Campus Technology article: Students Unimpressed with Faculty Use of Ed Tech

November 6, 2009 By 1 Comment

Eva Fernández of Queens College recently shared this interesting article with us on Facebook. I thought it might be of interest to many of you. It’s funny that I am forwarding this as it is almost like the article virtually traveled across the ocean and back!

Perhaps it’s generational, as Eva also wonders. I have an impression that whereas some adults are very tech savvy enjoying playing with iPhone, Facebook, twitter, etc. there are many others who are very resistant and proud to ignore it altogether. On the other hand, for many (or most) students, technology seems to be something that is woven into their lives much more closely. I would love to hear what your thoughts are.

That said, where I work in Japan there isn’t much technology implemented in classroom teaching yet, and I am yet to hear of somebody who uses social-networking tools in their teaching. There are some online education tools that we use over here for students to self-study (outside of classes), about which I am hoping to write soon.

Filed Under: Online Learning, Technology

Greetings from Yamagata, Japan

August 27, 2009 By 1 Comment

RIMG0066
Creative Commons License photo credit: youthkee

Here is a (belated) quick note saying hello from a former BLSCI Fellow now in Yamagata, Japan. Since past April I have been part of Yamagata University (also see their fairly well-written wikipedia page), and only a couple of weeks ago I finished my first term as a full-time faculty. I am part of their foreign language education center, which is in charge of running first-year language classes. In my case, I am on the executive committee for freshman English.

These few months went by faster than anyone can imagine. Not only I moved from the US (where I spent the last 8 and a half years of my life) to Japan, I moved from the big city to a not so big of a town which I had never lived in or even visited in my entire life (I am from the big city in Japan). I am living on my own in Japan for the first time, working as a full-time faculty for the first time, working for a Japanese university for the first time…it’s a lot of firsts and firsts in a long while. But day by day I am growing less overwhelmed and more comfortable with the environment. The place is really nice with lots of things to see and all kinds of delicious food and drinks. The people are nice and the students are really polite and sweet.

I will leave more reports and thoughts on my work for future opportunities. Meanwhile, I just wanted to say that it has been a great pleasure working with you all and I am looking forward to keeping in touch with you all. I would love to learn about all the exciting projects and events going on over there and to keep you posted on mine. I hope everyone is well and all the best for the start of the new year!

Filed Under: Asides

Reading and creating ‘the air’: a fun clip

February 13, 2009 By 3 Comments

A couple of you who shared the table discussion session with me at last year’s symposium might remember me talking about how Japanese people appreciate the skills to actually ‘read’ what’s not spoken, referring to this as ‘read the air’ (we do also have that well-known expression ‘read between the lines’ for written communication, so reading ‘the air’ is more about oral communication).

Even though some of my table-mates seemed really fascinated with this notion, it is obviously not something that you only experience in Japan. Good air-reading skills can definitely help us be good audience (the theme for the upcoming symposium).

Without making today’s post too serious, I would like to introduce this funny clip from Clint Eastwood’s latest installment ‘Gran Torino’, definitely one of my recent favorites. Clint Eastwood’s character is trying to ‘man up’ this Asian boy so that he can get a job in construction. Check out and enjoy how the boy learns to ‘read’ and ‘create’ the air that he never breathed in before.

Filed Under: Audience, Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Symposium

The 8th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction

May 21, 2008 By 2 Comments

I was among the group of Fellows who attended the 8th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction, held on May 9th, 2008. Despite the weather, the turnout was great and we saw a lot of lively exchanges of ideas. Esther Dyson’s and Richard Lederer’s Keynotes were interesting and entertaining, and we enjoyed each other’s company at the table discussion and over dinnner afterwards.

This year’s theme was ‘Miscommunication’. In the table discussion, Olga and I were with facilitators Gardner Cambell (Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington) and Ruth-Ellen H. Simmonds (Executive Director, One Stop Senior Services), our own Dennis Slavin and three other professionals (Irwin Dayan, David Sutcliffe and Karen Stevenson). Because we had a good proportion of academics and professionals, we were able to share our experience in the classroom and the workplace, what kind of miscommunication takes place, and why it takes place. Our dicussion somehow centered around the fact that many of us feel like we ‘miscommunicate’ with colleagues because we have little understanding of people that belong to different generational/gender/cultural groups from our own. Just as we did in the symposium, by ‘listening’ to each other’s perspectives and experiences, we learn a little more about effective communication every day. I feel that ‘listening’ is an essential part of communication no less than ‘talking’. Now I should tell my Japanese friends to keep their heads high for their ‘air-reading’ ability.:-)

So this was another interesting experience for me. I would also like to invite comments from other Symposium participants. Please share your experience!

Filed Under: Symposium

Texting Affecting the Language Skills?: The Case of Japan

April 8, 2008 By 6 Comments

I go back to visit Japan quite often lately (2-3 times/year), and yet every time I am back I am just amused by how the cellphone technology is rapidly advancing there. Now you can watch TV in those cellphones, which even don’t cost much to get.

As text messaging is also very common there and even my own mother (60+) now sends her friends long messages full of emoticons (serious), I wondered whether educators over there talk about the side effects of those advancements on people’s language (especially writing) skills as people here do. And what I noticed is, whereas I do hear about people blaming computers (Internet and e-mail) affecting people’s abilities to write well, they don’t necessarily blame cell phone messaging. Why is that?

As I communicated with my friends using my father’s cellphone while I was there, I noticed something. No one abbreviates common words (e.g. from the ‘where r u?’ type to ‘LOL’ and all that) like people here do to save on typing effort, not because Japanese people are more consciencious but because of a feature with the input software common with any phone. Very roughly speaking, basically what it does is when you type the first letter of a word (say ‘b’) the phone provides a list of possible continuations automatically (is that ‘be’, ‘best’, ‘blue’…?) and all you have to do is to choose what you need from there. Of course if what you want is not there, you can choose to ignore the list and keep typing letters. Even better, the phone remembers what you wanted from a certain beginning and offers those first when you type the same letter the next time (‘You wanted ‘beautiful’ the other time. Do you want to say it again?’). This way, there is no need to make much effort to compose a nice long text message in Japanese. I don’t think I had to type a word in full when I was there the last time.

Of course, I am simplifying the story and this is not a unique feature with the cellphone technology (this tool has a long history going back to the days of word processors because of the characteristics of the Japanese writing system), but I was amused by this little realization. If more cellphones here had this function, would it have prevented some students from forgetting to spell out what ‘r’ or ‘u’ stand for in their essays?

Filed Under: Language, Technology

Effective written communication workshops

March 18, 2008 By 2 Comments

This semester, I will run workshops for Professor Cherny’s ACCT 5400 (Principles of Auditing) in preparation for the students’ final paper project, a ‘lessons-learned’ assessment of an audit failure. It is different from my last semester’s work on oral presentations for ACCT4100 (Advanced Accounting) in the sense that the assignment focuses on writing (and not speaking), but the two do share a common goal: the coursework is designed to help the students develop as a more effective business communicator. My workshops will review principles of writing (the writing process, organizing the paper, how to do citations etc.) and move on to a (hopefully) in-depth look on the essence of an effective business paper. Even though this assignment may appear to be somewhat ‘old-school’ to some of the students, I hope that they will realize that writing is still an important part of business communication (just as much as the oral communication they practiced in ACCT4100) and they will learn a lot through this assignment. I am looking forward to meeting them at a workshop and hear what they have to say about their coursework. I will report back on the workshop in one of my next posts.

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Writing Across the Curriculum

For once…

February 26, 2008 By 1 Comment

Sometimes I think that being a linguist (or a language teacher) justifies my act of nit-picking at what I see written in public places. Not that it is a good thing, because most probably what I cannot help but ‘nit-pick’ illustrates another case of ‘non-standard’, if not ‘wrong’, use of English, which makes me either sigh or picture some people getting started on that same old ‘correctness’ issue again.

Then, today I came across this article on this poster I was staring at a few hours ago, which made me smile. For once, someone does something right and gets yays from some sticklers (such as Lynne Truss). And Bush somehow gets a sniff from Chomsky (again?).

Also look here and here for what some linguists are saying about this…

Filed Under: Language

Some Thoughts on ESL Oral Communication

December 7, 2007 By 1 Comment

This semester’s work supporting an accounting course group presentations has been a great experience for me. I worked with a lot of different groups with their own characters. One thing that surprised me a bit was how many of them are actually ESL students (international students or recent immigrants), and as an ESL person myself, I was interested to encounter some of the challenges they face in tackling this task. I thought I would share some of my stories here, and would like to invite others to share their experience working with them as well.

The two different sections of the course I worked with (taught by two different instructors) had a different set-up for their presentation component. In one of the sections, students were allowed to choose their partners, so I encountered groups who consist of native (and near-native) English speakers only, while some groups had ESL students only. This created situations where some groups struggled in preparing and performing due to language issues and having no one in the group to watch out for them. However, the team dynamics were generally good and some groups actually really got into it and produced excellent presentations.

In contrast, in the other section, where the instructor did the grouping, I observed some nice teamwork where native speakers are supporting the ESL students and the presentations are generally easier to follow languagewise. However, I did see more intra-group communication difficulties, unfortunately. Some students had a hard time understanding each other in the process of working together, and/or some of them get frustrated because their partners are not performing up to their expectations.

From the two sections that presented different types of issues, I see not only language but cultural difference behind their ‘communication difficulties’. I can imagine some of the students might be less experienced with public speaking (as I discussed in a post on class participation), or working extensively with classmates. Although I practiced a lot of group work in my own teaching at CUNY, I never had the experience of working on a big group project as a student back in my country. It is not really a common practice there.

So much for the analysis, but what could we do to best support ESL students and help them (and those working with them) succeed in their presentations, then? Their trouble with English could be remedied by extra language coaching, or so it appears, but that is really just giving them a band-aid (as Jennifer nicely put it). We would want some more fundamental solutions, but it is too ambitious to hope that they will become a significantly more competent speaker of English between today and 5 days later. So far, I am limiting myself to giving them one or two pointers that they could use for now and later, so that it is not too overwhelming or takes too much time (especially when non-ESL students are present). I share my own experience as an ESL student (if I can do it, you can do it too!) and cheer them on. There is not much one can do in one sitting, but I hope a tiny step today will lead to a big leap for them.

Filed Under: ESL, Oral Communication

Tricky Linguistics, Indeed.

November 13, 2007 By 4 Comments

I was delighted to find this lovely clip ‘Tricky Linguistics’ from a British show ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie’ by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (now recognized by most in the US as playing Dr. Gregory House on the TV show ‘House M.D.’. A point made in this funny clip, that our knowledge of language is capable of generating an infinite number of grammatical sentences, is a fascinating property of language that always comes up in an intro to language course. Our knowledge of language can generate a lot of sentences. Even the ones that our stickler spirits don’t like.

People with reasonable education, especially academics, have keener sense of prescriptive ‘correctness’ of language and often lament on ‘sloppy’ ‘broken’ ‘bad’ usage of language often found on the Internet or student writings. I notice a lot of those, not only because I can be a bit of a stickler myself, but also because it is interesting what people do.

The other day I heard a friend of mine, a sociologist, say ‘I should have went…’ and immediately corrected himself and said ‘I should have *gone*…’ It wasn’t the first time I heard ‘went’ used instead of ‘gone’ after ‘have’. As an ESL student I learned “to form a perfective, you use the auxiliary ‘have’ followed by the past participle form of the verb”. So it is, for me, a super-fast thought process of “ok…say ‘have’…and then say *gone* after ‘have’”. I tell my students “You don’t say *went* here because it is in the past tense and it is wrong”. But native speakers don’t do it this way. They shouldn’t even think. Their knowledge of language is supposed to only create right things! But he didn’t, and he actually had to go on the process of consciously evaluating what he said and revised his sentence.

I thought this example was interesting, because it almost looks like people are starting to change their rules and use past tense after ‘have’. Is this the beginning of our language change? If we did change our rules and started using past tense, shouldn’t we also allow ‘I should have *ate*’, ‘I should have *wrote*, ‘I should have *gave* up’, and ‘I should have *did* it’? My sense is that it is not that simple, yet.

True, ignorance of the distinction between ‘what you end up saying’ and ‘what you should be saying’ might suggest certain things about your education, etc. (Yes, we still have to take ‘correctness’ seriously.) But it is fascinating, for many linguists, how there seem to be distinctions among ‘what you should be saying’, ‘what you shouldn’t be saying but end up saying sometimes’ and ‘what you never end up saying, ever.’

Filed Under: Language

Commenting in Blogs

October 22, 2007 By 4 Comments

What makes a blog lively is not just good posting, but also good commenting. Good/sensible comments could benefit it by sparking more fruitful discussion, and bad/less thoughtful comments could harm it. In that sense, successful blogging should create healthy interaction between writers and readers. My own experience of writing and commenting in blogs these days has got me into thinking about how we can participate in a blog, especially a course blog, in a productive way.

At last Friday’s WID/WAC Professional Development session, Jenny and I attended a rather fun workshop put together by faculty of New York City College of Technology called ‘Thinking about Drinking and Writing about Food’. Among all the fun activities in the workshop, there was interesting discussion on how we could respond to this blog entry by William Grimes, a former food reviewer and presently a book reviewer for the New York Times. How would we as general readers post a comment on this posting? What if this was not an informal journal writing by an already accomplished writer but instead a student entry in (say) a writing course blog that you set up as an instructor? Does it somehow make a difference?

While we might appreciate this piece as a fun read with beautiful use of language, it is not a good example of carefully organized essay with one clear thesis statement, etc. A writer like Grimes might be ‘entitled’ to informally share his stream of consciousness on a blog. However, if it was a student’s writing, our response would be different depending on what kind of blog it is intended to be: students can grow their own voice and throw ideas out there without worrying about organizing them, if that is the purpose of the blog. Only if that is the purpose of it.

A beauty of introducing blogging in the course, instead of sticking to the old-fashioned exchange of papers, to me, is its flexibility. Simply giving the students opportunities to write more and share it with others is one way. Identifying a course blog with a way to brainstorm/freewrite and get some ideas together about the course is another. One can also have the blog as a place to compile and discuss each other’s high-stakes writing pieces. The role one would want a blog to play in the course is dramatically different depending on its purpose. Speaking of healthy interaction in course blogging, I think it is very important for all participants of a blog, before launching on it, to discuss and share understanding of how they should regard posting and commenting on a blog entry as, how it would benefit them, and what role they are expected to play in order to successfully develop the course blog together.

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging
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