editorial, rough draft

The focus in language instruction needs to shift from giving grammar, and reading and writing as much attention as listening and speaking in the early stages in foreign language courses taught at U.S. universities. This should be replaced with the more effective ‘natural communication” methods promoted by Stephen Krashen, an expert in the field of linguistics who specializes in theories of language acquisition and development at the University of California. (http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html)

I am a native speaker of English, a teacher of English as a second language, and a student of Mandarin Chinese. In my experiences as both a learner and a teacher, I have found difficulties dealing with both student and teacher expectations. In my Chinese classes, the students were expected to learn the four proficiencies (listening, speaking, reading, writing) equally at the same time.

As a teacher of English as a second language, I had to deal with the differing expectations of English language students who not only had varying levels of English proficiency, but were expecting rigid, grammar-based lessons. They wanted rules to memorize.

I learned how to teach English as a second language at Oakland University. In my classes, we learned that the old “grammar translation” method of teaching was no longer the favored method. The new theories put forth by Krashen and others focus on communication-based, real-world English. Linguists like Noam Chomsky teach of concepts like “Universal Grammar”, wherin everyone, no matter what their native language is, knows fundamentally how to put words together to create meaning. These theories bring a different, more natural approach to language teaching and acquisition. Another fundamental difference between how English is taught and how foreign languages are taught is how soon reading and writing is brought to center stage.

As anyone knows, when we learn our native language as babies, we don’t learn to read, write, speak and listen all at the same time. Babies listen first; imitate what they hear, begin to produce language in spoken form, and finally learn to read and write. The later, continues to be a subject of study throughout adulthood for many as any university student of literature or rhetoric can attest.

As teachers of language, we have to remember why students are taking a foreign language in the first place; to be able to functionally communicate in the target language. As Krashen puts it: "The best methods are therefore those that supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready', recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production." Stephen Krashen (http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html)

There has been a lot of study done in teaching English as a second language. I don’t know if as much effort has been put forth in other languages that are taught to native English speakers in American universities, but obviously the same concepts championed by Krashen and others for teaching English should apply to native English speakers attempting to learn a second language.

There are examples of this focus shift outside the classroom. In my Chinese studies, one of the most effective learning tools I found is ChinesePod.com. Part of Praxis Language, Chinese Pod offers a learning experience unlike that which I found at Oakland University, who’s curriculum is based on the “Integrated Chinese” system originating from the Chinese School of the East Asian Summer Language Institute at Indiana University. Chinese Pod uses an audio podcast with a short dialogue, followed by an idiomatic translation and discussion of relevant cultural aspects of the vocabulary. A paid subscription provides the student with transcriptions in PDF form with English, Pinyin (a Romanized form of Chinese), traditional and simplified characters, and various study tools including one-one lessons with Chinese teachers. Chinese Pod focuses on input in the early stages which mimics 1^st language learning.

The Integrated Chinese method, adopted by OU, expresses their philosophy as: “The Chinese title of Integrated Chinese, reflects our belief that a healthy language program should be a well-balanced one, paying attention to all four skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing.”

The problem with this method is that reading and writing are far more difficult that listening and speaking. I spent so much time trying to memorize characters so that I could pass quizzes and tests that after 3 semesters, I could barely speak a complete sentence that wasn’t one of the memorized dialogues from the book. Real conversational meaningful language production was absent. I could not express concepts or thoughts in the target language. Frustrated, I quit after the third semester. I continue my Chinese language studies through ChinesePod. In speaking with my former classmates, I find the same frustrations felt by all. I don’t know if Spanish, German, or other languages are taught the same way, but I suspect they are.

Works cited

Electronic resource: (http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html) accessed 11/24/08

Electronic resource: (http://chinesepod.com/) accessed 11/24/08

Electronic resource: (http://eall.hawaii.edu/yao/icusers/) accessed 11/24/08

Worksheet 10

A. For my editorial piece I'm planning an argument for increased financial aid in the form of grants, scholarships and workstudies as opposed to loans. In my preliminary research I am finding many schools across the U.S. that are transitioning away from loans and toward grants and scholarships. Oakland University seems to be behind on this.
B. The arguments seem to be about ownership of the expenses of education, whether private or public.
C. Readers are very opinionated about private vs public funding of may things; I'm sure education is no different. Many are opposed to tax dollars going toward anything besides defense. I believe most people argue emotionally on this topic rather than logically.
D. Three of several sources of information are:

The misinformation about financial aid: inaccurate perceptions about the cost of college often stand in the way of economically disadvantaged students pursuing a college degree.

by Horwedel, Dina M
This article is similar to the examples we viewed in class in that it discusses the cost/benefit concerns of potential students. This article focuses on the Hispanic population of California, but the fundamentals are universal. In a nutshell, it says one of the biggest problems facing high school students trying to decide whether or not to attend college is misinformation.

House Republicans Challenge New England Senators on Shaping Aid Policy.

from " The Chronicle of Higher Education. 48.23 (Feb 15, 2002)
This article may be a little too old to use, but the attitudes haven't changed, so I still think it's relevant. In it, the author discusses how in the good old days, Republicans and Democrats put aside partisan bickering to ensure college educations were funded. Today, however they can't agree on why college costs so much and why it should be a federal problem, not a state or local one.

Harvard takes lead in easing college costs.

from " Newsday (Melville, NY). (Dec 11, 2007)
This is one of several article I have found on universities attempting to ease the burden on students by offering more grants and scholarships. There are several, all saying basically the same thing. What I need to find out now is why and how they are and why OU isn't or can't.

argument strategies

I find the most convincing arguments are those with data or statistics to back them up. Emotional arguments are interesting to listen to...sometimes, but they don't convince me by themselves. I know people who argue vehemently about things they know nothing about. This kind of ties in with the articles for this week in that at least 4 of these people I'm thinking about, have never set foot inside a college. Aside from practical things like helping you land and keep jobs, a college education also teaches you to look at things from different perspectives. It also teaches you to check your sources. Just hearing it "on the TV" or reading it in the paper is not good enough. My personal favorite is "I hear that..." followed by an emotionally-charged empty-headed argument about some controversial topic that your interlocutor knows nothing about.
If you really want to convince people, back up what you say with something other than "the news" or "some guy at work". As I mentioned in class, a few semesters ago I wrote a paper for a biology class on global warming. I tried to show arguments from the side that global warming is a man-made phenomenon and should be addressed vs global warming is a natural fluctuation and nothing to worry about. I found it very difficult to find reliable sources for backing up the "nothing to worry about" argument. There were plenty of "don't worry about it" arguments out there, but not written by anyone who actually knows anything about the climate. They were written by spokesmen for public policy think tanks, authors who work for economic magazines, and others in the corporate world or government.
Needless to say there agendas at work here. These people are also educated and can make convincing arguments if taken at face value, one of the fallacies on our list, but these people are not climatologists and have no formal education in climatology or perhaps the sciences in general. They know how to argue and convince the pedestrian masses, however and so politically charged things like climate change become "controversial".
Some of these journalists would say things like "scientists still can't agree" or similar things. It sounds good, but it's simply not true. The scientists do seem to agree. In fact, all but one from the ones I was able to find with public statements about climate change. The one climatologist I was able to find in the "nay" column was countered by evidence pointing to inaccuracies in his data which was based on 1970's satellite data that other climatologists point out is no longer considered accurate.
In the 1990's there was a proliferation of talk radio shows and TV talk shows with guests pulled from the ranks of the "average Joe" who spouted ill-conceived opinions on all sorts of topics. That brought new meaning to "I heard on the radio that..." Who cares what you heard? Who said it? What do they know? What do they have to back up their arguments besides superlatives?
The problem is time. We don't have time to research everything we want to opine about. When people put forth "arguments from authority", the reader assumes this authority figure knows what they are talking about. My climate paper is an example. I'm not a climatologist and wouldn't know what to do with the raw climate data if I was presented with it. I have to assume that when a climatologist interprets this data in a certain way, he or she knows what they are talking about. Maybe they don't. Maybe they have an agenda too. I do know enough, however to take arguments from non-authorities, without data to back them up, no matter how eloquently or emotionally put, with a lot of salt.