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It’s a class in the history of the English language, it’s a 300 level upper division
class taken by mostly English education majors and English majors who are in kind of a linguistics
emphasis. All of the ones who are going to be English education will be English teachers
at I think a middle school and secondary level. In the class kind of goes through the history
of English I suppose in a way. We’re doing old English now and then we’ll move into
Middle English. I’m trying to make the point that language, you know, is primarily oral.
I really insist upon them working on pronunciation of old English and later Middle English. I
have sound files mostly from the ones I have made myself but some others on d2l, so they
listen and repeat and try to get down the pronunciation, how the pronunciation of English
has evolved through the centuries. I wanted to do a project, a group project
was in the syllabus from the beginning, in which they would work as a group to do some
kind of presentation. It occurred to me that there are some plays that were produced in
various places in England in the late 1300’s, so I thought it would be interesting to sort
of semi-stage one of these things. Originally I was thinking of it as a live thing, that
we would just do in class. I would give groups a play or part of a play to do, the audience
being the other members of the class. But then, well the English department has something
called English fest in the spring. So I suggested that maybe we do this as part of English Fest,
still thinking that we would probably do it live.
Students have to do a lot of work preparing the translation and they also have to actually
write a paper about the language features of the section they’re in charge of and
so on, so there is a lot of work in this so I don’t want them to have to do a lot in
the editing view. To still do it live, as originally planned,
but at the same time projecting a PowerPoint with the translation sort of beside where
the actors are standing. With that approach, you could have more text up there at a time.
I mean, you could have ten lines or something so the people would see more of it as they’re
hearing. Premiere Elements, that’s right. So that
would have a couple of advantages. More control over the pacing so you would have better correspondence
between what is being said and what is on the screen. And secondly, the end product
could be a dvd which would mean it could be any length.
I was delighted when we tried this YouTube approach. YouTube has a, I don’t know what
you would call it, a program or whatever, that allows you sort of captioning that more
or else does the work. I mean you just put in the type to text and it matches it to what
people are saying, with remarkable accuracy, not perfect. So far, that looks to me to be
maybe the ideal approach, it would involve relatively little time in the editing process.
Most of the effort will go into presenting the text.
The grading of the project will be pretty heavily based on the pronunciation, not really
on how much effort they put into costuming and stuff like that. I think having that for
English Fest will be enough encouragement for them to do it with some splash, I hope.