News and blogs

December 15, 2008 By 3 Comments

While leafing through an AM New York paper on Friday (yeah, yeah, I do that sometimes when riding the subway), I saw a short opinion piece by Ellis Henican that resonated with me. It’s one of the “old vs. new” debates, which are often controversial, and we often tend to either embrace the side of “the old” because of some sentimental feelings, or dismiss it as the bickering of the people who don’t understand how great “the new” is. But sometimes the arguments of “the old” are rather reasonable and shouldn’t be discounted right away.

Henican is quite bitter in his piece, describing blogging as “some self-absorbed nitwit sitting in front of a computer in his bathrobe, stealing the facts that some hard-working, low-paid newspaper drone just spent hours collecting,” but he has a point: bloggers do often get their facts by reading some other sources, be it newspapers or websites, because they often don’t have the time, the resources, or maybe even the desire to go out and do all the “dirty work” of going to crime scenes, sitting through court trials, reporting from war zones, doing the fact checking. Almost inevitably, if you get the facts that have already been retold by someone to their liking, you get a skewed picture; then you add your angle, and it gets even more skewed. And while this is good for something like philosophy, for news reporting it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Of course, there are biased reporters and diligent bloggers, and sometimes a witness who has a blog can undermine a corrupt newspaper’s official point of view. But still, the overall state of affairs seems to be correct. And this is one of the reasons that it’s so upsetting to see the newspaper industry in such bad shape, and it would be a shame if the disappearing newspapers are replaced by nothing other than the “Bathrobe Boy” bloggers.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging Tagged With: ,

Accent Reduction, take 2

June 5, 2007 By 5 Comments

Some time ago I wrote a post about the need for accent reduction training that was expressed by some students I had worked with. And today I stumbled upon an article from the New York Times that talks about exactly the same issue, only it is not students who are expressing the need for accent coaching, but professionals from legal, business and science fields. People from different language backgrounds seek the help of language coaches, either because they have realized themselves that their speech isn’t always clear to their interlocutors, or because their business partners have pointed that out. Some large companies now pay their employees to undergo this training. It seems that voice and accent coaching field is growing. The term “accent reduction” is not an ideal one, and has specific cultural presuppositions. But the need for this training is real, and as with many language-related things, the earlier you start working on it, the better the outcome will be.

Filed Under: ESL, Language

Web 2.0 technologies overview

April 19, 2007 By 7 Comments

I know that I’d be preaching to the converted if I tried to persuade you that most emerging web 2.0 technologies could be used to engage students in the learning process and spark their creativity. But I still think that this neat resource that I have come across might be useful, if not to you, then to some of your professor colleagues that might not know the full potential of web 2.0

The 2007 Horizon Report, a product of collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative gives an overview of various technologies that can be used by students and teachers. What’s good about this report, which has been published for the fourth time in 2007 is that it gives a description of each new (or relatively new) technology, then a specific section on its “Relevance for teaching, learning and creative expression” and a section with links to examples of the ways this technologies is being used in education. The report covers user-created content, social networking, mobile phones, virtual worlds, new scholarship and educational gaming.

The 2007 Horizon report can be accessed at www.nmc.org/horizon I think this is a very well-organized resource that I wouldn’t mind sharing even with a conservative professor.

Filed Under: Pedagogy, Technology, Web 2.0

Women’s Day

March 8, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Happy International Women’s Day!

It’s a bit off-topic for this blog, but I think it’s an important holiday, and it’s somewhat related to communication, because this is one of those holidays, the discourse around which has been changing through the years. Since I’m most familiar with the Russian discourse around this holiday, this is what I will mostly talk about.

Although this holiday is international by nature, as the name suggests, it is celebrated differently in some parts of the world, and it is barely celebrated at all in others. It is actually quite interesting to see how the discourse around this holiday has changed since its inception.

It was Clara Tsetkin, a famous German politician and women’s rights activist who, in 1910, at the International Conference of Women Socialists in Copenhagen, proposed celebrating the International Women’s day. At first this day was marked only in a few European countries, mostly by rallies that demanded the right of women to vote, to work, to receive professional training, and to be treated equally on the job. The holiday started being recognized in more and more countries, and in some, like Russia, it even became an official day off. In Russia, after the Revolution, it also took an additional role of diverting people from celebrating religious holidays like Shrovetide that had been celebrated around the same time of year. Later, probably during the so-called ‘period of stagnation’ (1970s – early 1980s), when the official propaganda was aimed at convincing the people that there were no problems left in the country, and everyone was treated equally and fairly, this holiday was slowly transformed into a combination of Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day in the USSR. Men presented women with flowers and gifts, and it became in a way a celebration of spring, beauty and femininity. So, as you can see, the original idea was turned upside down. Then, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, some of the former republics have dropped this holiday altogether, lest it remind their people about their Soviet past. And recently, from what I hear, many women in Russia have been rebuking the idea of the International Women’s Day, but not because its original idea has been abandoned, but because… it designates only one day per year when women should be appreciated.

In the meanwhile, in 1975, during International Women’s Year, the United Nations began celebrating 8 March as International Women’s Day. In adopting its resolution on the observance of Women’s Day, the General Assembly cited two reasons: to recognize the fact that securing peace and social progress and the full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms require the active participation, equality and development of women; and to acknowledge the contribution of women to the strengthening of international peace and security. So, the UN took the original idea and added its twist to it, stressing the idea of international peace. The UN has been supporting a large number of programs and events related to women’s rights in different countries.
Nowadays the urgency and passion of the original idea seems to have been subdued, and, sadly, in most countries all the media does is simply state that this is the International Women’s Day, but nothing else really happens.
Now, I won’t tell you what my favorite reincarnation of this holiday would be, but I think it deserves to be celebrated. Since the nature of this holiday has been so volatile, maybe it could become a holiday with an open meaning, in which women can be celebrated in different ways, depending on your beliefs.

Filed Under: Cross-Cultural Communication, Gender

ESL challenges

February 24, 2007 By 3 Comments

This semester I am working with a world literature class that is composed solely of ESL students. It is the first time such a section is offered, so it is sort of an experiment. The content is the same as for a native-speaker class, but the class is smaller, so students get an opportunity to participate in class discussions more often, and they are not in the “ESL-minority”, so they don’t feel shy about leading conversations in English. They also have an additional 1,5 hour tutorial, where they learn about writing techniques, some ESL-specific writing issues and get an opportunity to practice writing. I believe this format is beneficial for many ESL students, but it seems that it still does not alleviate all of their problems.

After a recent discussion of thesis statements in general and potential thesis statements for their paper, their instructor came up to me and said she was shocked at how little they had understood of the texts. This was surprising for her since she knew that these are smart students. I started pondering about it, and about the comments the students made about the text. I think that now I see what might be the problem. When you are learning a second language and have not mastered it yet, there is a period when you feel that you are using it as a child, which is very frustrating, because you know and understand much more than you can express. And when you are reading in your second language, the amount of unknown words bogs you down so much that you can hardly appreciate the depth of the argument or the style of the author, even if you would have grasped it in your native language. It seems to me that this is what might be happening. The amount of reading in that class is quite substantial. A native reader probably does not need as much extra time to go from the ‘surface reading’ to the full picture, with cultural allusions, undercurrents, etc. But for many ESL students it is long and exhausting enough to trudge through the plot, so they have no time or energy to go back and deconstruct the text. I don’t know if there is a perfect solution for this, but maybe it would be better to reduce the amount of reading in such classes, and spend more time during class on going from the ‘surface’ of the text to the possible deeper readings. Would you agree?

Filed Under: ESL, Language, literature

Writer’s reference

December 4, 2006 By 2 Comments

At our last professional development session (which probably deserves a separate blog entry) there was a discussion about the publication of “A Writer’s Resource: A Handbook for Writing and Research” by Elaine Maimon, and Janice Peritz. The discussion focused mainly on educational publishing and its complicated relationship with the academic world. I want to mention something more concrete and practical that came to my mind while I was listening to Janice Peritz. She mentioned that one of the chapters in her handbook lists some major grammatical points that students needs to work on in order to make their writing clear. I believe she started with 6 points in her draft and then had to extend them to 12. I think this would be a nice reference to give to our students at Baruch (and elsewhere).

While reviewing a number of student drafts, I noticed that there are quite a few common errors, like subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, their vs. there, punctuation, etc. I think it might be useful to give out some such reference to students in the beginning of the semester (put it on the CIC’s Blackboard site or just hand it out). A whole chapter from that handbook would probably be daunting (and bulky) for students, so we could develop something more laconic that would include references to additional resources for those who want them. We could even distribute this among teachers, so that they could give it to students selectively. I think especially the professors who are teaching something other than composition or literature would appreciate that. There surely are similar resources online and in different handbooks, but somehow students often don’t get to them.

Do you all think this is worth doing?

Filed Under: Resources

Telling statistics?

October 26, 2006 By 2 Comments

Today some of us here at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute listened to a presentation by Jimmy Jung, Assistant Director of Baruch’s Office of Institutional Research and Program Assessment. The presentation was called “Who are Baruch College Undergraduate Students?” and was intended, I believe, to give us an informative “map” of the student population at Baruch. And it started off that way. But soon, probably unexpectedly for the presenter, it turned into a conversation that touched on such topics as NY public school system and the pressures professors might feel when they are deciding on a grade.

The first statistic that raised some eyebrows was the breakdown of students by ethnicity. International students were listed as a separate population and not grouped with their ethnic groups as many of us would have expected. And the first generation immigrants, who might speak a language other than English at home, but who are permanent residents as opposed to holders of a student visa, are all listed together under “white”. It turned out that that is “the way the government requests” the student population to be broken up. And on top of that, there is a financial reasoning behind this, which is that since the international students were shown do better at the university than other groups, less budgetary resources need to be allocated to them as a group.

Next up for scrutiny was the statistic that Baruch is the #1 producer of accounting majors and CPA test takers in the US. It provoked a half-joking question, whether those test-takers were also “test-passers”. It seems that most of them are, but we didn’t get a specific percentage.

The diversity of Baruch students and the number of languages they speak was not that surprising to hear about, but what was interesting to know was that about 60% of undergrads at Baruch transfer in from another college, the majority from the CUNY community colleges. Now that I think most of us didn’t know. And it might be one of the reasons why in every class there is such a wide range of communication skills. Apparently the applicants who are rejected by Baruch because of their low GPA and test scores can go to a community college and later transfer to the same program at Baruch without necessarily having brought their writing and content knowledge to the same level as the original Baruch students. Some argued that the problems in writing can be traced back to the middle and high schools, and that the variable quality of NY schools can account for the variability in the skills of undergrads. Also, one study that was mentioned claims that the student’s grade in high-school English is the best predictor of college freshman year success.

The other statistic that proved to be controversial was that 94% of Baruch freshmen receive grades of As, Bs and Cs in their first writing intensive English course. This smacked of grade inflation for some of us in the audience. And although the presenter tried to reassure everyone that Baruch has been doing better than other institutions in regard to grade inflation, that still does not mean that there isn’t any of it going on, or that Baruch hasn’t reached ceiling in terms of grade inflation. This issue has sparked a whole conversation on the reasons a professor has for giving a certain grade. For some, if they saw that the person was making an effort and submitted all the assignments, they couldn’t give him a grade lower than a ‘C’. For others the dilemma was: if the whole class submits papers that are only “F-worthy”, can a professor fail everyone?

There were many other points raised; I am surely forgetting some. If anyone would like to continue this conversation here, or add some insightful statistics, please feel free to do so.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Higher Education

Visual Thesaurus

October 7, 2006 By 4 Comments

A friend of mine recently e-mailed me a link to this really cool site I’d like to share with you all. It’s called Visual Thesaurus. From the name of it you might think that it’s a type of picture dictionary, but it’s visual in a different way. It visualizes for us the links of the word networks, by showing us a word with its “relatives” all around it, distributed according to the closeness of their relation. This thesaurus not only gives you a word definition, it also shows word maps, gives examples of the word’s usage and even its pronunciation. I think it might help students, especially those for whom English is not the first language, develop a better vocabulary and get a better grasp on the way words are used.

And this is not all. There is more to that site than just a thesaurus. It also has interviews with writers and bloggers, and links to useful linguistic resources, as well as links to blogs related to teaching, corporate communications, writing, grammar, kids books, lexicography. I haven’t looked through every corner of that site, but I think that every one of us can find something interesting there.

Filed Under: Resources, Technology

Accent reduction

May 3, 2006 By 16 Comments

The issue of accent keeps coming up with the students that rehearse oral presentations with me – and I’m not the one bringing it up. Many students are very self-conscious about their accent. Some of them just ask for advice on how to pronounce this or that word, others express their concern that they will receive a worse grade for their presentation because of their heavy accent, yet others are worried about their future job interviews, some of which could happen over the phone. And recently one of the students asked me whether there is an accent reduction program/service/course/whatever available at Baruch. I don’t think there is anything like that, am I wrong?

It seems to me that given a large number of ESL students at Baruch, this would be a valuable program to have. And if nothing like that exists at Baruch, maybe we should think about collaborating with the ESL program on this issue. If there aren’t very many resources available for a consultation service or a course on accent reduction, maybe it would be worth it to acquire someaccent reduction software? What do you all think?

Filed Under: ESL, Language, Oral Communication

Culture-specific forms of narration

March 29, 2006 By 2 Comments

This may sound naive to some people, but I only recently learned (from the chapter “Language and Literacy in the School years” by R. Ely, in “The Development of Language”) that there are two major forms of narrative: topic-focused narrative and topic-associating narrative. In fact, there may well be more forms, but I am not aware of them.

A topic-focuses narrative is a story about a single person or event that has a clear beginning, middle and end.

A topic-associating narrative is a story that links several episodes thematically, and these episodes may involve several principal characters and shifts in time and setting.

It is stated in this chapter that the former are mainly used by many middle-and working-class European-American children, while the latter are often used by working-class African Americans. While I did hear oral topic-associating narratives, I have never seen an essay written in this form. I was wondering if any of you did read such essays, and what would you tell the student in this case? Because on the one hand, we should not discourage creativity and personal style, but on the other, we want to help students learn to write in a way that would be appropriate for their future workplace. This seems to be almost like a vicious circle.

Filed Under: Literacy, Non-Standard English
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