Jennifer Li’s Task 3 does one thing really well that I did not do at all: find parallels between the voice-to-text program and student work. Jennifer comments that the structure of her sentences, when spoken, were full of conjunctions, like “and so”, which are absent from her formal written work. I had noticed the same thing in my own voice-to-text story and explained it as a result of a lack of time in planning sentence structure. Sentence structure plays a large role in how fluent a piece reads and how satisfyingly it reads (not reading the same sentence structure over and over, which is quite annoying). When telling a story orally, we focus on ideas and how to order them, so less time is taken in making each idea sound good. If we did spend the time, there would be a lot of pauses in the story as we think about it and we would lose audience engagement. Jennifer compares this repetitive sentence structure – short sentences joined by “and so” – to the written sentences of her students. She describes her students’ written work as “just streams of consciousness”, which is pretty accurate! Jennifer is an elementary teacher so her students are very young. At this stage of their development, it is all about the sharing of ideas and less about sounding good. Her students are at a very early stage of developing academic language, though they will soon learn how to sound professional. But as a high school teacher, I also observe this kind of writing sometimes in my much older students. Have these students not mastered an academic voice, or do they not value academic writing, or do they not understand when an academic voice is expected, or do they simply just value ideas over language? Is it a combination of all of these things? I find that now I am thinking about this question. How should I approach teaching lab report writing to my students so that I encourage them to use a scientific voice? How do I motivate them to spend more time on developing this voice when perhaps they would much prefer to spend their time learning content? If lab reports were posted on a public space, would my students then care to take the time to proofread because their work would judged by their peers, and peer approval is everything to a teenager? Jennifer’s experience with her students begins to answer my questions. Her students liked to “sound intelligent and thoughtful”, so how we appear to our peers matters enough to change behaviour.
Jennifer also comments on how the voice-to-text program, on several occasions, mis-transcribes her words. In describing “cloves of garlic”, the voice-to-text program wrote, “clothes”. My own voice-to-text transcription had way more of these instances than hers did and I commented on how it is a result of my tendency to rush through my words; I sometimes slur when I do not make a conscious effort to slow down and enunciate. Rather than focusing her analysis on herself, Jennifer connects her experience with that of second language speakers. How frustrating it must be for someone who has an accent to hear, “pardon”, “come again”, and “what was that?” over and over again. Do they simply feel annoyed, or do they feel ashamed and embarrassed at their inability to speak with a native accent? Jennifer’s comparison of the two experiences is really insightful. The voice-to-text exercise has put us in the shoes of a second language speaker. What the voice-to-text program heard us say reflects what we might hear from an accented speaker.
Overall, Jennifer’s analysis is empathetic while mine is focused on the self. Once again, I wonder if this is because of the difference between an elementary vs. secondary teacher. Elementary teachers tend to be highly empathetic and nurturing so it is not surprising that Jennifer thinks of her students and people with accents first before thinking of herself. On her e-portfolio, she is self-described as a plant “parent” who enjoys watching her plants develop new leaf “babies”. Clearly, she is someone who enjoys watching her students grow. She is motherly! As a senior science teacher, I sometimes have tunnel vision. It is less important to me how my students grow holistically and more important how they grow specifically in science.
This dichotomy, well roundedness vs. pointiness (being especially good at a few things) is an old battle. Indeed, our own Ministry of Education pits citizenship against academic rigor and the current teaching community is split: elementary and middle school teachers favour the idea of a “whole child” while high school teachers favour academic rigor. BC’s own new curriculum is evidence of such a battle where a group of elementary teachers were the ones who designed the curricular competencies for Gr. 11-12 science.
Jennifer ends her analysis with a reflection of her experience as a bilingual person. I was delighted to see that she and I had the exact same experience in our immigration to Canada. Both her and my parents made us focus on English, and as a result, we both lost much of our mother tongue. I don’t even consider Chinese my mother tongue anymore because it is not the first language that I am absolutely literate in. The jump between BICS and CALPS is much smaller in English than it is in Chinese. I immigrated to Canada in Gr. 1 without knowing any English. By Gr. 3, I could watch the news without really having developed CALPS. If I turn on the Chinese news, honestly, I can only understand 1% of what is happening, the part where they say when the incident occurred.
A severe consequence of not keeping up with Chinese is that I cannot connect with my family. This is the most isolating experience that I continue to have when visiting my family in China. I lack vocabulary to express myself so I appear as an introverted boring person in front of my relatives. When I make blunders, the focus is sometimes on the fact that I cannot speak Chinese rather than on the ideas that I am trying to express. My father is the most harsh on this point, always making a point to make fun of me for it. I wish my family knew how witty, funny, and alive I am.