d.
Developing Your Own Knowledge of the Resources
Having
made decisions about using some of the resources and opportunities
in tandem, it is important for the teacher in the case study to
get to know the resources well enough to feel confident about
using them in the classroom. It is also important that the pupils
will feel comfortable about using resources.
We
can focus on this with an exercise that should provide some focus
on the relations between the what we want to achieve in terms
of pupils' understanding of communication and the kinds of things
you can do with the web sites. To begin with, the web locations
for the translation services are as follows. Go to the main page
of each site and enter 'translation' as a search:
www.yahoo.com
www.altavista.com
www.lycos.co.uk
Have
a look at these sites first, and get a sense of how they work
to generate translations between languages. Almost all of the
services provide translation between the following languages:
English, German, French, Spanish. What we want to do is see what
happens when we submit more and more complex or ambiguous messages
to the sites for translation between more and more languages.
Obviously, it doesn't take long for things to go comically wrong,
which is one of the things I like about the activity. To give
it some structure, though, you could arrange things like this:
| |
English
to French to English |
English
to French to Spanish to English |
English
to French to Spanish to German to English |
English
to French to Spanish to French to German to Spanish to English |
| Short
Simple sentence with no ambiguity |
Small
likelihood of error |
 |
Increased
likelihood of error |
| Long
simple sentence with no ambiguity |
 |
 |
|
| Complex
sentence with no ambiguity |
| Simple
sentence with ambiguous terms |
| Complex
sentence with ambiguous terms |
Increased
likelihood of error |
Massive
likelihood of error |
Have
a go at submitting some sentences of your own in the structure
described above, and see what happens. Then answer the questions
below:
- What
patterns of error could you see at the short/simple end, and
at what point do you think even the error pattern breaks down?
- At
what point did the errors begin to affect the meaning - this
is what matters in Chinese Whispers, of course - and at what
point did meaning become lost?
When
you have looked at the web in the light of these questions, and
perhaps written some worksheets of your own to go with these resources,
you should discuss with your mentor what you want to do with the
material in the classroom. This can be done in a mentor visit,
over the telephone or by e-mail, and should serve merely to satisfy
you that you are on the right track with your use of the materials.
 e.
Planning the Work of Learners
|
