Author Archive for Yukiko

Tracking where you look…

Published
by
Yukiko
on April 5, 2007
in ESL and Language
. 0 Comments

I just got back from the sunny La Jolla, California, where I participated in the 20th annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing. (Yes, it is called ‘the CUNY conference’ and yet held at some other places; it was here last year, but we can’t afford to host it every year anymore!) It is one of the major and prestigious conferences on psycholinguistics, which my research is in, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present a poster with one of my advisors. I had a very nice and fruitful time there.

The field of psycholinguistics is fast growing and expanding. It seemed that this meeting focused a lot on the resolution of pronouns (e.g. when people process ‘he’ in ‘Mickey hit Donald. He…’ what strategies do they employ to decide what ‘he’ refers to?). Although most of the research looked at native speakers’ language processing, there were also some studies on second language processing. I will introduce one of them that was interesting.

This study used a method called eye-tracking. Participants wear a head-mount device that tracks their eye-movement while they look at objects or parts of sentences. In this study, they focused Dutch native speakers also speaking English as a second language. An interesting difference between Dutch and English is that Dutch (as well as many other European languages) makes clearer grammatical gender distinction, especially in pronouns. So in Dutch, a masculine noun like ‘tractor’ is referred to as ‘he’, where as it would be just ‘it’ in English, although it is the same ‘tractor’ in both languages. If you are a Dutch native speaker and use information about their knowledge of Dutch when processing English, there might be some influence coming from it.

The subjects were shown a picture and hear a text in English describing the scene.

(1)The tractor will be driven by Donald.
He is in the other field.

(2) The tractor will be driven by Daisy.
She is in the other field.

As expected, they found that English monolingual subjects they didn’t look too much at the tractor in (1) because it cannot be a candidate for ‘he’. In contrast, the Dutch-English bilingual subjects looked more at the tractor when hearing ‘he’ in (1) than when hearing ’she’ in (2), which means that they are considering the possibility that the tractor might be ‘he’ because it is masculine in Dutch. Interestingly, this phenomenon is limited to ‘cognate’ words between the two languages; if the word is unrelated (e.g. English ‘kite’ and Dutch ‘vlieger’), there is no increase in looks at the object when hearing ‘he’, which means that they don’t use the information about the Dutch word ‘vlieger’ to think about the English ‘kite’; they seem to observe the similarity in form to strategize.

The point that this study makes seems somewhat intuitive, but it was really nice to actually see clear and solid data proving that it is the case. Studying second language processing seems very interesting and it would definitely be a possible future topic of my research. Also this eye-tracking method is really nice; without pressuring them to answer questions or write essays, we can see what’s going on in their heads!

The Universe of English: A Freshman English Program

Published
by
Yukiko
on March 20, 2007
in ESL
. 0 Comments

In the previous post, I have talked about the Freshman Year Composition Task Force that I am working with. In an attempt to keep notes of my thoughts on this project, I am going to write on some of the programs that I am familiar with as a former member. I hope that this might be of interest to not only the members of the Task Force but also to anyone who is interested in this topic. I will start with a Freshman English Program in a Japanese university. Although it is basically an ESL program (hence not focusing on writing necessarily), it might be a good example of a very controlled Freshman program.

In 1993, the Freshman English workgroup at College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Tokyo launched a new freshman English program, which requires all instructors of the English courses in the liberal arts school (freshman and sophomore years) to use one single textbook (called the Universe of English), which consists of readings in popular culture, sciences, history, literature, etc., accompanied by audio-visual materials and exercises that have been prepared by the staff of the workgroup. This was a groundbreaking move, because this means that more than 7000 students of the same year take the same content course. The program turned out to be a great success and the textbook, the Universe of English , was published for purchase for general public and made a bestseller.

A large part of the success comes from the fact that it achieved a very high level of control and consistency in terms of the course content and evaluation through all sections (several dozens) of the English class. The progam started a year after my year and I know how things used to be; everyone taught a different English class, and by everyone I mean dozens of instructors. Nobody knew what everyone else was teaching, and usually the textbook was something that the professor was interested in and was usually some literary work that they publish as a textbook. If you hit a professor who is actually into teaching ESL, you might get something more practical and fun (such as watching movies), but that was rare. The grading scheme was also very obscure, somewhat consequently; you might hit a demanding professor and get a bad grade, while in other sections everyone might just get an A. So this new program achieved a new sense of fairness and clarity among students and instructors. Also, from an instructor’s standpoint (I also taught this for a year), preparation for this new class is extremely easy. Every week I was given a videotape to play in a class, plus an exercise worksheet to use in class. All I had to do is to do the reading and explain the hard part to the students. That was it.

However, there have been drawbacks. As the discussion on the school’s official website (sorry, there is no English version) admits, the class can become really monotone and boring as a result of too much control; as an instructor, I found that not spending too much time preparing, especially for the readings that weren’t so interesting, resulted in monotone teaching. Also, because there is only one textbook per course (that thousands of students are all taking), it was so easy for someone to start selling a cheatbook for the textbook, which you can purchase for cheap to use when you skip a class. So for the end of the semester exam, I got a lot of students -I mean a lot- who never showed up to a class and got over 80% on the final exam. Astonishing.

The school has recently replaced the textbook and revised the way to supplement this reading-heavy class by requiring all freshmen to take another course, which they can choose from comprehension (reading) and presenting (oral or written), to enhance other aspects of ESL. They also have a support system in managing this course by hiring English-speaking international students to hold a discussion group for students to sign up to talk about the materials.

Even though they have some issues to work on, this program is a good example of actually achieving a drastic change and a high level of control across the sections of the course.

First Year Composition Task Force

Published
by
Yukiko
on March 7, 2007
in Baruch College, Pedagogy and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

This semester, I have been fortunate enough to work as a research associate for the First Year Composition (FYC) Task Force at Baruch College. The Task Force consists of faculty from different disciplines, including Zicklin school, and is joined by Suresh Canagarajah, our WAC Cordinator Cheryl Smith, and our own Mikhail Gershovich, to name a few. The Task Force is investigating the current situations in FYC pedagogy, curriculum and objectives inside and outside of Baruch and CUNY schools, and discussing how the new FYC writing program can be organized and implemented at Baruch College.

At the moment, the task force is in the process of studying about and discussing the following questions:

1. Social Context [How the ends and means of literacy are changing]
2. Institutional Context [How universities situate FYC]
3. Academic Context [Expectations of diverse disciplines from English literacy]
4. Departmental Context [Relations between Literature, Cultural Studies, Journalism, and Composition; Relations between adjunct and full-time faculty]
5. Genre Considerations [Which genres the writing course should prioritize; the ways in which the course should relate to the genre conventions from popular culture and native communities brought by students]
6. Language Considerations [Relations between standard English, non-prestige dialects, and other languages in English writing]
7. Models of FYC [The desired sequence, curriculum, and pedagogy for the course]

There are some successful writing programs developed in other universities, including City College, and I am researching about them, coordinating with Cheryl as well as Suresh.  As someone who has previously taught FYC and the equivalent of it in Japan and at Lehman College, I am personally very interested in this topic and do have some stories based on my own experience.  For the next few posts, I plan to write them to share with you. I would also love to hear any opinions or ideas about this topic from you, as I am sure that some of you readers have taught or are teaching Freshman Composition courses and many more of you must have taken them as a student!

A Collection of ‘Real’ English

Published
by
Yukiko
on February 15, 2007
in ESL, Language and Literacy
. 2 Comments

In my spare time (well, in my spare *work* time), I am working as a writer for a Japanese-English dictionary. I have been involved with this series of ESL dictionary projects for a number of years now, and although I have done two English-Japanese learners’ dictionaries, it is my first time to work on a Japanese-English dictionary. The work can be tedious sometimes, but it is an interesting experience.

The writing of ESL dictionaries is significantly different from the writing of the English dictionaries that most of the readers here may be familiar with (OED, etc.) in the sense that it involves a lot of cross-linguistic (mental) activities. Especially, for this Japanese-English dictionary, the editors keep emphasizing to us how we must provide real-life expressions, those that people actually use, rather than the literal translation of the given word that traditional Japanese-English dictionaries have been criticised for listing uselessly. In this sense, this work is aiming to shape up as an organized collection of expressions, not a list of words or grammatical explanations about the words.

To give you a very simple example, for the entry that typically stands for ’stomach’, I am to first come up with expressions in JAPANESE that we actually use, including ’stomach is empty’. Of course, no one says ‘my stomach is empty’ in English. Then, I provide the equivalent expressions that we actually use in ENGLISH, ‘I am hungry’. Furthermore, when you want to say you are very hungry, in Japanese you say something like ’stomach is very empty’, which should be expressed in English as something like ‘I am very hungry’, ‘I am really hungry’, or ‘I am starving’, which might be more ‘real’.

Also, you might have noticed that in the Japanese that I provided above, ’stomach is empty’, there is no determiner. It is absent in Japansese. In Japanese, you tend do omit personal pronouns, whereas English requires one; when you say ‘I went to school’ in English, they say ‘went to school’, which is usually enough for the hearer to know that the person who went to school is the speaker. Using of a personal pronoun is always possible but, when you used it redundantly, the sentence becomes less natural. Hence, in the dictionary I work on, I am expected to omit the personal pronouns in the Japanese sentences wherever I can, to make it more ‘real’.

Working on these things makes me remember the old days when I studied English at school. In the translation exercises, which were a lot, we always had to translate everything in full: when there is an ‘I’, you have to always spell out the ‘I’. As a result, all the Japanese sentences translated from English were really weird. I think it was part of the reason why, in our mind, ‘School English’ was never real English and no matter how well you know School English, you never feel like actually knowing the real English.

I hope this new dictionary, a collection of ‘real’ English expressions that I deliver from my experience using the real English here, will help the students a bit with their long endeavor to acquire communication skills in the ‘real’ English.

How did we/should we learn a second language?

Published
by
Yukiko
on November 21, 2006
in ESL, Higher Education and Language
. 4 Comments

(This post is more of asking questions and trying to start a conversation. I hope that through this I can find out more of everyone’s experiences and thoughts on second language learning and language education in general…)

Across the ocean in Japan, there has been a whole debate over whether they should start teaching English earlier in schools. This is due to the worrying reality that Japanese people are not so great at learning English, especially in terms of speaking and listening. Many parents, hopeful for their children possibly becoming ‘bilingual’ or ‘international’, send them to expensive ‘kids’ English classes’ to make a headstart. Reflecting on the trend, the government is on the move to revise the national curriculm so that English classes start earlier than the current 7th grade. They are also considering revising the curriculum so that English classes have more ‘communicative’ components, such as speaking and listening, i.e. reducing the number of classes that used to be devoted to reading and grammar.

My former supervisor at the university I went to, Yoshifumi Saito, opposes to the idea. He believes that good English skills comes from good grammar knowledge and reading skills. He claims that although learning ‘basic conversations’ can be done at an early age, you would choke as you try to communicate more complex information if no one taught you much grammar and you didn’t get to read much.
He also argues for the importance of teaching their native language before emphasizing English language learning. He argues that unless students acquire good knowledge and command of the Japanese language, they will never acquire good command in English.
Therefore, according to him, starting English earlier and only teaching ‘communication’ while reducing the number of Japanese classes (you can only teach for so long!) would never work. (Sorry I would give a reference but as far as I looked his publications are in Japanese).

I think I agree with him overall. I have never really met anyone who received all the A’s in Japanese but D’s in English. It is the matter of enriching your ‘language sense’ so to speak, and you enrich your sense primarily by quality native language experience (e.g. reading and appreciating literary works). I also think that knowing the grammar of a language well is very important especially at an advanced level; it ultimately matters in any aspects of ESL learning. But the dilemma is that the current state in Japan definitely needs improvement. Even people who are called ‘English teachers’ do not know English so well; starting English classes earlier faces with this practical issue that we just don’t have enough elementary school teachers who know English well enough to even do this.

I would like to take this opportunity to ask the readers what they think. If English is your second language, how did you learn it? If English is your first language, how did you learn your second language? What did you think of the way you were taught or given opportunities to learn it? How important do you think knowing the grammar of a language is? Do you think knowing your native language is related to your foreign language learning?

American English as a Second Language?

Published
by
Yukiko
on October 27, 2006
in Language and Non-Standard English
. 1 Comment

I just finished running a psycholinguistic experiment for my dissertation research. I am working in the field of sentence processing, which looks at how one ‘parses’ the sentences they hear and how to resolve potential ambiguity they might encounter. My project is on English and I am targeting native speakers of English, more precisely those of American English. The participants are undergraduates at Queens Collee who are enrolled in Psychology 101, and they were doing this for a course credit.

This is how the experiment goes. You read a mini dialogue, proceeding from one ‘frame’ to another with the button press, and your task is to choose the answer choice that best fits the dialogue in the third frame. For example,

<start dialogue>
1. Until Frank got the fancy job
that he was just bragging about,
<proceed>
2. how much money was he making?
<proceed>
3. He earned far less than you. OR He earned more than anyone.
<choose Left or Right>

Obviously the right hand answer would best fit the dialogue if you carefully
read and understood the content of the whole dialogue.
I won’t go into details of what we are interested in testing, but it suffices here to know that although students tend to think that they are only being tested for the question-answering accuracy, we also measure how long it took to move through the dialogue, and compare the ‘reading times’ across different constructions.

After running the experiment, we evaluated their performance, since if the participants are reading too slow or making too many errors, we need to discard the data. And an interesting thing I noticed was that most of the data that we had to throw away come from people who were recent immigrants from other places where English is spoken but that English is a dialect that is not American English (for example, Jamaica or Trinidad). They were all ‘prescreened’ by the research management system as native speakers of English. But it fascinated me to know that it showed such a systematic difference in performance between people who are early immigrants (came to the US in their infancy (0-6)) and those who came later (9 or later, when according to a theory the learning of a second language will become dramatically more difficult).
As I interacted with them as the experimenter, they speak good English and they look and behave reasonably smart - it’s not like they forged their background information or they are not part of the smart bunch. I can see them contribute good ideas to the class and write good papers. But in the world of milliseconds in an intricate reading experiment like this, the difference shows up. Their reading speed was almost as if they were second language speakers of English, though highly proficient ones.

Although we are not looking to research on this issue, I brought this up in the meeting I had with one of my advisors and we agreed that the dialectal difference between American English and their English is so huge that we just can’t view them as the kind of ‘native speakers of English’ that we are targeting for.
It has definitely proven something to me. The students who speak certain dialects of English, though treated the same as other American native speakers, they might have more in common with advanced ESL population than we think. And, from my experience of interacting with them, it is definitely not the matter of intellect, or their ‘broken’ English. Though this point may be obvious to some people, I feel like I truly learned something about the variety of Englishes.

Why are they having difficulty ‘participating’?

Published
by
Yukiko
on September 28, 2006
in ESL and Oral Communication
. 8 Comments

The other day, I visited one of the psychology classes that I am working with. As we waited for the class to start, the professor seemed to be having a problem with getting the classroom computer to recognize her flash drive. She looked panicked, because the whole class depended on the file she had in the stick.
Then an Asian student, apparently technology-savvy, stood up and offered help by switching the flash drive to the back slot. (I didn’t know, but apparently those front slots sometimes don’t work as well as the back ones). And voila! the computer recognized it this time. Relieved, the professor said, “Thank you! Class participation, right there!”

I was born and raised in Japan like any other Japanese kids, and after I graduated from college I went for a Master’s degree in the UK. Before I left, I took a prep course on ’studying abroad’, taught by someone with her Ph.D. from the Michigan State University. I still remember feeling overwhelmed and scared when I learned how “in universities in the US (and probably the UK too), class participation is mandatory and you will be penalized for not speaking up in many of the classes. If you don’t speak up, they think you are not paying attention, you think the class is boring, or you don’t have any ideas”. In Japan, this is definitely not the case. It is not common to speak up or discuss something in class unless it is a specially designed ‘discussion course’ (and you don’t come across such courses often). Most of the classes are just lectures, where the teacher does all the talking and the students just listen, nod every once in a while and take notes. You are not supposed to express your opinions in class. You can speak, but that’s only when you answer the questions asked, when you want clarification, or when you can’t read his handwriting on the blackboard :-). Presenting different opinions from the teacher’s (or your seniors’ in general) is often interpreted as rebellious or rude and they say that you show respect and politeness by being silent and not interrupting. In some ways, you are ‘participating’ by being quiet rather than chitchatting with your friends.

In such an environment, it is hard to be critical about the subject matter, at least on the spot. Although you are given an opportunity to express your opinions elsewhere (in your term paper, for example), the style of instruction is definitely not the same as in the US, or for that matter, in many parts of the western countries. You also have much lesser opportunities to do group work or give oral presentations.

Of course, I can’t speak for everyone in Japan when I talk about this. Some Japanese people are extremely proactive and talkative. But it seems generally true that Japanese students find it harder to ‘participate’ in classes in American schools. I think it is also somewhat true for students from other parts of Asia. As far as my experience of teaching in this country goes, Asian students are generally quieter than other students (they almost never open their mouth unless they are one-on-one with me). I wonder if that’s too much of stereotyping, or there is some truth to it. I also wonder if there are other factors in other cultures that are associated with a particular communication style. (E.g. an aggressive communication style associated with some kind of cultural, or even linguistic, factors?)

In any case, if the way students were raised and taught in their own culture has something to do with the typical communication style they have in college, then there needs to be more recognition of ‘cultural factors’ when we think about students’ communication skills. It may not be just language issues that ESL students from Asian countries are facing …

I am not suggesting that we should be easier on Asian students just because of this. Of course, some students may be just too shy to speak up; some students might be just insecure about their language skills. But it may simply be that they can’t help but ‘participate’ according to their own cultural scheme. It would be good for those struggling ones to know that their culture is (at least partly) responsible for the ‘participation issues’ they have, feel better, and then think about what they can do about it. People who already know this do strategize. Someone I know reckoned, “You can’t fight off those western people. Participate before everyone else starts doing so (e.g. Give the class the review of the last session or homework answers, which are relatively easy to do and you have less competition)”. Surely this Asian guy in the psychology class knew what to do: help the panicking professor set up the class!