Notes from TESOL 2009

This year's TESOL Convention has just ended in the Mile High City of Denver. A belated winter blizzard that started on Thursday did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of 5000 ESL professionals from across the globe. Several principles continue to be heard loud and clear and consistently in the discussions this year.

Be Realistic

• No one should expect even the "motivated" students to become proficient too soon.
• Authentic writing situation includes more than just academic essays; journaling and even online chats count, too.
• Teachers should prioritize feedback and not respond to every single error. Let students have a chance to succeed.
• We need to be each other's allies when advocating for our students and for our profession.
• The status of the English language worldwide has changed. As an international language, English is now viewed as a tool that can be acquired without learning the cultures of the native English-speaking countries.

Be Helpful in an Empowering Way

• Teachers should develop age-appropriate ways to build students' intrinsic motivation, to increase students' sense of ownership, relatedness, and accomplishment.
• Teachers should adopt a "tough love" approach, set the bar high, and stop hand-holding and enabling in order to teach self-discipline, etc. For example, students can lose a percentage of the grade for non-participation, and teachers can consider a 10% penalty for a paper turned in late and a yellow-card-and-red-card warning system to improve classroom behavior.
• Teachers should demand their students to reflect on a discussion in order to teach higher order thinking.
• Teachers should discourage the use of L1 and demand total participation and interaction. Thus, online chat is an ideal tool for these goals.
• Teachers should develop appropriate rubrics for assessment.
• Teachers should ask their students to brainstorm on different topics to argue about, on a team blog's name and design, on their own project plans, etc.
• Teachers should have their students become the teachers by, say, explaining their comments on their partners' papers and offering suggestions.
• Teachers should push forced learning of academic vocabulary in order to achieve lexical richness in their students' written productions.

Be Resourceful

• Teachers should learn to use blogs, wikis, and other free or low-cost web 2.0 tools to faciliate teaching and learning. Technology can support developing speaking skills in an interactive online enviroment, for example.
• Teachers should utilize community resources such as libraries in order for their students to practice targeted skills.
• Teachers should utilize internet-based resources to design meaningful projects to really engage their students in authentic language learning.
• Teachers should explore using music, games, and other fun activities to help their students adjust to the new culture they are living in.
• Teachers should do corpus-informed teaching.
• ESL teachers don't want to deal with the Gen 1.5 issues alone; we want counselors, mainstream teachers, and others to help us.

That is all for the random notes I took at Denver. I'll post specific bright ideas here in the future.