When I took Chamorro at the University
of Guam I was fortunate in that for CM101 and CM102 I had the same professor,
Peter Onedera. As I moved from one to the next there was a smooth transition,
we picked up in the second semester easily from where we had left off the
semester before. Other students however had different experiences. They would
take one professor for CM101 and another for CM102 and often times they would
find that two faculty from the same institution would start and end up at
completely different for their courses. Even now as I teach Chamorro language
at the University of Guam I have noticed these gaps. Sometimes they are minor,
but sometimes they can be serious. Part of this problem is the lack of any standardized
textbooks that instructors can use to help maintain a continuity between
various levels of Chamorro.
At present instructors use a variety of
materials in order to teach their courses. The books created by Donald Topping,
most famous for co-authoring a Cha…
