Making Film into a Productive Teaching Tool

March 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“The puffballs. When the puffballs come, then winter is almost gone.”

Thus begins Amarcord, Fellini’s autobiographical film, a brilliant tribute to his birthplace Rimini. I’ve been replaying its opening scene in my mind for the last few days, desperately wishing for some signs of spring in NYC.

This weekend I finally sat down and watched Amarcord in full again. The last time I watched it this closely was several years ago when I was constructing a writing assignment around it for my composition class. Naively, I thought my students would immediately share my fascination with the colorful characters and the sheer surreal beauty of some of the scenes: a boy encountering a white bull in the fog or a gorgeous peacock appearing out of nowhere in the midst of snow. To say the least, my students were not engaged when I showed the film. I was willing to connect their reaction, rather lack thereof, to anything – non-linear narrative, symbolism, unrealistic characters, insufficient introduction to Fellini on my part – but subtitles. Really, I was very surprised to learn that a small inconvenience to read short notes while watching a scene would be met with such intense resistance.

Watching the film again, I wondered how subtitles could be made into a useful tool in the classroom. If the film is in English, subtitles can work to the advantage of English language learners, or to their detriment: relying on the written text, they may turn off their listening. I did some additional searching online and found an extensive list of practices aiming to develop linguistic and cultural literacies through film as described by Anthony Helm in the post “Teaching Language Through Film” on the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) blog. Helm reports how two foreign language instructors use film to create teaching resources. A Russian instructor Alfia Rakova “develop[ed] teaching materials (readers and exercise books) from the scripts of four films. Film scripts are not regularly published, however, so it meant watching and re-watching the film countless times in order to extract a working script. From there, she could build vocabulary lists, identify parts of the film that serve to demonstrate grammatical points that she wants her students to work with and understand, and highlight language exchanges between characters that serve to model real-world interactions.” A Japanese instructor Mayumi Ishida focuses, among other things, on how “films excel at presenting clear demonstrations of non-verbal communications, which textbooks may only be able to describe.” I find the whole post illuminating when thinking about the place of film in the classroom across disciplines and encourage those interested in the subject to take a look.

Filed Under: ESL, Media, Pedagogy

Ciao! Bye! Do widzenia! Tschüss!

December 1, 2010 By 1 Comment

Image taken from http://www.propwishbook.org

Living in a bilingual family raises all kinds of communication issues: questions about what it means to be a native speaker of a language, how to associate each language with a different culture and how to hold your own as a non-native. Sure, in New York City it’s easy to find multilingual households, so it’s a wonderful environment to experience a multiplicity of cultures and languages.

But at home, a family setting is its own microcosm. Having come from a monolingual family I find it fascinating to wonder about just how to create an environment that would lead to a bilingual child. How does one navigate the challenges of introducing a child to a minority language and, no less important, to the minority culture, in a household dominated by the English language and by the ever present American culture.

Developmental psychologists and linguists generally agree that knowing a second language is a big advantage in a globalized world. More than that, bilingualism makes it possible to see the world in more complex ways and to better understand other cultures and countries. There are huge advantages to learning a second language early in life such as developing the cognitive firepower devoted to language acquisition, having improved attention span and it is definitely easier later to learn additional languages. Not so long ago, skeptics argued that bilingualism confuses kids or causes language delays.

When kids mixed languages and choose to speak in a funny concoction of two languages, they appeared to be confused, when in fact they were making sense of the world in which every object has two names ( and in some case a gender as well.) We now know that being bilingual has no down side.

Raising a bilingual child requires a major commitment from all family members but, in particular, from the speaker of the minority or non-native language in the household. It requires a special effort, particularly when it is difficult for a child to find speakers of the minority language or to find educational material in that language. There are also varying degrees of bilingualism: from understanding the language spoken to you by family members, to being able to speak it yourself, and finally to fluently read and communicate with near native fluency.

One of one of the most common methods of teaching bilingualism is known as “one language, one location method.” It works by designating areas of life, sometimes areas of the home, where a minority language will be exclusively spoken. For instance, while English is the dominant language in the school and with peers, the minority language will always be used at home or during weekends or perhaps only at dinnertime. This requires both parents to be able to speak that minority language. Another method, often considered easier and perhaps better at achieving quicker results is the “one person, one language” method, where a minority speaker in the house uses his or her language exclusively to speak to the child. Many families which are not fluent in a second or third language find ways to introduce a child to another language and culture by, for instance, sending him or her to a kindergarten where a foreign language is spoken or hiring a nanny who speaks a foreign language exclusively.

Even if one of the parents is fluent in a minority language and is devoted to helping a child become bilingual, competence in two languages and cultures is a difficult thing to achieve. The ability to devote appropriate time and resources to this task can be made more difficult by just how rare the minority language is, or how difficult it is to provide the child with meaningful interactions with the speakers of the second language. As kids grow into teenagers, new problems appear, from rebellion against a language that is not spoken by the child’s peers and may seem archaic or strange, to the child’s diminished interest in learning the second language.

Regardless of the challenges I think it is worthwhile raising a bilingual child. What is your method? Advice? Experience?

Filed Under: ESL, Language

Common idioms: prosaic and provocative

November 5, 2010 By 1 Comment

The other day I took part in a public conversation at the Austrian Cultural Forum. My co-speaker was a contemporary artist from lower Austria, an international residency-hopper currently based just outside Seoul. The two of us spoke for an hour or so, with him presenting groups of installation images and explanations of past projects, and my interjecting longish questions and observations.

Because the preparation for our chat largely consisted of lots of, well, chatting, we didn’t spend much time going over the presentation itself. A couple of hours before we were scheduled to speak, I noticed that there was a quite a bit of time and space (an entire Powerpoint slide) dedicated to explaining the colloquial term “on the fly.” There were several definitions listed, but no usage at all out of the ordinary that would make the term worth noting or discussing, I thought.

“On the fly,” I pointed out, “is a term that most English-speakers won’t need explained to them—do you really think we need that in there?” But he insisted that the term was critical to his practice and defined an essential element of how he moved through collaborative, community-based structural projects. As it turned out, he had only discovered the term a couple of years earlier and found it revelatory, insisting that there was no equivalent in German (insert snarky comment about stiflingly rigid Teutonic order here).

So I put my pedantry aside and we worked it into the conversation, getting into a slightly more sophisticated discussion on the structural limitations of language and architectural terminology. And I found myself thinking about multi-lingual learners here at Baruch, and how elements of the long process of language acquisition figures into the (equally long) process of articulating ideas. When a student makes much of a particular point that seems hackneyed or obvious, it might initially be worth unpacking even further, rather than immediately focusing on how to quickly achieve more concision. What about this particular idea has them so enraptured, and why? How might it be broken open to reveal something more complicated or interesting?

Filed Under: ESL, Language

Guest Post: Support for Oral Communication within the ESL Curriculum at Baruch College

February 2, 2009 By 2 Comments

The following is a guest post from Professor Elisabeth Garies, of Baruch College’s Department of Communication Studies. She can be reached at Elisabeth.Gareis@baruch.cuny.edu.

Oral communication instruction is traditionally somewhat neglected in the ESL curricula and services of colleges. Many programs focus on reading/writing proficiency and give only nominal, if any attention to listening/speaking skills. The imbalance is due to a great extent to college entrance requirements and grading practices in college classes: Students are often only tested for reading and writing proficiency but not for speaking skills. With the correlation between spoken and written proficiency in nonnative speakers being only moderate, it is no surprise then that some students graduate with low proficiency in spoken English.

This status quo is in stark contrast to the skills needed for integration into the college community and success in the workplace. In fact, oral communication skills are consistently ranked most important by employers of business as well as liberal arts graduates. Yet, every semester, nonnative students report that they are being asked by teammates not to speak during group presentations so that team grades are jeopardized. They also report being dismissed from job interviews due to comprehension-inhibiting accents.

It is paramount, therefore, that we address oral-communication competence. Two services are available for students at Baruch College: (1) Students can go to the Student Academic Consulting Center (SACC, VC 2-116) and make an appointment for free one-on-one tutorials with a professional speech tutor. (2) Students can visit the new ESL Lab (VC6-121, enter through VC6-120) and practice with the excellent software, audio, and video materials there. See http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for hours, instructions, and materials.

To give an example: It’s the beginning of a semester. An (ideal) instructor collects writing samples and engages his/her students in speaking activities to determine whether a student may need assistance. The student is then encouraged (required?) to make an appointment with one of the speech tutors at SACC (the tutors, by the way, are all professionally trained speech pathologists and ESL specialists). During the first meeting, a diagnostic conversation/reading takes place, and the tutor determines which speech patterns are the cause of he students comprehensibility problems.

While the student may already have an idea about some patterns (e.g., differentiating between /r/ and /l/), some problems are more difficult to determine. For example, many languages have a syllable-timed rhythm (i.e., syllables have the same length); English, however, is a stressed-timed language (i.e., the rhythm of a sentence is determined by the regular beat of the stressed syllables only). Try to say the following sentences out loud as you clap your hands on the stressed syllables. You will notice that the sentences take the same amount of time, although the first one is much shorter than the last one. This is because of the stress-timed nature of English.

The lion came.
The lioness came.
The lionesses came.
The lionesses arrived.
The lionesses have arrived.

Comprehensibility problems often arise from stress problems; e.g., when a speaker from a syllable-timed language used his/her native rhythm to speak English. A staccato delivery ensues that makes it difficult for English listeners–who are used to listening for word and sentence stress–to follow the speaker.

In any case, once the student is diagnosed, the tutor will help the student produce the speech pattern correctly in one-on-one tutorials. When the student can produce the speech pattern, he/she needs to practice to commit the new pattern to muscle memory. It is said that our body has to practice a new movement (including speech organ movement) 1,000 times before the movement becomes muscle memory. Please see the Accent Reduction FAQs at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for more information.

Ideally, a student should see a speech tutor once a week and practice individually in the lab several times a week. With regular practice, significant progress can be made, even in the course of one semester. Please alert your students to these services. and remind them that, to change speech patterns, regular practice is necessary

Filed Under: Baruch College, ESL, Oral Communication, Resources

The Constitution of Articles: Our Surface Errors, Ourselves…

November 17, 2008 By 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?

Filed Under: ESL, Feedback

Digital Learning and The Schwartz Institute: Northern Voice 2008

February 29, 2008 By 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

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Conferences, ESL, Higher Education, Literacy, northernvoice, nv08, Pedagogy, Technology, Web 2.0, Writing Instruction

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

Making the Process Work

October 12, 2007 By 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? 

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, ESL, Low-Stakes Writing, Process

How Can We Best Support ESL and Remedial Students?

September 24, 2007 By 6 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. 

Filed Under: ESL, Language, Literacy

Accent Reduction, take 2

June 5, 2007 By 5 Comments

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

Filed Under: ESL, Language
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