I know there's been research done somewhere that says that the modern technologies of instant messaging and text messaging don't affect the way students actually write an academic paper, but what about the way they speak? I know there are many other factors involved, but something is making the kids babble incoherently instead of expressing their thoughts in something of an orderly manner, and it makes me nervous for our future as a a competent culture in literacy.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Speaking coherently
The assignment we've been doing for Content Literacy has made me think lately. I believe that most of us decided that their discussion on Truman was a fairly good one for the high school level, but at the same time I'm rather discouraged by it's content, mainly that many of the students couldn't manage to put together an intelligible sentence! I realize that they were nervous because the rest of the class the video camera, but I feel like they should at least have been able to express their thoughts a little bit better. I had a great time laughing at their terribly constructed thoughts, but now I'm actually getting worried.
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I think that you're addressing a very important topic, Rachel. You raise a provocative question...does the modality of communication employed by many kids affect their ability to articulate their ideas orally? We've mused a lot about the possible impact on writing, and now you open another dimension. Do you have an intuition about this, Rachel? For my part, I think that public speaking is a rather fraught pursuit for many of us, and this goes back well before IMing and Chat were in the picture.
There's an opportunity here to be sure, and if this is an important dimension of the learning experience you want to support, there's lots that you can do to help your students develop their skill sets in this domain. It couls tie in beautifully with developing skills as audience members, too. Maybe the students are asked to cite a certain number of ideas or phrases they understood from the presentation of a group of their classmates. They think the test is for them (listening comprehension) but for you it offers a check on how effective the presenters were at being understood.
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