Tamil Language Story

[Miss Ruhnke]

I come from Zaporizhzhia, a Russian-speaking city in southeastern Ukraine with a Cossack past. In recent months, Russia illegally annexed my region, though the regional capital remains under Ukrainian control.

Cossacks are the proverbial heroes of Ukrainian history, who carry the weight of Ukrainian nation-building on their shoulders, so one would expect their stronghold to have projected a clear sense of national identity. This was not the case.

For my generation, Zaporizhzhian Cossacks could have symbolized defiance and democracy. Instead, we inhaled the self-provincializing attitudes of our teachers and cultivated a penchant for the kitsch grandeur of the empire that has sought our erasure. For three centuries, our Cossack region was Russified through the forced reshuffling of the population as well as the suppression of Ukrainian identity.

When I moved to Kyiv, my friends frequented my student flat. Kyiv, however, was different from Zaporizhzhia. For one thing, the capital was bilingual. It was in Kyiv that occasional mocking of the Ukrainian language penetrated our conversations. While my Russian, like that of most Ukrainians, was always spoken with an accent and a subversive twist to my vocabulary, it was in Kyiv that my Russian friends made me aware of it as something worth repairing. At the time, I laughed it away.

It was the first time in the history of modern Ukraine that we saw police brutality directed at the citizens of Ukraine so blatantly and on such a scale. The next day, I took to the streets of Kyiv with my mother and several close friends, fearing we too would be beaten up, but hoping nevertheless to meet at least a few hundred compatriots equally outraged by the broadcasted scenes of state violence.

Arriving at one of the central Kyiv metro stations, we struggled to get out for 20 minutes because of the crowds. On the overflowing escalators, those crowds burst into a song which, eight years later, would become one of the most recognizable melodies worldwide: the national anthem of Ukraine. Not just hundreds but hundreds of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians were outside. We were embraced by a roaring ocean of people. On Dec. 1, 2013, Ukrainians made clear they would not accept any form of authoritarian rule. That choice defined the nation and to that nation I chose to belong.

The successful popular revolution in Ukraine had the potential to inspire similar movements in the region and was thus perceived as an existential threat by Moscow. In 2014, Russia invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine under the pretense of protecting its Russian-speaking population from the so-called Ukrainian nationalists who had toppled the regime in Kyiv. In other words, Russians claimed to protect me from myself. My mother tongue was turned into a weapon the enemy held to my throat. When the advance of the Russian troops was stopped 200 kilometers away from my native city, I doubled down on my Ukrainian conversion.

(2) We wanted to draw attention to the serious situation that many Native or indigenous languages around the world are endangered. By coupling visual cues with audio, we hope to inspire others living on the Lakota lands, those working with language projects such as Recovering Voices, at the WoLakota Project, at the Language Conservancy, and others, to not only to keep this and other languages alive, but to help them to thrive and grow, and to create a community of practice. For more story maps and other resources, see the indigenous languages across Canada resources from Canadian Geographic.

We hope the reader will take these ideas and do even more with the story maps platform and other web mapping applications. For example, you could embed these story maps in web pages; you could add video to the maps (as we illustrated with the word "lake"), you could create different types of story maps, dashboards, instant apps, infographics, and much more. For learning about language, place, biology, history, geography, and many other themes, integrating audio and video with maps is becoming an easy-to-understand medium and yet a very powerful one. Entire narratives of tribal elders speaking about locations, events, people, and other things of significance could be added to maps such as this. In addition, quizzes can be embedded into story maps to help people learn a Native language such as Lakota.

Story maps are part of a rapidly evolving geotechnology platform. Compare the above Lakota story map, for example, with the first one we created, and the changes will be evident. Plus, the story map from 2022 took only a fraction of the time that the original story map required! It shows that the tools become more powerful and easier to use as time advances.

Your questions are very valid and tell me a lot about you and your understanding of your son's deficits. However, I am missing a lot of information about him, beginning with his age. I am assuming that he is probably in the second-third grade in school, judging by the fact that you ask him to write down his responses to the questions.

So I may run a few scenarios of possible difficulties your son may have in terms of language processing and production and give you some suggestions for helping him along the way.

While it was quite easy to memorize words similar to English, like gut, muss, Ende, and Freund, there were many words for which I had no cognate or other crutch to lean on. Among them were Schatz (treasure) and Insel (Island). And yet I learned these two words effortlessly.

I must have leafed those pages a million of times, and I loved to try to make connections between the story I was reading and the images in the illustrated version. That might have been the moment when my fascination for languages was born, and also probably the reason why several years later I decided to begin learning German seriously.

In stories, every word you come across is surrounded by other words and phrases. Essentially, stories always give you some context, and context is key for memorizing words because it helps you create connections and associations, which are paramount if you want to remember the new vocabulary.

In the 1980s, an American teacher named Blaine Ray, who was fully convinced of the remarkable power of stories to teach foreign language, had an idea. That idea blossomed into an interesting, and most importantly, an effective teaching strategy, which he called TPRS.

As you probably guessed, his approach uses stories to teach language. The TPRS method is a mixture of reading, listening and storytelling, and its main goal is to help students achieve proficiency in an entertaining way.

Learners become familiar with new words and phrases by reading and hearing them. In this step, they need to come in contact with new vocabulary and figure out its meaning. Then, learners answer some questions that provide context for the new words. Students say the questions and answers out loud several times. Doing so serves two main purposes:

The teacher plays or reads the story several times so that students have time to work on their comprehension skills. The story might be read at a slower pace than normal conversation to facilitate comprehension.

Students read the story several times in order to understand it completely, and also continue memorizing the new words they learned. They might even be encouraged to read other stories that contain some of the same words and phrases, for example another story on the same topic, or another chapter or installment of the original story.

Based on my experience, it can be tricky to find stories that are neither too easy nor too difficult, and that are also interesting. And even when they meet those two criteria, they might not contain the vocab and structures you need or want to learn.

Therefore, if you want to save time and get a turnkey solution to leverage the power of stories to learn languages, I suggest using stories that were designed specifically for language learners. Stories like the one in MosaSeries: The Man with No Name, an original language course by MosaLingua, the language learning company I co-founded.

In the course, MosaSeries participants discover the story of a man who wakes up in a hospital without any recollection of how he got there or who he is. Episode after episode, students practice immersion in their target language as they learn more about the main character. They end up getting hooked on the story and benefitting from all the advantages of storytelling and stories that I already mentioned.

Luckily for us, we are no longer limited to the stories told by the people in our family or even the people in our town or country. The internet has made stories incredibly accessible; the topics, languages, and formats that interest you are just a click away.

Story Champs is a multi-tiered language curriculum for preschool and school-age children allowing you to teach basic and advanced story structure, vocabulary, modifiers, causal and temporal connections. For additional details on what is included in the kit, please click here. Story Champs is also available in Bilingual English/Spanish.

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My grandparents came to the United States in the late 1930's with many other Italians from Naples, Italy. During that time, talk that Italy might join the Axis of Power in WWII scared just about everyone and for good reason. Taking what little belongings they had, my grandpa boarded a ship headed to the US and left everything behind; family, friends, the homeland... and landed in Queens,New York. It was a few years later that my grandma joined him.

Life then was tough then. People wanted a new life, But once you got through Ellis Island reality hit. You had to fend for your own. And quickly neighborhoods popped up like little Italy so that you could actually understand someone, find a place to live, sleep, and hopefully find work.

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