discrimination where they found it. They demonstrated a sense of agency and desire to make a change for the students in city schools. They often had to discern their parents for the children so if the children had issues that they wanted to talk about they would come to the teachers who would understand the kind of problems that they were going through. And they were able to make a difference through connections with churches, social networks and common culture and experiences. And this is something I want to talk about which is the different modes of learning and this is something which isn't really discussed a huge amount of it. It's about how Indigenous peoples across the globe tend to have different modes of learning. People learn differently. We all know that the Asian, kind of Japanese, Korean method is growth learning, repetition, drilling. They become famous for that kind of mode of learning. It wouldn't work over here. It would be a rebellion. I know it. My kids would literally hang me if I had this mode of learning. We have to adapt to the cultures in which we find ourselves. People learn differently. So Indigenous styles across the board in previous studies have shown that they tend to favor things like observation, invitation, narratives and storytelling, cooperation and cooperation. And in their paper Indigenous Elementary Students Science Instruction in Taiwan, Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science, that's a nice paper. Lee notes that Indigenous students have to learn subjects in a hand environment whether they're brought up in another language with different modes of learning and different cultural values. But they found that by incorporating Indigenous knowledge into their lessons they helped to, it didn't only, it not only helped to scaffold their learning but it also helped them to have an increased sense of pride in their learning. So they did a programme about time and they introduced the Amis concept, traditional concept of how time works and then compared it to the Western concept. And that was fascinating for people to see that you can perceive things like time in different ways and they're not necessarily rubbish. There's value to these things. Yeah. And other than that, I think it's important that Indigenous and other studies by Lin has shown that they're kind of collaborative that students tend to learn visually and kinesthetically and they prefer collaborative learning based on group solving because their knowledge is traditionally acquired through participating in hunting, observations, storytelling, group-related activities and not by mainstream textbooks and examinations. So this is something that if you don't fit into the kind of the hand system, you're stupid. When really, it's just that you don't learn that way. That's why you have things like Duolingo. Because people learn different ways. We know this here, but it hasn't been accepted in Taiwan. Now one great way to overcome this barrier is by the use of online technology, which is why I mentioned Duolingo. So online educational resources include things like dictionaries, e-books, archives and recordings, Indigenous media, film, music, arts and games and activities. There are a number of digital households in the world apparently. Most people have, even elderly people have an iPhone or something, some kind of smartphone that they work around about. And some studies, some developments of e-learning software developed in Orchid Island has showed that Indigenous communities actually not only value but find it quite effective to have good, high quality resources that they can use in their homes. Now I'll talk about that in a second. So the impact of technology, multimedia content gives you different modes of learning, audio, visual, games, substitution methods. You can have anything on the phone. It's easily accessible and affordable. Most of these things are downloadable for free. Autonomous content development, so people like this Sharia have set up a website where they digitize all the materials and they've done it so that they can give you this sense of again grassroots, you can empower Indigenous communities through technology if they have access to it of course. Independent distance learning which is good for urban populations, so things like if you have Indigenous Skype lessons, if you don't have access to an internet speaker, creates new forms for language use. People that are using Indigenous language on Facebook, on Twitter, it modernizes traditional languages. I don't like this, but there's something that keeps coming up. Increasing the area for use, more than just modernizing, but also new word development and things like that. Creating a strong online presence for average needs. We're all about curating ourselves on Facebook. You can... I don't do it, but be used as like smearing. The idea of being able to portray yourself on your own terms is very important. Instead of being viewed through the media. Using social media to establish or re-establish connections between urban youth and tribal villages. This is an example of a group for the Sakizai village I was living in. Two of them, actually. So people who lead the village can keep in touch with their friends and families in the local village. And this has been really good. This is a digital... a digitized version of all 16 languages, the dictionaries that have been done by the CIP. It's a really, really... that helped me out a lot on the PhD. I didn't know any words. I didn't have access to a speaker either, and I was just like... So again, they're quite limited, but they're good. This is a really good website. This is the support materials for the proficiency test. It's got a lot of recordings. It's thematic. Again, it doesn't have, like, a morphological breakdown, which is really necessary, but nonetheless, it's useful. These are e-books. I've highlighted those because you can see that you have some, like the Rukai here, you have 42 books available, and then the Saisha, you have, like, seven books, so there's an equal kind of development there. Taiwanese Indigenous Television was founded in 2005. They do regular broadcasts in Indigenous languages, and the updates pretty much all their videos onto YouTube, which is really, really useful to get little kids. A lot of them are kind of just a few minutes long, or some of them you get, like, an hour on there. Just an hour broadcasting, which is great. With subtitles in Chinese, most of the time. They started this thing. They're not, it's called a Mu Yu Chalic, a mother tongue nest, or a language nest, but it's not. It's mainly just two hours of classes that happen a weekend. So, you have this, this is in Type A, so you have a map of Type A with these little icons that you click on. You can select in the yellow box here, you can select which language that you're looking for, and then it'll come up with a little thing, and you can click on it, and it'll give you the address of the place, what time, so this one here is an Amis language class with that address, and it's on Sundays at 10 in the morning, until 12, so you can go there and practice your Amis language, language practice within the city, which is really useful. They also established its University of Type A Indigenous Community, so this is like a center of learning in the city. So this is about indigenous skills and modern knowledge of indigenous communities, more publicity for kind of cultural, intercultural understanding, lifelong learning. Yeah, I mean this is something I'll talk about, which is an Aboriginal education system, so kind of integrating Aboriginal concepts and knowledge into the curriculum. Opportunities to participate in tribal culture for urban and aborigines and cooperative learning between the Han Chinese cultures and indigenous population. So the future I'll be quick, hold on to that I've already run over it. It doesn't matter, you enjoying it? Yeah. This is a good part. Okay, so now we have an increased status of Aboriginal languages. This is like a nice political thing that just came up last year, which I'll talk about. There needs to be increased motivation to new job opportunities and this is something that again it's a big ask, but it's a necessary one. Language nests, indigenous language nannies, improved learning resources, cultural education of urban teachers, aboriginal curriculums, virtual learning environments. Yeah, that's the future. So, we had the famous apology from president Tsai Ing-wen and she said she apologized to the aborigines for their historical mistreatment for the first time in their history in 2016, which is a lot more to do. Last May, they granted official status to indigenous languages, which was a huge huge step part of the act that related to education is to the government should promote aboriginal languages, compile dictionaries and archives. Government institutions and schools and companies in aboriginal areas should prepare official documents for local languages. Public transport should use local languages and announcements. They do this on the train, if you're going to Kuali and as you pull into Kuali and we have the Nannies announcement, I've first time heard that, I got super excited. All public schools that follow the national curriculum have to provide aboriginal language courses up to high school now, at least local languages. You can decide not to take it you can do HACA or something instead but you have to do a local language up to high school. Local education should launch programs to train full time aboriginal language teachers, so hopefully more employment opportunities for people to be teacher full time in a school instead of having to run around aboriginal language publications aboriginal language publications and airtime for aboriginal language content in government owned or government invested media should not be less than 50%, okay? Language Nests Language Nests is where you have it's like a nursery where kids are dropped off and they're looked after by elderly fluent speakers of the language, usually elderly fluent speakers of the language and they're only spoken in the target language and this started off in Hawaii and New Zealand and it was trialed in Taipei in 2001 but now this is a new resurgence of this 35 kindergarten and ten nursery now in the program most of the speakers did the 36 hours training so they should be fine but again some studies have shown that this isn't necessarily applicable everywhere, it works in Hawaii but it didn't work in mainland America for certain reasons because the situations were different and that's something that's been pointed out so it's not ideal because of children not living in rural communities where they can be looked after by elderly people they're all living in the urban areas but some have started in kindergarten as well they started this program called Indigenous Language Nannies which is great so this is people who they have to take this is brand new, this is this month they started so the candidate has to do an oral test to see if they have language ability those who pass then go on to take a 12 hour long nursery training program to look after kids and then they can apply for grants, the oral exam was took place nine days ago so they're going through the process now so this is brand new those who you can either work as like a relative nanny so looking after kind of like relations or general nannies so you can kind of be hired out as it's looked after other kids to do that you have to go through 126 hour training certificate which is more than it takes to be a teacher and yeah and you get a certain amount of money for each kid that you take on to look after um I don't have time to show that video but it was a nice video about a little kid I'll show you two seconds it's a minute we can watch it so he's a drip-through artist he does intentionally turn the boy to speak the indigenous language the greater laws of languages has been a major concern of the indigenous people many local children nowadays can't speak their own languages but from good old we can see that family is an important thing to learning indigenous languages in a natural way so that just goes to show the impact that spending time with native speakers on a regular basis can have for language learning unfortunately it's not the case in urban areas this is the need, this is why there's an increasing need in urban centers for self-study and by that I mean properly scaffolded lessons with dialogue, vocabulary lists grammar explanations please and activities to practice the four skills the material should also be culturally rich and contextual and contain ideally multimedia so this is a really nice example for the YAMI project alright well this is not this, this is Mongolian but this is just to show you that this is very simple this is like a kind of a regular teacher self-book that we all, we probably all own something teachers or whatever, Spanish you have your dialogue with an audio file that goes with it you have a list of the capillary and then you have a grammar explanation of what has just gone on in the dialogue that doesn't exist for Aboriginal languages it's simple and it doesn't exist all of the materials have been based around teachers' materials because they're the ones with the knowledge if you don't have access to a teacher the materials are useless because you can't access the linguistic information because there's no explanations so this is a project that was started by a linguist called it doesn't matter Rao, there's a surname I can't forget he was working with the Tao or the YAMI community in Orchid Island and she developed this this is a really great you've got this beginner, intermediate and advanced level so this is the beginner you have it's thematic so greetings, introduction family members eating breakfast visiting the school and it gets progressively more difficult so I clicked on lesson one no I didn't, lesson two and this is you've got your dialogue or you've got audio files for everything you've got translations it's a bilingual website it's just in Chinese and English so if you want to learn YAMI you can go ahead and do that then you click on if you see on the sub menu on the left you click on grammar and you have a breakdown of things like case marking determiners what is the genitive and how it's used possessive as well as a case marker and a normal kind of grammatical sentence things like how to use a locative form this is all very particular to from awesome languages then you can click on activities and exercises this one activities at the top you've got with two people in a group ask each other for names, number of siblings and then for the exercise students need to write a self introduction so it's giving you a pedagogical advice for teachers of how to use that material to teach now you've got this material with all the files here's how you can use it in a classroom or here's how you can just use it by yourself so this is a really really excellent format I think that this should be kind of the standard but this is the only one I've found the other languages I can't find anything they're more similar to that there needs to be more cultural education so this was in 2003 the education act required teachers working in indigenous areas to complete an ethnic multi-cultural courses and all levels of government should comply with that in five years but it doesn't apply to urban areas which is really where you need it and this is a big problem there's a nice PDF I found called the Australian curriculum guiding principles for promoting implementing Australian curriculum curriculum and it was like a breakdown of how to be more inclusive and culturally sensitive for teachers who are working in aboriginal areas in Australia and this kind of thing should be standard for all teachers in Taiwan or anyone working in any country with aboriginal aboriginal populations aboriginal curriculums this is just incorporating some indigenous knowledge or histories into the standard curriculum this kind of thing could smooth that transition from mainstream education for aborigines in urban areas it can educate ham people and the other people that actually live on the island with them and have been living there longer than they have on their views so they have more cultural sensitivity and understanding as well as for teachers and this kind of thing is being trialed in Canada including a lot of these things for their different aboriginal groups this is a secondary school program in Ontario in Ottawa and they have first nation cultural values in their curriculum, English courses like literature is culturally based or culturally significant they have food and outdoor programs that focus on native heritage and cultural teachings and this is going to be done by a gentleman here a few weeks ago called Daniel Davies who is a former student here and he is now working with the local government the Pingdong local government to develop a series of aboriginal English books but they are doing it across different subjects geography, maths, things like that but he is working on the English one and to create some materials that are to teach teach English but with an aboriginal twist so they have so the target vocabulary is chosen to be more applicable to local students reflecting local culture, clothing activities food and the local environment they have traditional stories for the basis of their units so the traditional stories are in English but they are about their own culture so they are already familiar with the again it is scaffolding they are already familiar with the content the traditional story that may have heard but now they are learning in a different way through English the same thing goes for using traditional melodies with English lyrics it is great for Disney films as well activities and games are centered around things like hunting, weaving making beads and the artwork and illustrations are done via local indigenous artists or people familiar with Taiwan culture so this is a trial the material is being tried across two campuses but the idea is to assess how effective they are and then to make them available for other Taiwan schools in the Pingdong area so hopefully that should be that should be done sometime I think this year or next year virtual learning this is pretty cool I found this Samsung electronics recently partnered with the CIP and Trunchi University to develop a new curriculum that uses digital technology to create immersive and interactive indigenous language and cultural lessons so they selected 10 different indigenous schools from 8 different tribes to take part in the first trial of the project and they use these interactive virtual to experience three dimensional aspects of their heritage to gain first hand educational experiences simulated natural settings I don't know how good it will be but it is pretty good innovative again this is homing in on the idea of people having different modes of learning modes done the last thing one of the last is motivation generally people identify language learning as having two motivating factors what we call intrinsic and extrinsic intrinsic is the reasons that you do it for the personal reasons why you learn a language you do it because you are interested in the culture the sounds of the language you want to communicate with the community you might be heritage learners about cultural pride or extrinsic reasons outside of you you need to learn a language to function in society to improve your social standing to get better economic benefits such as learning English to do trade or to develop certain professional skills that you might want to take with you in the future the thing is there is no right now language learning in Taiwan is purely intrinsic there is no extrinsic reason for you to learn the original language there is no job opportunities there are people needed to translate for hospitals courts the older generation have a language skill the language ability with no professional skills the younger generation have professional skills but no language ability there needs to be a bridge between the two the reason I've showed you've got musicians the author and then the famous the first film solely in indigenous language the highest grossing film in history but you have these kind of new modes of media and with that lots more employment opportunities so once Gallic for example in Scotland was made an official language they opened up BBC Alba the kind of Gallic branch of the Scottish BBC and that created jobs for like reporters journalists everybody who needed to work on the industry generally had to have some kind of level of Gallic it also spurred the need for Gallic teachers nationwide I just googled it the other day I was typing Gallic teaching jobs and I got 46 jobs available that they can't fill there's a need for teachers Outlander if you've ever seen it it's a stupid show they go back to kind of old Scotland and people speak Gallic and the Americans love it and they came over everyone comes over to Scotland from the States they revisit their culture and they're obsessed with Gallic so this kind of prompted this whole thing the Highlands and Islands have done this Gallic innovation scheme where they've used businesses that are starting to try to incorporate Gallic into the marketing because people think it's cool and the New Zealand government estimates that the Maori economy is worth about 30 billion US dollars and it's a major force in the nation's economy things like media they have two Maori TV channels dozens of radio stations growing online digital content this is all stuff that Taiwanese aborigines don't have but need you could promote culture both both for the love of the culture but also to create jobs so in conclusion you go wrong educational focus in Taiwan should be shifted towards strengthening language support in urban areas for self-learning teachers should be educated and have cultural awareness training so they can more effectively work with aborigines Aboriginal viewpoints and cultures should be integrated into the national curriculum there should be more collaboration between linguists and educational specialists to develop quality scaffolded resources with detailed yet accessible grammatical explanations and the government and industry should invest in creating employment opportunities that are in line with education and that value indigenous language skills such as tourism, media, education, publishing and marketing thanks very much for your time sorry I went over that's fantastic exactly what I was looking for in the election even though I knew you were going over I didn't really want to stop you last questions I've got quite a few questions but let me limit myself just to I actually found with a lot of my questions you were kind of altering them as you were going along another question about you touched upon the indigenous TV station 20 steps does that really play a role because you've got 16 something languages from my impression a lot of that TV station is done in Mandarin is that right? is it actually some but you have things like it depends so for example the Sakizaya channel it depends on the population so for example you have about 100,000 Amis and you have less than a thousand Sakizaya so they have a lot of time according to so you turn on the TV usually you hear Amis or something like that Sakizaya they get one hour a week it's broadcast on like a month the vast majority of it is not based on it doesn't have any kind of educational content it does have a few for nursery kids songs and stuff like that but most it's just kind of it's about Aboriginal issues things that are affecting people and in their area and the reporting is mainly done in Aboriginal languages if you don't speak the Aboriginal language it's nice to hear it but you don't understand anything but it's rather than nothing and is it something that will be used in the classroom for example it's too fast I try to use it for my own resources for my studies it's really difficult it's extremely quick and the technology the technical jargon that they use for things they talk about things like car crashes and what's going on and kids learning how to say like cow and chicken it's difficult for them to access the vocabulary another kind of very minor question I had well minor actually probably quite important because you mentioned one of the big issues is Indigenous people living in urban areas so let's say you have one Indigenous kid just one in a school does a school require to actually put together some kind of teaching programme for that one kid if they can find a teacher okay right probably can't in some way well because you have about 16,000 Aborigines in Taipei you may have some teachers but they'll be spread really thin if there are any at all a lot of them will probably be done remotely online using the materials if you wanted to they would probably be self-studying they'd have the I mean they have like the tribal university there so they could probably do a lot of self-study a lot of listening practice themselves with the materials online and then maybe have additional help but I mean it's chances are they would just drop it and do something like just focus on English so one of the things I was kind of curious about was the role of local government you talked about the project that Daniel Davis is involved in but I was thinking someone like Taipei again or Galshwin you have an Indigenous section in city government do they get involved in this kind of project they do a lot of them are funded by local government like Kualien 45% of Kualien are Aboriginal as opposed to 1% 2% of Taipei so there's a huge amount of funding available through local government in places like Kualien where there's a need for it there will be funds allocated to Taipei but I mean almost the problem about Taipei is that you have 16,000 Aborigines 16 different tribes 16 different languages so how do you accommodate all of these the variety of need in Kualien it's easier because you have maybe three or four tribes in the end of the year OK, let's have a bit of questions at your hand it's a small room thank you very much it's very very interesting I think you kind of touched on it and I can build my own answer by the different that you're talking about the structural racism and the general lack of resources but is there much drive or interest in expanding these indigenous languages to non-indigenous children and getting Han children to learn Amis or because it feels at the moment or the picture I got is that it's almost like they're just teaching indigenous languages to indigenous children to keep these languages alive but they will inevitably slowly die surely if any of those children are uninterested and the language can't really grow without some non-native speakers or some non-indigenous children picking it up I don't know if that's necessarily true but what I will say is that it's all about motivation if you are 98% of the population and you get by just fine with Mandarin and maybe you got some pressure to learn Paka or Minanyu which is more relevant to your life and to your ancestry plus all of the other academic pressures that I mean Taiwanese schooling is not easy if you're like well on top of all this wouldn't it be fantastic if you learned a language which no one speaks or just be like no why would I waste my time and it's about attitude I think that kind of it's all about again extrinsic motivation is there a need for me to learn that language there isn't you have to do it because you want to and you know I think but in order to do that you've got to break down structural issues of racism and marginalization there has to be a lot of cultural communication and dialogue which isn't there right now I mean it's becoming more and more kind of accepted and cool at least for the younger generation because of I mean very very recently in talking because of music and film and the media but the vast majority of people are look down on Aboriginal people outside of their communities so I don't see that happening anytime soon I think the thing is right now is to to make young Aborigines proud of who they are and to want to embrace their own culture first okay well this gentleman almost asked my question and I was going to ask if there are any cases of non-Aboriginal children learning aboriginal which is in the schools yeah well sorry I think maybe you came in a bit late yes yes yes yes yes no no I'm not like why did you know because I played a video and it was in an Amis village but they had a hand-trained student in the school who was doing Amis lessons as well and I said it was very enjoyable and mainly because they were living in within the community and had constant kind of access to culture because it was around to okay and I just want to sort of question but more of a comment two European poets George Campbell Hay who's probably the second most important Scottish Gallic poet of the 20th century and Gabrielle Resti who many people say later 20th century neither were indigenous speakers George Campbell Hay he learned Gallic not through going to classes but by when he was a child talking with and spending time with the local fishermen and Gabrielle Resti as an adolescent chose to learn the best language now the point is both these poets learn to language that has a very strong literary tradition and an audience okay so languages are so social media anyway and they exist within society so part of languages viability surely is also it's all the various aspects of culture in vehicles so some kind of literary production perhaps will be a good thing yes and no the reason I'll say that is because the vast majority of languages are not written down anyway vast majority of languages their future is not secure that's true, yeah but it's trade off so they are written down now that's how you say thank you yeah but you have issues with I mean interestingly enough you mentioned the poet Campbell Locke Fine, they don't speak Gaelic there anymore and the dialect that they used to speak there has been dead for a long time now when you learn Gaelic you learn standard Gaelic which is spoken million in the eye of the sky there are dozens of different varieties which aren't really written down that's not part of the literary canon if you were to write down aboriginal languages again you would have to standardize it which is at the cost of other dialects so that's one thing say you have a poet who wants to write about his experience growing up in one particular village where his particular dialect of Amis or whatever is different from that of other places he would have to do it in a different tongue he would have to do it in a standardized tongue or just in Mandarin just write down about his own experiences in Mandarin there are a lot of the guy, the Tal author he writes in Mandarin even though he writes about indigenous issues and issues about growing up on his island as an indigenous person a canon of indigenous literature doesn't mean that there can't be one but it's not there I think but I agree with you and I think that's why online platforms are great for that because once you have people growing up being able to be literate to write then they can start to produce their own resources, their own poems, their own stories their own dialogues put it all online and then you start to have a literary canon canon so literary culture so whether you're always using linguistics you build a corpus you build a corpus of material and that will take time I agree with you, it's a good idea you mentioned the Amis have a 100,000 population 100,000 speakers I think I think it's less than 50,000 people but they have a flourishing literary culture Thank you for your interesting lecture you did your work in Hualien so I'm wondering what did you find there if the kids there are happy are they happy to learn their indigenous language I asked this because I worked as a school teacher in Taipei for many years before I came to London and what I found from my students is that they told me they are not happy to learn their indigenous language because they feel this kind of language is useless in their life and in their family their parents they don't communicate with them with this language and also they complain about the chaining of the teacher they don't really understand how to teach these children really well so that's what I found maybe just a small sample in Taipei and other area so I'm wondering what did you find from your fieldwork Well my I think it also depends on the age group so I think kids young children in primary school are probably a lot more likely to enjoy the classes because most of the time it's taught through games through songs, through dance and it's just fun as you get older when you're a teenager you don't really want to dance around and sing songs songs about frogs because you're too busy whatever going on dates and playing with your iPhone and again when you get older you start to there's more exam pressure there's more need to think about your future about the decisions that you have to make for one of the best decisions you have to make in terms of your educational choices and average a language for by the wayside because after they get their proficiency exam there's no need for them to use their language in daily life there's no opportunities, there's no jobs so why bother? also you're right a lot of this is structural socially people don't talk aboriginal they don't teach their kids aboriginal language because not because they don't value them as intrinsically but because they don't feel there's this notion that if you teach a kid even in this country if you grow them up to be bilingual they'll speak English or Mandarin with a funny accent or they'll take them longer to learn it or they won't learn it as well or they'll be stupid at school more people in the world are multi-lingual people in Africa, the average African guy speaks about 5 languages the Dutch speak about 5 languages and they're all fine, happen to speak better English than I do and for people to have this idea this is a big problem in Wales people didn't want their kids to learn Welsh but it would hinder them in the future this is a notion which is certainly carried on in Taipei but erroneously I think families need to be made aware that their language is valuable but again this is a you need large-scale social change it's not just about the kids being fun, having fun when they learn because man school's not fun we try to make it as fun as we can sometimes the kids just don't want to learn the motivation isn't there languages is one of the biggest problems because you know even in schools here English and maths they see the value because they need to they need to pass it to get a job they won't get a job, French who cares foreign languages in general have a bad rap but you know if you can't use them in any kind of professional sense it's even worse so it's about large-scale change both socially and also economically as well a last question sorry Peter do you have a question you have a question I was just going to support your point about literacy and I mean some of the most vibrant cultural movements that are happening in English things like rap music and you know kids on the streets and what's happening if you go see what's happening in the music scene in the east end of London with multicultural modern English and so on that's where the liveliness of language is really I did have a question which was maybe things have changed, I haven't been to Taiwan for a while but what I saw was kind of internal colonialism happening we went to this place at Sun Moon Lake there was a kind of Disneyland thing and there was dancing and singing etc and then we talked to the people afterwards they were Han Chinese dressed up as Aborigines there was money to be made but it was being made by Han it wasn't being made by Aboriginal people so it's kind of cultural I don't know is that still going on cultural assimilation no it's appropriation sorry, meant appropriation that's correct no, no this is a a bit mistook so we Julie and I we were living we would go often to a village called Chi Chi which is a Sakizai village on the coast and they have as you pull up to the village they have this beautiful layout of indigenous patterns all over like the Sakizai have colors the tribal colors all over these buildings which was supposed to be it was built by the by the government for the tribe to use as because it's pretty much the only accessible beach for about 100 kilometers by the way so people go there and there's nothing, no development there there's a tiny little village and then you've got this beachfront they originally built it for the villagers to make a living but eventually the villagers didn't own it so it was owned by the by the government and then they they rented it out to Chinese businessmen who now sit in these aboriginal huts with all these aboriginal colors selling crap and make all the money but still using the aboriginal thing as the selling point so yeah this is I think Daniel was talking about this as well politicians are using they're dressing up like aborigines to try to promote Taiwan as being different from mainland China it's a political ploy as much as anything else it's about pushing the narrative of we all have this kind of this different descent even though it only applies to 2% of the population okay on that point let's continue our discussion over some wine first thank Douglas one more time