The 2009/10 school year is rapidly approaching and the Lakota Language Consortium is preparing the Level 3 Lakota Language Textbook for delivery. Approximately 5,000 students attending 35 schools in the Great Plains are ready for this next level of language instruction. Delivery is scheduled for Nov. 27th .
The Level 3 curriculum makes the transition from earlier levels that focused on language basics and sounds to comprehension and putting sentences together.
Visiting linguistic experts and Lakota language teachers vetted the Level 3 Textbook at the 3rd annual Lakota Summer Institute (LSI) held at Sitting Bull College in June 2009. The Textbook’s approach to advancing the curriculum exceeded expectations.
LSI teacher instruction kept pace with the progression of student curriculum creating excitement and a collective sense of direction among teachers preparing to take the Level 3 Textbook into the classroom.
What’s New?
To promote intuitive aspects of language learning, and overall comprehension, the Level 3 Textbook will use a storyboard approach to “show and tell” the reader what is happening in a given section of instruction. If you’ve ever read a comic book you are already familiar with storyboards—a sequence of panels that illustrate situations and action and include callout boxes for conversational text.
From an education aspect, showing the language learner what’s going on in a story—one panel after the next—helps them to intuit the conversation between story characters and helps them to navigate vocabulary, sentence structure and dramatically aids in comprehension.
Below is a selction of pages from the L3 texbook. There You’ll find several complete storyboard illustrations: |
