Dean Lub
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Adaptation of News clips Arabic Classes .Khoshaba, Matti P
for
New
Abstract Adaptation could mean different things. Most often then not it takes various methods to match authentic materials of the target language, in our case Arabic, to the level of the students while simultaneously maintaining the difficult elements within the texts for comprehension in the classroom activities. To teach high level language clips of T.V. materials, teachers must do two things. 1. Adjust styles of their teaching and their plans to what their students may suggest as general process. 2. Divide the selected authentic material as texts into subtopics to determine how much of the material students can cover within class sessions. Adaptation of styles to where students suggest is not easy to achieve because the process includes the styles and beliefs of their students, a crucial point that may not meet learners’ expectations of the class. The majority may not accept the process if they lack that experience or might not agree with their styles when they learned their first language. From my experience, I noticed that teachers need to gostep by step- in adapting to what their students suggest and create new optimal environments. Receptivity To gain receptivity of the materials and methods, the foreign language teachers need to be flexible and hand over the responsibility to their students to deal with the materials and have them get involved in the process. It is very hard to fulfill this goal because students as foreign language learners lack the confidence to take the responsibility of learning the target language on their own. They need to be co-coached. Instructed, and encouraged all the time. Foreign language teachers should not expect too much to be done voluntarily by them unless they receive directions from their teachers. Students as foreign language learners do not like to work hard, but they try to achieve what is only officially required from them and not more than that. They, therefore, do their best to avoid being involved in the details of the process. They limit their efforts to do only simple and short homework exercises and participate in classes as careless speakers. For all those mentioned reasons, efforts should be exerted and patience should be experienced to get the courses materials, methods, and activities be accepted by the majority of the students as learners. Instructions With all my efforts and patience since 2001, I made my students do three things: select the materials at home, present their materials in classes as peer teachers, and collaborate together to have the task be done despite of all other difficulties. It is part of the process that teachers should explain to their students the process and the goals behind each step taken so that they may collaborate to make it workable. From my experience of teaching I noticed that if students succeed the first time to teach the assigned material inside the classroom, they are encouraged to take further responsibilities and willingly do more and more to enhance their learning of the target language through teachers’ collaboration..
1
:Scaffolding
To get fully involved, students need to have an entire control over the news broadcasts material as clips to watch on their own and at their pace time. They need to rewind the taped material as many times as they need and maybe work in private at home to avoid embarrassment Some students prefer to work in privacy and not in public and need to listen to the same material times and times. I put all those points into consideration and I started recording tapes (clips) from various Arabic Channels especially Alrabiya, Aljazeera Scola, Iraqhurr and on issues related to the military field jobs, on the basis that I may gain students’ acceptance to teach those clips in classes. I also transcribed or put the inventory of clauses and phrases (idioms and cultural cues) of the same taped or recorded material for students as written texts once they selected their subjects as clips. I divided the written texts into small portions so that students get thematic paragraphs suitable to teach in each session. There are also content questions to cover the content plus cultural analysis of expressions . Finally I expanded the topic to have a task whether written or oral as debates, discussions…… Students, before their class presentations, negotiated with me the meanings of certain parts when they were incomprehensible and or vague to them. All those things whether done by my students or me were considered scaffolding procedures to facilitate the process for the adaptation of the materials and methods for the classroom. :Co-coaching students When my students received both the clips and transcriptions of the same material, they started coming back to ask for meanings of certain phrases and idioms for more comprehension or more explanation on the linguistic structures of the texts. They indirectly made me co-coach them and check out for them the meaning of the lists of the words that they already had prepared for the class presentations. So co-coaching precedes each presentation of their material to the class with personal encouragement. :Raising students’ Awareness to the types of tasks as 3 stages The only thing that I did was that I raised my students’ attention to carry out three stages of activities so that they get familiar with the subject matters and the vocabulary within the themes of the subtopics. The activities were three: (1) the pre-listening or the pre-watching activities ( ideas , discussions as brainstorming), (2) the listening stage which required re-winding the tape enquiries on sounds, language forms, and comments and jokes), (3) the post- listening activities ( summarizing, collecting, expanding, commenting etc as decided). :Integrating listening to reading and production I also agreed to the suggestion made by one of my students which was that they need to go over the same material as out loud reading. It was exciting to me to see them divide the article among themselves. One reads out loud and the other one translates consecutively. They ran simultaneous interpretation classes, and they asked for my help when contradictions or deviations occur in their translations.
2
:Teacher’s goals from the process The goals that I set then were that the materials and the methods may help my students work on their own to be independents. They were undependable later in the course. They started doing extra activities with little help asked from me. One of the students ran two hours jeopardy class, activities that she designed for herself as material and she told me to videotape that class activities to encourage others. My purpose was to upgrade students’ ability and be able to watch T.V. for information. In fact, students get used to the speed of the announcers, and they really gathered information from the live channel of Aljazeera and reported on spot to each other in Arabic during the last four months of the course. :The official goals of the course The results that students scored on the final tests were between 2+ - 3+ DLPT and that met the objectives of the Defense Language Institute as both proficiency and performance. In addition to those official results students have got the skills to listen to the Arabic news broadcasts and T.V. channels and collect information independently, the same way the Arabic native speakers do. The last two goals were the real goals that the teacher had set for himself at the beginning of the course. :Conclusions It is very possible for foreign language teachers to upgrade the ability of their students to catch up with the speed of the mass media level by giving students various clips with scripts to listen to and /or read the way they like. In this way, students assume the responsibility to select the material and work on to carry out classroom activities with success and collaboration. In the course2001, I tried my best to give my student encouragement to build up gradually the skill to watch the video clips despite all fear factors of the speed and difficulty of language. My experience with them makes me believe that it is very possible for foreign language students to achieve this goal if teachers are patient enough to let them work together the way they suggest. Students, consequently and gradually, create optimal environment of teaching in which almost all students participate. Teachers, then, are more effective to work in such circumstances and be able to co-coach and facilitate better for more progress.
3
for
New
Abstract Adaptation could mean different things. Most often then not it takes various methods to match authentic materials of the target language, in our case Arabic, to the level of the students while simultaneously maintaining the difficult elements within the texts for comprehension in the classroom activities. To teach high level language clips of T.V. materials, teachers must do two things. 1. Adjust styles of their teaching and their plans to what their students may suggest as general process. 2. Divide the selected authentic material as texts into subtopics to determine how much of the material students can cover within class sessions. Adaptation of styles to where students suggest is not easy to achieve because the process includes the styles and beliefs of their students, a crucial point that may not meet learners’ expectations of the class. The majority may not accept the process if they lack that experience or might not agree with their styles when they learned their first language. From my experience, I noticed that teachers need to gostep by step- in adapting to what their students suggest and create new optimal environments. Receptivity To gain receptivity of the materials and methods, the foreign language teachers need to be flexible and hand over the responsibility to their students to deal with the materials and have them get involved in the process. It is very hard to fulfill this goal because students as foreign language learners lack the confidence to take the responsibility of learning the target language on their own. They need to be co-coached. Instructed, and encouraged all the time. Foreign language teachers should not expect too much to be done voluntarily by them unless they receive directions from their teachers. Students as foreign language learners do not like to work hard, but they try to achieve what is only officially required from them and not more than that. They, therefore, do their best to avoid being involved in the details of the process. They limit their efforts to do only simple and short homework exercises and participate in classes as careless speakers. For all those mentioned reasons, efforts should be exerted and patience should be experienced to get the courses materials, methods, and activities be accepted by the majority of the students as learners. Instructions With all my efforts and patience since 2001, I made my students do three things: select the materials at home, present their materials in classes as peer teachers, and collaborate together to have the task be done despite of all other difficulties. It is part of the process that teachers should explain to their students the process and the goals behind each step taken so that they may collaborate to make it workable. From my experience of teaching I noticed that if students succeed the first time to teach the assigned material inside the classroom, they are encouraged to take further responsibilities and willingly do more and more to enhance their learning of the target language through teachers’ collaboration..
1
:Scaffolding
To get fully involved, students need to have an entire control over the news broadcasts material as clips to watch on their own and at their pace time. They need to rewind the taped material as many times as they need and maybe work in private at home to avoid embarrassment Some students prefer to work in privacy and not in public and need to listen to the same material times and times. I put all those points into consideration and I started recording tapes (clips) from various Arabic Channels especially Alrabiya, Aljazeera Scola, Iraqhurr and on issues related to the military field jobs, on the basis that I may gain students’ acceptance to teach those clips in classes. I also transcribed or put the inventory of clauses and phrases (idioms and cultural cues) of the same taped or recorded material for students as written texts once they selected their subjects as clips. I divided the written texts into small portions so that students get thematic paragraphs suitable to teach in each session. There are also content questions to cover the content plus cultural analysis of expressions . Finally I expanded the topic to have a task whether written or oral as debates, discussions…… Students, before their class presentations, negotiated with me the meanings of certain parts when they were incomprehensible and or vague to them. All those things whether done by my students or me were considered scaffolding procedures to facilitate the process for the adaptation of the materials and methods for the classroom. :Co-coaching students When my students received both the clips and transcriptions of the same material, they started coming back to ask for meanings of certain phrases and idioms for more comprehension or more explanation on the linguistic structures of the texts. They indirectly made me co-coach them and check out for them the meaning of the lists of the words that they already had prepared for the class presentations. So co-coaching precedes each presentation of their material to the class with personal encouragement. :Raising students’ Awareness to the types of tasks as 3 stages The only thing that I did was that I raised my students’ attention to carry out three stages of activities so that they get familiar with the subject matters and the vocabulary within the themes of the subtopics. The activities were three: (1) the pre-listening or the pre-watching activities ( ideas , discussions as brainstorming), (2) the listening stage which required re-winding the tape enquiries on sounds, language forms, and comments and jokes), (3) the post- listening activities ( summarizing, collecting, expanding, commenting etc as decided). :Integrating listening to reading and production I also agreed to the suggestion made by one of my students which was that they need to go over the same material as out loud reading. It was exciting to me to see them divide the article among themselves. One reads out loud and the other one translates consecutively. They ran simultaneous interpretation classes, and they asked for my help when contradictions or deviations occur in their translations.
2
:Teacher’s goals from the process The goals that I set then were that the materials and the methods may help my students work on their own to be independents. They were undependable later in the course. They started doing extra activities with little help asked from me. One of the students ran two hours jeopardy class, activities that she designed for herself as material and she told me to videotape that class activities to encourage others. My purpose was to upgrade students’ ability and be able to watch T.V. for information. In fact, students get used to the speed of the announcers, and they really gathered information from the live channel of Aljazeera and reported on spot to each other in Arabic during the last four months of the course. :The official goals of the course The results that students scored on the final tests were between 2+ - 3+ DLPT and that met the objectives of the Defense Language Institute as both proficiency and performance. In addition to those official results students have got the skills to listen to the Arabic news broadcasts and T.V. channels and collect information independently, the same way the Arabic native speakers do. The last two goals were the real goals that the teacher had set for himself at the beginning of the course. :Conclusions It is very possible for foreign language teachers to upgrade the ability of their students to catch up with the speed of the mass media level by giving students various clips with scripts to listen to and /or read the way they like. In this way, students assume the responsibility to select the material and work on to carry out classroom activities with success and collaboration. In the course2001, I tried my best to give my student encouragement to build up gradually the skill to watch the video clips despite all fear factors of the speed and difficulty of language. My experience with them makes me believe that it is very possible for foreign language students to achieve this goal if teachers are patient enough to let them work together the way they suggest. Students, consequently and gradually, create optimal environment of teaching in which almost all students participate. Teachers, then, are more effective to work in such circumstances and be able to co-coach and facilitate better for more progress.
3
