[261]

1. Diccionario Practico De Regencia Verbal Pdf Merge Pdf
2. Diccionario Practico De Regencia Verbal Pdf Merge Excel
3. Diccionario Pratico De Regencia Verbal Pdf Merger

- 2 -

Applied Linguistics

Diccionario Pratico De Regencia Verbal Pdf Reader. 5/30/2017 0 Comments Veja aqui a lista de acervo bibliogr. So, for a nominal, verbal equivalent of the London Times Atlas. And I am also not the kind of person who says it’s the reader’s. Wheaton College, Weathon, Illinois, janeiro de 1960. Create PDF files without this.

Prepared by Karen L. Smith

[262]

Vygotskyan Approaches to Understanding Foreign Language Learner Discourse During Communicative Tasks

Frank B. Brooks

The Florida State University

Richard Donato

University of Pittsburgh

Abstract: This article presents and analyzes speech data from secondary-level learners of Spanish who are engaged in a problem-solving speaking task commonly used in classrooms and in research. It applies a Vygotskyan perspective to understand the nature of selected aspects of their speech activity, such as talk about the task, talk about the talk, and the use of English. The findings suggest that encoding-decoding perspectives, prevalent in much second language research on learner-to-learner speech activity, are inappropriate for capturing and understanding what these learners are attempting to accomplish during their face-to-face activity. In other words, not all speech activity between classroom learners during classroom communicative tasks is necessarily communicative in intent.

Key Words: discourse, speech activity, Vygotsky, classroom-based research, foreign language learning, language learning tasks communication

Introduction

Drawing from information-processing models of first language production (see Crookes 1991, for a review of second language speech production research), second and foreign language learning research assumes that student discourse is the result of encoding, decoding, and modifying internal representations of the new language. Verbal interaction is operationalized, as Pica et al (1991: 353) point out, as a series of signal-response exchanges in which learners attempt to understand the literal meaning of the utterances that the language forms and structures encode (our emphasis). Thus, analysis of target language interactions during communicative tasks is often confined to uncovering the ways interlocutors unwrap linguistic messages and achieve literal comprehension through requests for clarification and comprehension checking. Support for such analysis derives from second language acquisition theory, which maintains that through these kinds of discourse negotiations language is made comprehensible and is thus available for linguistic processing in the learner (Pica 1987).

This conceptualization of human communication, often referred to as the «conduit metaphor», according to Reddy (1979) portrays the receiver's task as one of simple «extraction» (288), thereby trivializing the function of the reader or listener (308). Bickhhard, moreover, maintains that this encoding-decoding view of communication is logically incoherent and is an aporia (see Bickhard 1992 for a thorough discussion of the impossibility of encodingism). According to Bickhard (in press):

For Bickhard, then, the encoding-decoding perspective fails to capture how utterances interact with social realities, evoking transformations of the social situation as well as constituting them. At best, encoding and decoding reflect only the most ordinary and instrumental aspects of language use, i.e., message transmission and reception (see also Wertsch [1991: 67]).

This article proposes that this dominant encoding-decoding view serves only to obscure our investigations of what foreign language learners are actually trying to achieve during verbal interaction in problem-solving tasks of the sort that are becoming more popular in today's second and foreign language classrooms (Pica, Kanagy, and Falodun 1993) by limiting it to the literal comprehension of each other's verbal output, and the building up of internal linguistic representations. Nunan (1992) succinctly summarizes previous second language investigations of verbal interaction when he states that in these studies the language produced by learners is reduced to, and reproduced as, a set of figures and numbers that are manipulated in various ways. For example, it is common in second language studies of verbal interaction to estimate the amount of negotiation of meaning that occurs under certain experimental conditions (e.g., information-gap tasks carried out in small group versus with the teacher) by counting the number of times the learners use clarification requests such as «What do you mean by X?» Statistical analysis is then used to ascertain whether one condition was more likely than the other to promote significantly more negotiation of meaning.

Nunan doubts the usefulness of such studies because they have one great drawback: they exclude the very thing that we are most interested in, i. e., language itself and the activity of the learners. More specifically, these studies fail to uncover how speaking is used as a strategic tool for cognizing and constructing tasks, meaning, and shared situational definitions. Nunan goes further to argue that «such studies are narrowly conceived and executed... are over represented in the literature... have unduly influenced the second language research agenda... and have given us an incomplete picture of second language acquisition» (15). We would add that by acknowledging the impossibility of analyzing second language discourse as simply encoding and decoding, we are in a position to extend the study of second language interaction beyond simple message transmission and comprehension and revisit learner verbal production during interaction with new questions and greater insight into the role of speaking as cognitive activity (Ahmed 1988; Donato 1988). We contend that what is gained by reappraising the encoding approach is a more refined psycholinguistic understanding of what learners are trying to achieve during verbal interaction. Further, this knowledge has an applied value. To be sure, it can ultimately change foreign language teaching practice in a way that has yet been achieved. Enabling teachers to understand better the verbal performance of their students during communicative tasks (e.g., why they may use their native language during problem-solving tasks) can unfasten the constraints on language use in many second and foreign language classrooms.

Vygotskyan Psycholinguistic Theory

Recently, a series of studies on the role of speaking in second language interactions have attempted to go beyond this encoding-decoding perspective of second language interaction (e.g., Ahmed 1988; Diaz and Klingler 1991; Donato 1994; Lantolf and Appel 1994; McCaffertry 1992). These studies are theoretically motivated by the work of L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934), a Soviet psychologist, semiotician, and pedagogue whose ideas on the interrelations of thinking and speaking have laid the groundwork for a sociocultural theory of sign-mediated human action. Vygotskyan psycholinguistic theory, in contrast to the encoding-decoding perspective, maintains that since thinking is mediated by semiotic systems, notably language, speaking is cognitive activity [264] (Vygotsky 1986). For Vygotsky, thinking and speaking are inherently linked. A brief review is necessary, however, of a basic principle of Vygotskyan theory, the principle of semiotic mediation, prior to discussion of this principle in the light of second language interaction during problem-solving tasks between third-year high school learners of Spanish.

Semiotic Mediation

For Vygotsky, linguistic signs are used to organize, plan, and coordinate one's own actions or the actions of others. As Wertsch and Toma (in press) point out, the use of signs as a tool of thought does not simply facilitate mental actions that could have otherwise occurred in their absence. Rather, it alters the entire flow and structure of mental functions just as a technical tool alters the process of labor (Vygotsky 1981). Thinking for Vygotsky involves, therefore, both the persons and the mediational means they use, i. e., language. Rather than separate individuals from the semiotic systems mediating their activity, as is implied in encoding-decoding perspectives of speech production, both the individual and the linguistic tools must be understood as an irreducible whole. Insisting upon the inseparability of the individual from the semiotic systems mediating and constituting action can lead to more robust descriptions of the cognitive function of speaking for conducting human activity.

Vygotsky's notion of semiotic mediation therefore enables richer and more robust understandings of foreign language learners in a classroom setting by focusing on what students are trying to achieve through their verbal interactions during classroom speaking tasks in the second language. This focus contrasts with encoding-decoding perspectives that often attend to the linguistic digressions from native speaker norms (or how native speakers encode meanings and how error-ridden learner production can be in comparison) or on verbal negotiations whereby seemingly already existent representations are converged upon by conversational participants (or how learners work toward mutual comprehension of each other's encodings). A Vygotskyan approach views speaking as the very instrument that simultaneously constitutes and constructs learners' interactions in the target language with respect to the target language itself, the task as it is presented and understood by the participants, the goals learners set for completing tasks, and their orientation to the task and to each other. In short, the focus of attention in a Vygotskyan analysis is on interpreting how speaking creates a shared social reality and maintains that individuals speak to plan and carry out task-relevant actions rather than encode and decode in order to speak (Donato 1994). As Frawley and Lantolf (1985) have argued, all forms of discourse during speech activity are relevant and revelatory of the cognitive disposition of the participants involved in the task. Thoughts and actions are forged in language. Using a Vygotskyan framework, therefore, allows us to move second language learning into the realm of human ontogenetic development.

The following study shows how a Vygotskyan analysis of second language verbal interaction can extend beyond the encoding-decoding framework of second language research by providing specific examples from student production during a two-way information-gap task that reveal the interrelatedness of speaking and thinking. These data serve as a backdrop for a discussion of the importance of understanding what learners are accomplishing through speaking during classroom tasks and how the results of this study can respond to perplexing concerns about group interaction in the foreign language classroom.

The Study

The present study is a reanalysis of data taken from eight pairs of third-year high school learners of Spanish and utilized in an earlier study (Brooks 1992) ⁽²⁸⁾ during which the students participated in a two-way information-gap [265] type activity. The purpose of selecting this activity type was to use one kind of experimental task common to the study of conversational negotiations (e.g., Doughty and Pica 1986; Gass and Varonis 1985; Pica and Doughty 1985, 1988; Varonis and Gass 1986). The specific jig-saw task diagrams are presented in figures 1a and 1b. During data collection, student pairs sat opposite each other but with a wooden barrier between them. They were directed to work with one another in Spanish to find out and draw in what the other had on his or her part of the diagram that was both similar to and different from the other's diagrams. When finished, the partners (theoretically) will each have drawn a representation of the same diagram. (For further discussion, see Brooks and Niendorf 1993). The conversations were both audio and video recorded. Procedures established by Green and Wallat (1981) for verbatim transcription of the conversations were followed. Each transcript was then explored and analyzed.

Figure 1A

Data Analysis

The intention in the present study is not to analyze these interactions as has been done previously (i.e., the codification and quantification of discourse patterns that, in the end, remove us from the very material of interest) but rather to investigate how speaking during a two-way information-gap task collaboratively influences and builds a shared social reality between the participants. A Vygotskyan approach is useful in this respect because it redresses some of the limitations of studies such as the ones summarized above by Nunan (1992) by providing a well-developed framework for understanding the constitutive role of speaking for the creation of shared social worlds and intersubjective encounters (Rommetveit 1979).

For this study we look at three specific instrumental functions of speaking identified by Ahmed (1988) during dyadic problem-solving interactions: (1) speaking as object regulation, (2) speaking as shared orientation, and (3) speaking as goal formation. [266] More specifically, speaking as object regulation refers to how speaking enables learners to think about, make sense of, and control the task itself (object) as it is presented to them. Speaking as shared orientation refers to the ways that speaking structures experience by establishing a shared social reality and joint perspective on the task or, as Rommetveit (1979: 94) calls it, «states of intersubjectivity». Finally, speaking as goal formation pertains to the way that learner discourse is pressed into service to construct individual or cooperative goals or plans during interaction (Jones and Gerhard 1967). We believe that these mediating functions during speaking are highly germane to the study of group interaction during communicative tasks in foreign language classrooms because they do not neglect the learners as co-constructors and sense-makers of their own interactions with respect to the task and to each other. Moreover, speaking and thinking are closely linked and are seen as co-constituting the total activity of the learners.

Figure 1B

I. Speaking as Object Regulation

In any verbal interaction, speakers must relate not only to what is being said but the activity of saying it as well. In other words, in addition to issuing verbal propositions (sending messages) to an interlocutor, speakers also engage in «metatalk». Metatalk is talk by the participants about the task at hand and the discourse that constitutes the task. Metatalk, however, is frequently discouraged in second-language classrooms as it can be considered non-relevant and undesirable since most metatalk, especially among novices, tends to occur in the L1 ⁽²⁹⁾. The following examples show how metatalk is an important component of discursive activity in both initiating and sustaining further discourse. In other words, metatalk serves to promote verbal interaction and is one type of verbal metacognition.

Example A:

In Example A, it appears that these two students have stepped out of the interaction to comment on the words they are using while participating in the task. S1's surprise at knowing the word solamente (line 036) leads her to comment on its usefulness (line 037). This statement can be classified as metatalk since S1 talks directly and explicitly about her own self-generated speech. In fact, she appears to be addressing no one other than herself. Note that she is not asking S2 if he understands the meaning of the word but is commenting on the word's usefulness in controlling the task. S2 responds by signaling to S1 that even if the word is un palabrabien (line039) he is overtly unaware of its meaning and explicitly expresses his non-comprehension in line 038.

Another example of speaking as object regulation (metatalk) is provided below in Example B. Here, we observe two learners coming to terms with the task itself and the language they use to construct it:

Example B:

In this example, S1 not only realizes that he has used a word in French (faire, line 093) he eventually feels that progress in the task is not going well at the moment and expresses this realization overtly in line 101. Nevertheless, S2 is able to gain control for S1 and to continue with the task following line 102. These two learners are clearly working with one another to accomplish the problem-solving task as presented, which is not an easy process for them, especially given that this was the first (and only!) opportunity they had ever had in their three years of Spanish to participate in this kind of problem-solving task. Their frustration is therefore normal but does not prevent them from completing the task quite well.

The importance of these examples of student speech activity from two different dyads is to demonstrate that not all task talk is about the task or encoding and decoding messages, nor should it be, but often is about the talk itself. This observation is critical in that it provides the conditions for learners to arrive at a common language for establishing intersubjectivity (Rommetveit 1979). Indeed, throughout the eight different recorded conversations there are many separate instances of metatalk that occurred and appeared to serve as a means of extending discourse in new directions and sustaining verbal interaction (e.g., «that's not a Spanish word», «I like that word/we have to use that one», «I know what you're talking about», «Hey, what's the verb for that?», «I don't know what that means»).

What is also interesting is that this metatalk occurred in English, a situation routinely observed in foreign language settings during small group work, especially from among lower proficiency level learners, though it also has been found to occur among intermediate level learners in a university setting as well (Donato and Brooks 1994). Why this occurs, more importantly, is explained by Vygotskyan theory. Metatalk is essentially metacognition «out loud». Metacognition in his theory is semiotically constructed, primarily through language. That these statements should be explicitly made in the students' native language, [268] moreover, is not at all surprizing. The examples above, which could have been discarded from some analyses (because production was not in L2), in fact serve to enable the learners to establish control of the discourse and the task by explicitly commenting on their linguistic tools used in its construction. What is more important, these learners are able to continue their interactions after having commented on their own and their interlocutor's language.

We are not suggesting that the use of the L1 during L2 interactions is to be encouraged necessarily but rather that it is a normal psycholinguistic process that facilitates L2 production and allows the learners both to initiate and sustain verbal interaction with one another (Donato and Lantolf 1990). In short, verbal thinking mediates one's relationship with the new language and with language itself (in this case, the learners' L1) and is quite necessary and natural. Moreover, it is characteristic of foreign language learner discourse, especially for tasks with which they are not yet familiar.

II. Speaking as Shared Orientation

Orientation refers to how individuals approach a given task and the steps they take in achieving the goals they have set for themselves. Closely related to the discourse of speakers about task-related talk, orientational talk serves to focus joint attention on the problem to be solved and relates to how a task will be carried out. As Talyzina (1981) points out, the actions taken to orient oneself to a task are highly idiosyncratic and can be defined only in reference to the individuals involved and not on the basis of externally defined and imposed task requirements. This is an important point to emphasize, especially for the conduct of classroom small-group tasks, since often it is assumed that these activities will be approached in the same way by all students. Discourse serves to orient oneself and others and is therefore verbal thinking about the coustruction of the activity. It is not merely the sending of the propositional contents of the activity to a partner. The following example demonstrates how discourse is used to construct joint orientation to the two-way information-gap task.

Example C

S1 suddenly changes the direction of the discussion; she has figured out a way to establish reference points on diagrams, which will serve to facilitate completing the task.

Like metatalk, discourse that orients participants to how the problem-solving task can be accomplished is a metacognitive strategy. In the beginning of the example above, we see how S1 suddenly understands the task for herself in a moment of excitement, which is reflected in the volume and tone of her voice. She then is able to guide S2 to a joint focus on the procedures for task completion. In Rommetveit's (1979) terms, S1 and S2 achieve intersubjectivity since they both come to define task procedures in the same way. What is important about this interaction is that much of the initial interactive work between S1 and S2 is focussed on knowing how to do the task rather than on displaying what they know about the contents of the pictures they are describing. In other words, they initially speak in order to act rather than act in order to speak (Donato 1988). More specifically, they talk in order to set up problem solving (i.e., establishing procedures for doing task) rather than problem-solving as an opportunity to practice speaking. Although compliance with the task was a requirement of the experimental session, engagement in the task does not come about until after several attempts to establish the students' own procedures for achieving their task-related goals. This will later prove critical to understanding the nature of classroom tasks and the role of speaking in carrying them out.

Looking more closely at Example C, early in the interaction S1 orients herself to a procedure for completion of the task. This procedure involves numbering the boxes on her diagram from left to right and from top to bottom, from one to twenty-four. She exclaims enthusiastically in lines 177 -Oye, oye, oye! and 180 -veo, veo, veo!. These two lines, said in Spanish and replete with affective force, indicate that she has arrived at an understanding for herself of how to solve the task. Her actions now take on a new significance. She orients her partner to a similar understanding, which takes a number of additional turns. S2, however, is not a passive partner but rather is an active co-constructor of the orientation. He regulates the interaction to a large extent by signaling his non-comprehension, as seen in lines 184, 187, 202, and 205. That he eventually comes to the same orientation as S1 is revealed finally at the conclusion of Example C when he explicitly states in line 258 I understand what you aretalking about. Later, S1's strategic orientation to the task is appropriated by S2 when he too begins referencing specific boxes in the diagram with a number that they both had agreed upon, as seen in line 309: uh número diez y siete. Thus, S2 demonstrates that he has indeed established intersubjectivity with S1 by using her numbering strategy six more times during the remainder of the task. [270]

Another example of orientational talk appears below.

In this example, S1 and S2 are trying to locate the figure of the umbrella in the diagram. Because S1 does not know the word in Spanish for umbrella, he uses the English word (line 061). S2, however, is not sure of its exact placement in the diagram and begins to reorient S1 (line 067 and again in lines 071 and 072). This reorientation to the location of the umbrella actually continues for many more turns. What in fact has happened is that S2 realizes that S1 is confused and thus takes personal control of the task for the time being by reorienting him to the diagram until they eventually resolve the dilemma.

III. Speaking as Goal Formation

Speaking as goal formation, although closely related to the principles of speaking as object regulation and orientation to task, represents another distinctive aspect of semiotic mediation. When individuals are faced with a task they sometimes need to speak in order to externalize the goal or end-result of their activity. Even though teachers (and researchers) often provide task goals, as is illustrated in Example E below, there are moments where confusion still exists for the learners that needs to be resolved.

Example E (R=Researcher):

R 001 LIKE WE DID LAST WEEK, YOU'VE GOT THE PIECES AND PARTS OF ONE DRAWING, OKAY? SO, YOU HAVE ONE HALF AND YOU HAVE THE OTHER HALF. WHAT YOU NEED TO DO IN SPANISH, JUST KEEP IT IN SPANISH AS MUCH AS YOU CAN, PREFERABLY IN SPANISH, OKAY, TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT THE OTHER ONE HAS SO THAT YOU CAN COMPLETE OR FILL IN WHAT YOU'RE MISSING, OKAY? YOU GET THAT INFORMATION FROM THE OTHER ONE, OKAY? SO JUST KEEP IT IN SPANISH.

We can see in this interaction that the researcher explained the procedures for task completion to these students. In fact, the students were oriented to the task goals the day before the taping was conducted to acquaint them with the recording room and the two-way information-gap activity. The students even had the opportunity to perform briefly a similar kind of task in English to become familiarized with what they were expected to accomplish during the taping sessions. All of the other seven student dyads displayed familiarization with the goals of the task except for this particular group of students. Because the researcher provided the task goals to the students, little if any goal formation talk is evident in the total sample.

Nevertheless, in the case of this one dyad, S2 needed to reformulate the task goals (line 009) in order to establish for himself the «mental image of the object» (Lomov 1982, cited in Ahmed 1988: 223) ⁽³⁰⁾. Moreover, S2 asked S1 if he indeed wrote down the number that he had provided (line 019), thus reassuring himself that they both were following the researcher's instructions. It must be remembered that all events and activities are organized according to goals and that meaning and purpose hold a central place in the definition of activities or events (Rogoff 1990). More importantly, it is only when the purposes of the participants in events or activities are understood that their actions make sense. Their actions occur in the service of accomplishing something that is understandable. In order for it to be understandable, it is sometimes necessary to externalize through speech, or semiotically mediate, those goals so that they become clear and are comprehensible, which often times results in initial goals becoming altered (Ahmed 1988). However, despite the externally imposed goal of «describe the picture by communicating with each other», the learners in Example E still needed to state for themselves the end result of this experience in order to make sense of their actions.

What occurs here is that S2 felt compelled to interrupt his own talk (line 009) and to reacquaint for himself what the purpose of the activity was (line 110). In so doing, he took control of the activity to reorient himself to the task goal. Once again, S1 and S2 achieve intersubjectivity or a sharing of purpose and focus for the task. Once this intersubjectivity has been established (line 012) through the externalization of their own goals, S2 and S1 are able once again to construct the activity in Spanish (line 013).

Conclusion

From the analysis of this study we offer the following points concerning the contribution of Vygotskyan psycholinguistic theory to research in foreign language learner discourse. First, the preceding examples indicate that when learners interact verbally during a task, they do more than simply encode and decode messages about the topic at hand. The discourse of the interactions highlighted from this study shows that learners indeed attempt to control the problem-solving task actively by constructing it verbally and orienting themselves to the language and task demands as they understand them. The importance of this insight is that what might appear on the surface as non-relevant task talk is in fact mediating the participants' control over the language and procedures of the task, each other, and ultimately the self. This control is what Vygotsky (1986) refers to as regulation and is one of the major features of human cognitive development within his theory. The discourse seen in the above examples demonstrates therefore the impossibility of discussing L2 performance apart from cognition (e.g., planning, monitoring, etc.) as is often done in second language acquisition research (e.g., Pica et al 1991). Further, this cognition is semiotically constructed and can be observed directly during verbal interactions.

Second, these data have implications for thinking about and constructing tasks given [272] to foreign language learners in classes or during experiments. In the case of classroom small-group activities, most instructors would probably agree that students could fall along a continuum from non-compliance to engagement with the task, as shown in figure 2.

More specifically, simply coercing students to comply with a task does not necessarily guarantee that they will become engaged with it or, to put it in other terms, construct it and connect to it and to each other as meaningful activity. For meaningful interaction to occur requires that learners be given the opportunity to structure tasks and to establish goals as they feel necessary in order to move from mere compliance to engagement, as is seen in the examples above (see also Donato 1994). We observed that when allowed to structure the procedures of the activity and discuss the language of the task and its goals, even in English, these learners were able to orient themselves jointly, thus allowing them to regulate themselves during the problem-solving activity. Therefore, those who have recently introduced the notion of task-based foreign language learning need to consider that tasks can not be externally defined or classified on the basis of specific external task features (e.g., Long and Crookes 1992; Nunan 1989; Pica, Kanagy, and Falodun 1993) despite our best efforts to do so. Rather, tasks are in fact internally constructed through the moment-to-moment verbal interactions of the learners during actual task performance. As Coughlan and Duff argue, «a linguistic event never duplicates a past one, and can never be truly replicated in the future. For these reasons, we must be careful when we assume that 'task' is indeed a constant in our measurements: while the task or blueprint may be the same, the activity it generates will be unique». Ceding greater control of the task to the learners themselves and allowing them multiple opportunities to engage in analogous problem-solving tasks can result in moving beyond mere compliance to greater levels of engagement and self-directed learning (Brooks and Niendorf 1993; Donato 1988; Donato and Brooks 1994; Donato and Lantolf 1990). Meaningful task-based instruction is derived in large part, therefore, from the extent to which learners are permitted to infuse activities with their own goals and procedures. As Thomson (1992) points out, tasks should be more concerned with the ways that learners interact with the language than the outcome of the language use. Tasks therefore draw their authenticity and meaningfulness from learners who believe that what they are doing is real, is under their own control, and is worth pursuing.

Third, if learners are allowed to participate in successive, analogous problem-solving tasks that they can jointly construct, learners can continue to become learning environments for one another (Brooks and Niendorf 1993). The learners can, thus, carry over task-relevant information from one context to another as a scaffold to support the performance of new task components (Rogoff 1990; Rogoff and Gardner 1984). In making new information compatible with the learners' current knowledge and skills, learners can guide and orient one another to successively more complex problems. Thus, students can continuously draw upon previous knowledge about prior tasks, bringing about continued cognitive growth and adroitness at solving new communication dilemmas.

Finally, Vygotskyan approaches to foreign language learner discourse shed light upon important small-group processes that up until now have gone unnoticed or worse, ignored. Language learning activity must [273] be viewed as cognitive activity and not merely the rehearsal and eventual acquisition of linguistic forms, as is prevalent in such classroom activities as «conversation cards» (Kinginger, 1989), communication simulations (Brooks 1989, 1990), and roleplay activities (Ahmed 1988 and Donato 1988). These activities, and by extension all classroom activities, can only become effective if learners are allowed to take control over them for themselves and have opportunities to grow into them. For Vygotsky, communication focuses less on the transfer of information and more on how, through speaking, individuals maintain their individuality and create a shared social world during communicative activity. As the present analysis has shown, it is not only the contents of the lesson or the communicative task that is paramount, but engagement with and control of communicative interactions that will ultimately benefit the foreign language learner, both in the classroom and in the real world. ⁽³¹⁾

WORKS CITED

Ahmed, Mohammed. 1988. «Speaking as Cognitive Regulation: A Study of L1 and L2 Dyadic Problem Solving Activity». Diss. U of Delaware.

Bickhard, M. in press. «The Import of Fodor's Anticonstructivist Arguments». Epistemological Foundations of Mathematical Experience. Ed. L. Steffe. New York: Springer-Verlag.

_____. 1992. «How Does Environment Affect the Person?» Children's Development Within Social Contexts: Metatheoretical, Theoretical and Methodological Issues. Eds. L. T. Winegar and J. Valsiner. Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum. 63-92.

Brooks, Frank B. 1992. «Spanish III Learners Talking to One Another Through a Jig Saw Task». Canadian Modern Language Review 48: 696-717.

_____. 1990. «Foreign Language Learning: A Social Interaction Perspective». Second Language Acquisition-Foreign Language Learning. Eds. Bill VanPatten and James F. Lee. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. 153-69.

_____. 1989. «Patterns of Instruction and Student Participation in Small-Group, Learner-to-Learner Speaking Opportunities in a Spanish Conversation Course at the College Level: A Social Interaction Perspective». Diss. The Ohio State U.

Brooks, Frank B., and Kari Niendorf. 1993. «Promoting Communicative Competence Through Task-Based Speech Activity». Dimension 92-93. Ed. Robert M. Terry. Valdosta, GA: Southern Conference on Language Teaching. 43-67.

Coughlan, Peter, and Patricia Duff. 1994. «Same Task, Different Activities: Analysis of an SLA Task from an Activity Theory Perspective». Vygotskyan Approaches to Second Language Research. Eds. J. Lantolf and G. Appel. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Crookes, Graham. 1991. «Second Language Speech Production Research: A Methodologically Oriented Review». Studies in Second Language Acquisition 13: 113-32.

Díaz, Rafael, and C. Klingler. 1991. «Toward an Explanatory Model of the Interaction of Bilingualism and Cognitive Development». Language Processing in Bilingual Children. Ed. Ellen Bialystok. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 167-92.

de Guerrero, María 1990. «The Nature of Inner Speech in Mental Rehearsal of a Second Language». Diss. U of Puerto Rico.

Donato, Richard. 1994. «Collective Scaffolding in Second [274] Language Learning». Vygotskyan Approaches to Second Language Acquisition. Eds. James Lantolf and Gabriele Appel. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

_____. 1988. «Beyond Group: A Psycholinguistic Rationale for Collective Activity in Second Language Learning». Diss. U of Delaware.

Donato, Richard, and Frank B. Brooks. 1994. «Looking Across Collaborative Tasks: Capturing L2 Discourse Development». Paper, AAAL Conference, Baltimore, MD.

Donato, Richard, and James Lantolf. 1990. «The Dialogic Origins of L2 Monitoring». Pragmaticsand Language Learning Vol 1.Eds. L. F. Bouton and B. Kachru. U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Doughty, Catherine, and Teresa Pica. 1986. «Information Gap' Tasks: Do They Facilitate Second Language Acquisition?» TESOL Quarterly 20:305-325.

Frawley, William and James Lantolf. 1985. «Second Language Discourse: A Vygotskyan Perspective». Applied Linguistics 6: 143-59.

Gass, Susan, and Evangeline Varonis. 1985. «Task Variation and Normative-Nonnative Negotiation of Meaning». Input in Second Language Acquisition. Eds. Susan Gass and Carolyn Madden. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 149-61.

Green, Judith, and Cynthia Wallat. 1981. «Mapping Instructional Conversations-A Sociolinguistic Ethnography». Ethnography and Language in Educational Settings. Eds. Judith Green and Cynthia Wallat. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 161-205.

Jones, E., and H. Gerhard. 1967. Foundations of Social Psychology. New York: Wiley.

Kinginger, Celeste. 1989. «Task Variation and Classroom Learner Discourse». Diss. U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Lantolf, James, and Gabriela Appel, eds. 1994. Vygotskyan Approaches to Second Language Research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Long, Michael, and Graham Crookes. 1992. «Three Approaches to Task-Based Syllabus Design». TESOL Quarterly 26: 27-56.

Long, Michael, and Partricia Porter. 1985. «Group Work, Interlanguage Talk, and Second Language Acquisition». TESOL Quarterly 19: 207-28.

McCafferty, Steve. 1992. «The Use of Private Speech by Adult Second Language Learners: A Cross-Cultural Study». Modern Language Journal 76:177-89.

Nunan, David. 1992. «Sociocultural Aspects of Second Language Acquisition». Cross Currents 19: 13-24.

_____. 1989. Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Pica, Teresa. 1987. «Second Language Acquisition, Social Interaction, and the Classroom». Applied Linguistics 8: 3-2 1.

Pica, Teresa, and Catherine Doughty. 1988. «Variations in Classroom Interaction as a Function of Participation Pattern and Task». Second Language Discourse: A Textbook of Current Research. Ed. J. Fine. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 41-55.

_____. 1986. Input and Interaction in the Communicative Language Classroom: A Comparison of Teacher-Fronted and Group Activities». Input in Second Language Acquisition. Eds. Susan Gass and Carolyn Madden. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 115-32.

Pica, Teresa, et al. 1991. «Language Learning Through Interaction: What Role Does Gender Play?» Studies in Second Language Acquisition 13: 343-76.

Pica, Teresa, Ruth Kanagy, and John Falodun. 1993. «Choosing and Using Communication Tasks for Second Language Instruction and Research». Tasks and Language Learning: Integrating Theory and Practice. Eds. Graham Crookes and Susan Gass. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Reddy, Michael J. 1979. «The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language». Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP. 284-324.

Rogoff, Barbara. 1990. Apprenticeship in Thinking. New York: Oxford UP.

Rogoff, Barbara, and William, Gardner. 1984. «Adult Guidance of Cognitive Development». Everyday Cognition. Its Development in Social Context. Eds. Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 95-116.

Rommetveit, Ragnar. 1979. «On the Architecture of Intersubjectivity». Studies of Language, Thought, and Verbal Communication. Eds. Ragnar Rommetveit and Rolv Blakar. New York: Academic Press. 93-107.

Schwartz, Joan. 1980. «The Negotiation of Meaning: Repair in Conversation Between Second Language Learners of English». Discourse Analysis in Second Language Research. Ed. Diane Larsen-Freeman. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 138-53.

Talyzina, N. 1981. The Psychology of Learning: Theories of Learning and Programmed Instruction. Moscow, Progress Press.

Thomson, C. 1992. «Learner-Centered Tasks in the Foreign Language Classroom» ForeignLanguage Annals 25: 523-31.

Varonis, Evangeline, and Susan Gass. 1986. «Non-native/Non-native Conversations: A Model for Negotiation of Meaning». Applied Linguistics 6: 71-90.

Vygotsky, Lev. 1986. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

_____. 1981. «The Instrumental Method of Psychology». The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology. Ed. James Wertsch. Armonk, NY: E. Sharp. 134-43.

Wertsch, James. 1991. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

_____. 1981. «The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology: An Introduction». The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology. Ed. James Wertsch Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp. 3-36.

Wertsch, James, and Chikako Toma. in press. «Discourse and Learning in the Classroom: A Sociocultural Approach». Constructivism in Education. Ed. L. Steffe. Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum.

[275]

Computers in Research and Teaching

Prepared by Mark D. Larsen, assisted by Joseph A. Feustle, Jr.

Reviews and Reports

La Casa is a HyperCard stack designed to teach and test vocabulary related to the inside and outside of a house. The stack is independent of any textbook and is suitable for beginning levels of any age. The stack comes on one double-density disk. The minimum requirements are a Macintosh computer with 1MB of RAM and two 800 K drives or a hard drive and HyperCard 2.0. Although not necessary, a hard drive greatly improves the quality of the sound. The disk is not copy protected, but the stack is, and no changes can be made to the stack or the scripts.

Figure 1

The opening card that appears is the outside of a house. The students can choose between two options, to practice/learn the vocabulary or to test themselves (fig. 1). In the practice session, the students move through five scenes of a house (outside, vestibule, kitchen, living room, and bedroom), clicking the cursor on various objects. Each selection will cause a box to appear containing the name of the object in Spanish along with the pronunciation of the word in Spanish. In the practice mode, the program keeps track of the objects selected and places them in a personal dictionary, along with a translation, which can be printed out for reference. One word of caution: the dictionary begins anew with each session and is not saved. In the «test yourself» option, the students click on the «Click here for word» button (fig. 2). When the students see the word, they then click on the item in the house. If the students are correct, they hear the word spoken. If the answer is incorrect, nothing happens. The students may choose as many words as desired and can move from room to room. The program does not report a final score.

La Casa provides a novel way to learn vocabulary. The presentation of the written, spoken and visual all at once is not new to language teaching, but the ability for students [276] to be able to do so at their leisure on a computer is. This is a simple program with only six cards but it accomplishes its modest goals. My high school students enjoyed the program and retained a large amount of vocabulary although they worked with it for only 20 min. The vocabulary is standard, and the pronunciation is by native speakers. I could find no errors in content.

Diccionario Practico De Regencia Verbal Pdf Merge Pdf

Figure 2

From the point of view of programming, the stack worked almost flawlessly. All buttons functioned when pressed and pictures were correctly labeled. The female voice (from the hard drive), was excellent. Movement between cards was good. The dictionary printed as indicated. Nonetheless, I did encounter one difficulty. Frequently, the students could not move from the practice mode to the test yourself mode without quitting the entire HyperCard program. This was quite frustrating, since the button is visible and responds to a click.

A pedagogical drawback is that the use/ testing of vocabulary is all passive, and there is no opportunity to type the vocabulary or to interact in any type of contextual situation. All words are presented/tested as single, isolated items.

Similar and more elegant programs may be available, but for those who are new to CALL or too pressed for time to make their own drills, La Casa is a solid choice for ease of use for students and teachers.

En MicroConcord, una de las herramientas más «tradicionales» en la informática para el análisis textual, la concordancia KWIC (Key Word In Context), ha renacido con un vigor insospechado, acompañado de un manual escrito por Simon Murison-Bowie que es un tesoro de ideas.

Es una concordancia sumamente interactiva y flexible, que permite manipular los resultados en diversas maneras: ordenar y reordenar los resultados en grupos designados, eliminar ejemplos y grupos, aislar [277] ejemplos, hacer una selección primaria y secundaria, cambiar el número de palabras de contexto y fijar un número de ejemplos deseados.

Como instrumento pedagógico, el programa está fundamentado sobre principios comprehensivos teóricos de DDL -data-driven learning, un concepto desarrollado por Tim Johns, uno de los creadores del programa- y su impacto sobre el proceso de aprendizaje. El propósito es provocar en el estudiante un espíritu de investigación y especulación. La concordancia le da acceso al lenguaje en sus contextos naturales sin la mediación del maestro, gramático o lexicógrafo. Como método, permite el aprendizaje tanto inductivo como deductivo y la formación de nexos entre ambos tipos de razonamiento. Se puede combinar el uso de la concordancia con actividades de diccionario y de hoja de ejercicios. Con un solo ordenador en el salón de clase, MicroConcord puede servir como un «recurso en espera». Además, el programa cuenta con una función única en materia de concordancias: permite sustituir la palabra o las palabras buscadas por un espacio en blanco para crear ejercicios o exámenes.

Para la enseñanza del español, el programa ofrece enormes posibilidades para observar múltiples ejemplos de lo que se estudia sin que el profesor los tenga que inventar. Algunos usos que se pueden observar en contexto son: diferentes preposiciones después de un mismo verbo (i.e., tratar de, con, a); la posición de pronombres objetos; cognados falsos; el empleo del subjuntivo o del indicativo con cláusulas condicionales («si...»). La concordancia se presta particularmente para estudiar los contextos de expresiones que causan confusión para el anglohablante que aprende el español como segundo idioma. Un corpus grande tendrá una multitud de ejemplos de términos problemáticos como poco y un poco, ya y aún, parecer y aparecer, por y para, pretérito e imperfecto, ser y estar, saber y conocer.

MicroConcord puede realizar tareas en áreas lingüísticas que puedan beneficiarse del análisis de grandes corpora: reducir verbos regulares a su raíz, aislar elementos morfológicos, estudiar sintaxis, proporcionar contextos y frecuencias para proyectos de lexicografía, y ayudar a resolver casos de polisemia mediante la observación de múltiples ejemplos. También facilita la observación de distinciones semánticas entre varios tipos de corpora (i.e., las artes, el comercio, o textos académicos, periodísticos, especializados, etc.) y estructuras sintácticas. El traductor puede usar la concordancia para comparar el uso de palabras afines al combinar corpora en los dos idiomas. La operación del programa no es difícil. Emplea el concepto de «búsqueda por ejemplo». La pantalla exhibe ejemplos con la palabra book de cómo formular búsquedas de un solo elemento o hacer las búsquedas «booleanas» en combinación o con eliminaciones. La potencia que tiene el programa para examinar textos de 10 millones de palabras o 60 megabytes en menos de diez minutes lo capacita para uso con CD-ROM. Dos detalles no funcionaron bien. Se supone que el programa reconozca un ratón instalado, pero en uno de dos ordenadores no reconoció la presencia del ratón. El programa de instalación supuestamente detecta si el ordenador tiene un procesador de 286 o más; en un ordenador 486 de escritorio lo hizo, pero en otro, tipo cuaderno 486, instaló en dos intentos la versión de disquete, que tiene menos capacidad.

El programa necesita sólo 200K RAM y se recomienda un disco duro. Los resultados se pueden imprimir en papel o en un archivo.

El programa tiene algunas negativas, la principal de ellas la interfaz, que corresponde a una generación ya superada en el entorno DOS con programas de menúes, sin hablar de los menúes estandarizados de Windows. Los comandos de MicroConcord dependen mayormente de las teclas funcionales y de combinaciones de teclas. Es particularmente molesto tener que recurrir a la tecla alt y los números ASCII para reproducir los caracteres acentuados de español o de portugués. Aunque el manual dice que MicroConcord acepta archivosescritos con tratamientos de textos populares, como [278]WordPerfect y MSWord, el programa no reprodujo los caracteres que llevan marcas diacríticas.

La función de co-localidad, que el manual con razón subraya como una de las más importantes del programa, no está suficientemente desarrollada para ser de mucha utilidad. Las ventanillas que enseñan las palabras de más frecuente co-localidad no llevan títulos, lo cual causa confusión cuando son tres (que muestran las frecuencias de las tres palabras inmediatas a la izquierda, a la derecha y en combinación). Sería mucho más útil tener frecuencias para co-localidades específicas, i.e., la segunda palabra a la derecha, ya que las palabras colindantes tienden a ser las funcionales corrientes -«de», «a», «el», «las»- y no las de contenido que pudieran ser de interés para investigaciones literarias y sociológicas.

Los investigadores en varios campos y los profesores de español encontrarán en MicroConcord un recurso muy prometedor, aunque no perfecto, que estimulará la creatividad de profesores y estudiantes.

[279]

HOW TO PREPARE TEXT FOR SUBMISSION VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL*

Mark D. Larsen

Utah State University

1. PREPARING YOUR DOCUMENT

A. Using the global search-and-replace function of your word processor, change the foreign characters to these recommended strings:

B. You can distinguish certain words or phrases by using the following two-letter commands between braces:

C. Format your document according to the following guidelines:

*To transmit a word processing file via existing computer networks and still retain all text formatting, accents, and diacritical marks, see Professor Feustle's article, «Sending Foreign Language Word Processor Files Over Networks», Hispania 75 (1992) 1376-79. [280]

Multimedia Instruction

Prepared by Richard A. Raschio, assisted by Roberta Lavine

VIPI, Visualización del pretérito y del imperfecto

Laura Hernán

Evanston, IL

Abstract: Este artículo propone el uso de vídeo para sensibilizar al estudiante sobre las diferencias de perspectiva de presentación que existen en su aprehensión de una realidad pasada, y para hacerle notar que estas diferencias están explicitadas en la lengua española mediante dos formas verbales: el pretérito y el imperfecto. El fundamento teórico en el que se basa esta aplicación es la existencia de una correlación entre la diferencia aspectual perfectivo vs. imperfectivo, y las diferencias de perspectiva visual en el lenguaje cinematográfico. Mediante el videodisco interactivo: VIPI (Visualización del Pretérito y del Imperfecto), se hace posible la presentación contrastada de las imágenes de vídeo y el texto para facilitar el aprendizaje del uso de estas formas verbales.

Key Words: verbo, pretérito, imperfecto, enseñanza del español como segunda lengua para anglohablantes, videodisco interactivo, VIPI

Introducción

El problema que el aprendizaje del pretérito y del imperfecto españoles plantea a los anglohablantes es clásico ⁽³²⁾. La categoría de aspecto se expresa de manera muy distinta en los sistemas verbales pasados de estas dos lenguas. En el sistema verbal pasado español la diferencia aspectual perfectivo vs. imperfectivo está gramaticalizada en los tiempos pretérito, «canté», e imperfecto, «cantaba» ⁽³³⁾. Esto quiere decir que el hispanohablante tiene que hacer una elección obligatoria de aspecto seleccionando ora el pretérito, ora el imperfecto. Por el contrario, el anglohablante no tiene que explicar el contenido aspectual del enunciado como lo hace el hablante de español. Enseñar estas formas verbales supone pues que el estudiante comprenda que cuando se expresa en español la estructura de esta lengua le «fuerza» a hacer explícita una distinción aspectual que no está acostumbrado a expresar gramaticalmente en su propia lengua.

Que en el marco de la enseñanza del español como segunda lengua a nivel universitario este problema es una realidad, ha sido ilustrado por un estudio llevado a cabo en el otoño de 1992 en la Universidad de Illinois en Chicago con el propósito de comparar los niveles de adquisición del pretérito y del imperfecto en los diferentes cursos ofrecidos por el Departamento de Español. Con objeto de medir la capacidad de los alumnos para utilizar el pretérito e imperfecto en contexto se utilizaron 10 tiras de dibujos animados que luego se volvieron a utilizar, con algunos cambios, en el estudio principal. Estas tiras fueron presentadas a un total de 120 alumnos a modo de examen y sin previo aviso. Durante la clase los estudiantes debían redactar tres o cuatro oraciones por cada secuencia de dibujos presentada. Para la corrección de estos ejercicios, los instructores respectivos siguieron unas pautas de puntuación previamente establecidas basadas en un análisis nocional de las formas utilizadas por los estudiantes. Los resultados mostraron que en ningún nivel la media de uso reconocido como adecuado -oraciones correctas- sobrepasaba el 32%. Sugiere este estudio que las deficiencias existen no sólo a nivel de la conjugación -construcción formal-, sino sobre todo en el uso en contexto de estas formas verbales. Es en este último punto donde se centra la presente discusión.

Las dificultades que los alumnos tienen con estas formas verbales pasadas son debidas, [281] principalmente, a la manera en la que éstas comúnmente se enseñan. El libro de texto no da lugar a que el estudiante comprenda de modo vital el porqué de la utilización en español de dos formas verbales -el pretérito y el imperfecto- cuando en inglés se usa una sola forma- el pasado simple. Por lo tanto, el estudiante no aprecia la correlación existente entre estas conjugaciones pasadas y la realidad extralingüística que describen; no entiende que ambas formas son posibles en cualquier momento (salvo algunas excepciones) y que la elección de una u otra depende de la voluntad del hablante de presentar la situación pasada desde una perspectiva o desde otra ⁽³⁴⁾.

El uso de vídeo tiene como punto de partida la vivencia real del estudiante. Esta experiencia de una realidad pasada, si puede ser expresada lingüísticamente, también debería poder ser visualizada. Es en las imágenes evocadas y en la presentación de las situaciones pasadas que ellas ofrecen en lo que se inspira esta metodología. Se pide al estudiante que visualice la situación pasada, y que se dé cuenta de la existencia de diferentes puntos de vista en la presentación de la misma en una secuencia de imágenes (variaciones en cuanto a los planos de detalle o generales, interrupciones o saltos en la secuencia y cámara fija o móvil, por ejemplo). Para sensibilizar al alumno a esta variedad de perspectivas, se le proponen imágenes de vídeo que presentan «una» situación pero de maneras distintas; unas muestran una visión de conjunto, la situación vista desde fuera; mientras que otras muestran esta misma situación pero vista desde el interior, en pleno desarrollo. Tomemos un ejemplo: my family ate turkey that evening. El director de cine que filma esta situación puede presentarla de maneras diferentes; puede filmarla desde lejos, con la cámara fija; entonces en la pantalla el espectador ve, desde fuera, un plano general de la familia. Pero también puede filmarla vista desde el interior. La cámara efectúa un travelín entre los personajes que están comiendo; el espectador los ve de cerca y se siente como un comensal más. El estudiante «aprende» a notar estos cambios en la perspectiva de presentación de las imágenes y a clasificarlas según su enfoque ⁽³⁵⁾. El paso siguiente consiste en darle los medios lingüísticos necesarios para expresar estas distintas perspectivas. Este salto de la realidad extralingüística a la expresión verbal se logra al hacerle asociar una situación que él visiona en su desarrollo con el imperfecto español; y una situación visionada como un todo con el tiempo pretérito español. Así pues, siguiendo con nuestro ejemplo, a las imágenes del plano general de la familia que come, el estudiante asociará la forma: «mi familia comió pavo aquella noche». Y a las imágenes que presentan a la familia comiendo asociará la oración: «mi familia comía pavo aquella noche». De esta manera cuando el estudiante afronte sus propias experiencias pasadas, esta técnica le permitirá clasificar las imágenes que tenga de ese pasado de acuerdo a su perspectiva de presentación y traducirlas por las formas verbales españolas correspondientes.

Hernández Alonso (1986) y Suzanne Fleischman (1990) afirman que existe una correlación entre la diferencia aspectual perfectivo vs. imperfectivo y las diferencias de perspectiva visual en el lenguaje cinematográfico. Según los autores, el hispanohablante asocia la forma de aspecto perfectivo (i.e., el pretérito) con las escenas que presentan la situación pasada filmada como un todo desde una perspectiva exterior, y asocia la forma de aspecto imperfectivo (i.e., el imperfecto) con las escenas que presentan la situación en su desarrollo desde una perspectiva exterior. Por su parte, el anglohablante asociará las dos escenas diferentes con una única forma verbal -por ejemplo, el pasado simple.

Si bien es cierto que las imágenes (imágenes estáticas como fotografías o bandas de dibujos) ya han sido utilizadas para la enseñanza de estas formas verbales, su función y propósito pedagógico es distinto al propuesto aquí. La idea motriz de esta aplicación es la existencia de pares contrastados de secuencias de imágenes y de formas verbales, en los que un formato visual de presentación (un cierto juego de primeros planos, planos generales, de variaciones en [282] el enfoque y duración de los planos, etc) está unívocamente ligado a una forma verbal, y viceversa. Para lograr la aprehensión por parte del alumno de la correlación existente entre estos pares, VIPI presenta toda situación pasada mediante dos secuencias de imágenes, una secuencia que corresponde a la forma del pretérito y otra secuencia distinta de la anterior que corresponde a la forma del imperfecto. Esto debe hacer comprender al alumno que si cambia el verbo varía la perspectiva de presentación de la situación, y que para indicar un cambio en la perspectiva desde la que se muestra la situación pasada tiene simplemente que cambiar la forma verbal utilizada. Otros enfoques metodológicos que presentan una sola secuencia de imágenes para referirse a la situación pasada no pueden dar lugar a que el alumno entienda el significado del concepto de perspectiva de comunicación del hablante implícito en la noción de aspecto verbal.

VIPI

Para la concreción de este enfoque se necesita un medio que combine las imágenes de vídeo y el mensaje lingüístico. Un medio que dé al estudiante la posibilidad de percibir el paralelismo existente, por un lado, entre unas imágenes de vídeo filmadas desde una perspectiva exterior y una forma verbal: el pretérito; y, por otro lado, entre estas mismas imágenes de vídeo aunque esta vez filmadas desde una perspectiva interior -y una forma verbal distinta: el imperfecto. Los métodos que utilizan imágenes fijas, tales como el libro de texto y el ordenador, no permiten la presentación de esta correlación entre vídeo y texto. Así, recurrí al videodisco interactivo; y utilizando HyperCard, diseñé y desarrollé un programa de aplicación llamado VIPI: Visualización del Pretérito y del Imperfecto.

Por lo regular, el desarrollo de una tal aplicación requiere tres etapas: primero, la elección de las formas verbales que se quieren presentar visualmente; en segundo lugar, la grabación en vídeo de una serie de escenas donde se presenten estas formas verbales filmadas según las perspectivas que se estimen necesarias; y por último, la conversión de estas imágenes de vídeo al formato láser. Sin embargo, en el caso de VIPI, el proceso de creación fue el inverso ya que decidí usar material de videodiscos ya existentes: la película Casablanca. Se escogieron aquellas escenas en las que las variaciones de perspectiva de presentación eran suficientes para ilustrar las diferencias entre las formas del pretérito y del imperfecto.

En esta aplicación, todas las imágenes aparecen sin sonido porque se considera que éste distrae al alumno de su tarea primordial: la percepción de los cambios de perspectiva en la manera en que las escenas de vídeo han sido filmadas y le son presentadas.

VIPI consta de dos partes: una primera que trata de la conjugación del pretérito y del imperfecto, y una segunda relativa al uso de estas formas en contexto.

En la primera parte el alumno aprende a conjugar el pretérito y el imperfecto tanto de los verbos regulares como de los verbos irregulares. VIPI presenta unas tablas de flexiones de verbos modelos, así como las pautas o reglas que fijan la conjugación de estas formas verbales. Después se propone una serie de ejercicios de reconocimiento de las formas correctas e incorrectas y se introducen ejemplos de conjugación de aquellas formas consideradas difíciles. Para finalizar se presentan ejercicios de selección múltiple y de completar los espacios en blanco, para que el alumno pueda practicar las reglas aprendidas. En todos estos ejercicios, VIPI propone ayuda al alumno, que puede utilizarla o simplemente ignorarla -el botón «AYUDA» está presente en todas las pantallas del ordenador. Esta ayuda consiste en feedback ⁽³⁶⁾sobre la corrección de la forma utilizada; VIPI propone la forma correcta, y remite al estudiante a las tablas donde se presenta la flexión de ese mismo verbo u otro similar.

En la segunda parte de la aplicación se enseña al alumno cómo usar el pretérito y el imperfecto, y es donde se utilizan las imágenes de vídeo. VIPI pide al estudiante [283] que establezca la correlación entre pares contrastados de secuencias de imágenes y formas verbales ya comentada, es decir, entre: (a) una serie de oraciones presentadas en la pantalla del ordenador que describen unas imágenes de vídeo, y (b) estas mismas imágenes de vídeo presentadas en la pantalla del monitor de televisión gracias al videodisco.

Se presentan al alumno las ocho reglas clásicas para el uso de estas formas y se ilustran con ejemplos visuales; el estudiante está trabajando frente a una pantalla de ordenador en la que aparece el texto y a una pantalla de televisión en la que aparecen las imágenes de vídeo. Tiene ante sus ojos, al mismo tiempo, una escena y la forma verbal española requerida para expresar lingüísticamente lo que está viendo. El alumno puede escribir una oración en la pantalla del ordenador y ver en el monitor de televisión la secuencia de imágenes correspondiente, también puede ver que si cambia el tiempo verbal por otro la secuencia de imágenes correspondiente será entonces distinta. Puede decir lo que ve en imágenes y ver en imágenes lo que dice. A continuación se le proponen ejercicios que consisten en asociar secuencias a formas verbales y viceversa. Al igual que en la primera parte, VIPI ofrece ayuda constante al estudiante proponiendo feedback sobre la corrección de las elecciones que él efectúa remitiéndolo a los ejemplos de la regla de uso adecuada en cada caso.

VIPI ha sido diseñado con el propósito de ser una herramienta que ayude al alumno en su aprendizaje, de tal forma que el estudiante sea su propio guía, que sea él quien controle tanto el empleo del tiempo como la amplitud del trabajo.

El experimento

Para poder apreciar el valor práctico de enseñanza de VIPI llevé a cabo un estudio estadístico para ver si se ratificaba la siguiente hipótesis: el nivel de uso en contexto del pretérito y del imperfecto de los alumnos que aprenden estas formas siguiendo la metodología propuesta por VIPI está más en concordancia con la norma lingüística, que el de los estudiantes que para su aprendizaje siguen métodos tradicionales.

Para medir y analizar la habilidad de los estudiantes al usar estas formas verbales se utilizaron tres pruebas de control distintas: una escrita durante el horario de clases, otra que tenían una semana para escribir, y una prueba oral en la que debían hablar sobre una pintura en una conversación con un hablante nativo.

La razón del uso de tres pruebas diferentes estriba en registrar las variaciones que las diferencias en cuanto al medio -oral vs. escrito- y en cuanto al registro o al estilo -más o menos formal- de una actividad lingüística tienen en la habilidad de los estudiantes para usar la lengua que están aprendiendo. Los estudios de Labov (1970), Tarone (1982, 1983) y Sato (1984), entre otros, han demostrado que según el tipo de actividad propuesta las producciones del estudiante estarán en mayor o menor acuerdo con la norma lingüística en vigor.

Los veinte sujetos anglohablantes ⁽³⁷⁾ en su primer curso de español se separaron aleatoriamente en dos grupos: grupo «tradicional» (N=9) y grupo VIPI (N=11). El grupo tradicional siguió un método preceptivo y deductivo, sin la intervención del maestro; al alumno se le presentan ocho reglas de uso de estas formas que debe aprender a aplicar en contexto. El grupo VIPI utilizó la aplicación para videodisco interactivo, VIPI, donde se propone la correlación entre perspectiva de comunicación y perspectiva visual ya discutida. Ambos grupos dedicaron cinco horas de clase a este propósito. El trabajo fue en ambos grupos individual; el estudiante trabajaba a su ritmo sin ninguna ayuda del profesor o de sus compañeros.

Se llevó a cabo un análisis nocional que tenía como objetivo delimitar cuáles eran las formas que los alumnos tenían tendencia a emplear cuando deseaban expresar aquellas nociones que el hablante nativo expresa mediante los tiempos pretérito e imperfecto. Se consideraron nueve nociones que, a mi parecer, resumen las directivas de uso fijadas por las ocho reglas tradicionales [284] para la utilización de estas formas:

Se delimitó, para cada una de ellas, la frecuencia de uso de formas del pretérito, del imperfecto u otras que hacen los sujetos de nuestro experimento.

Los resultados obtenidos en el estudio estadístico (véase apéndice) corroboran la hipótesis propuesta.

Conclusión

El experimento llevado a cabo nos ha permitido verificar que la enseñanza del pretérito y del imperfecto españoles por medio de la aplicación para videodisco interactivo, VIPI, da lugar a un uso en contexto de estas formas más adecuado ⁽³⁸⁾ que el obtenido siguiendo un método de enseñanza tradicional de libro.

Sin embargo, dos factores parecen limitar el alcance de esta afirmación; por un lado, el reducido número de sujetos considerados en nuestro experimento (N=20), y por otro lado, como ya se ha comentado, la repercusión que puedan tener en las producciones lingüísticas de los estudiantes las variaciones en cuanto al tipo de tarea que éstos lleven a cabo. Se ha intentado paliar esta deficiencia proponiendo tres actividades diferentes: un examen escrito, una redacción escrita y una conversación oral; pero aún así, la falta de trabajos sobre el tema referentes a lengua española obliga a considerar los datos obtenidos con cautela.

Pienso que en el plano teórico VIPI aporta una clara ventaja a la enseñanza de estas formas verbales frente a los métodos preceptivos o de la imagen fija. La presentación de las secuencias de imágenes en forma de pares contrastados enfatiza las distintas perspectivas de presentación de las secuencias dando lugar a que el alumno note la existencia de diferentes puntos de vista al presentar una realidad pasada. Una vez el estudiante «siente» estas diferencias de perspectiva le es más fácil establecer una correspondencia entre estas últimas y las formas verbales que en español le permiten expresarlas.

La correlación entre imágenes de vídeo y texto es el punto clave de esta aplicación, y donde creo necesario depurar la presentación llevada a cabo por VIPI. Los estudiantes de nuestro experimento han tenido dificultades cuando se les ha pedido que se enfrenten a las imágenes de vídeo críticamente, que reflexionen sobre su estructura formal. Por extraño que pueda parecer si pensamos en la cantidad de horas que estos jóvenes están expuestos a los medios audiovisuales, no parecen ser conscientes de la «forma» del mensaje visual que reciben; parecen estar únicamente interesados por el «contenido» que las imágenes presentan. Este problema ya ha sido planteado por Cooper, Lavery y Rinvolucri en su obra Video donde introducen el término video literacy ⁽³⁹⁾, y subrayan la necesidad de una enseñanza previa del «lenguaje de las imágenes» a los estudiantes (6).

Otro factor digno de tenerse en cuenta es la favorable acogida de esta aplicación por los alumnos; pienso que se trata de algo más que del mero interés por un nuevo medio, ya que ellos habían trabajado con videodisco en ocasiones anteriores. Los resultados de un cuestionario que se presentó a los estudiantes con objeto de conocer sus impresiones sobre VIPI muestran que sin excepción todos los alumnos que lo utilizaron juzgaron la experiencia positiva, y que, si tuviesen que elegir entre volver a aprender estas formas verbales como lo hicieron o con el método tradicional, «todos» volverían a elegir VIPI. Los comentarios [285] indican que les parece más fácil aprender el uso del pretérito y del imperfecto de esta manera que por medio de reglas que tienen que memorizar una y otra vez antes de cada examen ⁽⁴⁰⁾. No les resulta una actividad tan abstracta porque pueden relacionarla con su propia realidad.

Los resultados iniciales resultan alentadores y sugieren que VIPI es un método eficaz para la enseñanza de estas formas verbales pasadas del español.

OBRAS CITADAS

Comrie, Bemard. 1985. Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cooper, Richard, Mike Lavery, and Mario Rinvolucri. 1991. Video. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fleischman, Suzanne. 1990. Tense and Narrativity. Frow Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hatch, Evelyn, and Hossein Farhardy. 1982. Research Design and Statistics for Applied Linguistics. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publishers.

Hernández Alonso, César. 1986. Gramática funcional del español. Madrid: Gredos.

Labov, William. 1970. «The Study of Language in its Social Context». StudiumGenerale 23:715-62.

Sato, C. 1984. «Phonological Processes in Second Language Acquisition: Another Look at Interlanguage Syllable Structure». Language Learning 34: 43-57.

Tarone, Eleine. 1982. «Systematicity and Attention in Interlanguage». Language Learning 32: 69-82.

_____. 1983. «On the Variability of Interlanguage Systems». Applied Linguistics 4: 142-63.

APÉNDICE

En las tablas siguientes se presentan los resultados estadísticos del experimento: la media y la desviación estándar para los grupos tradicional y Vipi. Para su análisis hemos recurrido a la prueba de variación 't', que se utiliza para determinar la diferencia entre las medias de dos poblaciones cuando los datos estudiados consisten en variables continuas. Los bajos valores de «p» (nivel de significación observado) prueban la escasa probabilidad de que los resultados del experimento indiquen la veracidad de la hipótesis nula.

Se presentan los datos en relación a cada una de las tres pruebas por separado.

[287]

News and Notes

S. 1040: Technology in Education Act 1993 is summarized in the August 1993 issue of T.H.E Journal, p.8. This act, pending in the US legislature, would provide several opportunities for educators to acquire technology, training and long term assistance in the use of new technologies.

Recovery has amassed almost 800 Hispanic periodicals and newspapers. The project hopes to identify and record at least twice that number and to have the information available on CD-ROM by scholars interested in all facets of Hispanic culture, history, literature and more.

CETH (Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities) was jointly established by Princeton and Rutgers Universities to establish formats for information exchange that will facilitate scholarship in the humanities by the use of electronic texts. CETH and Recovery have been in close contact so both organizations can share information about the latest advances in machine readable media.

Electronic Lists for Foreign Languages are available in athelstan, NEWSLETTER 5A 13-15. These computer discussion fists can be valuable sources of current information about language, culture, methodology and materials. Most of the groups listed are conducted in English, but some are in the target language. The article includes subscription procedures for the automatic list server.

T H.E. Journal 12. 14 (September 1993): 18, +, contains a concise and accurate summary of technological trends in foreign language education. The editorial discusses both traditional and technologically-based new approaches to teaching languages.

Higher Education Product Companion3.1, (1993) contains three useful articles for educators: 1) planning a computer lab; 2) integrating audio in computer-mediated lessons and, 3) wondering how educational institutions might take advantage of the Information Revolution instead of being left behind.

The Higher Education Software Collectionisa free catalog containing many commercial and shareware educational programs for the Macintosh and IBM. Contact: Chariot Software Group, San Diego CA.

Diccionario Practico De Regencia Verbal Pdf Merge Excel

Spanish and Latin American Video Catalog is a free catalog which contains many films from Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean and Brazil. All titles are in VHS format while some are available on laserdiscs in CAV and CLV formats. For more information write to: Facets Video, 1517 West Fullerton, Chicago, IL 60614; 800/331-6197.

Syllabus is a journal dedicated to presenting information covering the latest technology, software, hardware, coureware development and methodologies in higher education. The latest issue, 30 (November-December 993) contains several helpful articles regarding multimedia tools, designs and implementation. For information about subscriptions write: Syllabus, PO. Box 2716, Sunnyvale, CA 94087-0716.

InterNewsis a new Macintosh news reader established at Dartmouth. Users can collect subsets of articles, post articles and participate in discussions. Your Macintosh must be connected to a network that has a «new host» machine and runs MacTCE Contact: Software Sales, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; 603/646-2643.

New Media Centers are being established by a group of technology manufacturers and publishers to allow people to learn about new media. These Centers will be formed at higher education institutions worldwide. The Centers will enable universities to train faculty and students, introduce interactive media into various disciplines and develop media-based curriculum materials. For more information, contact: 408/541-5020. [288]

Pedagogy: Teaching in Colleges and Universities

Prepared by Robert A. Quinn

Making Authentic Cultural and Linguistic Connections

Susan Knight

Central Michigan University

Abstract: To make a course on Peninsular Culture and Civilization more interactive, relevant, and interesting, an electronic-mail exchange was established between university students in the U. S. and Spain. This article describes the steps involved in setting up such a project, the student tasks assigned, and an evaluation.

Key Words: electronic mail, computers, Spanish, Peninsular culture and civilization, Spain, communicative competence, penpals, second language pedagogy, motivation

Most language departments require Spanish majors and minors to take at least one course in the culture and civilization of Spain or Latin America, so that students will acquire basic knowledge about the geography, history, art, and politics of people living in Spanish-speaking countries. Recognizing the importance of this course, teachers often try to enliven it by supplementing civilization textbooks with materials from the various media (like newspapers, videos, slides, and music) and with visits by native speakers. If we could in some way «transport» students to a country like Spain and immerse them in its culture, however, their learning experiences would be much more vividly remembered and their motivation would increase. Consider, for example, the difference in motivation between students who have studied in Spain and those who have never been there.

In an attempt to replicate that travel experience and take advantage of its benefits without physically traversing the Atlantic, I set up an electronic-mail exchange between the 27 students in my Peninsular Culture and Civilization class (Spanish 303) and university students in Spain. The primary goals for this exchange were to «meet» people in Spain, develop personal relationships, and learn more about the country through the eyes of Spaniards themselves. To clarify how teachers who are interested in enlivening their course can supplement it with a new medium that puts students in direct, interactive contact with people living in the culture they are studying, I will discuss four areas in this article: (a) a definition of electronic mail, (b) the steps involved in establishing the exchange, (c) student assignments, and (d) project evaluation.

Definition of Electronic Mail

Electronic mail is a method of communicating via computer networks to relay messages. Compared to other means of communication like letters, phone, or facsimile transmissions (fax), e-mail is the only medium capable of producing messages that are fast, inexpensive, and also versatile (Lunde 68). Computer mail messages sent in one part of the world usually take from several minutes to a few hours to arrive in another part. The cost of electronic mail varies, depending on whether the individual is affiliated with a university or organization that offers these services or whether the individual must subscribe independently. For students and faculty at thousands of universities, however, there is usually no fee involved in sending messages. Another major advantage of e-mail is its versatility. Because electronic mail arrives via computer, it is easy to manipulate the messages by saving, filing, or printing them, by revising their content, or by resending them with addenda.

Steps Involved in Establishing the Exchange[289]

1. University support. Preliminary to planning, teachers need to consider several questions: (a) Does the university have network access (to Bitnet, Internet, or some similar system)? (b) Will the university give students personal accounts so they can use these networks? (c) Are there enough microcomputers available on campus with network connections (e.g., modems, data paths, or other devices that permit phoneline or network transmission)? The computer service department of most universities can quickly answer these questions as well as provide additional support. If the answers are «yes», the project can begin.

2. Finding «penpals». This was perhaps the most difficult and time-consuming part of my project. Two months before the actual exchange, I began a query of various Spain-related computer bulletin boards in order to find Spaniards who also had electronic mail access. At first, I put out a general «want ad» on NETNEWS, our USENET, which is a distribution bulletin board and discussion system that is international in scope. It consists of discussion on almost 1,000 topics, organized hierarchically into newsgroups. Although I only posted the NETNEWS announcement on a newsgroup called SOC.CULTURE.SPAIN, there are two other groups whose contributors write primarily in Spanish and whose concerns are Spanish oriented: /SOC.CULTURE.MEXICAN and /SOC.CULTURE.LATINAMERICA. The HELP menu provided by the various bulletin boards gives information on how to post general announcements for readers of the sub-group. I also posted the article on España-L, a Bitnet-affiliated LISTSERV group ⁽⁴¹⁾. In addition to helping with the previously mentioned bulletin boards, the computer service department of most universities can also help find out the node names for universities in Spain with access to Bitnet or Internet. Once these «addresses» are known, informational inquiries can then be sent to the postmaster at that node name ⁽⁴²⁾.

The general announcements I wrote were brief and asked only for Spaniards interested in a semester-long, e-mail exchange with U. S. university students studying Spanish Culture and Civilization. I received 17 responses from students in Spain and several from Spaniards studying in the United States. Responding individually to each student, I gave more information about the project, such as the kinds of e-mail assignments the students would have and the basic time line for the project. In addition to the «Spaniards-wanted ads,» I also recruited students on an individual basis. After reading several of the exchanges on NETNEWS or España-L, I wrote directly to certain contributors using the account numbers listed on their messages. I not only found fifteen more this way, but also found a computer science instructor in Madrid who volunteered to put a message out to his 70 students. Through his help, 22 more students were found.

By two weeks into the project, we had 54 Spaniards, making it almost impossible for me to communicate with them individually. In order to facilitate sending a single message to all Spanish students, I established a Nicknames File (i.e., I put all of their account numbers or e-mail addresses under one group name). Group messages were sent out at the beginning of the project in order to give them more specific information and also at the end of the project to thank them for their participation and solicit future cooperation.

Although I only had 27 students, it was necessary to find more than 27 Spaniards. Not only did most of the students want more than one correspondent, but many needed more than one «penpal» to fulfill the assignments. Unlike my students who were motivated by a grade to correspond, the Spaniards had no incentive other than an exchange of friendship and information. Thus, some corresponded much more frequently than others.

3. Initial training. Although computer literacy was not a goal of this class, it became essential to the project. When the class started in January, not one of the students had ever had a user-ID (an account number) and only a few even knew how to logon to the mainframe. These problems had [290] been anticipated, however, and Computer Services here at Central Michigan University offered to help in the training. Three sessions were scheduled: a general one explaining how to log-on, send and receive mail, and access NETNEWS; and two follow-up sessions for hands-on experimentation. Students were given a handout which summarized the steps presented in the general session. (Most computer service departments have these handouts already prepared). So that individual problems could be more readily addressed, the class was divided into two groups for the hands-on sessions.

Electronic-mail concerns were also addressed via a LISTSERV discussion group established just for this class. Many universities permit classes to set up their own LISTSERV groups in order to disseminate class information and encourage joint projects. As with all LISTSERVs, any message that is posted is sent to each member of the group (in this case, to the entire class). Likewise, any member can respond to messages or initiate their own.

Student Assignments

Based on recommendations by others who have worked with penpal projects in educational settings (Cohen and Miyake 268; Levin and Riel), I decided to give the students several specific assignments and then evaluate what they produced. Because the overall goal, however, was to encourage personal friendships as well as to obtain cultural information, I limited the number of assignments to five. After I gave students topics or questions to ask their Spanish peers, I asked the students to type a page-length paper summarizing their findings and reactions. The first three topics were the same for everyone and dealt with local customs and holiday celebrations, education, and politics. Students were also given specific terms and abbreviations to identify, such as E.G. B. (Educación General Básica), E.T.A. (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), and P.S.O.E. (Partido Social Obrero Español), as well as others, depending on the topic.

For the final two papers, students could choose a subject in which they were interested. The topics for these varied from Spanish food and music to American stereotypes, the Common Market, and the role of women in Spain.

In addition to the five information-reaction reports, students had an end-of-the-semester assignment: compile a notebook containing printouts of the messages they had sent to solicit the information and the replies they had received. The notebook assignment not only helped me verify that students had done their own work and that the messages were written in Spanish, but also gave me insights into the types of communication that had occurred. In the notebook, each student had to include a list of new vocabulary learned through the exchanges and a personal evaluation of the project. If students wanted to, they could include any other non-required messages that had been exchanged. About ninety percent of the students did so. The rest included only the e-mail headers showing when messages were transmitted, to whom they were sent, and from whom they were received, so that I would have an idea of the number of non-assigned exchanges that took place. The average student sent a total of 16 messages and received 12. Although fewer messages were received from the Spaniards, many of their responses were longer. Typically, an answer about politics or education would run over 300 words.

Students were also responsible for class discussions based on their findings. They found it interesting that all the Spaniards did not give the same answers to the same question. They provided varied interpretations to what the text treated as an historical event or a common perception (such as Gibraltar, regionalism, or U. S. bases in Spain).

Project Evaluation

The electronic-mail project actually had four components. Two involved on-campus communication: (a) communicating directly [291] with the professor or with another student and (b) reading and responding to class messages on the class LISTSERV. The other two were related to off-campus or international communication: (c) accessing the NETNEWS and Spanish LISTSERV bulletin boards, and (d) exchanging messages with the Spaniards and engaging in the follow-up discussions in class. Although each component served a different function, the first three helped to support the fourth, which was the most important.

Many students communicated with me directly, when they needed help with some point made in class, an assignment, or a problem with e-mail. This student communication gave me a way of responding to them individually and fostered a better rapport between us, since, via the network, I seemed to be always available.

The class LISTSERV facilitated such student-teacher communication. Using it, I could send a message that would be received by the entire class every time I wanted to post notices about special Spain-related artistic events in our area, let students know about television programs, or conduct review sessions. Before the final exam, I prepared an electronic «review sheet». Using it, students could add details or share information with others in the class.

NETNEWS and Spanish LISTSERV bulletin boards were another source of authentic information for the students. Unlike the e-mail exchange, most of these messages are written by Spaniards to other Spaniards. Thus, some of the vocabulary and idiomatic expressions were difficult for third-level students.

At times the topics were not of interest to all students (such as the 30 or so messages concerning the best beer). There were, however, interesting and heated discussions on regionalism, with contributors from all parts of Spain. Many of these exchanges gave the class topics to discuss with their Spaniards.

The fourth and primary component, the actual e-mail exchange (i.e., the information-reaction papers, the e-mail notebook, and the participation in classroom discussions) was the only one evaluated. Combined, the electronic mail activities accounted for twenty percent of each student's final grade. Even though there were some problems involved, exchanging e-mail messages had many benefits and increased the students' motivation to communicate further. By using electronic mail, students increased their knowledge of Spanish culture and history, the Spanish language, and computers.

The cultural information these students received seemed to be more authentic and better understood than information gained through conventional instruction. Not only was this evident in our classroom discussions; many student also attested to it in their evaluations. Perhaps for this reason, they became more interested in what was happening not only in Spain, but in the rest of the world-including the United States. Several Spaniards asked the American students about religious cults, their health-care system, the fanfare of political elections, and so forth. Because of the topics involved in the e-mail exchange, the students had good opportunities to think more theoretically and perhaps more critically about world issues.

In this project, students increased their knowledge of the language by writing messages, reading replies, and being exposed to different types of written discourse. Electronic mail has been previously used in the foreign language classroom to promote both reading (Beazley) and writing (Cohen and Miyake, Flórez-Estrada, Tillyer and Robb). It provides a natural way of promoting communicative competence, that is, of giving students meaningful, realistic reasons to use language and of exposing them to authentic models of written discourse. In this project, my primary purpose was to increase knowledge in a content area (Spain and the Spaniards). The students' communicative competence improved as a natural by-product of that pursuit.

Since students in the United States usually do not have much contact with colloquial phrases used by their Spanish-speaking [292] peers, a common complaint of those who study abroad is that they initially have trouble understanding the language spoken in the homes and on the streets. In an interesting way, this e-mail project did help replicate that valuable learning experience for the students. Although many of the Spaniards who participated in this project wrote in a more formal style when responding directly to questions, most of the private exchanges were written informally, as if they were talking to a friend in the same room. The electronic medium itself and the immediacy of the computer transmissions probably both contributed to this style. Thus, students in the United States who participated in this project learned about the Spanish used in daily conversation. Although there were no pre-tests or post-tests of language skills, many of the students indicated in their evaluations that they felt better able to comprehend and write Spanish as a result of participating in the e-mail project.

In the past, culture and literature classes have tended to de-emphasized communicative competence in an attempt to devote more time to course content. Recent studies have shown, however, that these students do not feel that enough emphasis is placed on speaking and that they are not «learning the language» as they thought they would (Martin and Laurie). In fact, a study with students at Middlebury College corroborates those sentiments. Liskin-Gasparro found that students who tested at the intermediate level on the Oral Proficiency Interview in September had not moved to the advanced level by May, even though all of them took a course each semester. Consequently, for our content courses, we need to offer students more communicative experiences. Electronic mail appears to be especially suited for helping students develop their communicative competence as well as improving their knowledge of Spanish culture and the Spanish language.

Besides learning more about culture and language, the students became more familiar with the use of computers, and their motivation increased. Although some students considered computer skills beyond the realm of a Spanish course and were reluctant to learn them, by the end of the semester the class understood how the computer could help them access a wide variety of information. Most students also viewed the e-mail exchange as an additional opportunity to use Spanish and to practice outside of class, if they so desired. The majority took advantage of the opportunity, either because they found the computer to be an interesting medium, because they found a new friend with whom to correspond, or both. Due to the open-ended nature of the activities, most students found they were directing their own learning and were finding out about issues in which they were interested.

Approximately a fifth of the students finished the semester having acquired a new «friend». In addition to writing frequently, some exchanged letters, photographs, magazines, music tapes, and personal presents. Two have even made plans to visit each other. In the end-of-the-course evaluations, most students cited this experience as the most meaningful part of the class. It appeared to be worthwhile for most of the Spaniards as well. After sending the last group message to the Spanish participants, twelve wrote back stating how much they had enjoyed the project and asking to be included in exchange in the following semester.

Although there were many benefits to this project, it was not without problems. At first it was difficult to find enough interested Spaniards, and several who initially agreed to be part of the project dropped out along the way. Assignment deadlines soon emerged as another problem. Because some Spaniards did not answer the questions, were on vacation, or did not reply with enough detail, some of the students found it impossible to turn in a page-long paper on a specified date, and I had to extend the deadlines.

There were also minor, individual problems that annoyed and frustrated several students on this side of the Atlantic: lost [293] mail, an inability to access mail, systems disruptions, and difficulty in finding an available computer at a specific time. In addition to computer problems, a few students encountered linguistic difficulties. They were concerned about being misunderstood or being perceived negatively due to their faulty Spanish. If students were overly concerned about this, I encouraged them to have another student check their message or to ask me how to phrase something before transmitting it. Most, however, found that the Spaniards would help them with the language by questioning what they did not understand, and at times, even sending back the original message with corrections made in capital letters. The majority were not intimidated by their Spanish peers and, in fact, found themselves taking many more risks with the language than they would have taken in the classroom.

Despite such problems, the students' reactions were overwhelmingly positive. In general, their comments could simply be summarized as follows: computers are NOT impersonal. For the 27 participants, computers increased access to students across the Atlantic, to students within their class, and to their instructor. This electronic mail project added a whole new dimension to the teaching-learning interaction, enlivened the course, and increased student motivation. It also -by allowing them to make authentic cultural and linguistic connections without actually having to travel abroad- greatly expanded the range of the content and skills that are normally explored in a required civilization course.

WORKS CITED

Beazley, Malcolm R. «Reading for Real Reasons: Computer Pals Across the World». Journal of Reading 32 (1989): 598-605.

Bedell, David. «Review of Electronic Lists for Language Learning». Athelstan 5(August 1993): 13-15.

Cohen, Moshe and Naomi Miyake. «A Worldwide Intercultural Network: Exploring Electronic Messaging [294] for Instruction». Instructional Science 15 (1986): 257-73.

Flórez-Estrada, Nancy. «Writing with a Purpose». Paper, ACTFL Convention, Chicago, November 1992.

Levin, J. A., and M. M. Riel. «Educational Electronic Networks: How They Work (and Don't Work)». Paper, The Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 1985.

Liskin-Gasparro, Judith. «Future Shock in Language Education: Responding to Global and Technological Imperatives». Paper, ACTFL Convention, Chicago, November 1992.

Diccionario Pratico De Regencia Verbal Pdf Merger

Lunde, Ken R. «Using Electronic Mail as a Medium for Foreign Language Study and Instruction». CALICO Journal (March 1990): 68-78.

Martin, Anne L. and Ian Laurie. «Student Views About the Contribution of Literary and Cultural Content to Language Learning at the Intermediate Level». Foreign Language Annals 26 (1993): 188-207.

Tillyer, Anthea and Thomas Robb. «Electronically Yours: Cross-cultural Communication Through E-Mail Penpals». Paper, TESOL Annual Convention, Atlanta, April 1993.

[295]

Pedagogy: Teaching in Elementary Schools and Middle Schools, FLES* (K-8)

Prepared by Gladys C. Lipton

Everyone Loves a Good Story: Take the Time

Janet L. Glass

Dwight E. Englewood Bede Lower School

Englewood, New Jersey

Abstract: Using children's literature as the core of a FLES* program is time consuming and requires variety. When preceded by games, songs, paired activities, sequencing of storyline, illustration, and role-play, most of the vocabulary can be pre-taught. Then, reading stories with first graders new to Spanish can become meaningful and memorable.

Key Words: story, FLES*, curriculum, children's literature, first grade, literacy

What could be a more exciting event for a first grade class new to Spanish than to read a story in Spanish and understand it all? Despite the joy, the wonders of children's literature in a second language are not arrived at quickly.

The first step is to choose a story, preferably in big book form, and adapt the text to a modest level. I chose the story of the Little Red Hen represented in this Spanish version as La gallina Paulina by Santillana Publishing Co. In the familiar story, a hen looks for food to feed her hungry chicks. She finds a grain of wheat and asks the other animals for help in planting it. They all refuse. In the end she makes bread but does not share with the other animals. She gives it only to her chicks. One of the reasons I chose this story was because the first grade classes were studying seeds as part of science. This meshed with planting and harvesting and extended to milling grain. Also, the social agenda of everyone helping with the work in order to eat the food at the end is appropriate for this age. After considering the message and intercurricular possibilities, I allotted about three weeks to develop the vocabulary necessary for the students to fully understand the story. With pre and post reading activities, the unit took about five weeks.

The way I chose to introduce the story was through the first two verses of the song: Los Pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío, cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío. La gallina busca, el maíz y el trigo, les da la comida y les da abrigo. The song, along with a picture of a hen and chicks, a plastic corn model and my coat, were all the class needed to get started on the vocabulary. The song became a game as the children, los pollitos, sang and circled around one student who was chosen to represent the adult, la gallina. As the hen, eyes closed, pointed to another student, the next gallina was picked to stand in the middle.

For the next activity I brought in a coffee grinder to change the grains in the story, los granos, into flour, harina. We easily set up the classroom so we could imagine a field on one side of the room and a mill on the other. Three students were chosen to act out the parts of la gallina, el molinero, [296] and laNaturaleza. As I said, «la gallina encontró un grano», the gallina pretended to find a grain that la Naturaleza had arranged for her to find, then when I said, «la gallina sembró un grano», she pretended to plant the grain. After the wheat grew, la Naturaleza could either put down more grains of wheat or stalks of wheat in that same spot. I used grains of rice, since that was easily available. Then, «la gallina llevó el trigo al molinero», la gallina took the grains across the room to the mill and I helped put the rice into the noisy coffee grinder while el molinero proudly pushed the button. The grains became flour before the students' eyes. I put the resulting flour onto a piece of construction paper labeled harina and took it around the room so everyone could touch it and repeat the word harina. Somestudents wanted to taste it, which I said was fine. Next we chose more students to act out the parts.

The next class period I asked the students to choose a sentence to illustrate. They could choose either «El molinero preparó harina» or «La gallina encontró un grano». This was written on sentence strips and on the blackboard so that the students could copy it easily. Before I gave them crayons to use for their picture, they had to read the sentence to me from their papers. Since we had acted these out, even the very slow readers could «read» it from memory.

In a follow-up lesson I drew three large figures on the blackboard, a chick, a mill, and a stalk of wheat. I asked a few students in turn to touch them as I quickly said, «trigo, molino, pollito, molino, pollito, pollito, trigo, etc.» Then I asked the class to say them as I touched each picture. I then did a paired activity in order to get everyone talking. I drew a smaller series of molinos, trigo and pollito son pieces of paper and gave them to students to describe to their partners. I said that some partners had the same pictures and some had different ones and their challenge was to find out which pairs had the same pictures on their papers and which ones had different ones without looking at each other's papers. For example, partner one might say: «dos molinos, tres pollitos grandes, un pollito pequeño, etc.» Then partner two looked at his paper and described what was there. They decided whether they had the same items or not. At the end they looked at each others' papers to see if they were right. This is a low anxiety activity with a lot of verbal practice.

Finally, I was able to read the big book of La gallina Paulina (with my simplified text taped over the words on the page) to a captivated class. At the end of the book, many students realized that they knew the story from somewhere else and the spark of recognition was palpable. Next, I took a copy of the words on each page on a separate piece of paper and laid them on the floor in the story's order. I then scrambled them and gave a pair of students a page to place in the right order. Each pair had to put their sheet back on the floor next to a number from 1 to 15, 15 being the last page. By then, they were so familiar with the story that some students could recognize others' mistakes and eventually get to the right order. We then read it again with the students chiming in chorus.

Additional branching from this tale has led to conversational lessons with the names, colors and sizes of the animals, new uses for the verbs sembrar, llevar, buscar, and expressions with tener, such as to be thirsty, tired, hungry, cold, and warm. Another follow-up was to play the farm animal game on CD ROM from the Playing with Language Series: Introductory Games inSpanish put out by Syracuse Language Systems.

As a culminating activity we used flour to make food ourselves. This seemed like an activity la gallina would approve of as long as all the students helped. I chose polvorones (see appendix) the small Mexican party cakes, because they are authentic, easy, and their main ingredient is flour. We enacted working together and reaping the rewards. Students also learned new food vocabulary and practiced numbers through measuring ingredients.

At best, teaching language to young children requires movement, games, songs, integration across [297] the curriculum, and multimedia. It assumes a number of performance skills to be taught such as comparing, describing, asking, etc. It also requires a body of content such as names of animals or verbs of daily routines. More than that, a curriculum requires a center that anchors all of these things. If given the considerable amount of time and variety necessary for the pre-reading phase, I believe that children's literature is the most compelling core for a curriculum design. Because it is rooted in a context, the language stays with them for a long time; because it is fantasy, it tickles the students' imaginations; because it involves reading and writing, it helps further literacy in general. In any language and in every culture, there is nothing more fun than a good story. ⁽⁴³⁾

Appendix

Recipe for polvorones

Cream one cup of butter, a half-cup of confectioner's sugar, 2 and a quarter cups of flour, 1/2 tsp. of cinnamon, 1/4 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. vanilla. Make a stiff dough. Chill. Roll into small balls about 1' diameter. Bake on buttered cookie sheet at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove and roll in confectioner's sugar and cinnamon. [298]

Pedagogy: Teaching in Secondary Schools

Prepared by Nancy Wheaton Modern

Moving Beyond the Tricks of the Trade, or Using Common, Everyday Items as Realia

Margaret Weatherly Roney

Belmont Abbey College

Abstract: Artistic ability is not a prerequisite for the innovative use of visual teaching aids. Everyday items can liven up a classroom considerably when instructors become aware of the pedagogical possibilities.

Key Words: visual aids, realia, first-year Spanish, ideas, adaptability

The Effective Spanish Teacher

Everyone knows that an effective foreign language teacher is clever, creative, and artistic, incorporating visual aids and realia into the lesson plan to hold the students' interest, right? «But I can't even draw a straight line, and I live 3000 miles from Mexico!», you may be thinking. For those of you who are not gifted in any artistic sense, read on! Many resources are available to the «non-artistic» teacher who wishes to add a little color and liveliness to the classroom. Of course, Spanish teachers for years have relied on some of the old standbys for teaching certain thematic vocabulary. Pictures of food and clothing items are easy to obtain, yes-even easier when the students find them! Teachers on the secondary level in particular can easily have more visual aids than they could ever use by announcing the awarding of one point of extra credit for each flashcard or poster of a food item which the students bring in. Setting a limit on the total possible number of points to be awarded stops the flood of items. Afterwards, an almost instant bulletin board can be created with the pictures and vocabulary cards

What Can I Do When I Run Out of Tricks?

Teachers can go beyond the obvious «tricks of the trade» by using familiar items in new and creative ways. The following are ideas that have been successful in my classroom, together with a lesson plan for one of them. These ideas may be adapted by teachers at any level to suit a particular classroom situation.

One of the easiest ways to add visual aids into the lesson is to use magazine pictures. Make it a point to clip and file any thought-provoking, unusual photos when you come across them. Some publications that are well illustrated lend themselves to this purpose better than others. One never knows when a photo will come in handy for a class warm-up, discussion, or activity.

Look No Further; You Already Have Material at Your Fingertips!

Additional visual aids can come from the most ordinary items, for example, a child's coloring book, or a toy. Even if you do not have a child's playroom to «scavenge» for visual aids, there are many simple, commonplace items lying around the house which can be brought into the classroom. One of my favorite visually-oriented ideas involves raiding my bathroom the night before teaching reflexive verbs to enhance a lesson visually with such items as a towel, a razor, or soap:

Or bring in a picnic basket to show the students un plato, un vaso, una servilleta for units on food and meal-related vocabulary.

A Creative Twist

Visual aids can help to present some difficult-to-illustrate concepts. Again, creativity counts more than artistic ability. For instance, once, when I was about to teach prepositions to a group of very disinterested high school students, a colleague of mine thought to loan me her daughter's dollhouse. Armed with dollhouse and doll (which had blue hair, I might add, for there is nothing like the unusual to get their attention!), I asked the students to describe the doll's location as well as the location of various rooms in the house. For example, they told me that:

There was 100% participation in class that day; the students were so enthusiastic that each class gave a name to the doll, and they competed to see who could make up the most outlandish sentences, using the vocabulary we had learned. Because the students could see the relationship between objects in three dimensions, they could more easily understand the meaning of new vocabulary; and because the lesson was a change from the ordinary routine, they were more motivated to participate and to acquire the new terms.

Looking Beyond the Obvious

While some vocabulary themes lend themselves readily to visual aids, other ideas require the creative use of items that are not usually associated with class use. The following is a description of how two very commonplace items came to life in the classroom. While the lesson plan described was used in a university-level, intensive review class in first-year Spanish, the ideas may be adapted to any level, place or language.

The Materials:

When the time came to teach my students the seasons of the year and weather-related vocabulary, I took two very simple, destined-for-the recycle-bin items: an old calendar and an empty Kleenex box. The box was a designer one that had pictures of teddy bears dressed for the different seasons of the year on its four sides-one raking autumn leaves, one carrying a beach ball, one picking spring flowers, and one dressed for a snowstorm. I cut the box apart and made a flashcard out of each side. On the back of each card, I wrote appropriate questions for each season. As for the calendar, I just took it off my wall and flipped around to the pictures I wanted to use. At the end of the year, I saved the calendar to cut up and reuse the photographs in the future. The calendar had nature scenes of the different months on it, making it appropriate for the lesson. I also happened to have an old Spanish-language calendar ordered from a teacher supply catalog to reinforce visually the names of the months and days.

Day 1: The lesson begins by having the students pronounce the vocabulary from a visually-cued text. In a slower-paced course, realia could be used in the initial presentation. Then, using the calendars, the students supply the names of the appropriate months and the seasons. Then, they give an appropriate weather expression for each of the photos in the calendar. From this point we springboard into dates and holidays. Because of the intense nature of the course, these activities occupy the first fifteen minutes of class time, after which the class can proceed to other points of grammar.

Day 2: The next day, the class begins with a verb drill consisting of the new verb forms introduced in the remainder of the previous day's lesson. The students stand in a circle so that they can all see one another. At this point, the teacher distributes the four Kleenex-box flash cards to four students at evenly-spaced points within the circle. First, the teacher asks the class as a whole to identify the season represented by each card. Then, for each card, they respond [300] to the question «¿Cuáles son los meses de invierno (de primavera, etc.)?» After the class names the months of each season, the student holding each card is asked to read the question on the back out loud and choose a classmate to respond. I write the following questions on the cards, but many more could be added as time permits:

The important thing is to use enough familiar vocabulary in the questions to allow students to communicate with the newly acquired terms.

From this point the students describe which holidays are associated with which seasons to practice further the new vocabulary. On day 2, the students spend ten minutes of class time to the above activities before moving on the next phase of the lesson. The entire activity takes place in Spanish, facilitated by simple, commonplace items used as visual cues.

So What Does This All Mean for Me?

If we keep our eyes open for suitable teaching aids, we can discover many resources right in our own homes, but another rich source of visuals is the grocery store -and we all have to shop. Look for the possibilities in the packaging, like the Kleenex box described above to provide a change from just using the same old textbook in the same old way. No matter how good the book, we all need a change of pace! Traditional teacher-supply stores can also provide a wealth of items for foreign language teachers. Materials intended for small children can serve first-year classes in high school or even college. For example, I adapted a poster designed to teach little children how to tell time for a class of older students. I cut it up into a large clock, four small ones, and pictures of people doing things in the morning, afternoon, and evening. The four small clocks were used to cue questions the students asked each other in a manner similar to the Kleenex box idea described above. All of these items spiced up the lesson considerably for a mere $2.00. One can also make cards for Christmas from a seasonal box. Another untapped resource is boxes of children's cereal, which often have useful pictures, and even the bonus of a toy surprise inside.

Shop for calendars, Kleenex, cereal, and other commonplace products, with an awareness of pedagogical possibilities! Class will be much more lively and enjoyable for all if we as teachers make it a habit to keep our ideas open to the creative possibilities right under our proverbial noses!*

----

*My thanks to Keith Mason, University of Virginia, for encouraging me to write this article and to Norah Jones of Campbell County Schools, VA, for loaning me her daughter's dollhouse and for that idea.