I took a class at UNCG called Hispanic
Literature. It was a requirement for my
major, and I was incredibly excited about it.
At the 300 level, the whole class was in Spanish. The professor stood up and spoke the first
day about how what she expected could be a little challenging, but we would
surely all be up to the task, and went on to say that she expected us to
participate in class discussion at least once a week. It all made sense. I went home to do my homework, and turned to
the poem we would be studying. It was
from the 9th century.
This
poem, less than a page long, took me 2-3 hours to comprehend. I went over it painstakingly, looking up
every word I was unsure about on Google Translate. I was prepared when I stepped into class and
wedged myself behind the door to take my seat in the last row. I could feel my cheeks flush as I waited for
class to begin, my excitement a poor combination with my sweater in the intimately
too-warm classroom. The professor strode
in and began class, asking if we had all done the reading. I fervently nodded my head, practically
bouncing in my seat. She began by asking
if anyone had any questions about the poem.
I didn’t but other people did.
When the first student asked his question, it took more than a minute to
explain what he meant. The professor
nodded along with him, and when he finished, she told him his question was one
posed by the author, and made perfect sense.
…
I froze, going over my memory of my classmate speaking. I had no clue as to what he said, like most
native speakers, he tumbled his words into each other (which is what people are
supposed to do), and I couldn’t extract the separate words enough to comprehend
him. When the professor opened the floor
to answer the student’s question, my heart sank. I couldn’t understand any of the native
speakers. They were too fast, too
fluent, and had a vocabulary 8 times the size of mine. When another English speaker did finally pipe
up, it was apparent (to the professor, not to me), that the girl had used
Google Translate. The professor looked
disappointed, and spent the next few minutes lecturing us on the laziness of
the site and recommended a different one to us, a Spanish dictionary.
Over
the next few months I tried when I could, but I couldn’t understand the new
site because the definitions on the dictionary site were also in Spanish, and I
couldn’t understand them. In addition,
the readings became longer and longer, until I could no longer complete even
half of my readings with so many words I had to look up to comprehend the
text. It became painfully apparent that
while I may have learned the Spanish words for “walk” and “run” authors tended
to use the equivalent of “saunter”, “mosey”, and “meander”.
I struggled to such a degree that I dropped
my Spanish major rather than face a second literature course. I quickly became discouraged about my ability
to read and speak Spanish, and that confidence still hasn’t recovered. I was terrified to make presentations, and
would spend days on essays that were mere pages long. It got to the point where I went over the
study guide for tests in the class, and actually pre-wrote and memorized my
written answers to test questions in an effort to raise my grade where I
could. This series of incidents crippled
my use of the Spanish language, even if it didn’t affect my English literacy.
This
issue gave me incredible insight to an ESL student, even if the E stood for a different
language. It showed me the importance of
peers participating in assisting a fellow classmate, and the importance of
continuity in simplistic language whenever possible to assist in comprehension
and weed out extra time taken to look up words unrelated to content. This will shape my future teaching methods in
that I will likely provide any struggling students with essay prompts ahead of
time (though they may get an extra one in the spirit of fairness) so that they
may prepare what they need to prove in advance by looking up words and checking
grammar. I also want to make a “highlights
reel” for students who struggle with literacy.
Students on grade level may be able to read chapter 14, pages 210-240
for homework, and be expected to take notes on it. But a struggling student doesn’t need the
witty anecdote at the beginning, and there may be a section or two within the
chapter that I know we will not be discussing in great detail, or it won’t be
on the test. Thus I could inform
students to pay special attention to pages 215-217, 220-222, and 231-236. This cuts the number of expected pages from
30 down to 12, a much more reasonable number for someone who struggles with
literacy.
No comments:
Post a Comment