The English Experience Serves as a Pronunciation Guide Allowing Students by Analogy to Learn Spelling in Taiwan Aboriginal Languages: An Example of the Amis Ethnicity

Abstract

Orthography is a set of conventions for representing language in written form; written forms are made up of graphic words, and such words, taking English for example, are composed by individual graphs or letters that represent sounds. Thus, writing systems are conventional visible marks for human communication (Gelb,1963: 12; Burnaby, 1997: 59; DeLancey, 1998). Written communication, furthermore, allows a culture to communicate in written form with its ancestors and with its progeny by crossing physical and time boundaries. All aboriginal languages spoken in Taiwan were in the past orally transmitted. As Fishman (1980: 169) writes, “Unless they are entirely withdrawn from the modern world, minority ethno-linguistic groups need to be literate in their mother tongue (as well as in some language of wider communication).” However, the language becomes vastly easier to learn and literacy is improved when the writing system is consistent. In Taiwan since 2001, English has been taught in our educational system from the fifth grade of the primary school onward. Students, therefore, know the alphabet and learn both the shapes of its 26 letters, the letter names, and the phonemic correspondence to these graphs, and it would be much easier to learn a system of phonetics for a pre-literate or semi-literate people group that uses letters found in the English alphabet, for the English experience serves as a pronunciation guide allowing students by analogy to learn spelling in their aboriginal languages. My intention in this paper through action research is to share what has been done for over thirty years to capitalize upon the fact that the students in Taiwan are already familiar with alphabetic writing because of their prior study of English. They would, therefore, be well-placed to transfer the regular sound-letter association which they have learned in English classes to the representation of the sounds of the various aboriginal languages of Taiwan. The great benefit of it is to make acknowledgement of the theme of translingualism, a process of empowerment. This empowerment of us in our daily life might produce an environment that fosters maturity and responsibility for our own circumstances. In a word, it would be easier to learn a system of phonetics that uses letters found in the English alphabet that serve as a pronunciation guide while making analogy in learning aboriginal languages.