Members of Taiwan’s largest indigenous tribe are taking the teaching of their native language out of the classroom and returning it to the home with a methodology borrowed from the Maori of New Zealand. Called Te Ataarangi, the technique has been at the forefront of Maori language education for 30 years, and has been used to educate thousands of new adult speakers. Now Taiwan’s Amis people, who are also known as Pangcah, are hoping it can revolutionize the way their mother tongue, Amis or sowal no Pangcah, is taught and in so doing help revitalize the language, which is falling out of use.
Sifo Lakaw, director of Hualien Tribal College (HTC) in Hualien County, eastern Taiwan, is the driving force behind the adoption of this new approach. He first learned about Te Ataarangi while attending a public health symposium in New Zealand in 2010. During a subsequent visit to the country in September 2011, he met one of the methodology’s leading advocates, Te Ripowai Higgins, who works in the School of Maori Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. “When I returned to Taiwan, I had a new mission—to restore our indigenous languages using Te Ataarangi,” Sifo says.
His interest in the teaching method led to a rapid growth in exchanges between HTC and Te Ataarangi instructors in New Zealand. In November of the following year, the Hualien college hosted the 2012 Taiwan Indigenous Te Ataarangi Workshop, which was attended by language teachers, members of local indigenous communities and guests from the Southern Hemisphere nation, including Te Ripowai Higgins. “Te Ripowai is in constant contact with us by email, Facebook and Skype,” Sifo says. “She always asks, ‘How’s our family in Taiwan doing?’”
HTC staff and their Maori mentors have grown quite close, perhaps due to the mutual awareness that they share a common ancestry. The Maori and Taiwan’s indigenous peoples are among the approximately 390 million speakers of Austronesian languages in Southeast Asia, Oceania and beyond. Linguistic evidence points to Taiwan as the ancient homeland of this language family. It is believed that large-scale migrations from the island, which began roughly 4,500 to 7,000 years ago, resulted in Austronesian languages taking root in places as far afield as Madagascar, Micronesia and Polynesia. Eventually, the ancestors of the Maori people brought the language family to New Zealand when they landed there around 750 years ago.
The Te Ataarangi teaching methodology places a strong emphasis on culture. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
The fact that Maori and Taiwanese indigenous languages share the same linguistic origins means Te Ataarangi is ideally suited to promoting aboriginal language revitalization in Taiwan. The approach is an offshoot of the Silent Way, a pedagogical method developed in the 1960s by educator Caleb Gattegno (1911–1988) that reduces—or perhaps even eliminates—the need for instructional language. In traditional teaching approaches, the target language is explained through the native tongue of the students. However, instructors using the Silent Way speak exclusively in the target language and guide students through the material with visual cues. This is done by using brightly colored plastic objects, called Cuisenaire rods, to represent grammatical or other abstract concepts.
The Silent Way came to New Zealand via Fiji. While studying Fijian in the Melanesian nation in 1973, Te Ataarangi founder Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira (1932–2011) was impressed by the fluency of US Peace Corps volunteers, whom she discovered had attended an intensive 10-week course conducted by Gattegno in New York. In the late 1970s, after returning to New Zealand, Mataira teamed up with educator Ngoi Pēwhairangi (1921–1985) to design a program for teaching the Maori language to adults.
Te Ataarangi is the result, but unlike the Silent Way, it places a strong emphasis on culture. For instance, in a traditional classroom, if a student was asked where they live, a one-word or one-sentence answer stating their hometown might suffice. According to Te Ataarangi standards, however, that reply would be inadequate. “Te Ripowai would say it reveals nothing of the culture,” Sifo says. “Instead, a better response from a student would be, ‘I’m from Tafalong. I grew up there, and that is where my mother is from. My father is from another village,’ and so forth.”
Participants tell stories in their mother tongues at an indigenous language speech competition in New Taipei City. (Photo by Chin Hung-hao)
Engaging Lessons
HTC is now sending Te Ataarangi instructors to teach in homes in Hualien County. During one such class late last November, Kating, an Amis language instructor, visited the residence of Osay Ongo in Tafalong. Held outside in the family courtyard in the evening, the class featured Kating and five students, all neighbors, at a round table, while the host family’s elders watched from nearby.
Kating initiated the lesson by modeling a question-answer pair with a sequence of Cuisenaire rods, and speaking it out loud with the student on her right. “O maan kinian?” (What is this?) “O kaysing kinian.” (This is a bowl.)
In turn, the students repeated the process until the rods had circled the table. Then Kating constructed a second phrase, and it too made its way from student to student, followed by a third phrase, a fourth and so on until the class ended. No notes were taken and no textbooks were opened. The lesson was conducted entirely in Amis. Throughout the hour, the students seemed fully engaged. “It looks like they’re playing a game,” says Osay’s father, Komod Namoh. “But if practiced every day, kids could learn really quickly.”
Classes such as this are having an impact, but much work needs to be done to overcome generations of marginalization of indigenous languages. Komod’s octogenarian father, Namoh Onor, recalls being forced to learn Japanese as a child during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). And for decades after the arrival of the Nationalist government, a Mandarin language policy was imposed in schools. “We were punished when we didn’t speak Mandarin,” notes Komod Namoh of his school years in the 1960s and 1970s.
Recent decades have seen the emptying of Amis villages as adults left to find jobs in the cities. Even children growing up in tribal villages are bombarded by Mandarin, especially from watching TV. “When we were children, our grandparents took us to the mountains and spoke to us in Amis, so we learned the names of the plants, insects and animals,” says Namoh Onor. “Now many adults don’t even know these words, and when we speak to our grandchildren in Amis, they answer us in Mandarin.”
The Te Ataarangi approach uses colorful Cuisenaire rods to teach languages. (Photo by Glenn Smith)
The Republic of China government has enacted a number of measures to help reverse this decline, such as mandating indigenous language classes for elementary schools in tribal villages. Kating is one of the instructors responsible for teaching these lessons, and the day after the Te Ataarangi class at Osay’s home, she taught two classes at Tafalong Elementary School.
In a cheerful, sunny classroom, Kating plastered a blackboard with Roman letters, and invited third-grade students to rearrange them into Amis words. The cornerstone of this teaching method is Romanization, and the students use textbooks with Amis phrases written in Western script. Next she taught a class of first graders. These students were not yet familiar with the Roman alphabet, so Kating wrote the lyrics of an Amis song on the blackboard in a modified form of Mandarin phonetic symbols. Then everyone sang to the accompaniment of a CD player.
Critics of this form of instruction say that students learn about their target language, but don’t necessarily become proficient speakers. However, this method is an ingrained standard—in Taiwan if not worldwide—and thus is a stumbling block to the recruitment of teachers by HTC as it seeks to expand its Te Ataarangi program. “The Council of Indigenous Peoples [under the Executive Yuan] has good teachers trained at National Taiwan Normal University, but they…want to teach grammar,” Sifo explains. “Their focus is solely on the language, but with Te Ataarangi the point is culture.”
Parents in Tafalong have another complaint—only 40 minutes of class time per week in the elementary school is dedicated to teaching Amis. Progress is being made, however. HTC has launched a three-pronged approach to language revitalization, aiming to introduce Te Ataarangi in schools, communities and homes. “We now have models in place for each of these,” Sifo says. “Kating is our model for bringing the methodology into schools, while we’ve started a model community group in Hualien.”
Language revitalization programs are inspiring younger generations of indigenous peoples to explore their aboriginal heritages. (Photo courtesy of Miaoli County Government)
Meanwhile, for the family component of this project, HTC aims to not only organize more Te Ataarangi classes in homes, but re-establish Amis as a language in common use in contemporary tribal households. In this regard, Sifo’s family is a shining example of what can be achieved. At home, he and his wife, Kidaw, speak only Amis to their three-year-old daughter Olic, who has also learned Mandarin by playing outside with friends. The effort has brought many rewards. “The elders love listening to my daughter,” Sifo says. “It’s been a long time since they’ve heard a small child speak their language.”
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Glenn Smith is a freelance writer based in Taipei.
Copyright © 2015 by Glenn Smith