TEACHING WITHOUT A LANGUAGE When 3 students with "limited English" showed up at Milton College (two speaking Farsi and one Cantonese), my first reaction was that we could not help them. But that was not my decision to make: the dean did accept them and then asked the faculty what to do with them. This was clearly an atypical situation, so I thought it best to chuck all of my previous ideas and expectations, and start from zero. And as it turned out, the students were very different in their training than I would have guessed. I suggested they take science and math until they learned English. When I was trying to determine what they knew, and what they COULD understand and could learn, I was suprised to discover that they already (from their high school!) knew not only basic arithmetic, exponents, roots, logs, but also differential and integral calculus. The first gap I found in their education was that none of the 3 knew how to use an integral table to evaluate results when they could not simply "guess" the anti-derrivative of the function. But they could follow some of my examples to catch on to the idea. So this was the first technique that I taught them. I still remember the eyes of the Iranian girl lighting up when she saw that the integral of an anti-symmetric function is zero from +A to -A for any A including infinity, while if the function is symmetric the result is twice the value from 0 to A. So I soon had them (as first semester freshmen) solving problems that are found in junior and senior courses. They did not get to the beginning descriptive material until later when their English improved. Not the way I would normally teach science, but it worked very well. Both Iranians were accepted to an engineering program in Milwaukee after 2 years at Milton, and the other graduated from Milton and was accepted to a graduate school. All three were taking regular college classes by the second semester (but they avoided English Literature) But for the first several weeks, I was drawing lots of pictures with them: we were communicating as much by images as words. They also had the advantage of living on campus, and so were expoaed to the Milton students on a full time basis. They quickly learned to understand the English they needed to survive, since no one in fifty miles could speak their language. We never did have many students from China or Hong Kong, but we did get several from Iran each year after that. They were accepted at Milton if they did could not pass the English exam at other colleges. Many stayed at Milton for only a year or two (until their English was good enough) and then transferred to other schools. This was during the time of the Shah, and he wanted to modernize Iran by sending their top students to the US to learn science and engineering. There was even a rumor that the Shah was keeping Milton College solvent. I doubt that it was true. But the school did go broke and closed soon after the Iranian revoultion. Just a coincidence....? Ted Johnson wrote: > So you would teach me the concepts behind the geometry theorems by using pictures? > Could you give me a specific example? Geometry has always been my weak link - it > might be interesting to see if I could pick up the concepts without the use of > English. Hi, I think that math is the least difficult subject to teach when there is a language barrier, literature probably the most difficult (probably impossible). But "a picture is worth 1000 words" and many concepts that can be hard to grasp in words (and even in symbols) can be obvious in pictures. I would illustrate this with a few examples, but I will have to find a way to draw and display the images. Maybe later I will add an illustration to my web page as a gif or jpg and let you know. Depends on how much time I can find. With spring and nice weather here, sailing will start soon. > BTW, as we're veering off into tangential areas, I might mention that last week I > was asked to be on the team that is going to write the CPS standards for high > school ESL classes. I think the older the kids, the harder the job of teaching a new language. So first push for pre-school, head start and daycare in English. Where kids can play, have fun listen to and talk in English. This would also address the "working mom/day care" problem. But for high school ages kids, I would stress math and English at the same time. I see delaying English but teaching science in Spanish as like this problem: you have a car and need to go to a city 500 miles away. You want to both get to the destination and learn how to drive. The "ESL solution" is "learn to drive and then take the car". The "bilingual education" solution is, "start walking. Along the way you will have some driving lessons. And maybe by the time you get there, you will have learned how to drive". As a PS to this, when dealing with the Iranian students, I was suprised to learn that the symbols for the numbers are different in the Arabic/Farsi language. 1 and 9 are the same but as I recall 0 means 5 and ^ is 8. The CONCEPT of 0 to 9 and a decimal system is the same, but not most of the actual characters. -- ,,,,,,, _______________ooo___(_O O_)___ooo_______________ (_) jim blair (jeblair@facstaff.wisc.edu) For a good time call http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/4834