Peer Review

One of the most difficult words to translate...

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Nov 30, 2022 by English

Bookmark

Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

This animated presentation describes the use of the word “you” in different languages around the world and why it can be so difficult to understand, use, and translate. The presentation is a downloadable video embedded in a website and offers a transcript, closed captioning, and pause and playback capabilities. The video does not come paired with any supplemental materials such as worksheets, questions, or activities. It is best suited for individual or in-class use for courses focused on linguistics, translation, or world languages at the beginning or introductory level.

Type of Material:

Presentation

Recommended Uses:

In Class
Homework

Technical Requirements:

Edge, Chrome

Identify Major Learning Goals:

Understand the difficulties in translating the word "you"
Understand how to use the seemingly-easy word “you” in a variety of linguistics contexts based on a variety of cultural factors.

Target Student Population:

Introductory English languge classes
Introductory Linguistics classes

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Fluence in English and a basic understanding of linguistics.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

The general subject of the presentation is clear, relevant, and covers an important concept in its field.
It is supported by research into various languages and sociolinguistic contexts.
The information it provides is accurate.
The presentation could be used in a variety of learning contexts.

Concerns:

To student users, the goal, learning outcome, and core concept for the video may not be clear without context given by an instructor or without self-motivated interest in the topic.
More material is necessary to cover a wider variety of examples and thus summarize and integrate the concept well into various linguistic contexts.
This video focuses mostly on European languages, only briefly mentions Asian languages, and does not include any Western Asian, African or Indigenous languages at all.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

This presentation can be used in a wide variety of contexts to measure a wide variety of learning outcomes.
The concepts demonstrated become progressively more complex but are demonstrated using many examples.
The illustrations reinforce what is being verbalized, demonstrating relationships between the concepts introduced in the presentation.

Concerns:

These types of learning materials almost suffer because of their flexibility of use: because they don’t have explicit learning objectives and don’t require prior knowledge in a specific field, they can be used in a variety of ways in a variety of contexts. However, by reading the title of the material, a potential user could feasibly understand what background knowledge they must possess.
Most of this presentation’s potential as a learning tool depends on how the presentation is used by instructors, especially since there are no accompanying materials, which affects whether or not it can be used to measure student learning outcomes.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

It is easy to understand how to operate and play the video presentation.
There are pause, fast forward, rewind, and closed captioning capabilities.
The material’s landing page and video are easily accessible in a variety of browsers and on a mobile device.
The presentation’s high-quality animation makes the video engaging and visually appealing.
On a different, linked website there are subtitles in 38 languages, making it accessible to speakers of languages other than English.
Also, when the name of the material’s author is clicked on, the video itself can be downloaded for offline viewing.

Concerns:

Unfortunately, because the material is a video presentation without any accompanying materials, there is no interactive element.
The closed captioning in different languages only exists on the Ted website, which is linked elsewhere without directions for how to access that website.
Additionally, the transcript located on the material’s landing page is one big paragraph which can be difficult to read for many.

Other Issues and Comments:: The value of this video presentation lies in how many different ways and contexts it can be used. It can be used in linguistics classes as an introduction to a concept or in an ELL class to practice listening and/or notetaking skills. The flexibility of this material is its key strength.
Creative Commons: