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Introduction
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When you’re working with language speakers to collect language information, you are doing elicitation. This is a shortened version of a Elicitation guide for collecting language information that will guide you through the basics of working with language speakers to elicit the best audio and most useful language information possible.
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Audio recording best practices
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Consider your speaker
Has your speaker given Informed Consentconsent to participate in recording?
How comfortable is your speaker? Are they going to feel the need to shift around, causing unintentional background noise? Are they sitting somewhere that they will be able to sit for long periods of time?
What is your speaker wearing? Are they wearing comfortable clothes? Are they wearing loose clothes or jewelry that will move or brush up against other things, causing unintentional background noise?
Consider your equipment
How far is your audio equipment set up? Is it at an appropriate distance to record audio?
What are your audio levels? Are you able to continuously monitor your levels while recording?
Consider your environment
Are you working in a silent space? Will there be background noise that could interrupt or potentially harm your audio file?
Is the environment safe and comfortable for everyone involved?
Consider your timing
How long will you be able to record for? Will you foreseeably be interrupted?
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It is best practice to record one continuous audio file |
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General elicitation information
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We want to ensure that the information we collect is:
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It’s good to remember to ask yourself: “Is this a useful thing to say?” |
Ways to collect language information
There are several different ways you can go about eliciting language information.
Word lists
When you use word lists, you are asking for one word at a time. Record the word on its own, but also ask the speaker to provide a full sentence with the word in it. This makes it much more useful for language learners and for understanding the proper context in which to use a word. These can be uploaded as ‘Related Phrases’ when uploading your words to FirstVoices later on.
Stories and conversations
Ask your speakers to tell you a story. Traditional stories are great but we tell “stories” in everyday life too. A similar method is to get two or more speakers together and ask them to have a conversation about a topic.
Brainstorming
Another way to collect language information is by brainstorming around a theme or topic. Take fishing for an example. How many action words can you think of that describe everything you do when you go fishing? What about the names of fishing equipment and kinds of fish? It is easy to generate word lists by focusing on a topic and these can be very useful for teachers who want to develop a lesson around a topic. Combine brainstorming with the story method; have the speaker tell a story about fishing to get you started.
Kinds of language information
Every language is made up of certain types of words. In order to be accurate about the language information you enter into FirstVoices, you need to have a basic understanding of some linguistic terms. Here are the word classes used in FirstVoices with an explanation of each.
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Nouns
These words are people, places, things and ideas.
Example: woman, Vancouver, chair, love
Pronouns
Pronouns are words used in place of a noun, usually referring to people. For example, David is a noun. David is sleeping. But you could also say He is sleeping. The word “he” is a pronoun because it is used in the place of the noun “David”.
Verbs
Verbs are the action words of the sentence. The action might be physical or mental.
Example: run, jump, cook, eat, think, love
Subjects are the nouns that are doing the action in the sentence.
Objects are the nouns that are undergoing or receiving the action in the sentence.
Adjectives and Adverbs
These are describing words.
Adjectives describe nouns. Example: bright, hot, cold, skinny, tall, red, blue
Adverbs describe verbs. Example: quickly, slowly, carefully, never, always
Prepositions and Postpositions (Adpositions)
These words usually describe a location or time and they go together with a noun. (They might also be part of the verb.)
Pre-positions come before or precede the noun
Post-positions come after the noun.
Example: in, under, on top of, up, down, with, for, to, during
Conjunctions
Conjunctions are words that join two sentences, phrases or clauses together.
Examples: and, but, or
Interjections
Interjections are exclamations.
Examples: oh, ah, ow, wow, dear me, yikes
Swear words are generally categorized as interjections.
Particles
Particle refers to a leftover category of words. First, try to see if a word fits in one of the categories above. If not, you might be dealing with a particle.
Particles can be words on their own or they can be part of a verb (or other word class) like a prefix, suffix or infix.
More about verbs
Verbs (action words) are THE MOST IMPORTANT PART of most languages and this is especially true when it comes to Indigenous languages spoken in B.C. Whenever you elicit any verb, you should try to get as many forms of the verb as you can.
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