Cognitive Daily: Does music help us learn language?

Cognitive Daily: Does music help us learn language?

Karaoke anyone?

 

Below are possible changes to the ELP program structure reform and related curricular matters that we discussed in our ELP Reform Commitee meeting on 5-28-08. 1. Keep or change weekly schedule? Reduce number of hours and/or workload. Provide more variation in when SE and TW are scheduled. See if we can make ARW and RCA hours more regular in order to allow for more flexibility in program or section changes for students. Clarify need for no classes on Thursdays -- primary reasons is the need to create a coherent time for all teachers to be able to work on research and other professional development activities. Doing this on the same day is necessary in order to avoid further complications to and already complicated scheduling system, and to ensure that all teachers are available on the same day for meetings. 2. Keep or change current courses and units? Eliminate NP and or EV. Shift hours from CS to Core or Core to CS. Use NP or EV hours differently. Consider SE + TW and/or SE + Vocab or Listening or speaking, etc. 3. Keep or change distribution of ELP over fist and second years? Move more content to Sophomore year or add more content to sophomore year for lowest students only. Offer SE and/or TW to programs 1 and 2 in first year. Open up winter term to more options such as SE-like course, CLA seminar, Expanded winter project. Note: We determined that if we consider any changes to ELP distribution, it should be based on what is best for the ELP students (such as workload reduction), not just to accommodate a possible new CLA first year element like a seminar. 4. Integrate ELP with some new first year CLA element? Have all first year ELP students do a project/portfolio that would be presented to CLA faculty in some way. (e.g. part of submission of request for admission to a major, or presented to their adviser.) Invite CLA faculty to give NP lectures. 5. Other ideas: Reconsider a Writing Center and/or Independent Learning Center for English. Create the option of indepent study in English using on-line course materials for CLA credit for students in 2nd, 3rd or 4th years. Offer more Advanced English courses, eg. vocabulary. These options might lessen our need for CS courses in the first year. 6. We also discussed what to do next. Generally, we seem to support the idea of work going on in the ELP to development a curriculum chart that would at this point not have specific courses in mind. Later we plan to combine the curriculum chart information with whatever program structure changes appear feasible. We need to provide a framework for the curriculum chart and a way to delegate the work of filling it in. We have a rough draft of the chart we can work on.