Paula Iveland

Home Undergraduate Program Life After the Department Paula Iveland

BA in Linguistics, 1991; MA in Linguistics, 1993
English Language Development teacher, Watsonville High School

Currently, I am an English Language Development (ELD) teacher at Watsonville High School. I teach English to recently arrived Mexican immigrants. My linguistics background has helped me immensely in this huge and challenging task. Because there just hasn't been very much quality curriculum written for high school students who are starting at the various language-learning levels, knowing the structure of English made it easier for me to start writing my own curriculum. It especially helped me to select manageable starting points for teaching basic grammatical structure. Because I had also taken Structure of Spanish, I can anticipate the grammatical errors and problem areas students will have and, in some cases, circumvent them or at least get students to see the source of their errors. In my teaching, I get to see applications from literally every area of linguistics play out in a "live" way as the students progress from one level to the next.

I believe the linguistics training I received at UCSC helped me to develop a good teaching practice. I guess the evidence for this would be in watching my students respond to some of the techniques and methodologies I undoubtedly picked up from the Linguistics faculty in the program: 1) clear objectives, 2) interactive learning, 3) emphasis on asking and answering questions, 4) looking at data, 5) appropriately leveled assignments. Perhaps the single most challenging aspect of teaching in the public schools is having a wide variety of levels in your classroom, so teachers are now attempting "differentiated instruction" -- gearing your teaching and methodology to three different levels. I can safely say that the only place I ever witnessed such instruction was in Jorge Hankamer's Computational Linguistics class; the low end of the class consisted of people like me, and the upper end had experience programming robots to walk on the moon.

I also train teachers to teach ELD and assess student writing. I know that my ability to think clearly and present large amounts of material effectively came in large part from watching great teaching and developing strong analytical thinking skills.

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