The Qatar Blog: The Moorman's Experiences in Qatar

My class is working on a new assignment. This is an off-shoot of a previous assignment in which they wrote children's books and put them into powerpoint presentations. That went really well; I've been trying to figure out how to post these on this blog, but so far have not figured it out. The new assignment is for them to translate children's books from Arabic to English; they are working in groups of three. The books are from Scholastic, and are basically translations of trade books and children's literature from English. The media librarian here thought it would be great to have English versions; an authentic task a whole language person would say. This is a really challenging task for them. Small details become problems. For example, what is the word for a baby bat? Turns out they are called "bat pups." I didn't know this!! The talk that surrounds the translating is very rich, and the students are really benefiting in their language acquisition. Last week they scanned the books, and will put the pictures and English text into powerpoints (no copyright issues in Qatar!). The Dean of the College told me today that the other section of this class is jealous because of the interesting assignments my students have, a great compliment to me. Thanks again to Amy Williams for the basic idea.