Section introduction

This section describes the process through which Twatati adapted Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa’s (OK) curriculum to create and implement an Oneida teaching curriculum. This section will contain 3 sub sections, discussing different aspects of this process. First, the history and broad strokes of the process will be described, including a timeline of the overall curriculum development process. Second, problems and concerns the program encountered during the process of translating and adapting the OK curriculum from Mohawk into Oneida will be described. Third, problems and concerns encountered in the process of implementing and teaching the adapted program in the classroom will be described. The adaptation and implementation processes are discussed separately in this document, but they were in reality performed largely simultaneously, often by the same individuals.

History of the curriculum development process

The organization that would become Twatati was originally formed in 2014 as the “Save the Oneida Language Committee,” as described in more detail in Twatati’s history document. The committee evaluated various language revitalization programs in order to choose one on which to base an Oneida program. Due in part to the similarities between Mohawk and Oneida as Haudenosaunee languages, the committee identified Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa as the most suitable basis for an Oneida program. The committee contacted OK and received OK’s Mohawk language curriculum in 2016.

The process of adapting the curriculum to Oneida began immediately with the help of native speakers led by the program’s intended primary instructor, Tehohʌletha. The program received external funding to begin delivering the course in 2016. Because of this, the program began running in Fall 2016 with a curriculum that was only partially adapted, while Tehohʌletha continued translating the curriculum. Some instructors had received training from OK instructor Rohahiyo before the program started, but the program was reliant on improvised content and live revision of unadapted parts for the first semester.

By the time of the program’s first Winter semester, the curriculum was adapted sufficiently to be directly implemented in the classroom, and for Tehohʌletha to take over as instructor. The second year of Twatati’s program was able to cover about half of the first year of OK’s curriculum. A second-year class was established to cover the rest of the material, which ran simultaneously with a new cohort of the first-year program. The curriculum adaptation process continued to operate and make revisions alongside the course delivery.

An intensive version of Twatati’s program was also developed. It has been run once, with exclusively younger students, and successfully covered all of the first-year curriculum in a shorter period of time than the regular program. Instructors were Kukwite Doxtator and Keshia Belisle.

Although the program has been running continuously since it began, recent data loss has necessitated a near complete restart of the adaptation and translation process. This new iteration of the process is close to completion.

Curriculum translation and adaptation

As described, the process of translating and adapting the OK curriculum began in 2016, led by Tehohʌletha. The adaptation process involved native speakers and adult learners from multiple generations of speakers. The specific speakers involved in the process varied over time, as most involved speakers have other obligations within the program or outside of it. After approximately one year of adaptation, the curriculum was ready for use in the classroom, though the process was not yet complete, and is still not yet complete today. Translated materials often require multiple rounds of revision to be fully translated into Oneida and free of loan translations.

It is intended that the process produces a Oneida curriculum which reflects Oneida culture rather than one which translates Mohawk or settler culture into Oneida. Because of this, the adaptation process contains many elements beyond simple translation. The process requires identification of places where Oneida and Mohawk differ and reconciliation of those differences in the written curriculum. This often concerns technical and grammatical elements, which participating native speakers tend to disprefer directly engaging with, though significant differences may appear in any part of the language.

Participating native speakers are most able to identify vocabulary choices and ways of speaking that will more closely reflect Oneida culture or identify things that are said in a Mohawk or English way translated into Oneida. For example, native speakers may be familiar with traditional Oneida ways of distinguishing kinship or describing people’s ages, and associated vocabulary that might be otherwise lost or displaced by English or Mohawk words or conceptualizations. New Oneida words were also coined as necessary during the adaptation process by consensus of the involved speakers.

Version control in the adaptation process posed multiple issues. Due to its necessity in teaching, program instructors kept and maintained versions of the partially adapted curriculum separately from the people working on adapting the curriculum. People working on the adaptation also kept multiple separate versions. This resulted in difficulty locating the most complete and updated version of the curriculum, and eventually led to a major data loss. This may have also resulted in revisions being made that were not transmitted to other versions of the curriculum, potentially causing work to be done multiple times.

Implementation

Twatati’s Oneida-adapted OK curriculum was first taught in 2016. As mentioned earlier, the curriculum was not yet ready to be fully implemented in the classroom until the Winter semester, running into 2017. As a result, the first Fall semester lacked concrete structure, which students found frustrating.
The OK curriculum received by Twatati contained content and technical material but was found to lack detail on how the content should be delivered. Twatati’s instructors found that the curriculum cannot simply be followed page by page, and that it would be necessary for someone to go through or witness OK’s program in person to fully understand how the curriculum is taught. Some instructors were able to receive training from OK’s instructors on how to teach the program.

Despite these difficulties, fundamental aspects of the curriculum were understood and implemented. The grammatical method and its gradual development of complex concepts were found to be effective means of teaching Oneida. Although OK’s program is taught immersively, exclusively in Mohawk, Twatati’s program is taught using English rather than exclusively Oneida. Grammatical lessons are given in English, while exercises and drills are performed in Oneida as exclusively as possible. The program emphasizes oral communication and dialogue between students, so all content and exercises performed with written components also have oral components.

Many new teaching materials were developed by program instructors. For the most part, such materials consist of exercise and review material based on curriculum content and the knowledge requirements of tests, rather than resources that deliver new content. Some resources were made to account for specific differences between Oneida and Mohawk which had been identified in the adaptation process. For example, Twatati developed a new resource designed to teach students Oneida kinship terms.

Twatati has found that it is important that all students in a class cohort progress through the content at a similar rate. When students learn at different rates, faster students may get bored and disengage from the class, and the overall progress of the class may slow down. Twatati has adopted OK’s policy of requiring that students pass an entrance test to be accepted into the program and found that this helps to ensure that students progress at similar rates. Age has also been found to be a possible factor; the intensive version of Twatati’s program was run with only younger students, and this may have contributed to its success. Creation of separate age-based class cohorts may allow for the speed of younger students to be taken advantage of without entirely excluding older students.

Section introduction

This section will contain specific information related to Twatati’s daily operation. It contains 3 sub-sections. The first sub-section briefly describes the daily operation of the program and how the students’ language proficiency is assessed. The second sub-section describes several tools and techniques used to structure and deliver program content. The final section describes various language drills and exercises used in the program.

Daily operation & student assessment

Twatati’s classes run from 9 AM to 3 PM, with a half hour lunch break. 50-70% of class time is spent on drills and exercises, with lessons and other activities taking up the rest of the time. Class days begin with a morning check-in, lasting 20 to 40 minutes. This morning check-in comprises greetings, introductions, and discussion of students’ activities outside of class. After check-in, the class moves onto exercises or lessons prepared by the instructor.

Non-instructor native speakers participate in classes when they are available. These speakers do not engage in formal teaching, but instead offer students more exposure to Oneida language and cultural concepts. Their participation consists of conversational Oneida spoken with instructors, modelling of Oneida for exercises, and demonstration of traditional Oneida practices.

Twatati’s instructors use a grading scheme based on 3 factors: class participation & attendance, written test scores, and performance in verbal assessments. Written tests are translation tests based on material that came with the OK curriculum. Verbal assessments consist of dialogue between students and instructors structured around a prompt selected by the instructors based on the student’s expected proficiency and recently covered program content.

The program has found that the best way to assess students’ language proficiency to get them to talk about things that are meaningful or important to them, or that they otherwise choose by their own volition, as students are more willing to talk about things they are interested in. Thus, instructors have found that it is effective to get students to talk about their families, where they come from, where they currently live, and similar topics of direct relevance to students’ lives.

Tools and techniques

Twatati’s first-year instructors teach and use a system of hand gestures in class for a variety of purposes. This system of hand gestures is similar to ones used by OK but has developed separately and covers a somewhat different range of language material. Hand signs used in Twatati’s program represent many grammatical features, such as the verbal agreement markers, as well as vocabulary. Hand signs are taught alongside matching language content, so that hand signs are always available for use. Hand signs are used by students as memorization aids, and by instructors to cue students without the use of English or direct provision of a word or grammatical feature.

Twatati’s program uses spaced repetition to structure the delivery of language content. Spaced repetition helps students to develop long-term retention of language content by repeatedly reviewing language content at intervals after its initial introduction. For example, some target content may be introduced, and then reviewed after a few days spent covering other content, and then reviewed again after a week, and then a month. Content targeted for spaced repetition can be quickly reviewed during otherwise free instruction time, or to break up newer and more difficult material. Spaced repetition places significant organizing demands on instructors to remember what content requires repetition and when, and to fit repetition into class time without compromising the delivery of novel content.

Dialogue drills are often structured using a rotating interview format. The format of a drill will be introduced to the class through a model dialogue performed by instructors, and then students will be paired up to perform the drill. After a short period of time, students will be moved into different pairs to perform the drill again. This exposes students to a wider range of dialogue partners and increases the intensity of the drill. Students find this format difficult but engaging and respond positively.

Language drills

Twatati uses a variety of different long-term exercise structures and language drills, which this sub section will non-exhaustively describe.

Twatati uses a family tree exercise to familiarize students with each other and to help generate language exercises based on topics relevant to students. For this exercise, each student creates a family tree in the Oneida language, which contains names and other information about a student’s family members. Students are asked to present their family tree to the class, and then answer questions posed to them by their classmates or the instructors. Answers may also be collaboratively prepared by groups or the class as a whole.

Twatati uses a map exercise which yields similar benefits to the family tree exercise. In this exercise, students collaborate to label a map with Oneida language place names and features. Each student is then given a series of characters to describe and create narratives on the map with. Students then engage each other in dialogue about their characters or roleplay conversations between their characters. The map may also be labeled with removable tags, allowing for the creation of an additional vocabulary matching exercise.

The program uses dialogue exercises based on representative pictographs. Sentences are given to students with some, or all words replaced with images representing vocabulary or grammatical features, testing their memory of vocabulary and grammar as they decode their sentences. Students may be given questions, and matched with other students who must provide answers, possibly from a specific perspective. This allows for students to rapidly perform many distinct short exercises by swapping partners.

Twatati uses group translation exercises. Sentences to be translated from Oneida to English or English to Oneida are written down and assigned to groups. Translation is performed in several stages, to encourage all participants to make some contribution. First, the students distinguish and identify the vocabulary items and grammatical features of the sentence, then they create a schematic for the translated sentence, which they fill with translated vocabulary items, and finish by adding grammatical features to the translated sentence. The exercise emphasizes the development of expressive skills and recognition of differences between how things are said in English and Oneida. The group format causes students to discuss what words are most appropriate, what changes to the sentence are necessary in translation, and how to translate the original sentence most faithfully.