NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

For the past year I've been working under Dr. Faye Untalan on the I Ma'adahen Fino' Chamorro gi Koleho project, a grant funded by the Administration of Native Americans to create a standardized curriculum for teaching Chamorro at the college level. I've been working with Chamorro teachers from the Marianas and Hawai'i to put together a draft curriculum and we are currently pilot testing it at GCC, NMC and GCC. With the drafting of this curriculum we've gone through months of editing and polishing. Hundreds and perhaps more than a thousand potential pages were produced for the curriculum thus far, and the majority of it has been edited and erased. These pages contained exercises, activities, drills, vocabulary lists, grammar lessons and of course dialogues. Alot of these materials I've been holding on to since it can always be used somewhere else, even if it doesn't make it into this particular project. Below is one of the dialogues that was cut. It w

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-a

Read below to learn more about a project I will be working on for the next few years: I Ma’adahen i Fino Chamorro gi Koleho. ************************ UOG Received a 3-Year Federally Funded Grant to standardize the Chamorro language curriculum for post-secondary instruction; it also plans to produce a textbook for student use. Starting this Fall Semester, the University of Guam will begin this 3-year project funded by the Administration of Native Americans to create a standardized curriculum for teaching the Chamorro language at the college level. The project entitled   “I Ma Adahen i Fino’ Chamorro gi Koleho” or “The Preservation of the Chamorro Language at the Post-Secondary Level” will bring together the four colleges that currently offer Chamorro language in their curriculum to work together to determine a unified curriculum for instruction for four-semesters of Chamorro language. Dr. Faye Untalan is the Principal Investigator of this project.   The Cham