Monthly Archive for November, 2005

The Vernacular Divide

Published
by
Anthony
on November 14, 2005
in Language and Non-Standard English
. 1 Comment

John R. Rickford’s article “Suite for Ebony and Phonics” contains an interesting discussion of Ebonics, the “vernacular or informal speech of many African Americans.” Rickford’s project is to explain how the Linguistic Society of America came to support the Oakland School Board’s resolution recognizing Ebonics as “the primary language of African American students.” In brief, the society considers Ebonics not “lazy English”–a common misconception (to put it kindly)–but rather a bona fide, i.e., systematic and rule-governed, dialect.

The upshot of the resolution is that the Oakland School Board adopted an approach to teaching Standard English that takes “students’ vernaculars into account,” rather than “ignor[ing] the vernacular altogether,” as conventional approaches have done. The success rates of this approach have been impressive: the “Contrastive Analysis approach in which SE and Ebonics features were systematically contrasted through explicit intruction and drills showed a 59% REDUCTION in [students'] use of Ebonics features in their SE writing after eleven weeks, while a control group taught by conventional methods showed an 8.5% INCREASE in such features.”

There are some striking parallels here to the arts. I don’t know if Rickford intended to imply such a connection through his title, but there is certainly an Ebonics/SE kind of tension between, say, African American “vernacular” musics (jazz, rap) and the canonic “Standard” still commonly offered in introductory music classes for the non-major. Does anyone out there have any experience in (or ideas about) applying the Contrastive Analysis linguistic approach to other disciplines?

Technology and Second Language Writing

Published
by
Yana
on November 12, 2005
in ESL, Language and Technology
. 0 Comments

I just looked over “Changing Currents in Second Language Writing Research: A Colloquium.” Since many CUNY students are second language (SL) learners, I think it is quite appropriate to our work.

One of the chapters talks about the relationship of technology to SL writing, and about integration of technology into the SL writing classrooms. The author, Mark Warschauer, is generally favorable toward this integration. I agree with some points, like the idea that when you have to put your comments in writing rather than say them out loud, you tend to use more complex language, and it promotees “more equal student participation”. On the other hand, it seems to me that another argument he gives in favor of the integration of technology, namely “incorporation of linguistic chunks” by students in their own writing mostly promotes laziness. I think that students tend to rely on copying and pasting too much as is. And when they are given a chance to do it so easily, many of them wouldn’t feel the need to think about their mistakes, and might even be encouraged to plagiarize.

Gates vs. Jobs; Powerpoint and Zen

Published
by
Kate
on November 12, 2005
in Powerpoint and Presentations
. 1 Comment

Much has been written about ways in which to use Powerpoint well. It’s so often used so poorly. This article from Glenn Reynolds’ blog Presentation Zen is an analysis of the presentation styles and methods used by Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, continuing a series on Gates’s recent presentations that Reynolds started here.

It really caught my attention as something Fellows might share with students working on presentation skills (especially in the Powerpoint-heavy world of business classes). I can see that many of the recommendations are similar, but the sample visuals go a long way in driving the point home that presentation matters, and that with visuals and multimedia, less is often more. Besides comparing the visual styles preferred by Gates and Jobs in their keynotes, Reynolds states that

One thing that would help Mr. Gates is an executive presentations coach and a video camera.

Ouch. See also:

A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept beauty, grace, and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, “Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.” When you examine your visuals, then, can you say that you are getting the maximum impact with a minimum of graphic elements, for example? When you take a look at Jobs’ slides and Gates’ slides, how do they compare for kanso?

While business students may wish to dismiss this as so much new agey mumbo jumbo, Reynolds makes a great case for molding our presentation visuals to a Zen aesthetic–one which is natural, simple, striking, and easy to follow.

Also from the site, Reynolds provides Presentation Tips. Click the “Download Handout” button for a PDF, which might also be useful for students. See also Seth Godin’s “Really Bad Powerpoint” (click the “Get it” button in “Step 2″).

Teaching Generation Tech

Published
by
Kate
on November 7, 2005
in Blogs and Blogging and Technology
. 2 Comments

An interesting article in the NY Times on teens and the internet, cited a Pew study on teens’ internet use which demonstrated

“the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content,” said Paulette M. Rothbauer, an assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto. “They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it.”

This will sound familiar to anyone who spends time around teens outside of class, or watches them in front of computers in the college setting. Despite the digital divide which does affect our students, a good many of them are more savvy about technology matters than most of us. As an example of this, I worked with some NYC public school teachers who were starting to blog with their classes; many discovered — while they were learning how to blog and setting up their classes on a blog — that their students (even those without computers at home) already had personal blogs on xanga.com, myspace.com, blogger, and so on.

“Today’s teens are breaking down the traditional barriers of the mass media age that had producers of media on one side of the fence and consumers on the other,” Mr. Rainie [Lew Rainie, who directed the Pew study] said. And in that respect, he said, teenagers are the agents who will challenge every maker, manager and distributor of content.

Whether bloggers like Brendan and Melissa consider themselves at the vanguard of change, however, is an open question. To many of them, they are just tinkering with the toys that the digital revolution has put before them.

I think this is quite relevant as we consider ways of making college courses communication intensive, and find places to implement CAC, WAC, WAD, and WID.

How do we use students’ enthusiasm for all things digital, how do we harness their creativity when it comes to re-making, altering, manipulating, and creating content, and get this into their course-work?

SAT Essay and Assessment

Published
by
Jill
on November 2, 2005
in Assessment
. 3 Comments

Interesting article in the NYT on some of the ways colleges are using the SAT essays. For instance, I didn’t know that college admissions offices can download a student’s SAT test essay from the College Board. I think it is a little troubling that a number of colleges said “they would use the SAT essay to evaluate whether students had received outside help on their application essays in cases where there appeared to be discrepancies in the applicants’ writing levels.” I think this brings up issues of genre (won’t a personal essay often be better because it is something about which the student feels passionately?), but also issues related to editing, revising, writing under timed conditions versus a drafting process, etc. I’m not sure that I agree with the argument that “basic writing and organizational skills should be consistent between the two samples.” But, in many ways, our work with the diagnostics functions under a similar assumption. I’d be interested to hear from others.