Archive for the 'ESL' Category

The Constitution of Articles: Our Surface Errors, Ourselves…

Published
by
Barrie
on November 17, 2008
in ESL and Feedback
. 5 Comments

I am disturbed by the degree to which grammar errors can be destiny, out of proportion to their actual context. For example, should someone who can design a wind tunnel or a life-saving evacuation system or build a robot end up failing an exit exam from a technical college because he or she has made too many grammatical errors? What if that student has only been speaking English for 4 or 5 years? While nobody would deny that the student should and must continue to improve his English, shouldn’t his engineering skills take precedence at a technical college? I’m sure that everyone reading this has faced some version of this problem-I suppose it’s one of the central problems if not THE central problem of student assessment in a linguistically-diverse culture. Yet even barring grading rubrics that would strike most teachers as unfair (counting article mistakes individually, for example-don’t get me started!), non-native speakers face challenges in their coursework that are both more complex than I originally understood , and, I think, less “inevitable” then they seem.

I’m working with some project reports, which are group-written and must conform to fairly strict guidelines. Not surprisingly, the native speakers tend to do most of the writing so that the entire group isn’t penalized for grammar and syntax issues. While understandable, this situation creates conditions that are detrimental to the whole group: First , it forces the second-language speakers to do a lot of the legwork in order to “pull their weight” while potentially overshadowing their contribution, and second, it pretty much destroys any kind of group ownership of the project. When meeting with the groups, I found myself addressing the writer of each section (which I could sort of guess by noticing who perked up as I reached it), rather than the group as a whole, which generally demurred with comments like “Oh, I don’t know about that part-I didn’t write it”, or “you’ll have to ask _____-she wrote the whole thing.” Over time it dawned on me that most of the non-writers weren’t even reading their own group’s report! When I suggested some different divisions of labor (and also that it might not be the best idea to put your name on something you haven’t read) _everyone_ agreed that the chance of being graded badly on grammar/syntax errors was too great to risk, and that it really didn’t matter whether they read the report or not, at least in terms of their grade (i.e. the way that “matters”!) I admit that I didn’t have the guts to ask about the division of labor during the design process, but it occurs to me now that I might find a way to speak to the groups _generally_ about their experience working in groups. I wanted to encourage the non-native speakers to participate more in the writing process (increasing their control over their contribution ), but felt it would be hypocritical, given the very real repercussions their “mistakes” might have on their groups’ grade. I don’t have immediate solutions for this problem, of course, but I thought I’d get it on the table. Thoughts?

Digital Learning and The Schwartz Institute: Northern Voice 2008

Published
by
Mikhail
on February 29, 2008
in Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Conferences, ESL, Higher Education, Literacy, Pedagogy, Technology, Web 2.0, Writing Instruction, northernvoice and nv08
. 2 Comments

collage by injenuity

Earlier this week I returned from my first Northern Voice, a remarkable conference on social media at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. (The keynote speaker was none other than Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress, the open-source blogging platform we have started to use here at Baruch, but that’s for another post.) I spent most of my time at NV around a great group of Canadian and American edubloggers and instructional technologists who have channeled their energies towards exploring how the technologies and media that facilitate all manner of social interaction online might be harnessed to transform teaching and learning. Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Jen Jones, Bill Fitzgerald, and our old friend Jim Groom made me feel welcome at NV and helped me gain invaluable insight into some of the IT projects we’ve taken on at the Schwartz Communication Institute. Most of all, they helped facilitate my thinking through of some of the more salient work we’ve been undertaking lately as well as new directions in which we might move .

For the last 10 years, we have described what we’re trying to do at the Schwartz Institute as “infusing oral, written and computer mediated communication-intensive activities” into Baruch’s undergraduate curriculum. What exactly we mean by the terms in italics above has mutated and evolved over the years as we’ve experimented with new pedagogies and played around with our ideas of what it means to communicate purposefully and effectively.

What we mean when we talk about “computer-mediated communication” has changed most in meaning. At first it was just a way of modifying “written communication”: writing but on computers, mostly email and asynchronous chat via Blackboard. It merely acknowledged the generic differences between the kinds of writing our students did that ended up on paper and those which were both transmitted electronically and read on a screen. This included a limited notion of blogging as simply an occasion for writing and not so much of interacting within any broader community of knowledge producers.

Since our engagement with the key ideas that inform the conversations at Northern Voice, what we mean by “computer mediated communication” has changed to the point that “mediated” is no longer appropriate or especially useful (even “computer” seems limiting). It’s not mediated, it’s facilitated, even transformed by the tools we use. (Medium=Message, etc. etc.) What we’re concerned with now is not just writing with a computer but something much more complex, nuanced, and more exciting: something social. And it no longer involves just writing but other media as well. We have started to encourage faculty to allow students to compose not only in words but also with sound, images, moving and still, and all manner of found objects from the vast vast universe that is the internet. We have started to play around with ways of aggregating the knowledge students produce and encouraging them to offer it up to other community members while maintaining a sense of ownership and of responsibility for their own work.

Kathy Davidson’s distinction between Instructional Technology and Digital Learning has been helpful in illuminating where the Institute has been and where we’re going with electronic media in the work we do with students and faculty. Davidson says:

IT is usually institutionalized from the top down whereas digital learning is shared, contributory, collective, collaborative, customizable. With IT, teachers or, even more typically, administrators propose and implement and often require other teachers and students to use a particular new instructional tool in a certain way and to certain ends. In digital media and learning, the outcomes are less clear, the teachers have less of a determining role, and technology isn’t something delivered to others but is intrinsic to the larger learning project. Its building and application are part of the collective learning experience. The purpose of IT is to facilitate instruction. Digital learning can happen in school–but is as likely to take place at recess or in the lunch room as in the classroom. . . . Digital learning enhances and takes advantage of all the various ways we do things on line, allows us to customize and remix and repurpose online tools, communities, games, and other media, and, wherever possible, also makes us think about the implications and applications of the technologies we use so that we can learn, think, and act better together.

Facilitating digital learning is where we’re headed and I thank everyone I spoke to at NV for helping me get my head around that and showing me some of key tools and approaches that will become indispensable to our work.

Creative Commons License photo credits: injenuity and penmachine

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.

Making the Process Work

Published
by
Olga
on October 12, 2007
in Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, ESL, Low-Stakes Writing and Process
. 2 Comments

Inspired in many ways by Luke’s post, I asked students in my Great Works tutorial whether they would want to share their thoughts and questions on our Blackboard discussion board.  To my slight surprise (this class is already very demanding of their time - they come to the 90-minute tutorial every week and often attend the Writing Center) they overwhelmingly agreed.  I see that despite the product-oriented writing instruction or perhaps because of it, students long for a safe space to share their thoughts in.  They really seem to understand the need for a process to take place before any product can be put out.  For this reason, I think it’s a great idea to have the tutorial in the first place, as it provides plenty of room for that process to develop.  In a similar way, the Writing Center with its “I Write” campaign, which seeks to give student writers a sense of empowerment, is also a comfortable Baruch venue where academic professionals serve as facilitators not judges of their writing efforts.

  I hope that Blackboard discussions would be valuable for my group of Great Works students.  Some of them need a lot of support in language areas, and they are the ones who would probably benefit most from these online discussions.  However, I’m afraid they would also be the least forthcoming participants.  Can those of you who have experience initiating blogs suggest ways to reach out to most diffident participants? 

How Can We Best Support ESL and Remedial Students?

Published
by
Olga
on September 24, 2007
in ESL, Language and Literacy
. 5 Comments

I was an undergraduate student at Queens College in the late 1990s when remedial instruction was eliminated in four-year CUNY colleges.  One measure to alleviate the rigidity of the new policy was Prelude to Success, the program that allowed students needing remediation to be conditionally admitted to four-year schools.  These students’ determination to succeed in their first crucial semester at Queens was truly admirable.  Working closely with such students, I saw a vast majority of them, ESL or not, successfully exiting remediation and becoming full-time students at Queens. 

At Baruch, ESL students receive strong support in handling the curriculum of English and literature courses.  There are now several sections of Composition and Intro. to Literature courses (2100 and 2150) designed specifically for ESL students who attend a one-hour tutorial every week as a part of their class.  It was interesting and extremely rewarding for me to lead these tutorials as a Writing Center Consultant last semester.  This current semester I learned about the existence of 2800 “T” (Great Works of Literature with a Tutorial).  In fact, a big part of my Writing Fellow work now is 1 ½ - hour weekly meetings with 2800 “T” students.  Even though the population of this class can hardly be called ESL - there has been a registration glitch, and many students who don’t need the tutorial rushed to get into this section because it was open.  In my next post(s), I’ll gladly share my difficulties and pleasures in leading this unusual tutorial.  For now, I want to dwell on the place of ESL students in classes across disciplines. 

Transfer students from foreign schools who “fall through the cracks” and enroll in regular English and other courses with intensive reading and writing; freshmen who struggle in exhausting summer Immersion classes; continuing students who are making gradual progress in learning English - they all find their way into classrooms where they want to “sound American” and eliminate all grammar problems that prevent them from succeeding academically and socially.  They may be afraid to speak in class; they may want to get rid of their accents in speech and writing; they often simplify their thoughts because they can’t find the right words to articulate the full complexity of their thinking. They receive papers with many corrections and sadly agree that they don’t deserve to get above “B” because their “grammar is bad.” They run to the Writing Center or SACC for help, often hoping to get their papers cleaned up and polished.  They are used to hearing “Could you say that again?” or “I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ….”. 

Whether we set out to teach these students in our classrooms or lead workshops for them, we can’t overlook these interconnected issues.   I hope we can all exchange some constructive approaches to dealing with ESL writers and speakers.  I just want to share a few strategies that I found particularly useful: finding and praising a strong point in the writer’s/speaker’s thinking, resisting the urge to eliminate original formulations that do not “sound American,” and finally helping students see that the abundance of red marks in their papers does not mean that they make an abundant number of mistakes — it simply means they make a few recurrent ones. In my work as a tutor, I found it very useful to use a particular color for each type of error.  This way the student knew that he/she had 2 or 3 problem areas and not 20 or 30. 

One particular article has been especially helpful in my work with ESL students: “Editing Line by Line” by Cynthia Linville (ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors.  Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2004.  84-93.).  Linville explains that there are “[s]ix error types that are treatable and are often frequent or serious in ESL college compositions”; these include subject-verb agreement, verb tense, verb form, singular/plural noun endings, word form, sentence structure.  When we focus on what’s treatable and teachable, we will help students to learn English more efficiently, build their confidence and preserve their unique voices. 

Accent Reduction, take 2

Published
by
Yana
on June 5, 2007
in ESL and Language
. 3 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.

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.

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.

Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University

Published
by
Mikhail
on March 13, 2007
in ESL, Language and Resources
. 5 Comments

Oh the wonders of the web. Linguist Steven Weinberger of George Mason University administers and maintains the wholly impressive Speech Accent Archive, a collection of recordings of native speakers of a myriad different languages (currently 210) reading the same passage in English:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

Here are some examples from native speakers of Georgian, Urdu, Norwegian, and Tamil.

There are currently 661 samples and more are added regularly. Many of them include phonetic transcriptions of the recording and are annotated with phonological generalizations, general rules that help to describe a given speaker’s accent. Samples also include biographical data on the speakers, including age, sex, place of birth, age when they started learning English, the learning method, and a number of other interesting facts.

The interface is very easy to use and there are a number of ways to browse through the archive including by language and region. The search function is quite powerful as well. Seasoned linguists and dabblers alike can spend lots and lots of time on this site. Take a look. (Thanks to Jim of bavatuesdays for the tip.)