PWP (2nd)

Bilingual education: The Benefits of Technology

- Topic:                                 Bilingual education: The Benefits of Technology

- Relevance/ contribution to our field: Help to connect better with students, because technology is a big part of the young generation and also the  mid age generation. Use this channel as an advantage to share knowledge and also teach more effective.

**Being bilingual is becoming very common worldwide for many different reasons. Nowadays, it’s better for a person to be bilingual as technology grows and it’s easy to learn a different language from helpful websites. The benefits of being bilingual are better career options, helps you communicate with a broader range of people, and if taught to children, they’ll grow to be more knowledgeable.

One of the best advantages of being bilingual is that you’ll have better career options, because you’ll be able to choose from a wider range of job offers. This may help you occupy the global job you’ve always dreamt about, or just have a better job with a higher position than your current one. Furthermore, current successful businesses prefer bilingual, because having bilingual or even multilingual employees can help promote this business globally. This could also help in worldwide trade. Besides, it’ll give your firm a good reputation if a client is foreign and lacks the English language skills.

Bilingualism is a major part in communication with a broader range of people as mentioned before, technology grows daily and now you can promote your company in a multi-language website. Having it in two languages can make people grasp an idea of your success. In addition, being bilingual can promote your social status. One day, a global company can see your online ad, and would want to hire you! Even regular people might need to be bilingual; not just businessmen. If you travel regularly, bilingualism can be a major help whether you’re a famous fashion designer or a professional photographer. Usually, fashion designers travel to France because Paris is the world’s fashion hot spot. This can help the designer communicate better with the people backstage and make the runway look better. As for photographers, they also happen to travel around the globe to capture one of the world’s most beautiful sites the eye can ever see. For example, Malaysia is known to be naturally beautiful causing..................(**due to change)

- Intended audience:   Young and adult learners

- Your purpose as an author: My purpose of writing about this topic is to talk about the importance of using technology  in schools or any educational institute  but more to in any bilingual learning environment, but also how to use this educational technology in order to get good results.

Writing and thinking (2nd)

Writing and thinking

Relationship  between writing and thinking

In my opinion writing it's such a difficult skill to develop and improved depending on the lever a person wants to achieved because required a lot a practise, time and effort, also I think including myself most people find it boring maybe hard to spend and waste time writing  or just no that significant to improved it.

Now thinking for me is easier then writing because as any human being thinking it’s a skill we developed since we are little and we are  to think sometimes about many things  at once. I believe writing and thinking are related because they are two main ways of expression we human beings have, writing and thinking go hand to hand because one is the reflection of the other one.

What's writing fro me?..... 

For me writing in English is more natural than writing in Spanish because I lived half of my life in the states and develop this skill in older years and in a natural way too, including how the language is used, expressions and culture, even though I never been into writing in general at any level, just what an average person writes, for example in:   "e-mails, letters, chat or text on the phone", and not following any grammar rules.

Writing in Spanish for me it’s been like remember how to ride a bicycle, I was very young when I left Colombia and I stopped practising the language, only used Spanish very occasionally with my Mexican friends, since I got back to Colombia around two years ago I remember a lot of my Spanish plus  I been practising a lot, I still have to improve a lot the  grammar because it’s still a little complicated  for me but is not as bad as I though, bumpy ride at the beginning but no hard falls.

Writing in French, not much to say I just suck, I guess it’s like a month with no water and no shower, a very funky feeling for me, I hope to overcome this feeling by practising and study very harder French. Soon.

Now that I'm at Univalle and I'm in connection and study different languages and learning how they work in order to be able to become a good teacher I  see the importance to develop these skill. Now taking in account what I said,  I consider myself a bad writer and reader but never the less I'm looking forward to improved them, in my case it's a long way to go  but I'm motivated to learn how to express myself and my Ideas in a different and higher level through this important skill which is writing.

Second version of my microwriting projects

Relationship between writing and thinking

• Any kind of text you decide to write, whether is an academic one where you have to do a research process, or an artistic one like poetry, writing begins in your mind. Therefore it’s better to clear your ideas so they can surge better. There is a strong connection between writing and thinking because the second one gives you the tools for creating, or imagine a mental structure related to what you want to write about in your text; later you consolidate your ideas through trial and error.

Writing in three different languages (Spanish, English and French) what is that like for me?

• 
  Spanish: For me, writing in Spanish is like swimming because I enjoy it, I feel comfortable about it and It is something I think I can handle very well but I also know that if I would do it more frequently I even could be a really good swimmer, just as I could be a very good writer, if I would practise more in order to improve my skills in this field.

• English: For me, writing in English is like climbing a huge hill because is really hard and you can fall over and over again but when you get the top of the hill you feel so proud about it because it is not what you usually do everyday.

• French: For me, writing in french is like singing. Although I really enjoy doing it, I know I can't do it very well and that I make a lot of mistakes. It is just something I wasn't born for, but I really like it.

MICRO WRITING SECOND VERSION

WRITING FOR ME IS...

Writing in Spanish is like a butterfly leaving her chrysalis, is the moment to show what she was changing in her body all that time; her metamorphosis. The butterfly can always be different, she can be big, small, colorful, dark, pastel... But she always has something to show. I'm like that, writing the things that I feel, showing the mood that I have.

Writing in English is like a quiz show of guess who? I'm always wondering if that is what I want to say, if that is understood as I understand it, if is better written it in this way or in that way, Finally I ended up choosing the better option for me.

Writing in French is like to go to a place known with unknown people, I feel comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time, because I feel I can do a lot of things but for do them I need the help of that stranger people. So I feel that I have limited possibilities to write.

PWP Second Version

Internet Lingo: a new form of nonverbal communication?

Ten years ago when the Internet was not yet a vital part of our mass media, conversations outside the physical space were only possible through telephone and letters. By these media was difficult to express our feelings as we did in a face to face conversation, because there was not space for gestures and tone of voice that always have strengthened our message.

David Crystal (2005) express that the advent of the Internet has revolutionized communication in many ways; it changed the way people communicate and created new platforms with far-reaching social impact. Significant avenues include but are not limited to SMS Text Messaging, e-mails, chat groups, virtual worlds and the Web.

With the appearance of these mass media, the non-verbal communication is presented through emoticons, internet lingo known as slang or acronyms, memes and pictures that beginning to reinforce the written message. Florencia Morado (2003), express that Nonverbal communication is replaced in a highly stylized form but, above all, creative. It describes actions or physical reactions, moods, feelings with a system of symbols created from keyboard characters that have been re-signified.

This new mode of language is interesting to study because it is an amalgam of both spoken and written languages. For example, traditional writing is static compared to the dynamic nature of the new language on the Internet where words can appear in different colors and font sizes on the computer screen (Franklin Cook, 2001). Moreover is interesting because as teachers in training, we have to know how current students are communicating, in order to understand their social environment and take the most of these elements to create an education according to their interests that make them unable to learn willingly.

My interest in this topic is to see how the use of the Internet Lingo helps us to express our feelings by only some keyboard characters put in a special form, acronyms created to express certain situations and even pictures that just seeing them, express moods. Internet Lingo is a new form of communication that needs to be studied because in some years probably this will be a very important topic in linguistics. I think this topic may be interesting for my colleagues and for anyone that does not know the topic but also think that is important to know this new form of communication. I hope to find important information by investigating in written documents about this topic and asking to some of my friends what they think about.

MWP after comments

MICRO WRITING PRACTICES

For me, writing in Spanish is like a bird learning how to fly because in writing process you have to take the same risk that birds  take when they taking of the land: fall down for learning and changing their lives.

Taking into account my personal experience as an English learner, I think writing in that language is like a child having stomachache when he is alone, far away from his mom. When I write in English I feel I do not have enough self confidence for improving by myself.

When I write in French I feel like a little person that enjoy and suffer while she learns how to walk. I think I feel like that because I enjoy writing in French by giving little steps and at the same time, I suffer for doing it in a good way.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WRITING AND THINKING

I think writing and thinking are both processes that cannot be isolated. For example, a writer needs to think about the topic or the ideas he/she wants to express through writing before begin the process of writing. Then, he/she can write those ideas in order to communicate what he/she thinks and also in order to give physical image to his/her thoughts. Both processes aim to the intrapersonal or interpersonal communication. So, the relationship between writing and thinking is so evident, but at the same time almost impossible to describe.

Second draft of my PWP

TRANSLATING A TEXT: FACTORS THAT ARE INVOLVED IN THIS PROCESS

Diana Carolina Monedero Solís

The translator's objectivity and subjectivity in the process of translating a text (narrative, argumentative, descriptive, etc.) are relevant factors that can affect, positively or negatively, the purpose of the author (writer) and also the sense of the text. This phenomenon can happen because the activity of translating a text involves the translator's knowledge, his/her culture and language, as well as the respect for what has been written in another language. Mariano García-Landa proposed the following definition of translation: “translators reproduce with a second sign system (language) in a second speech act (‘language game’) the percepts produced by other speakers/writers in a first speech act (‘language game’) with a first sign system”¹. This definition bring us to think in the process of getting the sense of the text we want or need translate, as well as to think in the process of finding words in another language for composing the original sense again.

I think this topic is relevant to our field because as foreign languages teachers in training, we need to know how to get and to keep the sense and the purpose of a text that we or our students need/want to translate. Also, it is relevant because this kind of exploratory research takes us to know and learn new information about the subject, as well as to know some authors as Mariano García-Landa, that proposes valuable theories on the subject of translation and its factors.

My purpose of writing this text, as a personal writing project, is to know the art of translating in order to enrich my knowledge, as well as present to the foreign languages students and teachers some theories and authors in the field. In fact, I am working in some theories and researches about the factors that involve the process of translating literature because, and I have to admit it, this subject is so new for me and I am really interested in it.

1 García-Landa, M. (2006). On Defining Translation. Meta: Translators' Journal. Volume 51, número 3 , 444.