ITA story
In our business we are the gateway; if people are good and capable teachers, at least as far as their speaking goes, they go on and teach at the university, and if their speaking, or some aspects of their teaching, falls short, they stay with us until everything improves. We are always afraid of disasters further up the chain. If there is a teacher at the university who can't be understood by students, that's indirectly our fault.
Yesterday afternoon at about 3:30, there was an explosion in the Chemistry building. Today, I decided to see what I could find out about it, and I checked my roll until I found the one student who was in the Chemistry department. After class, I asked her if she knew anything about the explosion.
In a nutshell she said this. There were two students under the direction of one TA. The TA was in her lab; she knew the TA (both she and the TA were Chinese). One of the students poured an acid in with a base, in a toxic waste container, and it blew up. People ended up in the hospital and came back with bandages covering glass wounds. Nobody was killed, fortunately. Also, it was the second explosion at the Chemistry building, although I know nothing about the first (I remember it vaguely, and I think it was worse, but I didn't do research on it, and have no idea what caused it, or how much worse).
Then I asked her about the TA. She said, you passed this very TA in the summer workshop, whereas you flunked me, so here I am, in your class. Now this floored me. I did not remember flunking this particular student, although it could be possible; in the summer workshop there are many students, and we often grade them for very short presentations and hardly see them the rest of the month. Same with the name she gave me; it sounded familiar, but I didn't recognize it as someone I knew well.
But the question remains. I'm a father, so I know how you can have native English, and still give someone instruction, and still have them do something stupid, or dangerous, or both, for no better reason than that they weren't thinking. Lots of times, it has nothing to do with language at all. But if you're a good teacher, and presumably Chemistry students want to be chemists, at least on some level, and if your communication is clear, and if your instruction is clear, generally they don't dump acid onto a base, even in a waste container. So, to what degree could this have been caused by language, or communication skills, or some other kind of failure?
Good question.
Labels: ita's, ttu
May report
So what have I been doing with my life? Several things. My semester of work is over here; I worked half-time, partly in an ITA class, and partly in the University Writing Center, but I will teach full-time in the ITA Workshop in mid-July, so that counts to bring my appointment up to the 3/4 time I am paid for. What is annoying about working half-time is that whenever you teach
anything, your worrying expands to fill up the space, so you
might as well be working full-time, because you're worrying full-time. I try to put time into other things, and do; I've been writing, I've been working on my music, but above all, we have two new children and have to fit them into our family routine, and this has all been quite draining. I turned 60, and some days, I feel very old.
But, before I give up, I have a couple of things I want to do. I've been collecting essays about acquisition, and I'm thinking of publishing them. I've also been writing about language as a self-organizing system, and I want to collect that writing as well. These, as I envision them, are two separate books, hopefully published this year, as I've already done the vast majority fo the writing. The first has this running title:
O to be estar: Essays on language acquisition. The second has this running title:
Language as a self-organizing system. That second title is rather boring; it might need some work. But that's where it stands. These are both collections of writing that put my work out into the world. Having them on google docs, or blogs, doesn't seem to be doing it for me. Not that anyone will read it in its CreateSpace form, either. But it will make me feel like I've put it out there better.
In fact, I've become interested in the process of putting things out there in little home-made books, if only because a book is something you can hold in your hand, and bonk people on the arm with. Lately I printed my most recent
e pluribus haiku, 875 poems in a single volume which is still only $5 (+ shipping), and I find that quite awesome, sorry about the plug, but basically if I make a string of these, and put out the writing that I do, it gives me a feeling of being an author that I don't quite get from being a teacher, or being a fiddler, or being a father, all of which I am being, but which reward me in different ways. Applying this to my ESL career, there are things I've learned, and I want to say them; I want to put them out there. If I have a single book, I have a place where I can point that encapsulates my philosophy. This blog, obviously, is one place. But this blog is fading into obscurity. The best thing about it is its pink and gray (very stylish) appearance, and even that, to tell you the truth, gets old. I hate the font. I can't keep up the links on the template. I'm getting impatient with it as a mode of communication.
I missed TESOL this year, and might even miss the one in Toronto, if I'm not careful, and I
love Toronto, cold as it is in March. There are people I love who go to TESOL, and I miss them, even though they are busy integrating technology into classes, and I am not. I have gone this far and not mentioned at all how I"m on the cutting edge of using EdModo; I'm not. I've lost the desire to tell the world to get with the program and get students to use the language in new environments. To some degree, this will happen on its own, with or without me anyway. There is one more book in me, though, and that's how technology has influenced the language, the grammar, and the way people learn language and grammar. It has, in fact, created a new world, and I'm in a better position to expound on this than most people, so I should, and perhaps I will. This, you'll notice, is a distant third, it doesn't even appear in my top two. Alas, either it'll happen or it won't, what else can I say?
Stay tuned. Here's hoping this blog doesn't go the way of the wooly mammoth.
Labels: creative, ita's, self-organized systems, tesol, webheads
instant karma
When I was in graduate school, all teaching methods that involved instant feedback were out. If you were to jump on a student for pronouncing "three" as "tree," for example, he would stammer, make the correct "three" word again, lose his train of thought (not to mention his confidence), etc. Theory favored the affective side of it: let him speak as much as he is capable of speaking; let him string entire sentences together; correct him later, if at all, privately, and let him know that his pronunciation and/or grammar are impeding meaning, or should be worked on before the others. Naturally, those that impede meaning are more urgent than those that don't. Also, we are well aware that with much feedback in general, there is not a direct relationship between what you tell them to work on, and what actually gets improved on the following day. They like feedback, and appreciate it, and are especially grateful to know when it is responsible for their grade's being a little lower than they'd like, but, even when they apply themselves to changing their pronunciation or grammar, often they can't, at least not right away. Or, they will change it on a prepared speech, but immediately get thrown off when asked a question or expected to produce language spontaneously.
Now I am in a situation where I am teaching high-level learners; grammar and pronunciation are sometimes an issue, but usually not. The issue for them is often lack of tone, poor tone, long thought groups or poorly broken up thought groups, lack of prominence or no stress on important words. Tone, I think, is extremely important. They drift into a monotone, and people fall asleep, losing not only the information but also a sense of how important it is. Tone doesn't come naturally to speakers of other languages. They're head is full with creating sentences, recalling what they meant to say, making correct pronunciation (which, as I've said, is not bad at this level.
But a graduate student, A.H., has taken to giving them instant feedback on their DI (discourse intonation), mostly with their permission, and her partner, R.R., now jumps right in there beside her. They'll stop a student in the middle of the second sentence and say, "No tone!" or "Why are you using a rising tone? Are you unsure of yourself?" or perhaps, "Mind your prominence! Stress on the important words!"
Students, as I've said, liked this, and agreed to it willingly at first. They needed to know their faults and the sooner the better, they figured, even at the expense of obviously losing their train of thought, getting rattled in front of a crowd, etc. Generally they would be teaching in front of their peers. Generally their presentation was limited - maybe ten minutes at most. Generally they would stumble upon being corrected, but get back on their feet fairly quickly. Sometimes the fault that was pointed out would be corrected in what they produced after the feedback. In those cases, we could say it was a success. They were directed to mind an aspect of their DI (often one they weren't paying attention to); they would mind it; they would improve, and presumably they would learn the skill of considering DI simultaneously with the other things they were trying to juggle.
I stuck to my traditional method, which was to point out their weaknesses on a grading sheet, to be given them after (well after) their presentation, which often pointed out both DI weaknesses and traditional, pronunciation/grammar problems. My theory was that private, separated feedback could be handled more rationally later, could be separated from the plain view of peers, and allow their immediate observations more room to develop as they were speaking.
The instant feedback system had several negative consequences. One is interesting and worth noting. One poor girl, frustrated at being criticized for lack of tone, had adopted an uptalk kind of style. This actually is quite common. Students hear others doing it, and adopt it, and notice that they do better with uptalk than with nothing. I actually encourage it, although I know it's rather grating to the ears of a native speaker, it makes us say, "you're from the valley?" or "you're asking me?" or some such. But it
is a tone, developmental as it is, and it helps them begin to hear them, hear their consequences, etc. So A.H. jumps on her for her uptalk, and says, basically, "You're giving out your syllabus (true). You're telling them how you're going to grade them (also true)...and you make it a question? WHY are you using uptalk?" The poor girl, flustered, starts over again. She realizes the feedback is intended to help her, she's not overwhelmingly embarrassed. But she really doesn't
know how to vary her tones, or she would have done it. She is more embarrassed by not being able to make what she wants, than just being mistaken.
And this, in general, is probably the biggest problem. Tone becomes fluent in developmental increments, which are now disrupted, and not allowed to be half-perfect. If she develops a fear of uptalk, or picks up the disparagement on the part of native speakers in the room, she goes back to monotone. The disruption of the process sets back the entire thing, and, as a result, she can't use varying tones at all until she is entirely ready to make them all right.
I have often pointed out this tendency in the development of grammatical structures, for example, present perfect continuous. A student, in trying to say "I have been going to the Rec Center" says instead "I have been go to the Rec Center," producing an intermediate, developmental form. The computer tells them that's bad, go back to square one, or, the student is corrected and set back by an aggressive grammar-cop type of ESL teacher, who jumps on him, marks him down, publicly shames him, or whatever. Bottom line: avoid that structure altogether. Avoid trying it, avoid developing it, avoid putting it out there. Correction can have an opposite effect of stifling ordinary natural developmental progress. And it certainly doesn't reward experimentation, the risk-taking required to master anything.
These may be the traditional arguments against
all feedback, and they remind me a bit of the writing "Error correction wars" in which some theorists argued strenuously against
all error correction, and even those who were in favor of it were reduced to saying how much and how strenuously they would couch it in positive terms, save it until the end, devalue it or absorb it into larger meaning-expression issues. That kind of feedback, in writing, was
out and was staying
out as far as I could tell, last I checked. Those who wanted to know
principal from
principle were left looking online for one of those online proofreaders.
I should mention, by the way, that A.H. and R.R. tried to set up a study; they asked students how they felt; they tried to determine whether this method worked, and how students actually felt about it. While getting accurate results on its efficacy may be extremely difficult, the controlled environment under which they asked students their true opinions might yield interesting results; I'll keep you posted.
Labels: grammar, ita's, learning theory, ttu, writing
report from Lubbock
It's been almost two months since I posted here; you might think I'd died, or fallen off a cliff, for as much as I've had to say about professional matters in general. It's true that I post a little on my other blogs, which I'll mention, but most of all, I've just been busy, and as I get older, I get a little more tired, and find it more difficult to go out of my way to point out something interesting.
But it is a new term, and I owe you an update, which I will provide. I teach a new class in writing dissertations and theses, for high-level graduate students. I used my eap2 skills to set up a writing project such that we would study a public issue (in our case Lubbock water crisis) and investigate how people feel about it; it's a fairly straightforward project on the perception of people toward an environmental condition (again, eap2 prepares me well) but the class is developing the project together, though they will write reports individually. If it ends up online (which I'd prefer), I'll keep you informed. Otherwise I'll just tell you what I've learned. In essence I've learned how theses look different in different departments, and use different styles, and carry different expectations depending on what any given department would call "data".
The other class is a high-level ITA speaking class, but the difference at Texas Tech, from other places, is that we (and the self-made textbook we use) identifies and graphs out discourse features that are crucial in the conveying of meaning and intent, features such as prominence, tone, thought groups, etc. We actually categorize and measure these things so as to give students, many of whom have adequate pronunciation and grammar, more insight into what is really hampering their ability to communicate successfully. It's very interesting and, in my view, somewhat cutting-edge, since other programs don't even really know how to
talk about some of these.
My last assignment is at the Univ. Writing Lab, but it's really my favorite, because I enjoy the people and it's more like working as part of a collective of very smart people who all practice a craft together; this also is a little more like CESL, and a little less like an academic department. Frankly, my office building is a little like Europe, with teachers of Portuguese, Italian, German, French and Spanish but about as much true camaraderie as the EU as well, and you have to give the office staff 24 hours to copy anything, and sometimes I long for the more free-wheeling ESL life.
It was at the writing center, however, where they actually assigned to me
this set of youtube clips which finally stirred me up to post in this blog. It's an interesting set on the problems in writing that ESL students have when encountering and trying to master writing in English. It stirred lots of memories in me, and awakened my passion for ESL writing, which in fact I am teaching, both at the lab and in the dissertation class. In this movie I saw my old friend Deb Healey, and was reassured that my skills, developed over decades, were valuable. I think the movie deserves its own review, which I will provide above, but in the meantime, I just want to say, I'm still here, still kicking, still teaching, basically, and walking home, since somebody lifted my bicycle in May.
I have two projects, both somewhat shelved, because it's so hard to get to the kids' schools, and soccer practice, in the time available to me. And, the walking, even the six blocks that it is, across a ten-lane road, exhausts me, for some reason. My shoes got to the point where nails seem to be sticking up into my foot but I've been to busy to simply buy new ones, or more appropriately, buy ones that are better designed for long walks at night. My two projects are as follows: I'm writing a book on language as a self-organized system, and in general I store my work
here, though I have the book itself elsewhere. Also, I have begun a serious study of text linguistics, which is really the linguistics of texters, as opposed to the linguistics of big books and entire tomes, which some people think it is, and which appears when you google "text linguistics." The fact is, this new field, the study of human communication behavior when phones and computers are mediating it, needs a name, although "computer-mediated communication" is close to acceptable. I struggle with it, because I'm really after text linguistics, yet I can't call it that; the name is taken.
So that's a report from the Hub City. The clouds come over in enormous colorful gusty-looking monsters but it rarely rains. The painters have moved in and sprayed chipped paint all over our yard thus causing us to suspect that our sunflower crop will have lead in it. Finally, the boys are both on soccer teams, thus causing a flurry of cross-town transportation issues not to mention finding matching shin-guards, a ball, filling a water bottle, etc. All for the purposes of activity, which supposedly makes them sleep better, but in fact, it's usually me who falls face-down on the pillow long before they do. I've found that wearing a fine-looking hat on nineteenth street increases my chances of being seen across ten lanes, so I do, and now people look at me oddly but go around me, and I limp across those lanes getting in the bicyclists' way.
Labels: cesl, chat, ita's, linguistics, self-organized systems, toefl, ttu, weblogs, wikipedia, writing, youtube
teaching writing, teaching pronunciation
I found an interesting parallel in two of my three new jobs here in Texas (I teach Anthropological Linguistics, teach English to International Teaching Assistants, and tutor in a writing lab). I thought I'd write about it quickly, while it's on my mind, and I can express it clearly.
In higher-level pronunciation, I've noticed, over the years, that pronunciation takes the rap, so to speak, for a number of wider and more serious problems that the native listener can't put his finger on. For example, a teacher with rough intonation, or especially with a monotone, will rub the student the wrong way, yet, because we Americans process intonation on the right side of our brains (it's emotional), and language on the left, the analytical side of our minds fail to identify the problem. We know there's a problem; we're frustrated; we want to do something about it, but rarely can we actually tell the teacher or speaker that intonation is the problem. So, we tend to criticize the pronunciation. I once saw this clearly with a bright American student who boiled over with frustration at a v/w problem with a Turkish teacher. I wondered: how could you get so angry about this? A
wowel is obviously a
vowel, etc. I was surprised to find out later that the problem really was an intonation that left students feeling frustrated, and cut off their emotional stability as they were trying to process.
In the same vein, I think it's fair to say that many Japanese speakers, with years of trying to fit in and speak well and smoothly, blame their pronunciation for whatever issues they have, when in fact, on an absolute scale, their pronunciation is not that bad. Sure, they have problems with
lice/rice. Or
fahst/first. But these problems are not the root of their communication problems with Americans, generally. They make friends, do things with us, and fit in successfully in many ways. A larger problem seems to be that a monotone intonation is at discord, in the listener's ear, with what we are hearing. If we sense that they care about something, yet their intonation does not show it, it's like saying one thing and meaning another. But, unlike grammar, or pronunciation, where we can say "no, you meant
lice but you said
rice", we can't do that with intonation. Even their best friends can't tell them what the problem is.
Now I state this as a general rule, which doesn't apply to everyone (some, shrewdly, master the intonation before
any of the words); others have such severe pronunciation problems that any criticism of pronunciation is entirely justified. But, on teacher evaluations and in general interaction with native-speaker Americans, you see pronunciation taking the rap for problems that are in fact wider, and often more serious.
So we were sitting in the writing lab talking about problems of the writing lab tutor; this includes internationals, but really far more of the clients are Americans. We were talking about meeting the perceived needs of the client even when what we perceive might be wider or different. So for example they request editing of fine points of grammar (tutors wince here), and tutors realize fairly quickly that there are far more serious problems in the work. The tutors of course are resistant to correcting fine grammar points when larger revision will be required anyway. The client has the problem of often not being able to put a finger on the larger, less clear problems, like organization, cohesion in the support, etc.
But the problem extends farther than the client's mind. You can sit with the client and say, look, here are a few issues with what you wrote, and clients will either react or not, but possibly learn something in the process. The problem may exist with the
teacher at the receiving end of the paper, who, not being a writing teacher (and in fact being part of an entirely different discipline) does not really recognize, and cannot identify, those wider, more serious issues. This teacher, who may be in the writer's past, or may be the teacher of this particular assignment, ends up criticizing the student's grammar, thus focusing a wide range of
kinds of dissatisfaction on the single most salient issue.
If, upon receiving a graded paper back from this teacher, the student sees a low mark and a paper marked up with grammatical correction, what are the chances that the student blames the grammar for the grade? Or believes that his/her single most severe problem is with the grammar? I'd say that there's a tendency here to overrate the editing, a tendency that could be played out over a string of teachers and a number of years.
You'll notice, by the way, that my grammar isn't perfect. Remember, I've retired, and while I'd like to share my shrewd observations before my mind turns to mush, I no longer hold myself to the strict standards I held for myself at the peak of my career. This, after all, is a blog. Take it or leave it. It's me,
Labels: grammar, ita's, ttu, writing
teaching ITA's
I have arrived in Texas and am preparing for my assignment here, which will have three parts: 1) teaching ITA's, 2) teaching Linguistics, and 3) working in a writing lab. On the ITA front, I've been reviewing some of the past work I've done with ITA's, and I found myself saying, first off, that what international teaching assistants have the hardest time with, on a day-to-day basis, is the interactive nature of the American classroom. American students expect to be able to communicate: to show the teacher they don't understand, or show the teacher they don't agree, and
they expect the teacher to respond. Now that doesn't mean students are equals of teachers, or that students respect the teachers less here. It doesn't even mean that the teacher has any obligation to agree, or change delivery, or change anything. But the teacher
is, for cultural reasons, expected to notice, and do something about it. And this is true for virtually every minute of every class.
Aside from that, I know that generally international teachers demonstrate a general maxim that intonation is far more important than pronunciation. One reason is that while we analyze pronunciation constantly, and can adjust to individual pronunciation idiosyncrasies, we have much more trouble adjusting to discordant intonation, because we aren't analyzing it in the same side of our brain. Thus we are especially rattled by international teachers from places where their intonation is likely to set off jarring emotions that may interfere with our normal understanding of, say, a routine psychology lecture. Intonation is used to convey emotions in English, and certain intonations, standard in some languages for lectures, are likely to make us feel put down, diminished, intimidated. What do you do after an hour of this kind of lecture? Go home angry. Save up your hostility for the class evaluation. Do worse on the exams.
The heck of it is, nobody can ever tell the lecturer this. Ask the students what the problem is, and they'll blame it on pronunciation, which is a reasonable cover for something they really can't explain, or don't know why they are upset about it. Here they have a person who they know is nice, wants them to learn, cares about them, reaches out to them, yet, every hour they end up feeling crappy, degraded, etc. It's a kind of discord, but it's classic and it plays out all across the US as international teaching assistants teach what, a large percent of lecture classes.
Then it appears that what international teaching assistants are
more likely to be doing, is teaching labs, in classes such as chemistry, biology, etc. What does a lab instructor do? Somehow the lectures are supposed to come out as practical assignments in the lab. I picture people pouring chemicals from one test tube to another, or poking at a dead frog before pulling out its kidney. What kind of things do you have to ask the lab attendant? There is a certain dynamic here. "Ask your friend" becomes a more likely response than "ask a teacher" when it is too hard to ask the teacher, or you are too likely to get a response you can't work with. Sometimes teachers are nice, present, willing, even aggressive and people
still don't ask the teacher. But my sense is that the lab instructor is really required to have a more practical approach than the lecturer. How for example do you show someone how to do something, so that next time they can do it themselves? Or so that they do not feel totally robbed of self-esteem? Or so that their budding love of chemistry, or whatever, is cultivated rather than squelched? And to what degree does the approach of the lab instructor really make a difference?
These are questions I'll try to answer this semester. I bring everything I've picked up over about thirty years of teaching. I have an entirely new environment. But, as one guy said to me here in Texas, this ain't my first rodeo.
Labels: ita's, ttu
