Kevin at CATESOL 2011

A few of us attended the conference in Long Beach last weekend. I presented on "Linking Student Learning Outcomes to Language Proficiency Assessment," an update of my presentation at TESOL 2010 last year in Boston. Kathryn Garlow, who'd traveled from New Mexico for the conference, came to my presentation, as did Marty.

Though the opening plenary was on Thursday evening, the conference really got underway early Friday morning. The schedule allowed for a lot of open time in the middle of the day, with concurrent sessions concentrated in the morning and late afternoon.

The sessions I attended were:

"Setting Up Training for SLOs in a Writing Course," by Kathleen Flynn of Glendale Community College. Though the abstract promised an explanation of the SLO Assessment Cycle, it was really just another go-around of rubrics and writing samples for an intermediate level course. Kathleen did confirm for me that it is acceptable to use student writing samples without specifically obtaining the students' permission, as long as personal information is removed.

"IELTS vs. TOEFL Smackdown: What's the Difference?" by Jim Watt and Erica Fulton of SDSU's American Language Institute. The IELTS is a paper-based test, developed under the auspices of the British Council, and used in lieu of the TOEFL for determining student placement and assessment in some American programs. The TOEFL has evolved a bit as well since the last time I read up on it. Both tests include an oral interview and a writing task, in addition to reading, listening, and grammar. The IELTS is a bit different in that it incorporates reading into some of the listening tasks, i.e. reading a passage and answering oral questions about it. I'd hoped to find out more about TOEFL's machine-scoring capability for essays, but that would have to wait for a later presentation the next day.

"Basic PowerPoint Presentations for Beginning Students," by our own Angela Webster. She was presenting on a project she conducts at Mira Costa College, but the activity would be suitable for our lab at Palomar as well. Students learn how to use Clip Art images and insert full-sentence captions to produce simple presentations on topics such as "My Favorite Foods."

"Identity Matters: Challenging Evidence-Free Policy Making in English Language Teaching," by Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto. This was Friday's midday plenary. Cummins proposed passionately that we need alternative frameworks for thinking about how we can orchestrate classroom interactions that will promote literacy engagement and academic effort among low-income and bilingual learners. He suggests a need to move beyond "transmission" approaches to instruction and towards "social constructivist and transformative" approaches. An interesting perspective, but I couldn't help feeling that the guy would have had a panic attack if he'd had to walk past the inner-city high school a few blocks from the convention center on the way to my budget hotel.

"Chunking Works," by Amgad Ishak of Defense Language Institute. An interesting presentation on how the memory operates, moving elements from working memory to short-term memory to long-term memory, depending on constant decisions about the relative importance of stimulii. Ishak suggests that the mind is capable of holding only about a half dozen elements in the working memory at any given time, and that "chunking" them increases the amount of data that can be handled. Examples include memorizing phone numbers, social security numbers, and such as several sets of three or four digits rather than as individual digits. In language learning, this can entail memorizing a set of semantically-related words as chunks rather than as individual random vocabulary items.

"Policy, Program and Practices for Long Term English Learners," more of the same from Jim Cummins, responding to a three-person panel of California educators. The discussion was based on a new policy and research publication, called Reparable Harm: Fulfilling the Unkept Promise of Educational Opportunity for California's Long Term English Learners. Long Term English Learners are defined as students who despite many years in our schools are still not English proficient and have incurred major academic deficits.

My own presentation was scheduled for the last concurrent sessions of Friday.

"CBI at the Community College Level: Is it Feasible?" moderated by Donna Brinton of USC, a pioneer in the area of CBI (Content-Based Instruction). CBI refers to the teaching of language through exposure to content that is "interesting and relevant" to learners, or just to academic content. The three main approaches to it are theme-based, sheltered, and adjunct, with several "hybrid" models of the three. Five panelists discussed the implementation of different types of CBI at their institutions. The biggest challenge seems to be that many instructors just don't like it, and prefer traditional grammar-based language instruction. The adjunct approach requires cooperation from other academic departments, which is not always forthcoming. My impression is that the question posed in the title was never really answered.

"If You Are a Teacher Today, You Can Thank Your Teachers," the Saturday plenary by Keith Folse of the University of Central Florida. The title provides a pretty good description of the presentation. Moderately entertaining, but the presenter seemed a bit full of himself.

"Community College Level Rap," moderated by Barbara Luther, Community College Level Chair. A lunch and discussion session, very well attended. Grim musings on the budget, mostly.

"Deciding About Automated Essay Scoring: Whether, Which, and Why or Why Not." Nathan T. Carr, CSU Fullerton. Automated writing assessment programs have improved in recent years. They operate on a mix of algorithims and Baysian "learning programs," where a number of human-scored essays are provided to the program as examples and the program eventually becomes "smart." The main drawback nowadays is that it takes such a large number of human-scored samples for every writing prompt used. Many institutions would find it easier just to retain the human scoring! The three major systems in use are Vantage IntelliMetric's MY Access (ACT, for use with the GMAT and COMPASS), Intelligent Essay Assessor (Pearson products), and e-rater (TOEFL). Each program is still somewhat weak at identifying and analyzing non-native writer errors, but I felt I had glimpsed the future and it is amazing!

"Using Corpora to Inform Teaching and Materials Development," Sunday workshop by Randi Reppen, University of Northern Arizona. A large number of free online corpora with concordancing (instances of a word's appearance in a text) and collocation (words that appear commonly with the searched word) functions were discussed. One of the more important and well-known are the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and Michigan Corpus of Upper Level Student Papers (MICUSP). Although I've taken a corpus linguistics course myself, the usefulness of corpora in most classroom situations is something I'm still a bit skeptical of. Corpus studies are, however, very useful for the development of word frequency lists, dictionaries based on actual usage, and such.