Endangered Language Documentation and Transmission

Abstract

This paper describes an on-going project on digital archiving Yami language documentation (http://www.hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?projid=60). We present a cross-disciplinary approach, involving computer science and applied linguistics, to document the Yami language and prepare teaching materials. Our discussion begins with an introduction to an integrated framework for archiving, processing and developing learning materials for Yami (Yang and Rau 2005), followed by a historical account of Yami language teaching, from a grammatical syllabus (Dong and Rau 2000b) to a communicative syllabus using a multimedia CD as a resource (Rau et al. 2005), to the development of interactive on-line learning based on the digital archiving project. We discuss the methods used and challenges of each stage of preparing Yami teaching materials, and present a proposal for rethinking pedagogical models for e-learning.

Keywords

• Endangered
• Language
• Documentation
• Transmission
• grammatical
• Yami
• pedagogical
• models