second two-week RGC workshop a few weeks following the first, so that everyone gets a rest before continuing. You can only cover the amount of grammar that you can cover in the allotted time. There is
no need to kill yourself or the participants in your attempts to meet the workshop goals. Goals are to spur us on, not to enslave or bury us. Whatever grammar is not covered in the first workshop can wait
for another workshop. That being said, it is your responsibility to carefully prioritize which grammar you will cover in the allotted time. Until the writing system is established, you must always be carefully
planning grammar sessions that will be the most helpful to establish that writing system, and most often this involves sound changes at morpheme boundaries.
3.6 Other specific instruction
3.6.1 Keep up the pace
In all the activities, there needs to be a balance between doing careful linguistic analysis and not getting bogged down on any one word or grammatical detail. Go slow enough that the majority of participants
are hearing the correct sounds, understanding some functions of the morphemes, observing the morphophonological patterns, tentatively agreeing on spelling, and writing correct grammar in the
notebooks. However, keep things moving. In a language with numerous sound alternations at morpheme boundaries, stifle your linguistic curiosity to exhaust all the syntactic functions of a particular
morpheme. Sure the grammar would make a nice linguistic paper, but your job is help the language group arrive at a tentative working orthography, not to gather data for linguistic papers that further your
career. For a practical writing system, it is more important to find the sound changes of morphemes than to fully understand all the functions of morphemes. Keep to the grammar that will help you arrive at the
goal of agreeing on an informed writing system. Often a broad view of the grammar, such as investigating most morphemes in most environments using representative data, will be a better
foundation for making orthography decisions than a deep but narrow view of the language, such as learning all there is to know about a few morphemes in the language.
Occasionally, participants will need time to discuss issues that arise, such as whether two adjacent roots should be joined as words, whether or not a certain noun has a plural form, or any number of other
issues. Allow each person to have a say in the matter, but don’t allow such discussions to go on past five minutes or so, unless the discussion is important for the activity. Often the issue can be more easily
answered in a later session when all relevant grammar is collected and discussed for that issue. So, at an appropriate point, bring the participants back to the goal of the activity, and encourage discussions
about other issues to continue during the next break time.
3.6.2 When the activity goes poorly
No matter how well prepared you are for the workshop, there will be one or more sessions that do not go as well as expected. In most cases, the cause is either that the data is not as expected or that the
participants did not understand the aim of the activity. When the data is not as you thought it would be based on the texts or what you know of related
languages, try to still make the session useful, such as by revising a frame until it can be used to collect the intended data, or by finding out enough details of the grammar that you then know how to collect
the data another way. There is no shame in not having all the answers. After all, the participants are the experts on the language, not you. It is just a matter of finding a way for them to communicate the
information about the language. But if you suspect that your floundering is causing the participants to loose their enthusiasm for the work, stop and change to another activity. Later, rethink the possible ways
of getting the intended data. If possible, pull one participant aside before the next workshop session and verify that your new frame will successfully elicit the intended data. Or collect one or more full
paradigms of complicated verbs that can be used as models for paradigms of other verbs. That way you save yourself and the participants the misery of floundering in another workshop session.
When the participants are not responding as you expect, it may be because they do not understand the aim of the activity or what you expect of them. You may need to give a brief explanation for why the
activity is important, such as in order to have a list of correctly spelled words in the dictionary that all language developers can refer to. You may need to explain exactly what you would like the participants
to do, such as to have one of them slowly read a list of words while all others listen for any vowels that are different than the rest. You may need to explain what you mean by asking questions, since
sometimes questions are used as rebukes in Africa. You can say, “Sometimes when I ask a question, I already know the answer. I ask the question because I want to know if you also know the answer. Then I
will know that we are together in the work.”
3.6.3 Co-leading an RGC workshop
