More Ideas from TESOL 2009

Using Blogs with In-Class Discussion Groups
by Celeste Scholz, an ESL teacher now teaching in Indonesia

She reported her success in using blogs with in-class discussion groups. She combined the literature circle idea with the technique of online diaries when teaching higher order thinking skills with the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Her handouts with resource links and presentation slides can be found here.

Online Journal Exchange with Writeboard
by Harry Harris of Hakuoh University of Japan

He has used Writeboard, a free wiki online tool that is

• easy to set up
• easy to use
• adaptable
• open to a variety of uses

It can be an ideal text-only platform to share or collaborate on a paper, facilitate pair journaling, debate arguments, and proofread documents.

The Authors' Fair
by Susan Thompson and her colleagues of Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute

They shared a successful project where a group of education majors from Japan were asked to choose an author or illustrator of children's books to research, then write a research paper on him or her, create a poster, and finally share their knowledge at an end-of-term authors' fair. Of course, students don't have to be education majors from Japan, and the authors researched can be any type of authors, not necessarily those of children's books. It is the skills that get practiced along the way that count.

Teachers' Practices in Responding to Student Writing: Walking the Talk?
by Dana Ferris of UC Davis and her co-presenters of Cal State Sacramento

The purpose of Dana's study was to investigate college writing instructors’ philosophies and practices in providing response to student writing. They studied 129 writing teachers at two universities and six community colleges in the Sacramento region. Among their findings are:

1. Teachers had a wide range of backgrounds, but the majority had advanced degrees in literature or creative writing, not composition or TESOL.
2. Only about 20% of the subjects had preparatory coursework for teaching L2 (second language = ESL) writers.
3. Few teachers (less than 9%) use computer-based tools for response to students.
4. Teachers express strong frustration about response.
5. Some L1 (first language = English/mainstream) writing instructors prefer to “outsource” L2 writers to tutors or learning/writing centers, handbooks, or web sites.
6. Some L1 writing instructors are unaware of L2 writers in their classes.
7. Some L1 writing instructors take a hard-line stance on L2 writers, putting on the top of their syllabi: “This is not an ESL class.”

Their suggestions:

• Teachers need to be trained to take primary responsibility for helping ESL students in their classes.
• Teachers should evaluate their own response practices and identify ways they can improve the clarity, specificity, and overall effectiveness of their feedback.
• Teachers should work on implementing effective accountability and reflection mechanisms so that students take feedback more seriously.
• Teachers should find out more about their students’ backgrounds so that their response practices can meet their students’ needs more successfully.
• Teachers should consider using computer-based tools and checklists or rubrics to improve their own commentary.

Dynamic Grassroots Advocacy
by John Segota, TESOL’s Advocacy and Professional Relations Manager

As part of TESOL's Leadership Development Certificate Program, this workshop aims to change people's misconceptions about political action. If we don't speak out about something we believe in, it is safe to assume our opponents have already spoken out. John offered steps to strengthening one's voice, ways to use the media effectively, essential skills for advocates, among other things. He invited participants and others to join TESOL's Advocacy Action e-list at http://capwiz.com/tesol. If you would like to have handouts from John, please let me know as I don't have his permission to share them online.

Generation 1.5 at the Community College
by Theresa Pruett-Said of Macomp Community College

She engaged participants from around the nation at this late-day session in brainstorming the issues faced by community colleges today vs. 4-year universities. Among them:

• intake more fluid
• Multiple-choice tests
• More variety of students including
• Students with more outside responsibilities
• “passed on” students
• Lower-level students
• Gen 1.5 student

Gen 1.5 concerns:

• Initial identification: native speaker vs. nonnative speaker—self-identified, which leads to the wrong assessment
• Open admissions leading to the wrong path
• Gen 1.5 vs. ESL
• Student self-perception
• Placement and anger at placement
• Low academic skills
• Fossilization
• Variation in class
• Pedagogical issues
• Behavior problems—high school to college problems
• Why just ESL? Why not counselors/advisers? Why not mainstream teachers?
• How to “sell” ESL programs?

Desires:

• ESL teachers don’t want to tackle Gen 1.5 issues alone. We want others to help us.
• Have counselors advise the students to take fewer classes!
• Promote rigorous classes. Bring in the parents, too, to see the rigor at CC.
• Articulate better with high schools.
• Open dual enrollment classes at high schools. Give students a placement test and offer an appropriate class alongside the AP English course!
• Offer learning communities (e.g. ESL with Bio) and work with assessment/counseling to advise Gen 1.5 student to take these courses.

A new broad definition of Gen 1.5:
Anyone who has been through the US educational system and still has difficulty with English!

A good relevant resource:
“Jump Start to Resolving Developmental Immigrant Students’ Misconceptions about College”:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4116/is_200604/ai_n17183360/

Teaching Academic Vocabulary and Helping Students Retain It
by Eli Hinkel of Seattle University

She declared that guessing meaning from context doesn't work unless the students understand 90% to 95% of the words being read and that we have to push academic vocabulary because it requires forced learning. She said we need to focus on and reward lexical richness in written products. Her handouts and overheads can be downloaded here.

The Changing Face of TESOL
by Jack Richards, a plenary speaker

• TESOL in a self-renewal now.
• Changed status of English worldwide. Now English is the language of globalization, viewed as one that can be acquired without learning the cultures of the English-speaking world. Local varieties of English are firmly established. There is much less pressure to turn English learners to mimic the native speakers. Off-shore English needed, which is basic English with the most frequent words, stripped of idioms and vagueness. The organizational view of teaching is driven by commercial world now.
• Demand for proficient users of English exceeds supply.
• Endless cycles of curriculum review and innovation; demand for accountability.
• One of the roles of teachers as facilitators is to build close relationship with students.
• Situated/contextualized understanding of what is a good teacher.
• We are in the post-methods era. Many old popular methods were too narrowly targeted and talked down to teachers, so they were discredited. Competency-based teaching has been criticized as a reductionist approach. Good teaching should not be just method-focused. Today’s learners do not just learn in the classrooms. Today, teachers are to develop their own individual methods.
• Looking ahead, teachers need to have a higher level of language proficiency; textbooks and learning resources need to have higher standards informed by corpora.
• Demands are increasing worldwide for upper-intermediate learning resources; demands for lower level textbooks are decreasing. So professional standards for teachers need to be developed. Teachers need to re-examine the way they teach, expand their knowledge base, and re-examine their values as well.

Going Beyond Facebook: Facilitating Language Learning Using Web-Based Multimedia
by Heather Torrie of Purdue University

She talked about the meaning of media sharing, offered many good online resources and concrete ideas to teach all four language skills using media platforms. Since there are now so many web 2.0 tools around, she suggested sticking with one multimedia platform that we are comfortable with. If you would like to have her conference handout, please let me know as I don't have her permission to share it online. By the way, Heather has assembled and categorized more than a dozen sites that provide short authentic and interesting video clips ideal for language learning. Click here to access her wonderful resources page.