Beginning Tlingit Workbook

The Beginning Tlingit Workbook is an extension of the landmark book Beginning Tlingit, which was edited by the late linguist Richard Dauenhauer and his wife, Nora Dauenhauer, a fluent Tlingit speaker and scholar. The workbook was written and compiled by Lance (X’unei) A. Twitchell, a language student of the Dauenhauers who is an assistant professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS). Twitchell’s work was informed by generations of teachers who have been taking what they know or were learning into classrooms over the past thirty years, and the result of their feedback is this first edition of the Beginning Tlingit Workbook. The goal of creating this workbook is to transition towards image-based language learning to encourage word-image association instead of Tlingit-word to English-word association. Additions have been made, and some optional grammatical explanations have been added through a number of different sections, but the basic philosophy remains the same: learn nouns that start off with sounds familiar to English speakers and begin introducing nouns with more challenging sounds. Phrases are introduced through substitution drills, where students can learn something basic and then make it more dynamic by adding other elements they are learning.