Help Iraqi Refugees

My brother told me that this Sunday at the Wilk there is a meeting for people who want to help volunteer and help Iraqi refugees in Salt Lake. When I was doing my ESL practicum, I was able to help translate for a 12 year old who was new to the school, hadn't been in school for about 9 months because of war. I am interested.

If you want to go to the meeting, all I know is that it is at 5:00 in the wilk. That pretty much is vague. I looked on the BYU website and couldn't find more information than that. So just email me (click above on contact me to get my email address) if you want to go, and I will get back to you with the "where". It sounds cool.

I had to take an online Arabic test for my teaching methods class, and this is the paper I wrote about it.

The CASLS pilot test seems to promote a communicative competence theory of teaching. According to Brown, the keystone of communicative competence theories is the interactive nature of language. “Users of a language creatively interact with other people as well as with texts (including test items). Simply put, this means that tests have to involve people in actually performing the behavior that we want to measure.” (Brown, p 259). The test put the test-taker in authentic or near-authentic situations, and asked a series of multiple choice questions about the test-taker’s comprehension. The test was careful to provide non-misleading advance organizers, which helped to more accurately simulate authentic interaction. For example, one of the test questions was about a lost cat. On the ad was a picture of the cat. The multiple choice answers included several items – but even if the test-taker had no idea what the words in the ad meant, they could use their previous knowledge and the schema activated by a picture of a cat in a newspaper to deduce a correct answer.

The CASLS pilot test also promoted whole thinking. Often, comprehension questions included words that were not included in the test itself. Instead of listening for a word, a student would have to understand the context. For example, in one listening comprehension question, Ahmed discusses his vacation with his mother. One of the comprehension questions is, “How is Ahmed traveling?” “A. boat, B. car, C. bus, D. plane.” The word is never discussed during the dialogue, but one assumes that Ahmed, traveling from Egypt to Lebanon for a short vacation, would travel by plane. The test assesses students’ ability to use language in context: Ahmed’s mom asks him if he bought his tathkara, which generally refers to plane tickets. If a student did not understand this concept, they would not be able to answer the question correctly.

The flaw in this test is the lack of student input. If the test were to truly be interactive, students would not be able to randomly guess from a list of items. In real life, there will not be options A-D to help guide comprehension and assessment of a situation. I answered questions correctly that I otherwise would not have known because the answers were in Multiple Choice format. In this way, the test falls short from testing the skills that it wants to measure, which seem to be communicative competence.

In general, this test is completely different from the other kinds of tests I have taken in Arabic. From 101-301, a staple of the test has always been translation. The tests have always been closed-book, closed-partner, with absolutely zero advance organizers. There was one time in 101 that taking a test involved watching a video-clip, but that was probably to assess our ability to understand a variety of speakers; it was basically a talking head on a video screen. These tests are far from promoting the communicative competency theory the way the CASLS pilot test does.

I agree with Brown when he writes that tests must “test for grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, and illocutionary competence as well as strategic competence [and] require the learner to use language naturally for genuine communication and to relate to thoughts and feelings, in short, to put authentic language to use within a context.” (Brown, p 458) How useful is our study of language if it does not accomplish the ultimate goal, which is communication? The CASLS pilot test comes closer to providing students with an authentic context and an opportunity to interact than many of the achievement-type tests I have experienced in BYU’s Arabic department. I believe that if students are expected to be competent communicators, our tests should assess communicative language proficiency. I think my students at Renaissance would love this type of test.

What I learned at UFLA...

Today was excellent. I went to the Utah Foreign Language Association Conference. There was food, textbooks (none in Arabic, of course!), a keynote speaker - the current President of ACTFL! - and a breakout session for all the different languages to meet together and collaborate. I am excited for Arabic in Utah. We are pioneers, but it's a great cause, and we are definitely making progress. I'm interested in the flagship Arabic K-12 Master's program offered in Dearborn, Michigan. So exciting!

We also had some humor...Check out www.engrish.com! Hehehe...I wonder if there's an equivalent site in Chinese, for all the stupid t-shirts we must be wearing!

Not enough Arabic Teachers out there...

So, I worked for Startalk Arabic at BYU this summer. It was way awesome. During the camp, there were these people walking around all the time video-taping us, probably for advertising for next year. I wanted to find the ad online, so I did a google search on "Startalk Arabic BYU", and came up with this article. I want to comment on it, as the issues are particularly important to me.

Surge in students studying Arabic outstrips supply of teachers

The title of the article alone completely catches my attention. I am the only Middle School Arabic teacher (in Public school) in all of Utah. Whoah.

A shortage of Arabic-language teachers across the country is shedding light on a classic economics question: What happens when there is plenty of demand and not enough supply?

And there definitely is not enough supply, I can tell you that.

Since 9/11, the number of students interested in the Middle Eastern language has been skyrocketing. More than 20,000 people in the USA enrolled in an Arabic-language higher-education program in 2006, double the number who signed up from 1998 to 2002, according to projections from a study the Modern Language Association expects to release this fall.

"Other languages will show an increase (in the fall report), but the only language that might be as dramatic as Arabic might be Chinese," says association executive director Rosemary Feal.

And even then, Arabic will be hard to surpass.

Interest has also trickled down to the pre-collegiate level as secondary schools and summer language camps surface across the country.

But generating student interest and enrollment is not the problem.

"There's definitely more demand for courses than there are qualified instructors," Feal says. "There's no doubt."

Absolutely none.

Education experts agree that Arabic is a difficult language to learn, more so than French or Spanish, the traditional alternatives.

That's not true. Arabic is not harder to learn than French or Spanish. It just takes more time because there are fewer cognates. It's wrong to perpetuate this idea that Arabic is "harder" than Romance languages.

Not surprisingly, the student dropout rate is high.

"We estimate that 20,000 students are studying Arabic at the collegiate level, but not even 5% are likely to graduate with functional speaking proficiency," says R. Kirk Belnap, director of the National Resource Center at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

One of the big problems with using "functional speaking proficiency" as a guideline for fluency in Arabic is that not all of the 20,000 students study Arabic with the goal of proficient speaking. Many want to be become translators, or analysts for government agencies. Right now, the most widely accepted Arabic textbooks for native English speakers prepares students to go into those kind of jobs, not become proficient speakers. I think that speaking is essential.

In an attempt to fix the problem, programs are sprouting to provide Arabic lessons to younger students.

More than 100 public, Islamic and other private schools nationwide now offer pre-collegiate Arabic-language programs of three to five sessions a week throughout the academic year, according to the National Capital Language Resource Center.

Like the two Arabic classes I teach.

Doing so does not come without risks, however. New York City this week opened its Khalil Gibran International Academy, which requires that its students study Arabic language. But the school has been greeted with protests by some who consider it a training ground for radical Islam. Others defend the school and say it helps meet the need for more Arabic speakers in the USA.

Oh yeah, well you can't study Korean, because it is a training ground for nuclear weapons creation.

This summer, STARTALK, a BYU-sponsored summer camp, offered a full session in Arabic for the first time in its 46-year history. This move represents further measures by the National Security Language Initiative — President Bush's 2006 effort to allot $114 million toward the study of Arabic, Farsi, Hindi and Urdu — to increase the learning of "critical" foreign languages. Minnesota's Concordia Language Villages recently completed its second annual Arabic language camp.

Go President Bush.

Whether creative and younger classrooms are the solutions is yet to be determined. The dropout rate at the K-12 level is 75%, says Dora Johnson of the Center for Applied Linguistics, an organization based in Washington, D.C., that researches and promotes the teaching and learning of languages.

But despite these numbers, academics say that there is potential for improvement.

Well that's the good thing about lousy results...

"I don't think they're frustrated," University of Texas Arabic professor Mahmoud al-Batal says of his "self-selected" Arabic students. "This is a national challenge for us. The most important thing is to provide teacher training for all those involved … and (create) more programs (overseas) and intensive programs in the U.S."

Concordia's director, Christine Schulze, adds: "Arabic is a language in great demand in many areas of society. … People are more interested, curious and want to reach out."

I really want to be the best teacher I can.

MY OPI!!!!

Today, I was 14 minutes late to my French Teaching Methodology class. Dr. Maggie Nassif was giving me a mock-OPI, Oral Proficiency Interview.

She would have rated me right between Intermediate-high and Advanced-low.

ADVANCED LOW!??! WHAT!!! That's incredible! I'm so happy!!!!!! I speak Arabic!!!!!!!! She told me that I speak very fluently.

Startalk - Arabic

I am working as an "apprentice teacher" for a program called Startalk. Kind of nifty little catch-name; Start Talking Arabic. Startalk Arabic. Yeah.

The federal government has a ton of money set aside for this specific project. Individual schools, like BYU, and Boston University, and the University of Chicago, come up with a proposal for a program, and then get the funding from the federal government to run it. There are over a dozen Chinese and Arabic Startalk programs running around the country.

This year, 2007, is the first year of Startalk.

People are here from Washington D.C., sitting in on our classes, and interviewing various people (including myself for an hour yesterday) in pre-program-evaluation-writing efforts. These people will write reccomendations for next year, and evaluate the program overall. It's exciting. I would work for Startalk next year.

There are many pros and cons to this job, but overall it has been invaluable to me as a future Middle School Arabic teacher.

Why I Love Waylon Jennings

I don't know how I could have grown up twenty years of my life without ever hearing Waylon Jennings' name. What rock was I living under? My friend Trevor made me a CD one time with one of his songs on it from a Sesame Street video called 'Follow That Bird', and I liked it, so I bought a CD called 'Ultimate Waylon Jennings' with a BestBuy gift card that I got for Christmas.

I like what it says about him in the CD Jacket: "he reinvigorated country music, took it by the scruff of its neck and walked it over to Hillbilly Central, reminding the Nashville Sound that its roots were in the lonesome moan of the wind, and the restless urge to keep moving, and a hard stompin' all-four hoofbeat. Thumb on the bass strings."

It would be neat to leave a legacy like that. "She reinvigorated the Arabic language, took it by the scruff of its neck, walked it over to Anti-Islam Central, reminding the Patriotic-borderline-Nationalist Conservative American Movement that its roots were in the pursuit of democracy, the restless urge to Manifest Destiny, and a hard resolution to uphold basic human rights and liberties. Right hand over your heart."