| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺東大學 === 進修部暑期幼兒教育碩士班 === 106 === Hla’alua language is on the brink of extinction and the revitalization of the language is urgently needed. This study aimed to investigate the process by which the teachers integrated Hla’alua culture into the tribal language immersion program and to examine the effectiveness of this program on children’s learning of Hla’alua language.
Action research method was adopted to solve the problems in the classroom and enhance the professionalism of the teachers through the cycle of teaching, reflection, and correction. A non-indigenous kindergarten teacher conducted this study. The study site was a kindergarten affiliated to an elementary school in southern Taiwan. Children in this kindergarten were mostly from the Hla’alua and Bunun tribes. The kindergarten had three teachers and 15 students aging from 4 to 6 year olds. Data were collected from classroom observations, interviews, documents and students’ work, and the Hla’alua language proficiency test.
This study found that in terms of the teaching practices, the teacher investigated the cultural experiences that children accumulated in daily life and developed the lesson planes based on these experiences. This approach compensated for the teacher’s lack of the knowledge of Hla’alua culture and captured the students’ interest in language learning. The teachers helped improve the students’ ability to speak Hla’alua language by providing a rich language learning environment, using gestures, , translating and repeating, developing sentence patterns as well as expanding vocabularies, and providing topics for students to discuss using Hla’alua language. The teachers motivated students to speak in Hla’alua language by using positive reinforcement, which integrated the indigenous values, pretending not to understand, designing lessons that involve active and static activities, creating rhymes and songs, and using teaching materials and puppets for children to manipulate. Regarding the children’s performance in learning Hla’alua language, the students could neither understand nor speak Hla’alua language before attending the program but afterwards, they began to speak the language more frequently and were able to use it to introduce themselves , to present what they have learned, to make plans and stories. They also develop the ability to communicate and translate in both Mandarin and Hla’alua language. The exanimation of the language proficiency pretest and posttest revealed that the students’ receptive and expressive vocabularies improved substantially. The findings of this study may contribute to the improvement of tribal language programs.
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