Why they don’t ask questions

April 30, 2007 By 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.

Filed Under: Baruch College, ESL, Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Symposium

Tracking where you look…

April 5, 2007 By Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: ESL, Language

The Universe of English: A Freshman English Program

March 20, 2007 By Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: ESL

Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University

March 13, 2007 By 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.)

Filed Under: ESL, Language, Resources

ESL challenges

February 24, 2007 By 3 Comments

This semester I am working with a world literature class that is composed solely of ESL students. It is the first time such a section is offered, so it is sort of an experiment. The content is the same as for a native-speaker class, but the class is smaller, so students get an opportunity to participate in class discussions more often, and they are not in the “ESL-minority”, so they don’t feel shy about leading conversations in English. They also have an additional 1,5 hour tutorial, where they learn about writing techniques, some ESL-specific writing issues and get an opportunity to practice writing. I believe this format is beneficial for many ESL students, but it seems that it still does not alleviate all of their problems.

After a recent discussion of thesis statements in general and potential thesis statements for their paper, their instructor came up to me and said she was shocked at how little they had understood of the texts. This was surprising for her since she knew that these are smart students. I started pondering about it, and about the comments the students made about the text. I think that now I see what might be the problem. When you are learning a second language and have not mastered it yet, there is a period when you feel that you are using it as a child, which is very frustrating, because you know and understand much more than you can express. And when you are reading in your second language, the amount of unknown words bogs you down so much that you can hardly appreciate the depth of the argument or the style of the author, even if you would have grasped it in your native language. It seems to me that this is what might be happening. The amount of reading in that class is quite substantial. A native reader probably does not need as much extra time to go from the ‘surface reading’ to the full picture, with cultural allusions, undercurrents, etc. But for many ESL students it is long and exhausting enough to trudge through the plot, so they have no time or energy to go back and deconstruct the text. I don’t know if there is a perfect solution for this, but maybe it would be better to reduce the amount of reading in such classes, and spend more time during class on going from the ‘surface’ of the text to the possible deeper readings. Would you agree?

Filed Under: ESL, Language, literature

A Collection of ‘Real’ English

February 15, 2007 By 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.

Filed Under: ESL, Language, Literacy

How did we/should we learn a second language?

November 21, 2006 By 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?

Filed Under: ESL, Higher Education, Language

Why are they having difficulty ‘participating’?

September 28, 2006 By 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!

Filed Under: ESL, Oral Communication

Accent reduction

May 3, 2006 By 16 Comments

The issue of accent keeps coming up with the students that rehearse oral presentations with me – and I’m not the one bringing it up. Many students are very self-conscious about their accent. Some of them just ask for advice on how to pronounce this or that word, others express their concern that they will receive a worse grade for their presentation because of their heavy accent, yet others are worried about their future job interviews, some of which could happen over the phone. And recently one of the students asked me whether there is an accent reduction program/service/course/whatever available at Baruch. I don’t think there is anything like that, am I wrong?

It seems to me that given a large number of ESL students at Baruch, this would be a valuable program to have. And if nothing like that exists at Baruch, maybe we should think about collaborating with the ESL program on this issue. If there aren’t very many resources available for a consultation service or a course on accent reduction, maybe it would be worth it to acquire someaccent reduction software? What do you all think?

Filed Under: ESL, Language, Oral Communication

What’s social psychology got to do with it?

December 5, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Last week I attended a very interesting talk by Joshua Aronson, an NYU professor of psychology on the fragility of human intelligence. Aronson began his talk by recounting how intimidated he was by his academic advisor when he was a graduate student in Princeton and how he lost a few IQ points every time he entered his office. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the feeling. I can’t be the only one who thinks that part of the Ph.D. training is about constantly doubting our intellectual capacity and questioning whether we really belong here or not!

Ten years ago Claude Steele from Stanford University and Josh Aronson published a series of laboratory experiments with White and Black college students and argued that the achievement gap on standardized test scores between White and Black students is not only a result of racism, poverty and unequal opportunities, but also a phenomenon they called “stereotype threat”, that is an “apprehension arising from the awareness of a negative stereotype or personal reputation in a situation where the stereotype is relevant and thus confirmable”. In their study, before taking the verbal part of the GRE students were either told that the test was diagnostic of their intellectual abilities or that the test was in the process of being developed. While White students performed equally well under both types of instructions, Black students’ performance decreased sharply when they thought the test was diagnostic of their abilities, that is, when they were threatened by the possibility of confirming a cultural stereotype about their group if they performed poorly. In the non-diagnostic condition, they performed almost as well as Whites did. These findings stimulated over 100 other studies which replicated the effect with Latino students, Whites’ math ability when compared to Asians, women’s math ability when compared to men, and older people’s memory performance. Stereotype threat has been the hot thing in social and educational psychology in the last decade.

What this volume of research suggests is that academic learning and performance occur in very specific contexts that are shaped by cultural stereotypes and situational pressures such as the awareness of who else is in the room. This is of course not news for us. Nevertheless, I wonder to what extent we are aware of and how we deal with cultural stereotypes that inform students’ expectations for their own performance in our work as writing and communication fellows. For example, while working with immigrant students who hadn’t noticed my accent and who are almost always apologetic about their English, I see that they get more relaxed and more engaged in the work when I tell them that I’m not a native speaker either and that I used to make the same mistakes. I wouldn’t want to fall prey to stereotyping myself but I did notice that, at least among the students I met with, men tend to write shorter papers –and not necessarily more to the point. What are the stereotypes about writing, and verbal communication in general that lead some students to disengage from the activity or that make them anxious, and what do we do about them? And how does the diversity of CUNY classrooms inform students’ expectations for their performance? I’d like to hear from other fellows and those of us who teach.

Filed Under: ESL, Language, Pedagogy
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