Volume 3 Number 2
January 1964

Alice M. Shipley

Absurd? Not a bit, if you are just learning the language and have not as yet caught on to that abominable sound of "x" (ks) plus an extra "t" at the end for good measure.

These fifth year students were Navahos who had not started to attend the B.I.A. schools until their teens. Most of the girls in this class were between the ages of 19 and 23; some looked older and even had one or two children at home. Nonetheless, they had come to the boarding school through this special program to learn the English language, a vocation; to get a certificate and be placed on a job.

During the first two years their learning had been through an interpreter in the classroom. During the third year they struggled directly with their elementary teacher and a shop or home economics teacher, depending on the sex of the pupil. In the fourth and fifth years they were expected to have mastered at least 3,000 words. During this period they spent half a day with their elementary teacher and the other half, three hours, with a vocational teacher. Policies were changed during the 1958-1959 school year; it was decided to give these Navahos only two hours of vocational training and use the third hour for "Related Subjects."

When they were sent to me for "Related Subjects" one hour a day, my task was to ferret out their needs and give them something acceptable to their needs.

When I asked them what they would like in my classroom (I was a Vocational Nursing Instructor), almost unanimously they said, "We wanna learn Nurse Aid, and we wanna learn lo’ssa vocabulary."

"What kind of vocabulary would you like?" I inquired naively.

"Oh, right here, see? This is what we wan’ an’ we wanna learn Nurse Aid, too," as each girl produced a triple sheet (legal size) vocabulary list. Each sheet contained between four and five columns of simple to complex words single spaced. It made me dizzy to look at them.

"Will you please help us make this words have ‘contess’ in sentence and learn Nurse Aid, too? Can you tell us how word make contess?"

As I watched their eager faces and listened intently to every word, suddenly it dawned on me that they wanted me to help them become Nurse Aids by using the vocabulary words in "context" in sentences. What an assignment they had given me! Could I come up to it? The cogs in my brain began to whirl and I asked, "Which. word would you like us to take up first?"

"ON," came the response in unison, as 15 pairs of black twinkly eyes rested on me with that air of "now whatre you going to say? We’ve sure got YOU."

Pulling a bed from the nursing lab into our room, I removed the pillow case from the pillow, placed it on the bed and asked, "What is this?"

"Iss a pillow case."

"Where is it?"

"Iss on bed."

I then slipped the case on the pillow and asked, "Where is it now?"

"Iss on pillow; but iss not on pillow; iss all aroun’ pillow, iss on top an’ bottom, too. How come you wan’ us to say iss on pillow?" Now they were positive they had cornered the teacher.

In reality, I felt they had opened a door for me, so I lost no time to explain to them that when the pillow case was on top of the bed, we called it "on," this was in proper context of the sentence. And when it was on top, around, and bottom of the pillow, we called it "on~’ again, which was in proper context of that sentence.

For a moment there was no response and no sign of understanding, then one of their leaders suggested, "Why we have to learn contess, huh? Less juss learn Nurse Aid and vocab’lary."

From then on we never mentioned "context," instead we took the words as they brought them. We selected only five words which could best be correlated with their Nurse Aid work for each day. Every word was pulverized by simple demonstrations, illustrations and role-playing, until it became meaningful to them. Using this same word, we then made a question, and using its simplified meaning, we made an answer. The girls then practiced these on each other as nurse and patient.

These Navahos were thrilled and delighted to think that they were having a part in preparing their own lessons. However, to expedite matters, since we only had one hour a day together, I took all this simplified material horne. Burning the midnight oil I prepared short exercises consisting of five words, their explanation, five catchy questions with an answer following each question, making certain that the new word was used in the question and its definition in the answer. To insure recognition, both words were underlined. Thirty-six such exercises were prepared and mimeographed.

The first four days of the week we had a complete exercise with all its "trimmings." Then on Friday we had an objective test in which they had to fill in the proper word chosen out of three given words. These same 20 words and their simplified definitions were also used as matching questions in groups of tens.

The response to this type of learning was tremendous. Each day the girls could hardly wait to rush into our classroom and get into the role they were going to play, as nurse or patient, and would start to practice the sentence which they were going to use on each other. With each success they showed more motivation and a greater desire to come and learn.

Although we had many fine dictionaries in our room, we very rarely used them for these Special Navahos for the simple reason that the definitions were not in Navaho but in a more complex form of English. These girls needed understanding, not further frustration. Our job became, first and foremost, to make all the words (one, two, or three syllable) meaningful to them. Without first having a clear concept of the word in at least one meaning, the dictionary was a useless tool to them.

To a non-English-speaking adult, who does not have a cross-language dictionary with which he can compare his own words, learning is almost a hopeless process when he has to rely on the English to English dictionary. The Indian, whose vocabulary is without tense, conjugation or scientific terminologies, becomes completely frustrated when he has to use such a dictionary without first learning the language in a simplified method. He finds no correlation between his language and English even in the elementary dictionary.

In teaching Home Nursing, Nurse Aid, and Pre-Nursing to students from various tribes, I have found it exhilerating to first of all make all technical terminologies meaningful to them. By giving them a taste of the simplified words, then telling them how the doctor or nurse would express the same terms, the students nearly burst themselves trying to learn the technical terminologies.

The delightful part about this method has been that once the girls begin to really catch on to these terms, it is difficult to keep them away from the medical and collegiate dictionaries. Once they have found the key, they clamor for more and more doors into learning.

How do we evaluate the success of this method? During the past six years 36 girls, with IQs of 70 to 90 and with very low academic standing, who took pre-nursing with me, have successfully completed a practical nursing course, passed their State Board examinations and are working at salaries of $3820.00 to $4185.00 all over the United States in Public Health Service hospitals. There are also eight girls who are working as nurse aids in California and one in a Tucson rest home.

It has entailed a tremendous amount of work and preparation on my part. Has it been worth it? I shall leave the answer to the reader.