Last month, the Lower Kuskokwim School District announced that a seal of biliteracy might be available for Yup’ik, or Yugtun, speakers, possibly as early as by the end of this school year. Yugtun is the proper way of saying the Yup'ik language. The seal is a mark of equal proficiency in written and oral language skills both in English and Yugtun. The seal will not only elevate the Yup’ik language among the 19 other languages with the biliteracy seal, but also elevate Yugtun speakers across the nation.
Earlier in the school year, Brendan Locke, the Director of World Languages at the Anchorage School District, contacted LKSD with a plan to collaborate with the Avant Assessment Group out of Oregon to develop a Yugtun language test. The organizations will compare students' scores from the Measure of Academic Progress, or M.A.P., scores, to determine eligibility. If they demonstrate a proficiency in both languages, students will get the seal on both their high school diploma and transcript.
So far, nine students from LKSD have participated in a pilot version of the test, which is currently being graded.
Shelia Wallace, a Yugtun/Yup'ik language teacher at LKSD, helped to develop the Yugtun test with another Yup’ik language instructor from the Anchorage School District. She’s been teaching Yugtun for the past decade.
Wallace said that the biggest challenge for writing the test was creating Yugtun equivalencies.
“We looked at the prompts and then we decided which prompts needed to be edited so that it fit the lifestyle and the language of our people, of our Yugtun, for the Yugtun language,” said Wallace.
For example, a prompt might ask: ‘Suppose you received an email from a friend who’d like to visit your community. What are the interesting places in your community? Where would you take them and why?’ said Wallace.
Wallace trained two people with the Avant Assessment Group who will evaluate the exams. Students can apply to take the exam as early as ninth grade.
Though Wallace studied Yugtun before high school, Yugtun was not taught where she went off to boarding school. Historically in Alaska’s education system, there was concern that indigenous language proficiency would interfere with students' ability to learn English. But now there are a lot of studies indicating that the opposite is true and that bilingual education produces more capable students. In fact, these studies indicate that students who grew up fluent in more than one language have a higher cognitive capacity in all languages.
“I wasn’t given the opportunity to take language classes in Yugtun in high school, but now it’s available for students today in their schools to take Yugtun,” said Wallace.
LKSD Superintendent Dan Walker says that the seal of biliteracy elevates the Yup’ik language to the same level as English.
“It creates pride in who they are. It helps our students identify with their language and their culture, which is who they are,” said Walker. “I’ve always maintained that as an education system our kids don’t check their Yup'ik culture at the schoolhouse door. As a school system we have to embrace that so that we can help our kids be successful. I think that is the bigger message of the seal of biliteracy.”
LKSD expects the pilot test results back sometime this week.