Recently, I have had some interesting experiences at my placement with respect to the types of text that are being used in the various classrooms that I am working with. Yesterday, for example the Chinese teacher requested that I take over his class for the first 20 to 30 minutes while he helped another teacher in the language lab. Before he left, he showed me a digital file in which he had stored several images of text in Chinese social settings that he had either taken pictures of himself and or downloaded from the Internet. These images/texts were very true to what you would find if you were walking down a typical street in Beijing, and as I searched through them, a flood of memories from my personal experiences in Beijing came to mind. The text and images that the teacher chose impressed me not only because of their authenticity, but also because of how the teacher was able to identify pieces of text from which the students could glean incredibly useful and relevant information in very meaningful, authentic contexts. Mr. Tu asked me to choose a few images that resonated with me and then to share my experience with the class in connection to the key vocabulary, rich social context, and the cultural commonalities and differences that could be observed. I chose images that enabled me to share about some interesting/comical experiences I had with Chinese medicine and with elevators in Beijing. While the context of the images may sound simple, the images were very rich in culture and allowed us to compare and contrast our own culture to the social aspects that were unique to Chinese society. And while the text was short, it stretched the students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary, and cultural awareness.
With regards to the varying levels of Spanish classes that I observe, the approach to text has also proven to be very effective. The department has adopted a series of textbooks that have been carefully crafted to help teachers scaffold their instruction. This publisher also offers a series of textbooks from beginner to advanced with a universal design that helps students feel familiar with the language learning process as they upstream through Spanish. One critique that I would give this textbook, however, is that it tends to treat the learning process of Spanish like a tourist getting ready to go on a vacation to a foreign Spanish speaking country—hit the sites and then return home. While the readings can be fun and interesting, this approach tends to be biased to the “American perspective”; it focuses too much on what makes us different from the Spanish-speaking world, which can make the students feel distant and disconnected from Spanish. The students therefore could benefit deeply from supplementary texts that bring in a variety of historical and cultural perspectives that cause the students to consider our world as a global community of which we are all global citizens.
Of course no textbook is perfect, and the teachers in my department are quick to recognize that. While the textbook is treated as a valuable resource, it is by no means the single source of text that the teachers use. More often than not, actually, the teachers do supplement the textbook by carefully selecting their own texts to bring to class. For example, several of the teachers use lyrics from popular Spanish music as text. Other teachers bring in popular Spanish magazines that represent what is current in the Spanish-speaking world. And other teachers bring in a number of classic Spanish and American children’s storybooks from which students can select stories that they find interesting and meaningful. In the upper-level Spanish classes, the students explore excerpts of classic Spanish literature and learn to compare and contrast the writing styles among prolific Spanish writers.
The foreign language department at Del Norte is a fun an exciting place to be as the teachers fill their classrooms with their culturally diverse experiences, backgrounds and perspectives. As I continue to work with the teachers and with the students, I look forward to exploring the various resources and texts that the teachers bring in to class and to discovering ways in which I can further help my students connect with the world around them.