1st Year Program
Goal
To enable beginning students to converse with fluent speakers on a limited number of subjects involving common situations and several dozen everyday actions. They will be able to talk about and describe their friends and family members: their names, relationships, physical appearance, clan and nation, health, mental state, aches and pains, location, place of residence, age, children, marital situation, personal possessions and the weather. They will be able to name common local, regional and world place names. They will be able to describe people and objects and where and how they are located, their ownership, colour and number. They will be able to talk about all these situations in the past, present and future. As well, they will be able to name common domestic and “wild” animals, birds and insects and geographic features.
Method
Classroom instruction involving one full-time instructor for six hours per day, five days per week for 35 weeks. All instruction and classroom dialogue will be conducted in Kanyen’keha. Ohsweken’a (the Ohsweken dialect) will be the language of instruction but students will also be familiarized with other dialects. Although students will learn to read and write, the program is primarily designed to develop oral language proficiency by first developing oral comprehension. Grammar and vocabulary will be taught through modeled speech using visual elements. The program content is divided into 12 units with students tested, orally, on each unit to measure oral comprehension and speaking ability.