兔子先生传媒文化作品

Fall 2017, 1st place prize winner

Blog Post 1

In the last two weeks, I've had the pleasure of meeting and becoming a part of the wonderful Swap community. Swap is a student-led organization that partners CU students with employees wanting to improve their English. I attended their four hour-long training last week and when it was over I felt myself disappointed that it wasn't longer!

The curriculum we'll be using is Intercambio, a "nonprofit organization providing cultural integration and English classes to immigrants in Boulder County". Their learning approach integrates a variety of mediums: textbooks, audio clips, worksheets online, and interactive activities. The students leading the training stressed the importance of making use of our time, even though we will only be meeting once or twice a week with our employee partners. Limiting them to just the one-on-one sessions can hinder their ability to improve, so encouraging them to practice with coworkers and family, going on field trips around campus, suggesting movies, or depending on the employee, asking them to read a current news article and bring it into class. Extending what they learn beyond the lessons is important, as immersion is vital to retaining new information, and also allows them to get creative and play on their particular interests.

As the daughter of immigrants, I know what aspects of English my parents struggled with, and I was able to apply some of that knowledge during the training. My mom, for example, gets very conscious of her pronunciation of the letters "t" and "d", because in our native language, Hindi, there are three of each sound, none of which sound like the english phonemes. When pronouncing words that begin with the letter t, like talk or tell, she says it with the letter 脿陇鸥 ("tha"), a retroflex t sound with the tongue curled back. This is a common feature of what we perceive as an "Indian" accent. During the training I voiced this, and expressed that we should work with employees to their comfort level and not worry about correcting every little thing. My mom also struggles with definite and indefinite articles, finding difficulty in expressing commands like "go to the bed" vs "go to bed", or "I have book" vs "I have a book". After learning about pronouns and "pointing words" in LING 2000, and thinking critically about my native language, I realized this was because Hindi has no "the" or "a". This doesn't mean we don't have definite/indefinite articles. We have "this" and "that", and to express "a book", we say "one book". The number one is used in place of an indefinite article. If it's not there, the "the" is assumed, simply saying "I have book".

Learning this, combined with how to address situations like this, I realized the importance in being able to understand your partner and where they're coming from. If there's patterns in the way they speak, learning from their perspective why they're struggling or what doesn't make sense, and even expressing interest in their native language can make a difference. We often think, "oh, the grammar is this way because it makes sense", but that's because we grew up with it. It's our default. But looking back on my own struggles trying to learn other languages besides my native ones, it's the same thing - learning a new language is learning a completely new way to assign sounds in a new pattern to our thoughts and the world around us.

That's why I really look forward to this experience for the rest of the semester, as I'll be teaching as much as learning. And who knows, as much as they learn English, perhaps I'll learn a few words in a new language!

Blog post 2

For a few weeks now I have had the pleasure of working with Armando, an employee at 兔子先生传媒文化作品. He came to the states over a decade ago and we conversed easily over our shared background as immigrants. He spoke highly of his daughter who married a German man, and his young grandchildren, with whom who he wished he could communicate more easily with. "They're learning Spanish so I want to learn English," he'd said quietly, in the hustle and bustle of Sewall Hall, where he worked.

Using the Intercambio curriculum SWAP provided us with, we were able to pinpoint his level easily. After a few pronunciation and conversational exercises, where I would ask him questions about his work and life, we were able to find a good place to start. Armando wanted to improve his vocabulary and grasp on conversational English, language that went beyond the workspace that he could utilize in his personal life. He also expressed frustration at his pronunciation, often being misunderstood. For example, we went over a minimal pairs exercise - with words like chews versus shoes, ice versus eyes, or thank versus tank - and we focused on contrastive phonemes, practicing with different words until he was able to differentiate the sounds. It required a lot of practice and patience, because there are sounds in English that don't exist in Spanish, and learning a completely new set of sounds in a few hours is impossible. However, we worked until he felt comfortable pointing out various phonemes even if he couldn't produce them himself. One trick I used when describing the "th" sound versus just a "t" sound was something I remembered from my Spanish classes in high school: in Andalucia, and perhaps other areas in Spain, people speak with a Spanish accent that's hallmark feature is replacing the "c" (vocalized as an "s" sound) in the middle of words with a "th", pronouncing words like gracias as grathias. When I pointed this out, we was immediately able to produce the sound, even though in writing he couldn't tell the difference.

The first half of the lessons focused on pronunciation. The second half was improving on sentences often used in casual conversation, like "What do you do?" and "What do you enjoy doing in your free time?". We went over some vocabulary and noun-phrases he could respond with, but when we hit verbs, it got interesting. Because of my background in Spanish, I was able to see what he saw, which was verb conjugation and noun-agreement. His English is better than my Spanish, but I was able to explain that while English verb conjugations are all over the place, for the verbs in the workbook, they were all simple verbs and it was only a matter of adding an "s" in the present tense. Spanish, on the other hand, is much more systematic (in my opinion) with rigid rules regarding verbs, as the subject, tense, number, and gender are encoded within them.

In English, subject and object are coded primarily through word order (pronouns being a big exception). Knowing this, he smiled, and easily learned the rule of making the verb agree to the noun, and that usually meant adding an "s" or "es" to the end of a verb if it was third person singular. An example would be I eat versus he eats. The topic of pronunciation came up again because while the verbs in the workbook were simple verbs following the "s" rule, sometimes they were pronounced with a "z" sound instead of an "s", like in does, fails, and wishes. I wasn't aware of any hard and fast rule that could address this, but as they aren't contrastive (pronouncing it as a "z" or "s" won't change the meaning and the listener can still understand) we practiced as much as time allowed but also encouraged him to do whatever was in his capacity as it would only improve with time.

It was an honor getting to know and connect with Armando. He is very driven and focused, and we enjoyed learning together. Our sessions end with him teaching me how to say goodbye in a new language, as his colleagues are all over the world and he knows how to say hi in nearly 10 languages! I look forward to working with him for as long as I'm in school, and hopefully beyond!

Blog Post 3

Working with Armando over the past few weeks has been a pleasure. His approach to learning a language can't be learned - perhaps dedication and motivation can, but passion can't be taught. We often start class with a discussion on our families and our lives over the past week, using phrases from the Intercambio learning book. When the new vocabulary is used naturally, he's better able to get a better understanding of the word, what contexts it's used then, and it's more effective than rote memorization.

Our last few lessons, we focused on building vocabulary to use in casual conversation. It can be tricky, because in most cases, there isn't a direct translation of a word from Spanish to English. Words in English translated into Spanish may mean the same thing on a surface level, but be used in different situations or contexts. Or perhaps there's different words but translated to mean the same thing. A simple example can be seen with Google Translate - if you type "I like the books", in Spanish it will translate to "Me gustan los libros". However, when translating word for word in Spanish, "Me gustan" is a reflexive phrase (the verb gustar being conjugated as such, and "me" as the reciever of the verb). So in the sentence "I like books", it literally means books are pleasing to me. But it's understood to mean that the person who is speaking is partial to books or even reading.

Things like this often came up with Armando, so I had to learn how to describe various nouns and verbs in ways that the colloquial meaning and how the words are usually used could be conveyed in Spanish. An interesting example is when going over minimal pairs, he asked what thick was in Spanish, and I responded with gordo (there's other words of thick in Spanish, proves my point)!. I gave the example of a thick textbook, then he asked if he could say a person was thick! Aside from slang people my age use (where thick often describes a voluptuous woman), a thick person can also mean someone who's dense, simpleminded, oblivious, etc. In spanish, if he says someone is gordo, it simply means they are big or fat. It's things like this that were interesting to point out - the nuances and pragmatics of the English language.

I learn a lot as well, having started to question many of the norms and rules of the English language. I knew that context is extremely entangled with language, but was a bit blind to the extent of which it affects every conversation, from words used to hedge to the word "like" which has more uses than Taylor Swift has twitter followers. I enjoy my time with Armando, not only building language skills, but also the ability to think critically when it comes to the science, and art, of communication.