In my undergrad class two weeks ago, I showed my students news videos of Obama and McCain each giving speeches about the financial meltdown right after the bailout plan was proposed. Although both men said a lot, neither said anything specific, which was my point. I wanted the students to read between the lines.
For homework, they had to write 200 words describing their views of the two candidates. As I grade their assignments right now, I keep seeing these funny Yoda-like sentence constructions. One wrote: "Confidence I lose to live through the economic storm." Another wrote: "Obama may be the first negro president in American history but I feel that he is just a [sic] actor, he is attractive so he gets a lot of supporters, action is the weakness of him."
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16 years ago
6 comments:
what do they think of palin?
They really don't know anything about Palin. They have her muddled in the same category with Hillary Clinton. I think some of them think Hillary is still in the election.
re Yoda-like speech: I think Chinese is kind of Yoda-like...you know? I think the Yoda way of speaking was taken from the pseudo Zen-master way of speaking English (a la Kung-fu tv series), which probably comes from the kind of broken English spoken by Asians in the U.S., transposing Chinese grammar structure onto English. "It is the Jedi Way, it is." That ending "it is" is kind of like a sentence-ending article like "le" or "ne", isn't it?
Love it! You're having fun it looks like--what a great teacher! --Becky
Why of course, Susan! I hadn't thought about it. I never studied Mandarin formally so I don't think about Chinese sentence construction (and besides, I'm probably saying everything wrong!) I just found an entire wiki entry about Star Wars languages and linguistic patterns. Kinda nutty. Lives these people need.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_in_Star_Wars
I was thinking that maybe one of your students wrote Palin's script for her Katie Couric interview....
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