All Things Linguistic

Leanne Hinton writes excellent things about teaching endangered languages. 

It is very easy for a non-fluent speaker (or often, even a fluent one) to fall back on a form of language-teaching that involves word-lists taught through the written word. This, after all, can be done with extremely minimal knowledge of a language. However, learning words in writing, in isolation, translated and explained in English, is not an effective way to learn a language. If the goal of teaching the language is for children to become conversationally proficient, then it is important to teach conversation.

Programs that have been effective in actually producing fluent speakers generally use immersion techniques, where no English is allowed in the classroom, and teaching takes place through conversation in the Native language and other forms of discourse embedded in interesting activities. Such models as Total Physical Response, or even just a combination of rich language input and common sense, tend to be the most successful ways of bringing students to conversational proficiency. How can a non-fluent speaker possibly do this form of teaching?

Really great teaching ideas, especially but not only for teaching languages with few fluent speakers. Sometimes I think that the question of how to effectively teach/learn a second language will only really be solved by people trying to revitalize threatened languages, because more widely-spoken languages have lower stakes and it’s easy to find an immersive environment. 

(Note that the link has a scanned version and a typed version of each page, unfortunately. Just scroll through one!)