Presented by A. Renee Gutiérrez
At Longwood University, Modern Language professors assess our study abroad program with a two-tiered project. Students begin by keeping journals while overseas, and then during their Senior Seminar, they use the journal materials as the basis for a reflective paper or project. Our assessment evaluates the final project. In designing the journal prompts, however, Dr. Gutiérrez encountered a fascinating collision of teaching and learning best practices in the foreign languages. Questions derived from faculty discussion included: 1) should students be writing their journal entries in the target language (the foreign language) or in their native language (often English) and 2) are there differences in the quality of journal reflection in their native or foreign language. She designed a qualitative research study using a form of grounded theory to evaluate these two approaches. While the data are too preliminary to offer firm conclusions, Dr. Gutiérrez evaluates what has been learned so far and how it might shape the on-going study. From this initial research, one emergent theme (lack of vocabulary) is intriguing because it occurs only when the students are writing in Spanish about a successful conversation. Three new considerations for coding and analyzing data are: how to handle ambiguous text due to language errors, losing nuance due to a lack of vocabulary in the foreign language, and the effect of a slower writing speed and shorter texts in the foreign language journals.
Gutierrez_Presentation_MOLA Assessment
Dr. Renee Gutiérrez earned her PhD in Spanish Literature at the University of Virginia. Her literary research and publications have focused at various times on the Spanish Golden Age and the Enlightenment period, but rarely stray from the topic of epic poetry. Her newest field of study began with a curiosity about what impact study abroad might have on pre-service teachers. She has since been drawn into the world of qualitative research to consider what happens to students’ learning and self-perception when they are immersed abroad, and is intrigued by questions of intercultural competencies and their long-term impacts.
I would love to read up on these dual-code conversations, where each party speaks in their own language or they both speak in what is for them the foreign language. I’d be curious to know which is more effective, and when do these conversations happen. I suspect that there are linguistic studies on dual conversations between first generation immigrants and their grandchildren, where there is sometimes no language overlap. I’m also quite sure these conversations also happen in tourist destinations among vendors who are intent on making people feel comfortable, and their clients who are equally determined to practice the foreign language.
I’ve also noticed in my own experience that people get “tagged” with languages, and I automatically speak the them in either English or Spanish. For example, it’s an effort to speak English to a friend who is tagged as a Spanish speaker when we are in the company of other friends who do not speak Spanish. Most notably, this tagging phenomenon included a former officemate’s dog: I always spoke to him in Spanish, sometimes to the amazement of the students sitting in my office…
While my experience as a learner of Spanish in non-traditional I would like to relate a couple of experiences I had while interacting with native speakers on their home turf. Both involve preconceived notions about what to expect in personal interactions.
Ordinarily, I enrolled in a Spanish classes in a formal school and did a little sight-seeing after class. In one school is southern Peru, the first instructor I had started out the class speaking English. At the time, I had no need or desire to hear more English so I replied to every question in Spanish. It took about 10-minutes for the instructor to realize that his expectation for this student’s first class was wrong and that we could communicate in Spanish. Fortunately, the conversation was about Spanish grammar for which I had the necessary vocabulary. At the time, I didn’t reflect on the issue other than to note that sometimes ones expectations are wrong. Several years have passed and my conclusion remains the same.
The second interaction was more typical of the tourist experience while buying trinkets to take home. My wife and I had made a purchase in a shop near the main square in Arequipa one day. That day the entire conversation was in Spanish, not a word of English. As far as I could tell, we were communicating fine and we made the purchase without difficulty. On another day, we went to the same place to buy something else and got a different clerk, maybe the manager. Anyway, as usual I was speaking in Spanish but could not understand what the guy was saying in response. Finally, my wife poked me in the ribs and said “Think English”. After flipping the switch in my head, I could understand his speech fine. I thought it was pretty funny and can’t get any more profound thoughts out of the experience. All I can think of is that the guy was used to tourists and thought he was doing me a great favor of speaking English. Likewise, I was in a shop in a Spanish speaking society where I expected to hear Spanish. It didn’t bother me at all to have to decode his version of English once I realized I had to do that. Once I listened in English, I realized he was answering my questions so I suppose his accent in English was no worse than mine in Spanish. Maybe my speech had similar effect on him!
As for doing reflection and writing about it, I find that it takes at least five times as long to write in Spanish as in English. While I think I have a decent command of the grammar, I find that writing about emotions related to these experiences requires careful choice of words and considerable use of the dictionary to be sure I have the right nuance for what I am trying to express. If I have a time limit on reflective writing, the result will be fewer words with less precise vocabulary if I write in Spanish. I guess I need lots more practice!