The Last Fall Regional CATESOL Conference

The San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference has again come and gone. This is the last time it will be held in October, as the state conferences will from now on occur in the fall and the regionals in the spring.

This final fall regional conference was held at Southwestern College last weekend. I have many pleasant memories of the area around the campus, which during my high school years and immediately after was quite undeveloped. It was a popular place for my friends and me to ride motorcycles off-road, and also to take street rides to Otay Lake, Barret Junction, and Tecate. The temptation was great to just leave at lunch time and visit one of my old haunts, but fortunately I decided instead to attend two very worthwhile afternoon presentations.

The first was an introduction to the Lexile Framework for analyzing text difficulty and student reading levels, entitled "What Reading Level is That Novel?" The presenter, Maria Allan of CSU San Marcos, showed us how a free online program is available to evaluate the complexity of any given text, once several random paragraphs from it have been input. There are also a very large number of book titles that have already been analyzed and assigned to Lexile levels.

Lexile levels have been correlated with TOEFL reading scores, and provide an impressive resource for determining both the appropriateness of a text to a particular reader and the reader's own proficiency level.

The website, lexile.com, is easily navigated and full of information.

The final presentation of the day had the intriguing title of "Do More with Less: Learn From Teachers in Developing Countries." The presenter, Katherine Guevara of USC, was fascinated by her experiences teaching abroad in less developed countries, and by the resourcefulness of teachers there who develop versatile materials from very limited resources.

We were shown any number of activities that can be practiced using a balloon and a marker pen, pictures from discarded magazines mounted on cardboard, and alphabet and number cards made from small cut up pieces of colored construction paper.

The two presentations were somewhat discordant, with one involving sophisticated computer algorithms and the other the simplest of handmade materials. The contrast was easily reconciled in my mind, however. Though not completely averse to technological innovation in the classroom, it's long been my view that the best teaching maintains a back-to-basics approach with simplicity as an organizing principle. Research tools on the other hand, such as the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) for corpus linguistics and Lexile for analyzing text complexity, will always grab my interest. They provide extremely useful resources for discussing language phenomena knowledgably, backing up intuition and hunches with hard data.