Native American Artwork And Literature

Native American Artwork And Literature The combination and significance of literature and artwork are an extreme importance in the Native American culture. These two topics are rarely discussed in the Native American civilization. The modern day culture of the Native Americans is hardly ever passing down the traditions of their ancestors and even from their mothers and fathers. Many other topics such as lifestyles, spirituality, and wars are important also, but are not practiced in the household. Native Americans seldom teach their children about the artwork and the literature that goes with the tales based upon literature and artwork. The majority of the myths and artwork are told from the elders in the family or in the community. The most used subject back when the Native Americans were free was oral literature, and it is still used today. ÂÆ'‚‚ ÂÆ'‚‚ ÂÆ'‚‚ ÂÆ'‚‚ ÂÆ'‚‚ ÂÆ'‚‚ ÂÆ'‚‚ ÂÆ'‚‚ Traditional Native American literature was expressed only oral ly, so it could be difficult for a person outside of a particular Indian culture to gain access to a tribe's literature.Some of the ancient oral literature of Native American cultures has been put into print after enjoying a long life among people. Petroglyphs, stories or events related through pictures carved into rock, have been found throughout North America. These drawn, carved, or written pieces are only a sample of the different forms of oral literature that have been passed down from generation to generation. In the Native American culture, elders told stories, myths, and legends. Ceremonies and songs were performed among the people orally. Oral literature served religious, entertainment, and educational purposes, often at the same time. The young people of the tribe were educated in this way. They learned the religion, moral values, history, artistic values, humor, and music of their tribe. Even now many Native American storytellers and poets record their stories and experie nces to still...

Understanding Passive Vocabulary

Understanding Passive Vocabulary A passive vocabulary is made up of the words that an individual recognizes but rarely uses when speaking and writing. Also known as recognition vocabulary. Contrast with  active vocabulary.   According to John Reynolds and Patricia Acres, Your passive vocabulary is  likely to contain more words than the active one. One way to improve the range of the vocabulary in your own writing is to try to transfer words from your passive to the active vocabulary (Cambridge Checkpoint English Revision Guide, 2013). Examples and Observations A passive vocabulary . . . includes the words stored in verbal memory that people partially understand, but not well enough for active use. These are words that people meet less often and they may be low frequency words in the language as a whole. In other words, activating them takes longer and it demands greater stimulus than most textual contexts provide. Words stop being passive if people are regularly contracting relations that activate them, since this lowers the amount of stimulus needed to put them to use. A facility in using the words develops. Again constraints of another kind in the extralinguistic context may also restrict the active use of some words. This can happen even when words are available for active use in principle, such as cultural taboo words that most people know but rarely use outside certain settings.(David Corson, Using English Words. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995)Media saturation may . . . provide what Dennis Baron called a passive lingua franca. We al l understand what we hear on the radio or see on TV, giving us a passive vocabulary, but that doesnt mean that we use that vocabulary actively in writing or speaking.(Robert MacNeil et al., Do You Speak American? Random House, 2005) How to Estimate the Size of Your VocabularyTake your dictionary and peruse 1 per cent of its pages, i.e. 20 pages of a 2,000-page dictionary, or every hundreth page (you need to take a range of letters of the alphabet). Note down how many words: (a) you are confident that you would regularly use; (b) you would recognize and understand if you read or heard them. Be brutally honest with yourself! Then multiply your totals by 100, to give a first approximation of your likely active and passive vocabularies.(Howard Jackson, Grammar and Vocabulary: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2002)A Passive-Active Continuum[A]  commonly drawn  distinction is between active vocabulary, that which can be produced at will, and passive vocabulary, that which can be recognized.  However, as discussed in Teichroew  (1982), the picture is really more complicated. Lexical knowledge cannot be captured by means of a simple dichotomy. Teichroew proposed that vocabulary knowledge can best be repr esented as a continuum with the initial stage being recognition and the final being production. In her view, production should not be viewed in a monolithic fashion, for productive knowledge includes producing both a range of meanings as well as appropriate collocations (i.e., what words go together). For example, in our discussion of the word break  with regard to the work of Kellerman . . ., we noted the many meanings of that word. Initially, learners may know the meaning of break as in break a leg or break a pencil, and only with time do they learn the full range of meanings and such collocations as His voice broke at age 13.(Susan M. Gass and Larry Selinker,  Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course, 2nd ed. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001)