Timothy Currie Armstrong

Cultivation of Leishmania braziliensis in an economical serum-free medium containing human urine

Leishmania braziliensis cells are difficult to culture in vitro and usually require media supplemented with serum for sustained cell division. Fresh, sterile urine is an inexpensive substitute for serum in the culture of 2 strains of L. braziliensis, 1 infected with Leishmania RNA virus 1, and 1 uninfected. In the presence of urine, both the infected and the uninfected strains grew to the same final cell density as the same strains grown in the presence of serum. One strain of Leishmania major was also successfully cultured in urine-supplemented media.

“Why Won't You Speak to Me in Gaelic?” Authenticity, Integration, and the Heritage Language Learning Project

The last speakers of an endangered language often include many individuals who have acquired less than full productive proficiency in the language, language users Nancy Dorian (1977) called semi-speakers. When these individuals enter formal education and seek to learn or relearn their endangered heritage language, they are often frustrated by challenges to their authenticity as legitimate language users and by difficulties in effecting integration into local language networks. This study investigates the unique language-learning task faced by heritage learners of an endangered language, Scottish Gaelic, and shows how this task differs significantly from the task of learning and using a foreign language. I will argue that the results of this study have important implications for pedagogical practice and curriculum development for the teaching of endangered languages, particularly where language learning is understood, at least in part, as a strategy for language revitalization.

Complementary reversing language shift strategies in education: the importance of adult heritage learners of threatened minority languages

Heritage learners of minority languages can play a lynchpin role in reversing language shift (RLS) in their families; however, in order to enact this role, they must first overcome certain barriers to re-integrate the minority language into the home domain. Using a combination of conversation and narrative analysis methods, we demonstrate how both enacting this lynchpin role, as well as the specific barriers to its enactment, unfolds at the micro-level for heritage learners of Scottish Gaelic. We then turn to Gaelic language planning at the macro- and meso-levels, and argue that Gaelic language education policy does not explicitly recognise this potential lynchpin role, nor does policy or pedagogy specifically address the particular interactional challenges that heritage learners face. We argue that in order to best maximise Gaelic education as means to RLS, the education of adult heritage learners needs to be seen as a complementary strategy to childhood education, not as a secondary (and often lower priority) tactic to ensuring the vitality of the language.

Naturalism and ideological work: how is family language policy renegotiated as both parents and children learn a threatened minority language?

Parents who enroll their children to be educated through a threatened minority language frequently do not speak that language themselves and classes in the language are sometimes offered to parents in the expectation that this will help them to support their childrens education and to use the minority language in the home. Providing language-learning opportunities for parents with children in minority-language education is understood as good practice in language revitalization, but there is little research on the efficacy of this practice. I will present data from narrative, life-history interviews with mothers who have learned Scottish Gaelic to some level and who have children who attend Gaelic-medium education, and I will discuss the difficulties they encounter in establishing new norms of language use in the family and the strategies they use to effect a new language policy in the home. I will show how these mothers work to establish a new norm of Gaelic use in the family in opposition to a common background ideology that understands language as a natural object, and therefore, that it is wrong and bad parenting to ‘force’ a language on a child.