FINAL SCRIPT [Edited by Abby w/ the input of the Research Team]

Daniella: Hello, my name is (insert name here)
Lauren: My name is (insert name here)
Imela: And my name is (insert name here)
D: And you’re listening to the first episode of AU Multilingualism
L: On this episode, we are going to be talking about COVID-19 and how a class at Adelphi helped make this semester more enjoyable
I: Since earlier on this year, there have been nearly 73 million coronavirus cases worldwide, and over 16 million cases located in the United States. Of the 16 million cases in the US, there have been 300,000 deaths in total. As cases started to rise dramatically in March, it led to schools, restaurants, stores, and small businesses to close down all around the US. This lock down affected people of all ages and races as many people were either laid off or fired from their jobs. This led to an uptick of unemployment claims, where many people didn’t know where to turn after a while as they struggled to make ends meet.
D: New York was one of the first few states to shut down schools, leading many students to quickly adapt to online learning. This shift wasn’t easy as students struggled with dealing with teachers who weren’t good with technology, not feeling motivated to study, and the piling amount of work teachers assigned. Many students would agree that this was a terrible way to end their high school semester.
I: As incoming freshmans, we were prepared to not live a typical college life where we are able to make new friends, have fun experiences, and enjoy the college campus.
L: With late nights on Tik Tok, bad sleeping schedules, Zoom University, and even more work piled on us, Fall 2020 was a rough success. Fortunately, a class at Adelphi called First Year Seminar: Multilingualism in Schools in Society allowed students to feel the college experience with a combination of interactive classes and a semester-long project, a virtual exchange with students in Seville.
D: Although many people may believe that a student in New York would live a totally different life than a person in Spain, this virtual exchange project showed students that they are practically the same person. One similarity shared before even meeting these students is COVID-19.
I: In Spain, there have been over 45,000 deaths while in New York there have been almost 35,000. This similarity sparked conversation between students off the bat. After a few months, many students have finished the class with new lessons learned that they can tell their friends and family about their exchange student.
D: For example, two students in the class liked how this virtual exchange gave them a new perspective of life outside of the U.S
L: Abby-gail, another student in the class, liked that this virtual exchange gave her something to look forward to each week as with COVID-19, we lack a lot of human interaction with other people where it’s hard to create friendships.
I: Yes, that was the same for Shahzar with his partner too. This project also helped them learn how to connect and communicate with a total stranger!
L: I think one problem for some people in this project is the language barrier. In this semester, we learned about dialects, accents, languages, and etc. I think we all can agree that we all know a thing or two about multilingualism and start to appreciate the diversity of the students in Seville.
I: Yea I know many students agree that at the start of this exchange, it was difficult for people to communicate which made conversations awkward and confusing. Many of these students knew Spanish, French, and English. For instance, a student in our class who had two students said that both of them knew how to speak in all three of these languages. Regardless of the difficulties however, it taught students in this class another lesson of seeing how multilingual Adelphi is.
D: I believe this exposure to multilingual students motivated students to create amazing proposals for Adelphi to improve their language policy in how they present information online, the amount of countries to choose from for study abroad, different ways to diversify their campus, and more. This was another interactive and fun project our teacher provided for us to work on.
I: This class was the perfect way to see how multilingual Adelphi is, with students speaking Urdu, Punjabi, Albanian, Spanish, Italian, Jamaican Patois, German, and a lot more all which I am happy about. As we look back and reflect on the few months of this class, Professor Bauler made sure students remained actively involved in campus and show us that we should be proud for being in a multilingual environment but also being multilingual
L: I think the amount of languages spoken in this class this year was about a dozen which we learned from our first discussion board. From our first talk about knowing different languages, I think us as a class are more confident in showing our multilingualism.
D: Yea I think so too. Anyways guys, I can see we all agree how influential this class has been for us. Any final words?
I: Add our page on Instagram, aumultilingualism. Shout out to Professor Bauler for keeping this class so interesting!
L: To the people listening, please embrace how multilingual you are. It’s a part of your identity!
D: And with that, we will be signing off!
L: Stay tuned for more episodes from AU Multilingualism!
I: Thank you for listening and see you next time
END OF SCRIPT