By the time John Kerry raised the U.S. flag over the U.S. embassy in Havana in August 2015, I had decided to assign my Spring 2016 capstone journalism class with developing a Spanish-language, startup news site for Cuba — a community that has no recent experience in producing and distributing objective news or First Amendment-like protection that supports freedom of the press. Students would work collaboratively to report and produce stories across media, using text, video, audio, photography and social media to target Cuban Millennials.

This would be no small order in a country where only 5 percent of the 11 million-person population has Internet access and one of the most common ways of distributing non-state-produced news and information is by loading up and passing around USB drives.

The Obstacles

Three of the nine students in the class were of Cuban descent (the rest of the students were of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Italian and Lebanese backgrounds). My hope was that they would lead the way in connecting to family and friends using smartphones or emails, which the Cuban government has increasingly allowed. In addition, four students had participated in the school’s South Florida News Service, which provides content for The Miami Herald, and one student wrote for a digital Spanish-language soccer startup, so I knew I had strong and resourceful reporters.

The first big challenge to the project came from inside the classroom. Aliana Zamorano expressed the class’s skepticism (all student comments were provided specifically for use in this article). “Leaving the class on the first day, I was extremely frustrated. I felt that the project was impossible, feeding unbiased, truthful news about Cuba to Cubans from our little classroom in a Miami college was a joke. If my grandfather could not speak to his sister who lives in Cuba about anything but the well-being of her children over the phone once a month, how was I going to be able to get real information and ask relevant questions to the people of Cuba and not scare them off?”

Karen Noa, like Zamorano, also has relatives in Cuba, but she couldn’t get her family, including a cousin who is a professor at the University of Havana, to talk to her about day-to-day life, revealing their fear of reprisals.

The inability of the Cuban students to get ideas from their own families spread doubt about the feasibility of producing the news site. The students’ Whatsapp chat group, created to work on the project outside the classroom, became a hub of confusion. Momentarily floundering, the students wanted to write stories about Cubans who had immigrated to and lived in Miami.

I was surprised the students had not tried reaching out to Cuban Millennials using social media and pushed them to employ multiple platforms. Guest speaker Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at FIU, further supported that idea when he spoke about young Cubans setting up blogs and expressing political dissent, in spite of the Cuban government’s control of media.

The Breakthrough

credit: Arthur Guisasola

Arthur Guisasola, the class’s soccer reporter, had tried connecting with Cubans through Airbnb, which does a brisk business on the island, but got no response. He had a eureka moment while searching Reddit for soccer news. “It hit me. There definitely has to be a Cuba subreddit … I wrote a post on the Cuba subreddit asking if anyone would like to talk to me.”  Several hours later, he received a message from a 23-year-old university student.

The two started communicating though it often took up to a week for Guisasola to receive a reply. (Internet is limited in Cuba to hotels or one of the government sponsored wifi hotspots. User costs run $3.50 to $4 an hour. The mean salary in Cuba is $20 a month.) But the exchanges provided a glimpse into Cuban Millennials. “(It) helped me to understand what the Cuban population was looking for news-wise.”

“Everything changed after that,” Noa said.

The Stories

With insight into their target audience, the students brainstormed in class and on Whatsapp, generating story ideas. They also came up with the name Diarioforcuba, which combined Spanish and English and reflected the class’s multiculturalism.

Knowing that Cubans are spoon fed their government’s version of the Cuban revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary socialist state, Noa decided to provide young Cubans a different perspective. She created a timeline (Cuba y Estados Unidos, un cronograma) that included Castro’s rise to power and alliance with the old Soviet Union; a chronology of Cuban immigration to the U.S., including the freedom flights and Mariel boatlift; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the U.S. embargo; and the ongoing rapprochement between the two nations.

Students reported on business, culture and sports. Nicole Montero investigated foreign banks and the future of credit cards in Cuba (Operaciones bancarias en Cuba). Patricia Gonzalez explored the rise of  “cuentapropistas,” Cuban capitalists. She reported on how a math teacher earning $20 a month created a cottage industry producing and selling bikinis on the streets of Havana  (El capitalismo se trata un oportunidad). Christian Portilla wrote about a Cuban artist who helps support his family by exhibiting his work at Miami’s Art Basel, and Guisasola reported on Cuban ex-pats playing amateur soccer in Miami. Sources were not easy to come by. Montero interviewed 22 people in Miami before she connected with a source for her story.

Image courtesy of Patricia Gonzalez

All the articles were written and revised in English. Guisasola supervised their translation into Spanish (English translations are available through Google). The students set up Twitter (@diarioforcuba) and Facebook accounts to create communities and distribute content.

While the students worked on their articles, commercial flights between the two countries were restored, and President Obama announced that he would visit Cuba at the end of March — the first president to do so in more than 80 years. The confluence of the contact with the Cuban student and the quickening of the momentum of change between the U.S. and Cuba gave the students a greater sense of the timeliness of the project and the role it might play, however small, in the future of independent journalism in Cuba.

Mixed Optimism

A synchronistic event about halfway through the semester tempered the class’s growing excitement. Tracey Eaton, a colleague teaching at Flagler College in St. Augustine who had set up the Dallas Morning News’s news bureau in Havana in the early 1990s, messaged me saying he would be covering President Obama’s trip to Cuba with Lester Holt’s NBC team and could stop by my class on his way home. I had been trying to arrange a Skype interview with him all semester.

The class with Tracey Eaton (center). (Credit: Karen Noa)

Fresh from Havana, Eaton expressed hope for the future of relations with Cuba (he passed around Cuban Cohiba cigars as a symbolic gesture of the growing ties between the two countries), but he also cautioned against a quick transformation by describing some of the difficulties he had in directing a bureau in Cuba under the watchful eye of the regime. Videos he showed of Cuban activists who had been fighting for greater freedoms and who are now leaving Cuba for Miami emphasized that major change, including freedom of speech and press, was unlikely in Cuba anytime soon.

Myriam Marquez, editor of El Nuevo Herald in Miami, echoed similar comments in student Amanda Rabines’ video, “La luche por la libertad de expresion” (the struggle for freedom of expression). She cautioned that even if Internet access is expanded, Cubans will be wary of speaking freely and exposing their thoughts on social media.

As a follow-up to all the remarkable events that occurred during the semester, I asked the students to try to get comments from Cubans about whether they believed that change is coming to Cuba. I also encouraged the students to develop a non-traditional approach to the assignment. They responded with “Que Piensan los Cubanos?” (What Cubans think?) — a multimedia presentation, combining a string of tweets and voiceovers with a mixed bag of comments from multiple sources.

The Future of DiarioforCuba

Barely a few weeks after launching the project, Diarioforcuba received comments from Cubans on its Facebook page, and The Miami Herald expressed interest in using student content in their new InCuba, Today blog.  As rapprochement between Cuba and the U.S. and the possibility of a freer Cuba are evolving stories, students in my summer and fall media classes will go into phase two of diarioforcuba: engaging and informing Cuban Millennials. To be continued …

Allan Richards is associate professor at Florida International University’s School of Communication and Journalism. He oversees the school’s language skills program. Richards developed the current computerized language skills testing program with a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the Writing Center with a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. Richards began his career as a music journalist in New York.

The post FIU Students Produce Independent News Site for Cuban Millennials appeared first on MediaShift.

Good Morning,
I want to thank Andy Bechtel for inviting me to speak at this year’s AEJMC Breakfast of Editing Champions.

I also want to thank our sponsors the Dow Jones News Fund, the American Copy Editors Society, Poynter’s News University and the Newspaper and Online News Division of AEJMC for their support.

I am someone who usually writes and speaks in grammatically clean English and challenges students to do the same — but I’ve never spoken before a group of editing champions.

So if I get a little tongue-tied and start perverting the language – saying things like farther instead of further – it’s because I am anxious and not just eager to please.

Andy asked me to talk about what we’ve been doing at FIU to improve students’ language and writing skills.

But before I get into that I want to talk about why I have titled my remarks Writing-First in the Digital-First.

I believe that solid writing must reign as the most important skill for those working in the media and communications industries today, especially amid the digital revolution — just as it did in the pre-Internet era. Writing is still fundamental.

There are two powerful forces working independently and simultaneously that are having a hugely deleterious effect on student writing skills, creating an even more urgent need for focus on writing in the JMC curriculum.

Photo by Raul Reis.

One is the dynamic shift in U.S. demographics.

The U.S. Census estimates by 2022 26 percent of all teenagers and 23 percent of those between 18 and 34 will be Hispanic.

I teach in a school that is 72 percent Hispanic, with many first-generation students who are new to English grammar and primarily speak Spanish at home.

So I understand the challenges of students raised in a home where English isn’t a primary language.

I also have some personal experience being raised in a home with a Russian grandfather and an Austrian grandmother who mostly spoke Yiddish to each other and also communicated with a lot of emotional hand-waving.

I actually thought the word vitamins was witamins, as my grandmother used to say.
And on more than one occasion, my grandfather brought me a birthday cake that said Ellen instead of Allan because he couldn’t enunciate well or read in English.

The point is that there are many smart, capable students in our schools who want to go into the communication field – be it journalism, public relations, advertising or some form of digital media – but can’t write grammatically correct declarative sentences or express themselves well in English.

I have colleagues across the country who teach in schools with a large percentage of Asian students.

They report having similar experiences as those of us who teach in Hispanic-serving institutions.

The second phenomenon is the digital revolution.

We are now several decades into an era that requires new technical skills and multitasking on a variety of platforms and also places a growing emphasis on visual mediums.

Photo by Sharon Terry and used here with Creative Commons license.

Many of these more technical skills distract students from the fundamental skill of writing.

Before anyone thinks I am a cranky, die-hard traditionalist, I started our school’s digital journalism program and developed our first web newsmagazine more than a decade ago.

I also led the development of our digital curriculum, including our Digital Media major – all while concocting our language skills/writing program.

In recent years, we have increasingly heard the same refrain from editors, public relations directors and recruiters demanding that students possess a variety of digital skills.

But now – suddenly – it’s as if they have come full circle. More and more I am hearing those same editors, directors and recruiters say: “Yes, teach them technical skills, but please teach them how to write.”

Let me tell you a story

Our school is housed in a three-story concrete block of a building, with a catwalk that wraps around each floor, on Biscayne Bay in North Miami.

One of the non-academic challenges of teaching in Miami is the late spring/early summer storms. Storms generally rumble in from the Everglades late in the afternoon with window rattling thunder and terrifying bolts of lightning that rip across the sky.

My office is on the third floor, and when I look westward and see the carpet of black clouds, I know it’s just a matter of minutes before the rain floods our parking lot to the middle of our hubcaps.

One afternoon, while walking along the catwalk, I saw dark clouds moving rapidly toward our campus. I dashed down the steps two by two hoping to make it to my car before it started to rain, but I was too late.

The sky broke – it was pouring when I reached the landing.

I was about to race to my car when I was stopped by the sight of two students dancing arm and arm around a tree, singing something about a grammar test. As I sloshed past them, they were completely drenched but gleefully singing — “I passed the grammar test, I passed the grammar test!” over and over.

Yes, the students were referring to our Language Skills Test — or The Dreaded Grammar Test as they call it — which they must pass to take our gatekeeper course and enter their major.

As the creator of our current program, I have seen students drop to their knees and thank “Senor” above for passing grades.

I have seen the stream of tears of those who failed the test. But I had never seen such an exuberant outpouring of joy, relief and wild dancing in a nasty South Florida afternoon storm.

What was behind all this?

We developed our current language skills and writing program over the past nine years. We have since experimented – had a number of stops and starts – some trials and errors – and have done a lot of fine tuning in an effort to teach our particular student body the importance of language and good writing.

So, here’s what we do and here’s how it works, and a few lessons learned along the way.

We have a two-part Language Skills Test that all students must pass to gain admission to our gatekeeper writing course. The test includes a computerized, self-scoring, 100-question multiple-choice exam and a writing assignment.

The questions were written by our faculty and are drawn from a large database comprised of multiple question banks. The test questions are randomly selected by the computer so no two students have the same test. Our current passing score for the multiple-choice part is 70. The writing sample is used to diagnose whether students can write grammatically correct declarative sentences.

If you are interested in reading about the evolution of the test, you can read about it in my article “How a Dreaded Grammar Test Became a Pioneering Model for Bilingual Students,” published by MediaShift.

To help students prepare for the exam, we also created a digital practice site with self-scoring practice quizzes focused on various categories we believe are essential and fundamental to good writing, including subject-verb agreement, verb types, sentence types, phrases and clauses, etc.

Rather than having to read dry grammar rules and explanations, I thought it would be more palatable – possibly even fun – if the quiz answers were light-hearted, offbeat, something that might ease the pain or tedium of studying grammar.

In teaching, I often compare learning grammar to learning a musical instrument. Anyone who has ever played a piano, or bowed a violin or blown into a saxophone, knows that they had to first master scales and play in time – whole, half, quarter, eighth notes, etc. – before they could play Chopin, Mozart or Charley Parker.

Learning to play an instrument requires patience and enormous repetition. Music and grammar are similar in that sense. Music being a language of organized sounds and tones; writing being organized thoughts and words.

Photo by Allan Richards.

How many of you sing in the shower?

Most people have no idea what they sound like, but enjoy the pleasure of singing. Those of us who have to listen to them will agree that they more often than not sound like howling coyotes. But even those warblers who massacre melodies can – through training, practice and repetition – improve their sense of pitch and be taught to organize a group of notes into a pleasing melody.

The same is true of writing. These skills can be learned.

Our students get this.

In one recent year, 1,600 of our journalism, public relations and advertising students accessed our digital language skills practice site for more than 90,000 hours. That is more than 200 self-tutoring hours per student per month – in preparation for the Language Skills Test.

In addition to the practice site, we hold what we call Grammar Slammers twice a semester. These are three-hour tutorials. Three of our full-time faculty, including myself, teach the Grammar Slammers to help students prepare for the Language Skills Test.

We also offer a three-credit course called Grammar Workshop, which is taught on-ground and online, for students who feel they need a refresher course in language skills, or who are still struggling with English as a second language.

In addition to the online practice site, the Grammar Slammer and the Grammar Workshop, we also have a Writing Center where students receive tutoring in writing.

When I started building our language/writing program, I always knew that our students would need more than a grammar test or a grammar practice site.

Our friends at the Scripps Howard Foundation agreed and awarded us funds to develop this Writing Center.

So is what we are doing working?

We have considerable feedback from our faculty about improvements in student writing. For example, my own experience is similar to that of other faculty members.

I remember when I taught my first class as an adjunct in 1997 and sat down to grade my first batch of student writing. Have you ever tried to unravel a ball of yarn after your cat got hold of it? I spent an hour on that first paper. I knew we had to find a way to improve student writing.

Photo by Nic McPhee on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

Today, I am happy to report that faculty are unraveling far fewer balls of tangled writing.

Another indicator of our success are the calls I receive from our grads who get back in touch with us – thanking us – for spending so much time and energy on their language and writing skills. We hear it over and over again – the program sharpened their writing and prepared them to compete in very competitive markets.

Many comment that they serve as the grammar police in their offices correcting their CEOs and colleagues. Our students are making their marks at such organizations as the NY Times; NPR; CNN; BBD&O.

Here’s what a few of them had to say:

“The test freaks students out, but the truth is I had minimal grammar training prior to the program and the test, and I needed to clean up my grammar. I don’t always remember the grammar terms, but the program was so valuable to me in forming sentences and developing a rhythm in my writing.” – Jessica Meszaros (SJMC 2014), Anchor/Reporter, WGCU Public Media

“One of the hardest exams I’ve ever had to study for and one of the most demanding programs I’ve ever had to be a part of. I spoke to several students prior to taking the exam and they said the same thing and I thought to myself ‘if you guys who were born here found it so difficult, what chance do I have being an international student that recently learned to speak English?’ But now I can tell you, it’s one of the best things I’ve done since being here at FIU. ” – Avigail Benhayuon, SJMC 2014, Radio Host Pangea FM

“All the studying taught me grammar, but it didn’t teach me to tolerate others … with bad grammar. Now, I can’t stand people who want to jog or run further or keep things between you and I. Kills me.” – Silvana Ordonez, SJMC 2012, Desk Producer, CNBC

Jessica, Avigail and Silvana were all in my journalism classes and are excellent examples of students who benefited from our writing program.

Apart from student responses, we get plenty of industry feedback, including from members of our School’s Advisory Board – which includes the executive editors of The Miami Herald and  Sun-Sentinel and the CEO of the Scripps Howard Foundation – who praise our student writers and thank us for our commitment to teaching writing as well as digital skills.

Additionally, we have hard data that show improvements in our students’ language skills.

For the past nine years, we have collected and analyzed test results that indicate significant improvements in language and writing proficiency. An average of 50 percent of the students who use our digital practice site and attend the Grammar Slammers pass the Language Skills Test. Also, the percentages are over 10 percent higher for students who take the three-credit Grammar Workshop before taking the test, ranging up to as high as 66 percent.

By the way, these data have been used as a primary direct measure for Standard Nine – the Assessment section — of the ACEJMC self-study. Our School was lauded by the ACEJMC Council in our recent reaccreditation. This is the third accreditation in a row in which we have been recognized for our emphasis on testing and teaching language skills and writing.

How Do You Get Started?

I often get calls from JMC administrators and faculty interested in learning more about how we do what we do and how our experiences might be useful to them in building a language skills/writing program.

Let me share a few questions I always ask them:

First, what kind of program do you want to build?

Do you want to test and teach students grammar or focus more on writing skills?

What changes in your curriculum will be required?

If you are going to develop a program, does your school have faculty, staff and administrative support? I would also include IT support. IT played a critical role in developing and securing our system.

We have had a few technical bumps as we changed platforms from Blackboard to Moodle and back to Blackboard, but we have never had one instance of anyone compromising our question banks.

Does your School have the resources, including the expertise and funding, to develop a program? If not, where can you find the expertise and funding?

Finally, before you raise your entrance standards, in the age of retention and graduation metrics, is your School willing to endure a temporary drop in enrollment?

These are just a few questions that might spark conversations at your School.

In closing, I can’t promise you that if you place more emphasis on teaching language and writing skills your students will be dancing in the rain.

But I can guarantee that they will be calling to thank you for making Writing-First in the Digital-First age.

Allan Richards is associate dean and associate professor at Florida International University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC). He oversees SJMC’s language skills program. Richards developed the SJMC’s current computerized language skills testing program with a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the SJMC’s Writing Center with a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. Richards began his career as a music journalist in New York.

The post Allan Richards: Writing Still the Most Important Media Skill in Digital Age appeared first on MediaShift.

Many have also heard that our school has developed a reputation for producing strong writers, increasing our internships, scholarships and job placements in media and mass communication markets, which increasingly want bilingual professionals.

Students attend a Grammar Workshop. Photo by Joshua Shear.

Florida International University (FIU), where I am associate dean in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC) and director of our digital language skills program, is a public research university with approximately 50,000 students. The university usually clocks in first or second of all institutions in the United States for graduating Hispanic students with undergraduate and graduate degrees (the 2014 Hispanic Outlook magazine ranks FIU as number two). Our school has 2,000 students, 73 percent of whom are Hispanic, largely from the Caribbean, Central and South America, and 12 percent African-American.

We are not alone in our experience as a communication school grappling with the quality of student writing in general, as well as English as a Second Language (ESL) issues — schools in Texas, Arizona, California and New York have long dealt with the challenges posed by bilingualism. But Miami has perhaps the most complex concentration and mix of Hispanics in the United States.

If the projected 2022 U.S. Census estimates that 26 percent of all teenagers and 23 percent of those between 18 to 34 will be Hispanic hold true, then cities across the United States will look increasingly like Miami, and more schools can learn from our experience.

Building a Language Skills Program

Almost two decades ago, before our school started digitizing the journalism, broadcasting, public relations and advertising curriculum, we started developing an extensive language skills program based around a digital grammar teaching and testing system meant to strengthen students’ language and writing skills and reduce the ESL issues that came with being a Miami-based institution.

Kevin Hall, a former Miami Herald editor, pioneered this seminal digital program in the mid-1990s. It was a combination of essays and tutorials on writing and quizzes that referenced literature and popular culture to illustrate that all writing and spoken language — from movie dialogue to song lyrics — contained the basic building blocks of grammar and punctuation.

This digital language skills program provided access to the fundamentals of grammar and writing to our students, the majority of whom came from Miami’s Cuban-American population. For many, it was the first time they reviewed English language skills since elementary school — or had arrived in the Miami area.

Instituted in a lock-step approach, the approach tested students before each writing course in their discipline. Each class had a 100-question multiple-choice, self-scoring entrance exam with a passing score five points higher than the previous class as a prerequisite. This take-no-prisoners approach constantly reinforced basic language skills through repetition, with the ultimate goal of helping students untangle Proustian-length Spanglish sentences and develop into capable writers.

The passing score for the introductory writing course, was 65, a D, and roughly 45 percent of the students passed the exam. As a journalist teaching writing for the first time, I was completely overwhelmed trying to teach narrative style writing to students who had great difficulty organizing words into basic declarative sentences in English.

A question arose: Should a professor have to teach the fundamentals of grammar in a journalism and mass communication school?

We faced protestations from students, their parents, even some faculty that “The Dreaded Grammar Test,” as it became known, was more punitive than helpful. The lockstep approach also often caused a bottleneck as students couldn’t keep up with the five-point increases in passing scores, with many forced into retesting (students had four chances to pass the exam) and retaking the writing and grammar course. Despite all this, improvements in the use of language and writing were measurable and often dramatic.

An Evolving Model

Between 2001 and 2004, recessionary economies and political instability throughout Central and South America drove whole families into South Florida for political asylum the way Cubans had come two decades earlier. The sudden surge of populations from Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua and Brazil brought students with widely different levels of English proficiency.

Now the director of our language skills program, I knew we not only had to change to a basic English grammar system and remove cultural bias through reference to Western literature and popular culture, but also start abandoning radical remediation and remove the lock-step approach.

We had to find a way to raise the bar for students and thereby relieve an understaffed faculty, who, like me, spent excessive hours correcting ESL issues while teaching journalism, public relations and advertising. At the same time, we had to figure out how to not abandon what amounted to about 55 percent of the students who failed to pass the language skills entrance exam.

We experimented briefly with non-digital copy editing exams in which students were challenged to read sentences and identify parts of speech and correct grammar, punctuation and spelling errors. But the majority of the students found it too difficult to score higher than 40 percent on the test. I decided we would have to return to the 100-multiple choice test in which students could choose answers from options in a language many were still struggling with.

A grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation enabled me to gather a team of the school’s top writing and language skills professors and IT professionals, and produce a new, leaner digital program that eliminated lengthy tutorials, focused on the question-and-answer approach, frequently infusing grammar rules with lighthearted or offbeat explanations as a way of making the digital site more user-friendly.

I also believed it was time for the school to raise our entrance score requirement. The 65 passing grade had kept us in the remediation business.

Raising Standards and Impact on Enrollments

Cautiously, we raised the entrance score first from 65 to 68, and then to 70. More, we added a basic writing sample to detect whether students could write clear declarative English sentences.

The percentage of students who passed the exam when we raised the score to 68 plunged from 59 percent to 43 percent. The rate continued to tumble when we raised it to 70. Only 36 percent passed. Enrollments fell from 200 to 160 students in our introductory writing course.

Students practice in the SJMC Writing Center. Photo courtesy of Florida International University SJMC archive.

It took several semesters for students to reach the higher bar and score 70 on the exam, and for enrollments to return to previous levels.

Students accessed the digital language skills practice site in greater numbers and for longer periods of self-tutoring. For example, in 2012, 1,600 of our journalism, public relations and advertising students accessed the site for more than 90,000 hours—that is more than 200 self-tutoring hours per student per month—in preparation for our entrance exam.

In addition, recognizing that language skills require reinforcement and that students could also benefit from in-class training, we developed and conducted Grammar Slammers, three-hour boot camps, several times a semester, and created a three-credit Grammar Workshop refresher course available in person or online.

In summer 2013, we again raised our standards. Where before we gave students multiple chances to score 70, students now have only one shot at passing the exam before being required to take the Grammar Workshop course. The tougher measures have motivated students to take the Grammar Workshop before taking the test for the first time, yielding a higher pass rate, increasing from 48 percent to 62 percent over four semesters. Additionally, I also continue to see vast improvements in the quality of student writing compared to the essays I graded when I first started teaching.

“The test freaks students out, but the truth is I had minimal grammar training prior to the program and the test, and I needed to clean up my grammar,” says Jessica Meszaros, an SJMC graduate interning at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “I don’t always remember the grammar terms, but the program was so valuable to me in forming sentences and developing a rhythm in my writing.

“The test does something else: You have to really make up your mind whether you want to improve your writing skills enough to be a journalist, so it kind of weeds out those students who aren’t serious.”

Silvana Ordonez, an SJMC graduate now a producer at CNBC in New York, writes in an email: “That semester of studying and stressing was a good, solid foundation. All the studying taught me grammar, but it didn’t teach me to tolerate others … with bad grammar. Now, I can’t stand people who want to jog or run further or keep things between you and I. Kills me.”

Grammar for a Multicultural Future

Teaching language skills as part of writing programs has long been a conversation in communication schools regardless of whether they’re dealing with bilingual issues. But the changing demographics will make it less of a choice and more a necessity — whether programs use self-tutoring digital models like ours (http://journalism.fiu.edu/#!/Language_Skills) or diagram sentences on a chalkboard the old-fashioned way. Here are a few things to remember if you develop a program:

1. Grammar rules tend to evaporate quickly from memory, so repetition and reinforcement are keys. All students should own a grammar book or refer to a recommended grammar site and an updated AP Stylebook.
2. Grammar courses and tutorials sharpen skills, but line editing students’ writing is essential to reinforcing and putting language skills into action.
3. An Online Grammar Workshop course with 140 students has proved to be as effective as the Grammar Workshop in-class with 40 to 50 students.
4. Enrollment numbers may drop at first, but students determined to have a career in journalism or mass communications will respond to the higher bar.
5. Schools must commit to higher standards to achieve results, and produce better writing students.

Allan Richards, associate dean and associate professor, oversees the SJMC’s language skills program. Richards developed the SJMC’s current computerized language skills testing program with a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the SJMC’s Writing Center with a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. Richards began his career as a music journalist in New York and later branched out to cover the environment and health.

The post How a ‘Dreaded Grammar Test’ Became a Pioneering Model for Bilingual Students appeared first on MediaShift.