A Little R & R

After a hard week at the 'office,' Kristine and some of the other teachers decided to walk down to the local coffee shop for some R & R.

From left: Jackie, Sandra, Kristine and Carolina

Jackie and Sandra are Kristine's TAs. Carolina teaches a couple of linguistics classes, including the Field Methods class that I helped with. She comes from Colombia were she used to work with a language group in the middle of guerrilla country. They still don't have a completed New Testament so she is going back for a couple of months after this semester to help out.

In my last post, I talked about training the students to use a digital audio recorder to record the sounds of a language. The next step in the process is to teach them to use a free program called Speech Analyzer to analyze their recordings. Thankfully, I didn't have to try to teach it myself this time. I only needed to help one of the Teacher Assistants, Moses, learn how to teach it. My help was needed because the program and all the documentation is in English. Moses speaks English pretty well but it is not his mother tongue. Here, he is teaching the class:

(Sorry for the lousy photo. I need a better camera!)

Moses was pretty nervous before the class but he did a good job. It is too bad the program and all the materials are only in English. It is a very nice, sophisticated program but it really hampers the students that it is not in Spanish.