Author Archive for Yukiko

The 8th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction

Published
by
Yukiko
on May 21, 2008
in Symposium
. 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!

Texting Affecting the Language Skills?: The Case of Japan

Published
by
Yukiko
on April 8, 2008
in Language and Technology
. 2 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?

Effective written communication workshops

Published
by
Yukiko
on March 18, 2008
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) and Writing Across the Curriculum
. 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.

For once…

Published
by
Yukiko
on February 26, 2008
in Language
. 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…

Some Thoughts on ESL Oral Communication

Published
by
Yukiko
on December 7, 2007
in ESL and Oral Communication
. 0 Comments

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.

Tricky Linguistics, Indeed.

Published
by
Yukiko
on November 13, 2007
in Language
. 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.’

Commenting in Blogs

Published
by
Yukiko
on October 22, 2007
in Blogs and Blogging
. 2 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.

A New Communication Intensive Course at Zicklin

Published
by
Yukiko
on October 3, 2007
in Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) and Oral Communication
. 0 Comments

This semester, I have been supporting a new Communication Intensive Course, Advanced Accounting (Acct4100). The instructor, together with a Communication Fellow, developed the syllabus over the summer, which adopted some elements of ‘innovative assignments’ (introduced in articles from Business Communications Quarterly). The course aims to develop students’ oral communication skills by having them present in front of the audience in various occasions for various purposes (individually introducing themselves, group presentations on a predetermined research topic, and presenting their evaluation of other groups’ presentations).

After our own expert Suzanne Epstein’s visit to the class for a mini-lecture on oral presentations, the students are now preparing for their own. I am only beginning to have rehearsals with the students at this point, but so far their response to the tasks seems positive. The professor, as I visited the classes, repeatedly emphasized the importance of gaining skills to clearly and effectively present and discuss complex materials like accounting research as something that would directly benefit them in the workplace. Another good thing about this new syllabus is that the topic and required research for the presentation is kept simple and straightforward, so that the students can focus more on the presenting of the material rather than panicking themselves with getting the content together. Also, the group size is small (2-3 per group) and hence the presentation is fairly short, so it is not overwhelming them. I think it is a good preparation to the presentation that they will put together in the capstone course that awaits them, typically within a couple of semesters.

I am excited to be part of the execution of this new CIC syllabus and I look forward to posting more as I work with more students and find anything interesting to share with you during this journey.

A Workshop That Professionally Develops

Published
by
Yukiko
on September 18, 2007
in Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

The first session of this year’s CUNY Writing Fellows orientation/professional development series was more of a success than last year’s. It is still true that each Fellow’s experience might be different, just because each campus’s program is so different from each other, but I feel like I learned more this year.

I attended an afternoon workshop run by Jason Tougaw, a WAC coordinator at Queens College, on some of the ideas for in-class workshops. After looking at a useful glossary compiled in Gordon Harvey’s “Elements of the Academic Essay” (can be downloaded from QC’s student resources page here), we experienced three activities that they actually used in their in-class workshops. The three separate reading activities focused on thinking about what writers are actually ‘doing’ through their writing (describing? analyzing? claiming? arguing?), how writers express their attitude towards the source they are integrating (i.g. “X argues/believes/acknowledges/emphasizes/implies/observes….”), and, finally, what the writers’ ‘motivating moves’ behind the text are.

The beauty of the ideas presented in these activities, I thought, was that they are concrete and yet flexible enough to be incorporated in different forms in our actual in-class workshops. It could be used in a workshop on analytical reading, but it could also be introduced as a revision strategy by using a student paper as a sample (as done in this workshop), or as a writing strategy by throwing in a writing exercise.

Even though my work for the Institute this semester, which I will talk about in my next posting, does not seem to involve workshops on reading and writing, I appreciated this workshop not only because I enjoyed his good teaching, but also because it presented ideas that are concrete enough for Fellows to immediately put to use in their actual work at a campus, and, for that matter, their upcoming teaching career during or after our graduate work. I walked out of it feeling like I had been ‘professionally developed’ a bit. After all, isn’t it what these orientations are about?

Why they don’t ask questions

Published
by
Yukiko
on April 30, 2007
in Baruch College, ESL, Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication and Symposium
. 2 Comments

I was one of the many participants at last Friday’s 7th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction. It was my first time to participate, so I can’t say anything about how it was compared to last year’s, but I think it was a great success and I had a very good time learning and thinking about various aspects of communication and communication instruction.

In the table discussion, I was assigned to a table facilitated by Phyllis Zadra, Assosiate Dean of Zicklin School, as well as John K. Gillespie, President of Gillespie Global Group, who is involved in cultural consulting and training of cooporate staff from Japan working in the US, as well as those from the US working in Japan. I don’t know if his presence and his interest had an effect on the direction of our discussion, but many of us were interested in considering cultural factors in communication and teaching of communication, and curiously, the discussion went into the direction of something that I wrote in one of my past postings at cac.ophony.org, which was about Asian people’s general tendencies to be less active in their class participation. I was glad that I was able to offer them input based on the real-life experience as someone who comes from that part of the world. I also learned that some other table also talked about this too; I must say I was pleasantly surprised that more instructors and employers are thoughtful and considerate of these challenges that people from other cultures might face going into international education and business.

A participant in my table told us another story that exemplifies the same issue. She asked one of the employers what makes the difference between the interns that eventually got a job offer from them and those that didn’t. The employer said that those who asked questions about their assignment got the job offer, and those who didn’t ask questions didn’t. This was stunning to me (it wasn’t even about participating in discussion!) and makes me sad for people who didn’t get the job. In my culture, if you are an intern you will try to understand the assignment as much as possible by only listening to the supervisor’s directions and you will try NOT to bother the supervisor unless you really have to. Asking questions about the assignment might come across as not paying attention or not having the ability to comprehend very well, so generally it should be avoided as much as you can. Of course you should ask questions if there are things that the supervisors didn’t explain, etc. but that would be after you made sure that you weren’t told about this; only then you are ‘entitled’ to ask the question. While I understand that in this culture asking questions might show that you are interested in and enthusiastic about the task at hand, if those unsuccessful interns didn’t ask questions because they didn’t feel ‘entitled’ to and they were in fact trying their best to behave themselves, that makes me sad.

It is a huge task to facilitate the understanding of these issues for everyone (students, instructors and business leaders), but I will continue thinking about how to achieve this and what I can do, as someone familiar with both cultures, to help achieve this.