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The TECHNOLOGIST
Bridging Language Gaps with Technology
Shannon Bishop sees computers as a means to promote English skills in South Africa
In a nation with 11 official languages, South Africans
typically use English to bridge the language divide.
Yet fewer than 10 percent have learned it as their first
language, so educators like Shannon Bishop, ’11, have the
opportunity to make a major impact.
“Young black children in South Africa are exposed to a minimum
of two to three languages before they start school, and
English could be the fourth or fifth language they’ve heard,”
says Bishop, who has spent the past two years at TC, earning
her master’s degree in TESOL (the teaching of English to
speakers of other languages) sponsored by the U.S. State
Department’s Fulbright Scholar Program.
In her master’s thesis, Bishop explored the use of English
as a medium of instruction in post-apartheid South Africa,
and she believes that technology is critical to making that
strategy succeed. It’s an outlook that marks a new direction
in her teaching career, which has included stints teaching
English in South African schools, tutoring children involved
in the film industry, teaching English in Great Britain, and
teaching English to adults through her tutoring company,
Clever Communication.
At TC, Bishop says she made great strides in adding technology
to her teaching repertoire. In one class, she learned to
develop downloadable teaching podcasts that could be sent
to TESOL students.
In Lecturer Carolin Fuchs’s class, “Classroom Practices,”
Bishop worked with TC students from Cyprus, Pakistan,
Taiwan and Japan to set up a proposal for a private social
network on Google Sites that could be used for off-campus
teacher training. As a requirement for her practicum class,
she also created her own e-portfolio, an online CV that
allows her to share her work with potential employers.
“The main thing I have learned about living in the U.S. is
that you can’t be afraid to market yourself,” says Bishop.
“You can’t be shy about telling people what you are capable
of doing.”
Bishop will return to South Africa this summer and hopes to
launch an after-school academic center in Cape Town—for
which she is already seeking funding—where students will
develop basic literacy and computer skills. The center would
be linked to several schools, building on the teacher-training
project she conducted in the summer of 2010, in which
she taught computer literacy to 100 Cape Town teachers
from five schools.
That program’s culminating project was a multi-media personal
story, presented in a digital format. She also created a
Google site that accompanies this project and contains the
procedure, technology used, pictures and video clips.
“By the end of the course, the teachers were able to use
all the technology, and we sat there speechless, watching
and listening to story after story,” Bishop recalls. “It was
quite powerful.”
— David McKay Wilson
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photograph by Heather van Uxem