Monthly Archives: June 2010

Planning the Language Hunt for "Tea with Grandma"

50 minutes and 43 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “the Meadow”
2. Technique “the Evaluation”

• We give attendees a blank piece of paper to (anonymously or not) give us feedback on the workshop experience.
• Because some attendees left earlier, we didn’t get feedback from them; we don’t know why they left. Next time we’ll put out the evaluation forms early, so that attendees can fill them out as they leave.

3. Technique “Exhibition Game”

• Evan and Willem can handle two lotus games of up to 50 people each.
• The lotus games have the following format, in 4 rows:
• Inner Circle: 5 central chairs (different from all other chairs, standing out).
• 10 angel chairs
• 5 angel slot chairs
• 25-30 high-backed chairs

4. Technique “WAYK Workshop”

• Evan thinks a workshop can handle no more than 30 or so people.

5. Technique “Your Weapons, You Will Not Need Them”
6. Technique “Inner Circle, FULL!”

• Evan and Willem flush out the inner circle and rotate folks through it, getting them used to calling “full”, by calling “Inner Circle, FULL!” and replacing everyone, 3 times in a row.

7. Techniques “Point to Your Angels!”, “Fringe, Point to Who You’re Helping!”

• These techniques build a support bond between the Inner Circle and  Lunatic Fringe, keeping them connected and involved.

8. Technique “the Lotus”

• The lotus is the fastest way to bring a group up to speed in the WAYK game.

9. Technique “Goal Conversation”, “Modeling”
10. Technique “Full!”

• Willem calls “Full” first, to model the behavior so that other folks will call it, on their own, as needed.

11. Technique “We’ll All Get There Together”

• While playing in the lotus, we don’t all get there together, at the same time; we all get there together, at our own individual pace. The group doesn’t wait or slow down so an individual can “catch up”, but rather the group organizes itself so that everyone is getting the attention they need, according to group needs.

12. Technique “Copycat”

• Players who feel like they’re “falling behind” in the Lotus are asked to simply “copycat” what they can, when they can, until they can get individual attention in pairings.

13. Technique “Pairing”

• We have a random collection of small tables with two chairs each, separated by 10 feet. We give folks a couple minutes in each pair to play WAYK at their level.

14. Technique “Mix and Match”

• When it’s time to switch partners, we ask everyone to get up from their tables, and both find another partner and another table, to keep energy fluid.
• We ask players to either find someone who can help them, or find someone they can help.

15. Technique “Time to Switch”

• We know it’s time to switch partners when one pair in the group starts chatting, rather than playing. It’s usually a sign of energy stagnation – they’ve played the game out, with that partner.
• If someone is having a hard time getting fluent, but has found a helpful partner, we have them keep the same partner throughout the switching so that they can get the help they need.

16. Technique “Fluency”, “Teach a Teacher”

• The goal of pairings isn’t so much to exchange any particular information, but to become comfortable and fluent in both teaching and learning roles (technique Push/Pull), rapidly changing roles over and over.

17. Technique “Bowling Night”/”Happy Birthday”

• If a community gets together for a regular event, it’s an accelerator for revitalizing their language.
• Also, if a group of people sing “happy birthday” for someone (or another culturally appropriate song for a similar occasion), it’s a great indicator of the health of the community.

18. Technique “10 Feet”
19. Technique “No Grief Debrief”
20. Technique “Technique!”
21. Technique “Tea with Grandma”

• Willem set-up the language hunters so that they could hunt grandma’s language, while Evan waited in the wings, watching from a distance.
• Evan remarks how crucial and unusual it is for someone to model/role-play gathering a team of people together to effectively interact with a last fluent elder.
• The grandma that Evan role-played was deaf, and didn’t speak English, to model the “worst-case scenario” of a monolingual last fluent elder, where you have not bridge language (such as English) to help.

22. Technique “Lift-Off”

• Lift-off is when a player, not knowing how to respond to sign language (or what to sign next), simply lifts their hands off their lap and their hands automatically start doing something.
• Willem applied “lift-off” to the Tea with Grandma scenario, by having people get up out of their chairs and just place an object on the tea table.

23. Technique “Apollo 13″

• We want to trigger the moment when people become a gaggle of language hunting geeks, totally energized about addressing this engineering problem of designing the perfect set-up for Tea with Grandma.

24. Technique “Contract”

• The team contracted a set-up for a common, imaginary grandma, that shared some characteristics of all their grandmothers.

25. Technique “Obviously!”

• One language hunter, Becky, noted that her grandma would expect a very formal tea setting, thus perfectly creating an “obviously!” environment.

26. Technique “Dirty Spoon”

• Becky also noticed a dirty spoon on the table.
• If a spoon on the tea table is dirty, grandma will notice, and will start speaking about dirtiness and cleanliness. Becky herself may already be a grandmother…so what she noticed, a grandmother will notice.
• The most subtle aspects of a set-up  will determine the course of the conversation; you cannot be too OCD!

27. Technique “the Same Props”

• Whatever is on grandma’s tea table, we must have exact duplicates for the language hunters to set-up practice away, at home, wherever they take their 3-D holographic notes.

28. Technique “Planning the Hunt”

• The language hunters wrote down all the sign language they knew, all the Craig’s Lists, all the questions (What, Who/whose, Where).
• They did this so they could agree on what to hunt next – extend craig’s lists, answer question words more fully (like “where?”), and learn the new language that will “get them to the party” (intermediate proficiency).
• Evan stresses that the language hunters are learning actual living language, in grandma’s unique dialect. Recording these kinds of conversations provide the most useful, rich data on language use and structure that you could possibly want.

39 minutes and 52 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “Full”/”Law of Two Feet”
2. Technique “the Meadow”

• A modification of technique “Pooh Corner”, developed for the SYL conference.
• A place for “full” lunatic-fringers to go to recuperate.
• Inspired by Open Space Technology gatherings.
• The Meadow is liberally sprinkled with interesting and topically relevant books and materials to look at while recuperating.
• People in the Meadow can still see the game, but have conversations quietly without disturbing the game.

3. Technique “Culture of Interaction”

• Willem put up posters around the room bearing key WAYK techniques, like “how fascinating!’, “we’ll all get there together”, “bite-sized pieces”, and more.

4. Technique “Nip it in the Bud”

• There are certain objections or concerns we want to address, before people even bring them up, at the beginning of a workshop or game experience.

5. Technique “That sounds like it would work for other people, but it would never work for me…”

• We address this objection by, as much as possible, applying WAYK as soon as possible to players’ specific language challenges.

6. Technique “Sad Clowns”

• Sometimes people have a hard time taking us, and WAYK, as a serious applied pedagogical science, because of the silly, high-energy nature of WAYK.
• The difference between effective education, and entertainment, is a fine line.
• We address this issue as soon as possible, by talking about the scientific backing of many of the techniques. The rest are waiting for Ph.D. candidates to investigate why they work!

7. Techniques “Comedy Duo”, “It’s Science!”/”Scientifically Proven!”

• Usually, at the beginning of a workshop, Evan and Willem banter back and forth to set the fun tone of the game experience.
• For the next workshop, Evan plans to preface this joking by introducing the material with a very serious, professional run down of the pedagogical science we’re applying to language.

8. Technique “Play First, Puzzle Later”/”Many Eyes on the Problem”

• Evan and Willem plan to add a section to the end of the workshop, dedicated to applying WAYK to specific language conundrums.
• If a participant doesn’t play, we are limited in how much we can help them later.
• At the end of the workshop, a room full of trained WAYK players can then apply their new skills to the specific participant’s language challenge.

9. Technique “WAYK Workshop”

• We use 4 fundamental group activities at the workshop.

10. Technique “the Lotus”

• The core group WAYK conversation set-up.

11. Technique “Pairing”

• We include pairing because if we don’t have people play in pairs, they likely won’t do it outside the workshop. Whatever we want folks to do later, we have them do now (“you go first”/”modeling”).

12. Technique “Tea with Grandma”

• Role playing the language hunt of grandma’s language.
• Before you can play Tea with Grandma, you must have the following WAYK skills: “What is that?”, “Is that a…?” (Make me say yes…, Make me say no…), “Mine/yours”, “want/have/give/take”, “CL: for, if, then, and, but…”
• Getting to the “CL: for, if then, and but…” usually indicates players finally understand the acceleration of adding richness to language, rather than adding topics/nouns.
• Questions CL: “What?”,”Who/whose?”, “Where?”.
• Locative CL: Above, below, in front, behind, next to…

13. Technique “Speed Dating”

• Rotating through pairing with fluent speakers of various, random languages, to practice the one-minute language hunt. This occurs in parallel to a lotus table of WAYK players in the corner, which usually results in a group language hunt there.

14. Technique “Many Eyes on the Problem”

• For the fifth group activity, that we will add to the next workshop, we will create a “what is that/make me say yes/make me say no” curriculum, as a group, for their language.

15. Technique “Último”

• If you create your WAYK play community well, you will never have to play “what is that?” with a newbie again, after teaching the first one.

The more complex you make WAYK play, the more effective it becomes.

47 minutes and 48 seconds.

[direct download]

Evan Gardner and Willem Larsen discuss (once again, while on the road to the June Vancouver, B.C. “Save Your Language” Conference”) issues of building fluency, over proficiency, by making technique use more complex, rather than language use. WARNING: this podcast contains some mildly off-color humor of possibly the third grade level, or lower. This is for a specific functional purpose, but if you are easily offended by toilet humor, you may wish to pass on this particular podcast. You have been warned. And if we at WAYK ever successfully seemed professional, this unfortunately will undo a lot of that careful image-building. Oh, well: it’s all for a good cause, folks.

1. Technique “Fluency”

• Fluency means Flow.
• Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi and Flow.
• If play is too simple, you become bored, if it’s too complex, you become overwhelmed.
• Your goal is to continually adjust the level of play into accord with your experience of flow.
• Willem tells a story of someone who wanted to increasing the complexity of their play experience (and thus reattain flow) by choosing to play with an object that was not obvious or limited. This would prevent them from achieving that flow state, in spite of their best efforts.
• Rather than increasing complexity of topics (nouns, objects, etc.), increase complexity of language structure itself, and the variety and layering of language hunting techniques.

2. Technique “Squatter’s Rights”
3. Technique “Accordion”

• How do you stay at the level of the edge of your fluent proficiency, so that you can build fluency, for as long as possible?
• You will get bored of before you’re ready to move on.

4. Technique “Can I Help You?”

• Evan: If someone, in a foreign speech environment, walks up to you and says “can I help you?”, say “yes!”. It may save your life.

5. Technique “Glad, Sad, Mad”

• Stretch out/accordion a conversation by incorporating different feelings and attitudes.

6. Technique “Overdo It”

• Peter extends his ability to stay in a target language conversation by getting really, really silly.
• This reveals new layers of “full” – once you get more experienced, you can keep playing even when initially “exhausted”, by discovering new reservoirs of energy.
• Sometimes the limited availability of a fluent fool means you have to extend your ability to delay getting “full”.

7. Technique “Potty Mouth”

• Creating off-color language will extend play for many people.

8. Technique “Dog Track”

• Anything that gets you playfully running over the same ground, over and over, is an accelerator.

9. Technique “Potty Mouth”

• Willem describes some of the poopy talk that he engages in in Chinuk.
• Taboo subjects make language easier to remember. Honest.

10. Technique “Link, Peg, Loci”

• The art of creating evocative mnemonic associations for new language structure.

22 minutes and 36 seconds.

[direct download]

Evan and Willem talk about the importance of returning, experienced WAYK players at workshops, while traveling to Vancouver, B.C., for the “Save Your Language” conference hosted by Dustin Rivers of Squamish Nation.

1. Technique “Please Return WAYK Players”

• Return players will help workshops and game experiences go faster.
• The more return players present in a particular workshop, the greater the acceleration.
• The more acceleration, the farther we can go in a workshop, the more new WAYK frontiers we can explore, earlier.

2. Technique “WAYK Proficiency Roadmap”

• Novice: Baby Bird. Feed me! Feed me! Fully wants to play, can wield one or two techniques.
• Intermediate: Language Hunter. Can run a lotus game.
• Advanced: Host. Can run a room full of tables, a language night. Using a 1-4 hour block of time as effectively as possible, with a full range of speech proficiencies present.
• Superior: Community Leader. Can mobilize a region by running day-long workshop experiences.

3. Technique “WAYK Workshop”

• The first level WAYK workshop gets people to Intermediate WAYK play.

4. Technique “Language Night”

• Just because you may not be proficient in a language-night level of WAYK play, you can still run a language night; just play at your level, even if it’s just a single pair of players.
• Part of fully running a language night means dealing skillfully with newbies who walk through the door – they don’t slow you down, because you have successfully delegated and trained other game leaders.

5. Technique “Teach a Teacher”

• Newbies need to run a WAYK game on their third language night. If you wait longer, newbies will become handicapped and have a much harder time getting started teaching.
• Newbies need to start teaching before they know enough about what they don’t know.

6. Technique “Último”

• Every newbie, on their third night, replaces the role of the newbie who taught them.
• Players are lined up like dominoes, each one advanced to larger roles as newbies come in the door, replacing them in the more fundamental roles.

Why did you do it? Why did you kill the faery?

32 minutes and 14 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “Killing Faeries”

• Every time you ask for a translation, and receive it, you kill a faery.
• It’s not the end of the world, but it does indicate a lost opportunity for gaining more proficiency in the craft of language hunting, rather than just acquiring language.

2. Technique “Bridge Language”

• In the beginning, we kill a lot of faeries, purposefully using English as a bridge language to help acquire the sign language.
• This is a short-term, temporary accelerator, just to get started. Technically, you’re still killing faeries.
• Words don’t directly correlate to other words in other languages; you can only approximately translate them.
• We make this sacrifice to build momentum, but then stop using the English (or other) spoken bridge language as soon as possible.
• If you continually kill faeries, you create faerie-killing addicts, who want you to kill even more faeries.
• The multiple faeries you kill every time you settle for translating: the faerie of the language and its unique meaning/spirit, the faerie of the immersive game flow, and the faerie of the emerging language hunters’ ability to learn to set-up their own game.
• Evan loves it when language hunters set-up the game to double-check with him if they understand and can employ some new language structure that he just used.

3. Technique “Superman III”

• When you translate, all those lost fractions of pennies start rolling out everywhere, on many levels.
• Evan: “It’s faerie genocide.”

4. Technique “Killing Faeries”

• Willem explains the appropriate sounds to make when faeries start dying. He encourages you, like the Lorax, to speak for the faeries, because no one else will.
• Willem: “Don’t do it man – don’t kill the faerie – they believe in you, man…”

5. Technique “Dictionary Addiction”

• People tend to get defensive when you simple ask them not to translate – their addiction tends to start speaking back at you…
• It helps to have softer, gentler, more amusing techniques to apply to these kinds of touchy situations.
• Dictionaries have a particular, perfect use: “I wonder if this is true? I wonder how this is true? I wonder in what context this is true?”.
• Dictionaries are a set of really good questions. They allow you to become a very informed questioner.
• Dictionaries are not books of answers; they are books of questions.

6. Technique “Speak to Remember, Write to Forget”
7. Techniques “It’s Science!”/”Scientific Studies Have Proven”

• The stages of language acquisition go: Understanding, Speaking, Reading, Writing.
• If this is the order, why do you want to write things down?

8. Technique “Full”

• We have an expanded set of “full” indicators; now if someone writes something down, or asks for a translation, we can tell they’re getting overwhelmed.

9. Technique “English Brain”

• Don’t encourage or feed your English brain when learning another language.

10. Technique “Bridge Language”

• Evan doesn’t feel like people are paying attention to the totality of his communication if they only listen while writing things down. He thinks his body language is important to understand too, to acquire the language.
• When someone writes something down, we’ve noticed that it tends to be a signal that people aren’t coming back.
• Use a tape recorder instead of writing things down.
• If you write things down, rather than fully participating in the game, you can’t take the 3-D holographic notes onto your friends and family.

11. Technique “Speak to Remember, Write to Forget”

• Willem relates a story about a language hunter who wrote Italian down, that she had hunted, so that she could lead a game in it later.
• Willem talks about the issues involved; the probability of finding another Italian speakers, the opportunity to push language into your “living, human, immersive, 3-d holographic database”.
• If you must document, prioritize using video recorders, audio recorder, and lastly writing.
• In spite of all of this, if you must write for your own self-care, of course, do what you need to do. Just focus part of your effort on transitioning to more effective techniques, eventually.
• If you stop taking notes, make sure your replace it with something: a full-on willingness to play, or focusing on thorough, 3-d holographic notes with friends and family, or something. Don’t just stop writing, replace writing with more effective techniques.

What do you do when you don’t have a spoken Bridge Language? You play WAYK! Sometimes you can think of WAYK as really just the best game of charades you’ll ever play in your life.

Which are the most "obvious" props?

45 minutes and 52 seconds.

[direct download]

1. Technique “Tea with Grandma”
2. Technique “Same Conversation”

• Leanne Hinton’s work with the Master/Apprentice system.
• Hang out with your elder, as much as possible, to learn their language.
• It seems to be missing the apprentice’s training in rigorous language hunting to accelerate the acquisition of language from the elder.
• “Tea with Grandma” is the archetypal “same conversation” you would have with your grandma.
• You’re trying to find out some important information: what does grandma like, what does she prefer, in terms of teas, milk/cream, sugar, general likes and preferences and the stories behind them.
• What if grandma doesn’t like milk in her tea, because she is allergic to milk? This could trigger a superior conversation (what if everyone was allergic to milk, how would it change our culture?).

3. Technique “Set-up”

• You’ll use the most obvious props you can, using grandmas preferred set-up as much as possible.
• This could be “Whiskey with Grandma”, or “Diet Coke with Grandma”, it depends on her preferences.

4. Technique “Appreciative Inquiry”

• If I ask you a question about something about something that gives you energy, that you enjoy, you will have more energy to keep talking.
• If I ask you a question about something that drains you, that causes you misery, you will lose energy for conversation.

5. Technique “These are a Few of My Favorite Things”

• Stick to topics and props that give your “fluent fool”, and fellow language hunters, energy and joy.
• Skilled language-hunting looks no different than skilled interviewing.
• You enjoy yourself, grandma enjoys herself, everybody wins.

6. Technique “Start at the Beginning”

• Start by just enjoying time with grandma. Sit with her, have tea, no language hunting (per se), just enjoy the time.
• Look around the room, what does she have out, bowling trophies, tea sets, pictures?
• You’re history hunting, story hunting, before you start pulling language.
• Look for common ground – if you like bowling too, consider next time have the conversation at the bowling alley.
• Start by going to grandma’s house; don’t make her come to you.
• What time of day is she available?
• What time is she napping, or watching TV?
• Evan’s grandmother won a car from Bob Barker on TV’s “the Price is Right”. And then later, he wrecked it: “that brought out some language there..!”.

7. Technique “Craig’s List: Positives’ List”

• Always start with the positive list, before negatives list, in the spirit of appreciative inquiry. There is a list of preferences, favorite, etc.
• Evan and Willem start building the list on the spot.
• “Want, Like, Need, Love, Prefer…”
• Another list: “Prefer, Style, Taste…”
• Another: “Kind, Type, Flavor…”

8. Technique “Obviously”

• Grandma’s favorite tea set is a hippie, tie-dyed, confusing set. You want to save that for a riddle-me-this moment later.
• Bring your own cup, if necessary, your “favorite” one.
• It will be really obvious, because you are a language hunter.
• Obvious props: tiny, tiny tea cup, and a huge cappuccino cup, to hunt “big, small”. All one color, like white.
• Find the easiest color to say, and bring everything in that color.

9. Technique “Modeling”/”You Go First”

• Evan and Willem decided to make workshop attendees experience this archetypal “tea with grandma” set-up.
• Evan plays the last, fluent signer of ASL on the planet, a grandma.
• Willem helps the participants set-up the conversation, and then bring grandma in, and hunt her language.
• Players can only hunt grandma one or two at a time; once they have acquired a small piece of language, they have tea again with a table of fellow hunters, and take “3-D, Holographic Notes”.
• All the props used with grandma, must have exact duplicates to take away to re-experience the conversation.

10. Technique “3-D, Holographic Notes”

• A story of a linguist who couldn’t find a piece of language in a computer/audio database, and Evan’s reaction as a node in the “living, human, 3-D, holographic database”.
• People who hold a target language, in trust, are essentially an immersive, 3-D, holographic, living database: the best documentation that any linguist will ever get.
• The highest quality information will always come from the information held in trust by living people.
• Now, the linguist can take the information he got from Evan, and go ping other speakers (other living databases), to double check, find accent variations, and so on.
• Evan tells a story of learning the meaning of the spanish idiom, “no me da la ganas”, through language hunting.
• To teach Willem the meaning of this phrase, Evan would use the same set-up that he experienced in Mexico, almost like programming a holodeck.
• Set-up a “holodeck” in your home, using the WAYK props, even if it’s just a 12″ square space on a counter.
• You’ll never find the embodied human emotional experience of language in a dictionary.

11. Technique “Language Hunting”

• Language-hunting is a way to re-hydrate what is in a dictionary, turn it back into embodied human interaction.
• Find words in the dictionary that you need to know, and use them as “questions” (technique “make me say…”, “correction response”) to hunt grandma with.
• Teach off your language as soon as possible to someone else, then they can start having tea (“same conversation”) with grandma too, accelerating the amount, and accuracy, of the language you hunt.

For a very good reason, which they understand better than I, XP (Extreme Programming) and Agile Software Development enthusiasts see a connection between the mentoring language and play of the WAYK game system, and their work. This, I believe, has to do with the similarity of a “language of successful strategies” that the approaches share.

Diana Larsen marking "technique"!

Jeremy Lightsmith signing "Not"

Click here for more images from the XP 2010 conference’s WAYK game.

Here’s a short video of the SYL 2010 conference, held on June 5th and 6th in Vancouver, B.C, hosted by Squamish Nation language revitalization activist Dustin Rivers. Evan and I graduated the biggest batch of language hunters yet, all ready to enter the world and apply their skills to their endangered heritage languages.

We thought we’d share another video of “the Walk”.

In this video you’ll see 7 year-old Jackson playing along with us on “the Walk”. Though for this “Walk”, you’ll only see one youngster, Evan runs this same walk with large groups of young children at other events besides Chinuk night. Keep in mind, by learning language with WAYK, young Jackson is instantly becoming trilingual – English, Chinuk Wawa, and sign language (PSE). Pretty cool, if we do say so ourselves.

Children are sponges; in the beginning, they are a rambunctious “lunatic fringe”. In a sense, they are the best, non-helping (“angel on your shoulder”/”copycat”), “lunatic fringe” you will find. They’ll suck the language up, just because of the “obvious” “set-up”, and their innate learning ability. This is fine; no need to ‘force’ them to  play along; let them “fringe” until they choose to step into the circle, like young Jackson here.