1. There were several students missing today but we moved ahead anyway. (This close to the end of the semester… I don’t have time to be too lenient and wait.)
2. We began a new sub-unit on Multicultural people. We read a poem called “The Laundress” aloud together and discussed its meaning and dissected it slightly.
3. We started a discussion about language for multicultural people. They would have whole experiences and understandings in their own language but in order to move forward in their Canadian experience they would have to embrace English or French which can leave some people feeling disconnected from their past experiences and emotions.
4. We watched portions of the video The Terminal where Tom Hanks does a wonderful job of showing the frustration and confusion of a man who cannot speak enough English to manage effectively in his new surroundings. Even later in the movie when his English does improve, he is reading the fast-moving English words at the bottom of a television screen at the airport and seems pleased that he can read aloud the words as they scroll by but obviously loses the meaning and tragedy of what he reads. When you learn another language, sometimes you are so focused on the interpretation of thoughts from first language to new language and responding in that language.. that there is such a time lapse that natural reactions, responses etc are of no value. Language becomes a functional thing and not an expressive thing.
5. The exerpt we are reading titled “Lost in Translation” (no relation to the Bill Murray movie by the way) is about a woman who has to choose between continuing to speak her native language of Polish and enjoying the emotions and colors of her language or challenging herself to focus on English which has no emotion or colorful memories for her and is only a language of distant things and neutral observations. We are reading it slowly, paragraph by paragraph, and I am having the students underline important lines and paraphrase in the margins so they clearly will understand what we’re reading.

Check out this preview of The Terminal.

 [youtube]AkBn2ExXg7U[/youtube]

Check out this longer clip about a portion of the movie that focuses on the importance of understanding language. Your native language has passion and great emotion to you. Speaking in a foreign language with such passion and emotion is very difficult. This is the topic of our reading… that emotions, memories, colors, feelings are lost through translation.

[youtube]QxEtbbGr7XA[/youtube]