Volume 4 Number 1
October 1964

Wayne Holm

Navaho Tribal leaders have shown, in recent years, increasing concern over what they feel to be the inadequate English of so many tribal job and scholarship applicants. A small but increasing number of reservation teachers, dissatisfied with the academic achievement of Navaho children, have been attempting to use or adapt materials originally intended for children (or adults) of language backgrounds other than Navaho.

The Bureau’s Branch of Education has for years quite correctly stressed the teaching of English. The ability to talk and to understand American English has been understood to be the sine qua non of an adequate education for the Navaho child. But there seems to be a growing consensus among those concerned with the education of Navaho children that, collectively, their English is inadequate, and that too many Navaho children are not learning enough, or good enough, English.

Navaho children in Bureau schools are expected to acquire enough spoken English in their beginner year to prepare them for first grade work on a level of near equality with native speakers of English. Almost all Navaho children, regardless of, and sometimes despite, their teachers’ methods, learn an impressive amount of English during their initial year in school. But this is not followed up and built upon in subsequent years; few grade-level teachers of Navaho children attempt to teach American English as a spoken language. Most teachers become involved in an intense and often desperate effort to keep the rapidly "fading" Navaho child up-to-grade in reading and reading-based subjects. There simply is no time left for spoken English.

The Navaho child’s small store of spoken English, accumulated as a beginner, is dissipated in a year or two of reading. With no new investments in spoken English, the demands of reading on the child’s knowledge of English become more and more difficult to meet. The children become used to operating on a level of near-bankruptcy; they learn to live with their inadequacy until they no longer recognize it as such. It is only when they attempt to enter the wider world that their inadequacy betrays them. They are refused a job or a scholarship, or they are accorded one or the other in the rueful knowledge that there do not seem to be any better qualified applicants.

In summary, I believe that it can be said that in most grade-level Bureau classrooms American English, as a spoken language, is not taught. In those classrooms where it is taught, it is seldom taught as intensively or effectively as it might be. And where American English has been intensively and effectively taught, this has not been followed up by other teachers in subsequent years. Too many Navaho children struggle daily to read and comprehend a language-American English-which they neither speak nor "hear" well.

But why this concentration on reading? Why don’t Bureau teachers teach children to speak and to "hear" American English. Why? Because, quite simply, they don’t know how. These teachers were trained to teach native speakers of American English: they were taught to emphasize reading. Few, if any, of them came to the Bureau with any prior training in the teaching of English as a second language. And we in the Bureau have neither a sequential program of intensive instruction in spoken English nor an effective program of in-service training which would prepare teachers to participate in such a program.

In the last twenty years a near revolution in second language teaching has been effected by this application of linguistics to the preparation of second-language materials and the use of such materials.

A language is the language as spoken. The spoken language is basic; the written or "literary" language is derivative. It is the spoken language that must be learned. It is the spoken language that must be taught. It is the ability to speak and to "hear" the spoken language that allows one to read and write it with anything near native proficiency.

Language is seen by linguists to be patterned and, in large part, habitual. Second language teaching may well be seen as an attempt to help the student acquire the salient features of the second language as habits.

The spoken language, then, must precede the written. But the spoken language cannot be taught in a single year. What is needed is a systematic program of instruction in spoken English which, in as far as possible, attempts to keep the level of spoken English ahead of the demands of written English.

The "linguistic approach", so-called, to second language teaching involves first of all a very careful analysis of both the language to be taught (English) and that of the learner (Navaho). This is done in an attempt to discern the salient features and patterns of the second language and to foresee some of the difficulties that will be occasioned by the native language. The construction of materials involves, among other things, an attempt to effect a graded and systematic presentation of these in such a way as to develop the more difficult and complex features and patterns from the simpler and less difficult ones. Teaching with such materials involves intensive and systematic drill in an attempt to make these features and patterns habitual. The intensive use of sound materials by well-trained teachers with strongly motivated children are the essentials of a sound program of spoken English.

In recent years this "linguistic" or "second-language" approach has been brought down to the elementary school level. A number of non-English speaking countries now begin systematic and intensive instruction in spoken English at the elementary school level. The materials used in Puerto Rico and in the Philippines are available to us in English and we ignore such programs to our own loss.

It is now all-but-axiomatic that the ability to talk English does not, in and of itself, enable one to teach the language to non-native speakers of English. English as a second language is not the same as English as the native language and it cannot be taught the same. Teachers of English as a second language must have sound materials to work with. But sound materials alone are insufficient, even the best of materials will not teach themselves. Teachers must have the necessary training to make good use of such materials; good teachers must, to some extent, become able to "see" English, as their students do. And they must know how to lead, to correct, to motivate, and to pace their students.

Bureau teachers are not given this type of training and they are not especially trained to teach English as a second language. They are teachers, as well trained as teachers anywhere, who happen to be teaching Navaho children.

Individual Bureau teachers have been experimenting with different materials and techniques. They should be encouraged to continue to do so. A few schools here and there have attempted to work out consistent and/or sequential programs of English language instruction. Such schools should be set up as a pilot or experimental project in the teaching of English as a second language.

Innovation and experimentation should be encouraged at all levels, but the development of a linguistically sound program of oral English cannot be left to the uncoordinated efforts of individual teachers and schools. A sound program is just too complex and difficult to allow such waste and duplication of effort. Existing programs in other areas of the world have been the collective work of any number of people trained in linguistics and secondlanguage teaching. We cannot reasonably expect teachers with little or no formal training in these disciplines to stumble onto these things for themselves.

Teachers need prepared materials and guides. We do not expect teachers to write their own books nor even their own guides to existing books. The teaching of the spoken language is, if anything, more complex than the teaching of reading. We should not expect teachers to write their own materials and guides. If materials are to be effective, they must be systematic and sequential. The children must work on spoken English day after day and they must progress as they go from grade to grade and from school to school. We cannot afford the waste and duplication involved in innumerable personal programs in this or that classroom.

Teachers coming into schools on the Navaho Reservation need materials and guides for a sound sequential program of spoken English. They need a program of in-service training which will enable them to use such materials and guides most effectively and, in time, to improve these materials and guides.

Such materials and guides, while extremely complex and difficult, CAN be constructed. Several promising adaptations of existing materials to Navaho needs have been begun in reservation schools. Some people who have begun this work probably could, with or without outside help, rough out satisfactory materials with which a beginning could be made.

It may be objected that we want only the best possible materials prepared by trained linguists specifically for Navaho needs before we undertake such a massive program of teacher training and retraining. Such materials could be developed and hopefully, in time, a fully integrated program of instruction in all the language arts will be developed. However, the needs of the present and the very near future are too great; we cannot await the development of "the perfect instrument" now. Spoken English is frequently not taught and where it is being taught, it is not being followed up. Any decent adaptation of existing materials would be better than no materials at all. The intensive and systematic use of any sound sequential set of materials would in a few years effect a significant improvement in the academic achievement of the Navaho elementary school children involved.

Teachers can be trained and retrained to teach English as a second language. Such a program will no doubt be difficult. It will call for a high order of diplomacy, but that it can be done is shown by the success of similar programs abroad. Teacher’s pay in Bureau schools is now comparable to, if not competitive with, that offered by the public schools, and better trained teachers are being brought into the Bureau. The reservation road network is expanding rapidly; communication and transportation are not the problems they once were. For better or worse, schools are becoming more institutionalized; they are becoming bigger and better staffed; they are gradually being freed of some of their more traditional responsibilities. We should make the most of these opportunities for internal improvement. A great deal can be done in these newer, larger, schools, especially during the summers.

The Branch of Education has been struggling since its inception for more schools, better schools, more adequately staffed. These struggles are by no means over, but we are beginning to see some of these things. With the advent of some of these improvements we can begin to give some consideration to the quality of education they afford. An education is not the buildings and staffing, it is what is learned in these buildings, from that staff.

If the problems of improvement are seen to be staggering, the extent of the need for improvement is even greater. It is here, with spoken English, that we must begin - for all else depends upon this. Spoken English is that without which there can be no further education. The efforts of individual teachers and schools are inadequate. Only comprehensive programs of materials-development and teacher training, vigorously undertaken, can begin to answer the needs of these times.

The development of such programs is imperative. It must be initiated in the very near future. If we do not have the personnel, or enough personnel, within the Bureau, let us recruit or contract for them as education ministries abroad have done. Let it never be said of us that American English is better taught in the schools of Puerto Rico or the Philippines or Indonesia than it is in the schools of our "first Americans".