Monolingual fieldwork in and beyond the classroom: The Logooli experience at UCLA

Abstract

Serendipitous discoveries are a hallmark of linguistic fieldwork, especially when it is conducted primarily in the target language. The linguist who listens and converses in the target language is privy to many unanticipated exchanges. Despite this, the primary mode of data collection in graduate linguistic field methods courses is usually translated elicitation. Few field methods instructors train students in the acquisition of competence in the target language. This means that even if a novice fieldworker believes in the value of target language competence, s/he likely has had little guidance in techniques for acquiring this, nor practice in monolingual elicitation. It is a pity that most field methods instructors cling to translation from English: monolingual elicitation is an enjoyable, memorable, and efficient framework for a graduate field methods course, especially in the early stages. The monolingual approach gives students a much more realistic introduction to the challenges, frustrations, and joys of linguistic fieldwork than does a controlled contact language elicitation model. The first quarter of the 2014-15 UCLA field methods course was taught using monolingual methods. This paper uses two transcripts from sessions from this course to show the potential of monolingual methods to gather large amounts of target language data quickly. Show more