4/1/13

I began my sixth field experience at North Central not as excited as my fifth experience the week before in which I worked with La Erb on his science and English homework. In that experience, I had begun the session happy to be working in science again. However, this week Ms. McCarthy introduced me to a student named Sun Light who was working on a speech for his speech class. She described Sun as being a strong student and said this would be a fun assignment to help with but I remained skeptical. I would not consider speech to be one of my strengths, but I set about helping Sun as best I could. 

We began the session with discussing the assignment. Sun spoke very quietly, and he seemed very nervous about the assignment. In looking over the sheets in front of him on the desk, I began to understand why–in total, the packet for designing the speech was nearly 10 pages long. It included everything Sun needed to do to complete the assignment from the instructions, to the description of how to formulate the citations. I nearly became quite discouraged orienting myself to the assignment and what the teacher was asking. I set about reading the first page, additionally I asked Sun to tell me where he was in his progress.

I find it important to note here that I, a seasoned student and native English speaker, nearly became discouraged at the daunting speech packet before me. This called to mind again, one of the first days of class in 498 when we completed the activity on photosynthesis. I thought back to how belittling it would feel to be handed this giant packet and told, “Here, take all this information written in a language you might not understand yet, and write a speech which takes about 10 minutes, to be said (entirely in that language) in front of a class of your peers.” Wow.

Okay, so maybe that extreme, but research shows us from the various ways students learn language and come to speak it, that many of them first experience a phase of serious self doubt because of the level of difficulty associated with learning a second language (Lightbrown and Spada 100, Levine and McCloskey 9). In this case, Sun had not been too intimidated, and he had made substantial progress on the assignment prior to my help. The assignment was the final speech of the semester which explained it’s length and breadth. It seemed safe to assume that this was the culminating activity for the semester; therefore, if the teacher had appropriately scaffolded all the students, they would be well prepared for the demand of this assignment.

Sun had chosen to construct a speech around teenage obesity. I asked him if he had been aloud to choose he own topic or if he had been assigned a topic, but he responded with an inaudible answer. I decided not to press to much on that point, although I was curious about whether he had been allowed to pick the topic because this could seriously influence his investment in the assignment. I would hope his teacher would have permitted the students to pick topics because this would permit student focused instruction which is a best practice procedure. Perhaps the students had to seek the teachers approval for their topics, I could see this being the case if the speeches were to maintain significant academic quality–teenage obesity, as a current issue, could be supported with factual academic data.

As we began work on the packet Sun shared with me, I could see the different parts of the speech clearly outlined with definitions of each section. It reminded me of the packet I had seen in my work with another student on another speech. I began to see that this particular speech assignment was incorporating aspects of that smaller assignment, which had probably served as a smaller summative assessment towards this larger culminating unit assessment. The structure for this particular speech was informative. Sun had to get the attention of his audience, inform using evidence with verbal citations of a particular problem, and then provide three appropriate solutions. I was curious about the requirement for verbal citations because in my opinion, although I am not an English teacher, this requires higher order grammatical structure which would be unfamiliar and bulky to a second language learner.

I looked to see if the teacher had provided any examples for how these verbal citations were to be constructed in the context of the speech. Seeing none, Sun shared with me what he had written for the first verbal citation (the students were required to have 3). It went something like, “According to….published in (date) in the journal of…‘…’ ” I was interested that it seemed so scripted. When we began filling in the second verbal citation, Sun formed the sentence the same way and I wondered if perhaps the teacher had given this example in class and the students then adopted it for themselves.

I think this is an important point in second language learning. Certainly we model our language acquisition off our surroundings, off those who speak it around us, and by what we are interested (Levine and McCloskey 7, Hill and Flynn 16). But we have to understand the grammatical structure of that language, and sometimes this needs to be made explicit. The teacher could have easily put together a reference page for structuring verbal citations in sentences so that students had a variety of models to choose from, therefore learning many ways to incorporate factual data into their speeches. This would give them a more complete tool for writing and speaking in the future.

References

Flynn, Kathleen M., and Jane D. Hill. “The Stages of Second Language Acquisition.” Classroom Instruction That Works with English Language Learners. Alexandria: ASCD, 2006. 14-21. Print.

Levine, Linda N., and Mary L. McCloskey. “Language Acquisition and Language Learning in the Classroom.” Teaching Learners of English in Mainstream Classrooms (K-8): One Class, Many Paths. New York: Pearson, 2008. 230-261. Print.

Lightbrown, P. M., and M. Spada. 2006. How Languages are Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 96-100. Print.

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