Dear Students, You all chose to comment on your experience as second language learners, and you all seem to agree that classroom instruction does not work. Do you have any suggestions on how to teach a second language more efficiently? How would you like to have been taught yourselves? Natalie
Hawaiian Pidgin, which is technically a creole, is spoken on the Hawaiian islands by much of the local populace. It was born of the necessity to communicate by the many peoples who came to the island in order to work the plantations. The languages from which it arose (aside from English) consist of Portuguese, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and even some Spanish. Pidgin has a distinctive rhythm when you hear it spoken. This is apparently due to it being "syllable timed," meaning each syllable takes up approximately the same amount of time. This is in opposition to Standard American English, which is "stress-timed." Its grammar borrows a lot from Portuguese and Chinese, in the use of articles ("Would you like a knife?" becomes "You like one knife?") and in negation ("You cannot do that!'' becomes "You no can do that!") Culturally, it has historically had a negative connotation, a sign that the speaker is uneducated. More recently, it is used as a sign of belonging by native speakers. As someone who looks local, I have been mistaken for one several times while visiting. However, this only lasts as long as I keep my mouth shut, because as soon as I say anything, they can immediately tell that I'm not. Thus, locals are able to distinguish between tourists and people who are from there - a valuable skill in a tourist locale.
I took a long trip to Europe a few years ago (several months) and spent a lot of that time in France. During my time there, I took several classes in French in order to better learn the language. One of those classes was in a countryside town in the south where groups of people from different parts of Europe came to learn French (Spain, Ireland, Switzerland and Denmark, from what I recall). One thing that struck me at the time was that different groups of people had different difficulties in pronouncing French words. This was so common that the school purposely broke up the class into groups based on their native language. Americans got special instruction on certain phonemes, the Danish had special instruction on others, etc. This experience also highlighted for me just how little I learned during my two years of high school French - which I passed with decent grades (B's or A's, can't remember exactly). From what I recall, it was taken as a given that nobody was going to learn how to actually speak French from the class. It was almost a joke. Going to class everyday was an exercise in making funny sounds that didn't mean anything and memorizing information for quizzes and tests that you would immediately forget afterwards. Looking back, I think of it now as more of a waste of time. I learned a lot more when I was in France because I was surrounded by the language everyday, in both spoken and written forms. It got to the point where I got tired of speaking it and it was a relief to speak English (usually with the Irish kids, so I wouldn't say it was exactly what we in America would call "English" either, but it was close enough). However, I learned it pretty well for the relatively short time I was there.
The language family that interested me the most was the Austronesian family, a group of languages that originated from Taiwan and from there spread across both the Pacific and Indian oceans, eventually spanning from Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, to Easter Island, almost to South America. The spread of this family of languages parallels an amazing migration of human beings across vast stretches of ocean, using seacraft that would be considered little more than rafts in our time. As these people moved across the world, they brought with them their language and culture to many isolated locations in the middle of the sea. There are several interesting popular works of fiction that dramatize these events. A movie called "Rapa Nui" is a story about the demise of civilization on Easter Island. The book "Hawaii" by James Michener contains a long prologue that describes how the islands of Hawaii were discovered by explorers from the distant islands of Tahiti. (A lot of people stop reading the book after finishing the prologue as they find it more compelling than the main story.)
Baybayin is a writing system that was in use by the Tagalogs in the Philippines when the Spaniards colonized the area. It is a syllabic writing system, meaning that each symbol represents a syllable. The base symbol represents a syllable ending with an 'a' sound. Modifiers, called kudlit, could be added to the symbol to change the vowel sound from an 'a' to an 'e' or 'i' (when placed above) or to an 'o' or 'u' (when placed below). (The Tagalog speech does not make much distinction, if any, between 'e' and 'i'. It also does not make much distinction between 'o' or 'u'.) Knowledge of how baybayin was used is incomplete. Baybayin seems to be an insufficient system for representing Tagalog. The rules are such that only CV syllables can be written even though Tagalog allows for more complex syllable structures (e.g. CCV, CVC, etc.) A Spanish priest was known to have added an additional modifier to the system to allow for trailing vowels, thus allowing CVC type syllables. Works in baybayin have not survived the ages, partly due to the tropical climate that caused written works to rot, partly due to the active efforts of the Spanish to remove the ancient script in favor of a Roman-based alphabet. By the 17th century, baybayin had been replaced.These essays are really not that hard. It makes me wonder what the heck is wrong with that one girl in my class who just seems to be cutting and pasting her entries from Wikipedia. Everybody else seems to be actually writing their own stuff.
