Professors Andrea Berez and Victoria Anderson receive NSF grant for the 4th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation.  Information regarding the conference follows:

Enriching Theory, Practice, and Application:

Master Classes and Special Sessions at the

4th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation

Sponsored in part by the US National Science Foundation

 

The theme of the 4th ICLDC, “Enriching Theory, Practice, and Application,” highlights the need to strengthen the links between language documentation (practice), deep understanding of grammatical structure (theory), and methods for teaching endangered languages (application).

This conference will bring together leading world experts in language documentation and revitalization to share methods for increasing the role of endangered language documentation in present and future scientific inquiry. Through Master Classes and Special Sessions on Pedagogy in Language Conservation, the conference will foster discipline-wide discussion on the relationship between linguistic structure and language pedagogy, based on the premise that language revitalization is key to keeping data alive and available for scientific study.

Conference participants will develop new methods for data collection and analysis. Intense targeting of the grammatical and structural features that make languages unique will lead to documentary materials that are more useful to scientific inquiry by a wider audience. In addition, the conference will lead to the development of sound practices for teaching endangered languages in the classroom. Endangered language teaching in the language community is often informed by only the most basic or generic of language pedagogies, and language teachers are often frustrated by the lack of sophisticated methods for tapping into documentary resources. Thus the goal of the conference is two-fold: to enrich the contributions of linguists to linguistic theory and description via documentation, and to create citizen scientists who can reflect on their language for the purpose of teaching and documenting without being hindered by metalanguage.