Case Study - Bethanny
Hi everyone! Here is my case study:
From English to Spanish
Since
I don’t have students that I work with throughout the semester, I have decided
to write about one student that I worked a few times in
the semester. Let’s call her Lily.
I
am actually familiar with Lily because I was her TA during my first year teaching
at the University of Iowa. Back then, I taught an intermediate level course.
When I was her TA, I remember that she was a good student who would participate
often in class and does her online assignments regularly. Sure, her Spanish was
not perfect, but it was above average; I also remember that she wants to minor
in Spanish. When she made an appointment at the center, I discovered she is in
the writing class (2000 level) that I am teaching now, but with another TA. So,
I was familiar with the class material and the assignments that she had to do.
When
Lily came to see me, she wanted to work on her draft for a chapter essay that
was about 600 words. When I read her piece, Lily clearly knows how to organize
her ideas and create a cohesive essay. Her main issue was sentence structure.
As I was reading through her essay, I found that her sentences sounded like
English but translated in Spanish. She was trying very hard to translate her
thoughts word for word from English to Spanish (she told me that she tends to write her essays in English first then translate it into Spanish, which I used to do when I first learned the language). I think this is a common issue for
students in the writing class, because I also see this issue among my students.
However, it is not easy giving feedback in these cases because sometimes some
sentences just do not work, and we would have to start over. Usually, I ask
Lily what she is trying to say and I have her say the sentence to me in
English. Then, I ask her to turn that sentence into Spanish, but instead of translating
it word for word, I ask her to make a new sentence that portrays the same idea.
She does not get every word right, but usually the sentence is better than the one
in her draft. However, this method is time consuming and I don't know if it's very effective.
I
want to ask if anyone has had any similar experience. I know we talked about
experiences with students whose native language is not English. If a sentence is not structured like the target language, how do you give feedback that
is effective?
Hi Bethanny,
ReplyDeleteI like the way you introduce Lily's issue--it feels like I've gotten to know her and can understand that this is a very particular kind of issue with a good student. I'm not sure that I have a good solution to this, although you might broach the topic of your own experience with her and explain how you improved from where you started out. I actually use a similar method with the one student I have who has English as a second language and I recognize that it is time-consuming, but she doesn't have quite as strong of an issue there and it doesn't happen all the time. I recently thought about--although it's a little late to implement this for the semester--making a simple chart for writing sentences that includes a section for what they want to say and then translating the "idea" of it alongside to practice taking the stress off the idea of verbatim translation.
I"m not sure this is entirely helpful, as it's more a long-term strategy but I counsel my ESL students to watch a lot of television in the language they're trying to learn, with subtitles. Short of going to live there, that really helped me learn French. Also to have a buddy with whom you can talk, though that might be difficult to execute. On the more sentence-level stuff, I think your strategy - constructing a sentence with the same idea - is interesting. When I learned French I also did a translation (English to French) and then worked really hard on the revision process, reading it aloud to myself many times. So, I think in this case it's a question of what works best for the style of your student and sounds like you are trying different things to see what'll be most effective in her particular case. It's a hard one so kudos!
ReplyDeleteLearners translate when they are at the beginning of their second language learning process. The more second language they learn, the less they translate. It's good, Bethany, that you were trying to break Lily of the habit of writing everything out first in English because if she is proceding linearly and trying to translate English expressions word for word into Spanish, the results can be disappointingly inaccurate (or humorous depending on one's perspective--like the student who asked my Spanish prof. friend if she could take a make up exam--un examen de maquillaje--a test of make up in the sense of eye shadow, lipstick and rouge).
DeleteSanjna is right in that the only solution is long-term to increase proficiency by immersing oneself as much as possible in the language: watching TV, reading material on topics that you're intersted in, subscribing to News in Slow Spanish, listening to Latin American and Latinx popular music in Spanish, and conversation partners, especially patient native speakers and Spanish tutors who can slow things down to provide enough "comprehensible input." That way, when a learner needs to encode a message or sentence in Spanish, Spanish expressions are more likely to come to mind rather than English ones.
I wonder how modeling sentence structures might help-- it would require finding or building some archetypes to use, but I suppose that's how I learned to vary sentence structure in earlier years of school. Meta-discourse is important too; drawing the student's attention to common errors they make or (more often the case) instances where they follow writing rules with severe devotion. One of my students has shown remarkable improvement by equipping them with vocabulary to self-diagnose structure or grammar issues.
ReplyDelete