TEXT TRANSCRIPT
Narrator:
The family in a person's heritage are often very important to many people. But often when you move and settle into a new home in a new country, it can be hard to communicate to others about who you are and where you come from. That's why, as part of Susan Gaer's adult learning classes at Santa Ana College in California, the students are combing the learning of their new language skills with the use of technology to produce Web pages about a very important topic:
themselves.
Gaer:
This is a Beginning One class; it's the first level of ESL that we have here at Centennial. There is a literacy and transition class that some students who have literacy problems go through prior to coming to Beginning One, but most of the students here do not speak English at all, but can read and write in their native language. Three-fourths of the students are Spanish-speaking, and the other fourth is Vietnamese, mostly in this class.
I have two goals for this class:
One is to improve their family life, and to help them with their children; the other one is to help them progress in their work skills. A lot of my students are housewives here, the women are housewives, and I would say probably three-fourths of the women are housewives. However, they do have children and they really want to know more than their children know as far as English skills and technology skills. So I teach both English and technology in the class.
The class that you'll be observing today gets into the curriculum, after personal information, in the very beginning level. We talked about family relationships, and we talked about name and address. All the students will be taking a picture of themselves, using a QuickCam camera, which is a little camera, and they will be then writing a story about themselves, or their family. And the stories will then be printed out for them to take home. Actually, we use portfolio assessment, so I have folders for each student, and I put a copy in their folder. They'll take a copy home. And then I will put a copy for them on the Internet and give them the address so they can send it to their family back in Mexico or Vietnam, to view the story as well.
When I teach how to use... I call it the using the right tool for the job. Every job has tools in it, and no matter whether you have computers, or a video camera, or a tape recorder, it's still a tool. And the process that I use is the same... for all students. I also train teachers and use the same process. I will start by demonstrating the process the students need to go through to take the picture. One of the students goes to the board and takes notes. As I go through, I tell him what to write. The student writes it on the board, and the rest of the class copies it. They are then divided up into groups, and each group has a chance to practice using their notes. I teach them about the keyboard. I teach them, you know, the keys on the keyboard, like the shift key, the tab key, the backspace key, the delete key. I teach them how to turn on and turn off the computer, and they must demonstrate they know how to do that appropriately before we learn any other computer programs. And I start out by giving them a series of questions, which they answer. With the answers to those questions put in order, they create the story. So then they go to the word processor, and they just learn how to open it and type in their story. Once they are able to do that, I teach them some basic formatting, like center, bold, and I teach them how to change the font size, if they can make it look bigger, and they get really creative sometimes with the fonts. By the time they leave my class, you don't even notice who's at the computer, and who's in the classroom, because it's such a seamless interchange of students going back and forth, using the computer when they need to, and using their desk when they need to.
(Classroom background noise, many students talking simultaneously)
Student 1:
[To other student] When did you come to Santa Ana?
Student 2:
I came to live in L.A. one year.
Student 1:
Are you married or single?
Student 2:
I'm single.
Student 1:
What are the names of your parents?
Student 2:
My father's name is Minh Nguyen. My mother's name is Quan Do. They died in Vietnam.
(classroom noise, students speaking simultaneously)
Gaer:
Insert your disk. Insert the disk. Insert your disk. Okay, what can we do? What do we do now?
Students:
Type.
Gaer:
Type. Type. So, number four is what?
Students:
Type.
Gaer:
Type. Yeah, type your story. Excellent. We have to find our disk, right? Our disks?
Where is our disk?
Student:
Inside.
Teacher:
Inside the computer, right. How do we find it here? We have to click on this:
down. Remember the arrow? What's the arrow? What way?
Students:
Down.
Teacher:
Up or... ?
Students:
Down.
Teacher:
The down arrow. And what are we looking for here? What letter?
Students:
(calling out answers) E, O, A...
Teacher:
A, A, A, A.
Student 3:
When we need [to] learn something about the computers, they wrote in the blackboard
the directions. For number, number one, we are going to do... this thing, number two, number three... When we read that direction, and she was... she will ask [do we] understand all the directions, then we go to the computers, and she was... behind us... always seeing if we understand the directions, all the directions.
Student 4:
There was just beginning classes we... you learn English and vocabulary grammar and everything, but in this class, she start teaching computer, and it was very interesting, and I really like it, to learn about Internet, PhotoShop, and other programs. I realized I really like computers, and that's what I'm going to study:
computer. And that class helped me a lot, in how to write, sometimes to speak English, and that's when I started growing up in my vocabulary in English.
Student 5:
The computer help me... to [learn more]... you can [find] anything you want, you can... practice typing, to practice verbs, grammar, and the computer helps you to... in English because you can.... you can, you know, [write] anything you want... be able to look smart, and looking for e-mail, e-mail grades... for information... you need to click in your number... your family, and you're going to see the names of... all the names there, so... My name is my Rose Ybarra. This is my history. This, she is my sister, I didn't put all my family in the picture, because I don't have any, any pictures [of] my family together. And my family live in Mexico.
Gaer:
There are various benefits of using technology in the classroom. It gets across a lot of different learning styles for students. Students with literacy problems, who have trouble writing with a pencil, can hit the keyboard much more easily. Their work looks beautiful when they finish, and [it] gives them pride in their work. And I think that they keep more time on task when they're using computers.
Lots of times they're copying things from their notebook into the computer, and in order for them to type what they have in their book... when they make a capital letter, and they'll do it with a pencil, it's just like they do it subconsciously, but when they're on the computer, they're thinking about those things, because they actually have to hit two keys. In my experience, completion of the product ensures me that the student has grasped the language that I'm trying to teach. They all do it to different levels. In my class I have a variety of different levels, even though it's Beginning One, and so they all can complete the product at different levels. I think it's important that you teach students what's available in the workplace, and not focus on educational software so much. Students learn how to use the computer in the process of learning their language.
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