The ESL Dept. Blog

A Corpus-Informed Grammar Textbook Series

2012-01-31T12:05:00.000-08:00

Cambridge University Press has just published a nice grammar book series that is based on real-world English, i.e. corpus linguistics. It is called Grammar and Beyond. Anyone can preview these fine grammar texts in their entirety until Feb. 21:

Book 1 and Book 2

I field-tested a past tense unit from Book 2 in my level 4 class last semester and really liked its approach to teaching and practicing the tense. My students enjoyed it totally, too.

Two CATESOL Awards

2012-01-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

With the Feb. 1 deadline fast approaching, some of you might consider participating in one or both of these two CATESOL awards:

Ideas for Covering Syllabus

2012-01-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

An on-going thread on the On Course Ambassadors mailing list is about innovative ways to cover a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. Here's a sampling of the ideas so far:

create a syllabus scavenger hunt sheet so that the info you want to highlight within the syllabus becomes the answers; assign a homework grade for this so that your students can gather the info while earning an early grade
do an expert jigsaw (http://www.jigsaw.org/steps.htm); immediately following the activity, each group generates questions based on the syllabus
do a Think, Pair, Share ( http://www.teachervision.fen.com/group-work/cooperative-learning/48547.html
give a homework assignment to read the syllabus and come to the next class meeting with three questions about the info/assignments in the syllabus; when taking roll the second day, have each student ask you one question when you call their name
give each student the syllabus and then divide the class into two teams to play a bingo game on the board; students select a square and you read a question that you have created for that square that relates to a concept you want to reinforce; the winning team gets extra points on their first assignment
give students a list of questions concerning the class that can only be answered if they have a course syllabus, the course calendar, the textbooks, and other handouts from the class, all of which you have planted around the room prior to the class; give them the instructions that they are to answer the questions without telling them that all of the resources they need are somewhere in the room; you then leave the room and observe through the window
divide the class into four groups on the second day of school and do a "syllabus quiz" large group activity; each group has signs that say A, B, C, D, True, False. When you project a question, the first group to have someone stand with the correct sign gets a point
take the syllabus, enlarge the print so that there are 5 to 6 pages, and then cup up each page into small puzzle pieces; put students into small groups and give them one page of the puzzle (i.e. cut up pieces) in an envelope and some tape; the task is to work together with their group members to put this one page of the puzzle together and then the small group is responsible for sharing their page with the class
provide extra credit to students who can find an error in your syllabus; you will have a lot more questions pertaining to the syllabus as a result of their trying to find errors

Part-Time Faculty Have a Website

2011-12-27T10:45:00.000-08:00

CATESOL has recently established a new interest group for part-time educators. Jose Lopez Mercedes is the PTE-IG Coordinator, and Barbara Luther is the PTE-IG Coordinator-Elect. The new IG now has a website accessible by this URL: http://www.catesol.org/igroups.html.

A New Website

2011-12-20T23:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.embedplus.com/dictionary/how-to-pronounce-words-and-use-them.aspx is a new and unique website that allows users to type in a word that they want to hear the pronunciation of. YouTube clips will be served up that contain the use of the searched word. The user can loop back to hear the pronunciation of the word again and again. There are other useful tips for using the typed word. It's worth a try.

Typing Is Not Grunt Work

2011-12-13T11:19:00.000-08:00

Here's an apparently fun and versatile website for "kids, students, and adults alike" who want to improve their typing skills. Click the image below to access the free online typing tutor called "PowerTyping"

Reflecting on the Semester - Part 2

2011-12-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

As teachers, whether veteran or relatively new, we all want to improve ourselves from semester to semester. On the last day of each term, I always administer my own anonymous survey asking students in my class such questions as "What was the best about the course?" "What was the worst about the course?" "What was one thing that you didn't like initially but has helped to improve your English skills?" "What do you think of the textbooks and handouts?" and "What do you think of Lee's way of teaching?" I then reflect on the feedback I receive in order for me to do a better job in the following semester.

One way to articulate such reflections is by using an "I wish I knew" statement. This method is exemplified here, though the statements were made by colleagues to reflect on their teaching career over the years.

Our Students on YouTube

2011-11-29T15:55:00.000-08:00

Five students from Roberta's level 1 class in Fallbrook managed to produce the following video about goals. The students modified a template for spoken text and selected images to represent "determination" and "success." What an accomplishment, considering these students' level!

Reflecting on the Semester

2011-11-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

Teresa Ward, the interim Dean of Language Arts and Humanities and a writing instructor at Butte College, has her students write a letter to someone they choose in order to share their reflection on their learning experience of the semester. She shares her idea in detail on an On Course web page here: http://oncourseworkshop.com/Learning048.htm.

Natural Landscape from Around the World

2011-11-15T11:08:00.000-08:00

This PowerPoint show with more than 100 slides came with an email I received. It may take a while to download, but the scenery in the photos is breathtakingly spectacular. Also, makes for great discussion material to practice speaking, vocabulary, and ways to describe details.

Spring Registration Begins

2011-11-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

At Palomar, credit registration for spring 2012 begins today based on individual students' "appointment" time found in their eServices account.

Since our dept. assesses our new students by ourselves, it is important to talk up the new student recruitment in our current classes as well as spread our information about new student recruitment and their registration for spring far and wide.

It also pays to know and to make it known that in the spring semester, our dept. still offers quite a few special-topics classes besides our Noncredit Certificate of Completion course sequence, our credit academic ESL sequence, and our Career-Track ESL program. See flyer 1 here, flyer 2 here, and the hours and location of these additional topics courses here.

EOPS's Drive for Needy Student Families

2011-11-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

As we near the start of the holiday season, the good folks at EOPS/CARE & CalWorks are once again organizing a campaign to supply 150 needy student families with a $25 gift card. If you wish to participate in this caring effort, please let your program coordinator know so that he or she can tell you where to put your monetary donation.

Highlights of CATESOL

2011-10-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

This year’s CATESOL conference held at the SDOE was in my estimation one of the best I have attended. From the keynote speaker and discussion groups, lunch time raps and of course the breakout sessions there was something for everyone. Generally I am not fond of keynote speakers. In the past I have found them to speak on general or esoteric topics which while appealed to my intellectual self, offered me nothing to take into my classroom. To my delight, our keynote speaker, Marian Thacher gave us a well spent hour on using the internet as a tool and how to integrate lessons, portfolios and bookmarks “in the cloud.” She also talked about using social networking sites. Her materials were very informative and included many lists of websites to surf and gather materials. She asked an interesting question, how many of us store our bookmarks for websites exclusively on our home computer. I believe everyone in the room agreed that is exactly what we did. She then told us that by joining Delicious.com we could store our bookmarks and have access to them on any computer. This would be very handy if you teach at more than one campus and would like to show your students that one perfect website you have marked at home.
The first session I attended was given by Suzanne Woodward from MiraCosta college. She showed us how to teach verb tenses with games and activities. Most of the activities she explained came from her book, Fun with Grammar, and I of course immediately ordered a copy for my classroom. One of her activities is played like musical chairs and practices the simple past. The teacher stands in the middle with students occupying chairs around her. She makes a factual statement about something she did in the past, “ I ate breakfast this morning,” If anyone didn’t, they must say, “I didn’t,” and give up their chair. The teacher then takes their chair and they are in the middle. Students learn to be crafty, girls saying, “I washed my new dress yesterday.” Of course, the young men can’t very well stay seated in agreement, so must say “I didn’t,” and give up their chairs. It seems a very lively game and one that would help past tense practice. The other idea she gave us that looked like a lot of fun was the Wanted Poster. This could be past or present perfect exercise. It is very easy to find online programs that will convert your photos into wanted posters. Students in groups must name their gang, then come up with several misdeeds they are guilty of. Although the teacher had some misgivings about putting students in roles of thieves and criminals, it seems her students really enjoyed the activity and got into the spirit of the crime. People feeling squeamish about this part of it could use lessor “crimes” like parking in the teacher parking, or thowing away a perfectly good sheet of paper. The posters can then be presented perhaps in a powerpoint for the whole class perusal and explanations by each “gang.” Suzanne then gave us a great list of songs that use different tenses. They would be good for cloze activities as well as having the class sing along for oral practice. There were so many good ideas, I’ll save the rest to share for next week.

Where Is Our Voice with This CCC Student Success Task Force?

2011-10-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

Did you know that outside "experts" are rapidly pushing many boneheaded recommendations through to drastically change California's community colleges' missions?
Many ESL professors at community colleges up and down the state are alarmed by some of the proposals, believing that we cannot

create the kind of "success" narrowly defined in the proposals while ignoring the radical differences between adult ed, noncredit ESL, and credit ESL
lump ESL indiscriminately with "basic skills" as just remedial courses
eliminate ESL courses more than one level below English 100 from community colleges

If you are concerned, check your Palomar email for a message sent out last Wednesday by Shayla, president of the Union, and Monica, president of the Senate and participate in a college forum this Thu. The time to make our voices heard is now. The time to act is now.

Additionally, you can share your thoughts publicly or email your comments here. The 72-page "Student Success Task Force Draft Recommendations" can also be accessed by clicking on "Student Success Task Force" on the left panel.

The Forever Student

2011-10-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

The Wednesday Afternoon Post

As we progress through our careers guiding the lives of those entrusted to our knowledge and expertise, it seems to me that there is an inherent obligation for teachers to also remain a forever student. Aside from the obvious research methods and ever changing legislation we must remain current on, there is an intrinsic reward in keeping the learning fires burning. If my lesson plans aren’t fresh, I am not fresh in presenting them. When I taught middle school I sometimes repeated the same lesson as many as five times in one day. As the day progressed I learned what worked well and what adjustments might make it better. By the end of the day the lesson I was teaching barely resembled the lesson I taught first period. In the teaching profession we have a vast treasure trove of materials at our fingertips if we wish to sample them. There are journals, professional development opportunities, conferences and the ubiquitous internet to name a few. Teaching is an exhausting profession, but I learned from Harry Wong, The First Days of School, that with a few procedures in place it ceases to be the sole domain of the teacher, and the students assume much of the day to day minutiae that can consume many instructional minutes. For an excellent example of a teacher handing over responsibilities and students thriving, look at Tim Bedley’s video at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-160387722995531338#
Remembering myself as a new teacher, I couldn’t wait to put my lessons into action in my classroom. The sparkle of enthusiasm a teacher brings to a class is very contagious. If you love a subject or an activity, it is almost guaranteed that your students will love it too. Some years ago I began teaching Tom Sawyer to my 7th graders. I personally adore this book. I knew that if we just tried to plow through it from page one, my students would quickly get bogged down by the vocabulary and tune out quickly. How many of us could define adamantine or ambuscade ? These were common words in the 19 century, but have fallen into disuse in our modern times. They perfectly described an unbending Aunt Polly lying in wait for an unsuspecting Tom. Mark Twain had originally written this novel as a play, and that is exactly how I worked with my students to read it and act out the parts. They were enthusiastic because I was, and they could see the humor and timeless values Twain portrayed so well. To remain enthusiastic we can’t be content to rest on our laurels with lessons we have done so many times we can practically sleep walk through them. Students all know if a teacher is only half there and it greatly compromises their willingness to invest themselves and their time if they suspect this to be the case in their class. As I write this I am greatly looking forward to an upcoming TESOL conference. It is on a Saturday, so I will lose a day of my precious weekend, but I know I will gain new ideas and insights that I will use for years to come. I’ve been attending conferences for the past twenty years and always come away with something new I can perhaps change a little, or use part of, or in many cases take into my classroom exactly as presented. This has impacted my teaching in that I am always changing and trying to improve. I remain curious as to why some lessons are so successful and some less so. I am always open to something that might help my students understand a concept that has been elusive and frustrating. I love to hear how other teachers have tackled a problem that I haven’t been able to solve. So bring on the teachers, this student is ready to learn!

All About Me

2011-10-11T18:59:00.001-07:00

The Wednesday Afternoon Post

One of my favorite activities to engage students in lively conversations with each other is very easy and calls for almost no preparation. Students are placed in groups of four and asked to each take out one clean sheet of paper and a pencil. They now fold their paper twice so they have four equal divisions of space or boxes to work with. For ease in explanation, I also have them number each square. Top left number one, top right number two, bottom left three and bottom right four. I explain that they will be given some easy (and fun) instructions on what to put into each box. They don’t have to worry about spelling because they are not permitted to write anything. All the instructions they will be given will be for them to draw. It can be a concrete image, a symbol, or an idea. I always find it necessary to stress that this isn’t about evaluating art, but is very much about communication. If you want to draw a person, we won’t expect some competition for the Mona Lisa. A stick figure or a lollypop outline is all we will need for the activity. In the upper left corner they are instructed to depict the people in their family. Stick figures, round balls, squiggles are all just fine as long as they mean something to the artist. Do allow a few minutes for this as some students are genuinely perplexed at being asked to draw and need time to get in the right mood. Next in the upper right block students should draw a hobby or sport they especially enjoy. They might draw a tennis racket, a horse, or a book. Whatever they depict should be something they truly like to do in their spare time. The lower left block is for something students have done that they are really proud of. I usually have to explain pride. I ask them to think of something that they have accomplished that makes them happy and warm inside like an excellent play in a ballgame or passing a very difficult course. It might be sitting with a sick relative or giving something up that you really wanted. Now in the lower right block students can put down symbols for their hopes and dreams. Do they want to get married and have children? Do they dream of a new car, an advanced degree? Have them put their dreams symbolically into the last box. If there is time I now direct them to the middle of the paper and have them draw a picture of the one place in the world they would like to visit. Now that they each have a finished sketch of things that are meaningful to them they should exchange papers with the person next to them. They now tell their partner the story of his life from the pictures. There will be many interruptions and corrections which is the purpose of this exercise. By giving students things to talk about that are very personal and in which they are highly invested, they become very motivated and open to share them with others. While these topics are of a personal nature, they are not intrusive and the student is always in the position to choose how much he or she wishes to share. When the noise level indicates that most of the productive interaction has taken place, I ask for a few students to share some interesting insights they learned about their neighbors. This activity promotes conversation, builds community and strengthens student willingness to take risks. If you wish to have a copy of this activity on a step by step power point, please email me.

Hearing Steve Jobs in His Own Words

2011-10-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

In his commencement address at Stanford six years ago, Steve Jobs recalled three stories in his life. In case you missed hearing these very interesting stories, here is a link to a webpage carrying the video (at the bottom of the page) and the last part of Jobs' speech.

Great Icebreakers

2011-10-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

The September issue of a Pearson Longman newsletter carries three great icebreakers by Sarah Lynn. These ideas can also be used for any topic that lends itself for the group interaction formats, not just for the first day of school. Check them out here: http://www.pearsonlongman.com/ae/emac/newsletters/september-2011-adulted.html.

Put a Word on Your Keychain

2011-10-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt the most important thing an L2 can do to build on his language skills is to enlarge his vocabulary. One neat way of keeping track of new words and watching progress, is to keep index cards. Many years ago I started assigning my younger students the task of keeping each new vocabulary word on a separate card. The new word would be printed on the front of the card. The back of the card would be divided into four parts. In the upper left students would write a pronunciation key with accent marks and any notes they might want to make. In the upper right I asked them to make a simple sketch of what the word meant or symbolized to them. In the lower left would be two synonyms and two antonyms. Finally in the lower right would be a sentence in which the meaning of the target word could easily be understood from context. Holes were punched in the upper left hand side of the cards and then kept on a key chain or metal circle clamp. As we studied new words, they would be added to the stack and students would become very proud of their visible progress. Interestingly when I mentioned this to one of my evening ESL classes, the students eagerly said that they too wanted to keep track of their words on cards. We now use these as flashcards for test review and for a few simple games. One quick and easy game we play is one minute password and it is similar to the standard password game played on TV and in many American homes. Students sit in groups of four. They may each choose five cards from their own collection, but must not tell their group mates which cards they have chosen. There should be about 20 cards in the playing stack. All the cards are shuffled and put into a pile face down in front of the student who will begin. The teacher then signals all groups to start. The “it” person in each group now takes the top card and turns it over, carefully not allowing others in the group to see. It is a good idea to have a blank card to put behind the cards as they are drawn, as students have been instructed to put much writing on the back. The person holding the card must now try to get his teammates to say the word on the card. He may not say the word himself, nor any part of it. He must think of clues in the way of synonyms, antonyms, sentences in context etc. (Much body language seems to also take place.) If his teammates do guess correctly, the card is placed face up on the table and equals one point for the group. If his teammates cannot guess after a reasonable length of time, the card goes back to the bottom of the deck. The player giving clues has one minute to elicit responses. He may give clues to as many cards as he can in one minute. When the teacher calls time, the student on the left of the last one who was it, now has one minute to get fellow students to guess the next vocabulary word. Play should go on at least until all players have had a turn. The winning team will have accrued the most points. I have found this to be a high energy fast paced way to raise the overall level of student involvement. Another plus is that the students love it. So get your students to put some vocabulary on their keychains!

Students Invisible and Not

2011-09-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

On one end of the spectrum there may be one or two students in a class who to the teacher's delight have an energy and charisma that sweeps the class along in its wake. These students add to the positive chemistry of the learning environment and encourage the shyer student to risk taking a more active role. When these students are absent, a tangible change takes place in the class almost as if someone had punctured a balloon. But when they are present they invite light hearted joking, competition for answering questions, and provide added help for a struggling classmate. The other side of the coin, of course, is that this chatty student may monopolize all the Q and A time, or rush in with answers before his fellows have a chance to formulate the right word order for the answer they may readily know. A remedy that can be useful is the "five elephant" rule. I use this for many situations from discipline to ensuring I allow enough wait time for students to think of an answer. It's quite simple. If you silently think, "one elephant, two elephants, three elephants, four elephants, five elephants," you have effectively waited for five seconds. By teaching an overly exuberant student to count five or seven or ten elephants, you give other students a more level playing field. They also feel less in competition with the stronger student. This should be explained to the elephant student so they also feel appreciated and needed. It is wise to remember that the school experiences we offer this population might be their first beyond a few years of elementary school. The opportunities for them to be recognized and receive kudos may only exist within the four walls of our ESL classrooms.
The opposite side of the spectrum is the painfully shy student who looks as though he or she is getting ready to bolt at any given second. They may shrink into the woodwork if they think they might be called upon. The teacher can be very comforting and nurturing, but if the student walks in the door with a lot of excess baggage, our greatest allies are going to be kindness and time. I like to build an atmosphere of trust and some minor risk taking for the first few weeks of classes. I often tell my students that the best audience they will ever have in their lives is surrounding them at that very moment. When I ask questions, I use a failsafe method of stress relief I learned from a presenter some years ago. In the TV show, "Who wants to be a Millionaire," contestants are asked questions and given options if they don't know the answers. They may phone a friend, survey the audience, or have two of the possible answers removed. The first two work very well in a classroom. If a student can't answer, he can ask a classmate. If that isn't satisfactory, we can poll the rest of the class. It becomes a more of a game and the spotlight isn't focused brightly on an uncomfortable deer in the headlights student.
The most worrisome group I find in my classes are those I call the "invisible students." I can easily learn the names of the class clowns and the shrinking violets by the end of the first week. They stand out and have obvious needs. But what about the students who turn in the work, cooperate nicely in groups, then fade into the background out of sight and out of mind? It is very easy to allow them to continue on, passing quizzes, contributing to class, and not giving the teacher grief. But I wonder if they are receiving equal access to English learning. We tend to call on the people we are familiar with and the names we know. The invisible students are usually the last ones I commit to memory. A small solution has been to keep an index card printed with each students name. As I circulate around the room, I can call students equally as I go through the pack. I have learned from experience to shuffle the cards often as student anticipate the location of their name and pay attention accordinly. Another way of providing equal access to everyone is to hand out our trusty index cards (do invest in shares of this company) with the names of fruit or animals on matching pairs. As students enter, I hand out the cards and they must find their matching partner. Too often when students choose their own partners, they keep picking the same ones. By mixing the pot we equalize learning opportunities and afford a richer conversational experience for every student.

Teaching School Priority

2011-09-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

A director of EOPS at College of the Canyons recently shared on a listserv a smart way of teaching students how to prioritize their time. She provides a series of activities to be plugged into a predesigned monthly planner. The first task is for the students to place their class schedule on the calendar. Next, they add their work schedule. Then, they add watching TV, going out with friends, etc. When this is done, she asks, "How many hours for study?" Most students have none. That is when a lively conversation begins to discuss what it takes to succeed in school.

2011-09-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Wednesday Afternoon Post
Can We Talk?
Research (not to mention common sense) tells us that to become proficient in a second language we need to practice speaking it. Often times in our ESL classrooms the teacher does a command teaching performance of explanations, modeling, assigning, anecdotes, and the list goes on. Unfortunately our captive audiences are only with us for a precious few instructional minutes each class session. Many times I feel like the class time has flown by and wonder how it could already be time to leave. When this happens, it gives me pause to think about how much teacher talk versus student talk took place. Time flew because I was having a good time, but were my students benefiting from our minutes as much as they could have been.
In the past few years I have revised both my teaching philosophy and the manner of transmitting my lessons to students. When I taught lower grade students I enforced strict rules of silence when tests were given. Lest someone be guilty of the major felony of CHEATING, I patrolled the aisles for any signs of miscreants. Today in my level three ESL class, we often share tests. Partners sit together and collaborate on answers. The answers may be correct or not but this is not a major concern. The important outcome is that they have actively engaged in speaking English, negotiated problems, and actually worked up a sweat making themselves understood in an authentic situation. Answers will be checked and corrected later. I tried this out as something of a lark in our summer session, and it was so successful that I now give many tests in this manner. Another change I’ve made is how I offer dictation practice. The research is somewhat mixed on the efficacy of even doing dictation with ESL students. In prior years I would do a dictation and have students share answers with each other, then put them up on the board for everyone to see and help correct if needed. At a TESOL conference a few years ago, a presenter suggested students dictate to each other, sitting face to face with file folders open and separating their work. This has been very successful and popular with the students. They still put the finished product on the board, but they have also spent much more time talking about it.
When giving instruction, or explaining a fine point of grammar I used to ask for questions, or carefully monitor guided practice for concerns. It occurred to me many years ago that there are levels of understanding and filters which construct insurmountable barriers between students and teachers. I was taking an advanced statistics class once and try as I might the figures wouldn’t line up, and the teacher’s explanations didn’t make sense no matter how many times he patiently explained. Luckily I had two good friends in the class who were also suffering. We decided that we could go on asking him the same questions and he would obligingly give us the same unintelligible answers. We tackled the problem together by meeting before class, each explaining the piece we understood. Voila! Oddly enough we each had enough of the whole to make sense and lead us to, if not complete mastery, at least a passing mark in the class. With this thought in mind, I began having students teach each other lessons I have just explained. I listen carefully for errors. I invite them to give examples on the board, and class discussions sometimes become very lively. Where in the past I was the sole dispenser of knowledge, students now are invited to share in information gathering and disseminating. They are taking responsibility for their own learning, and on a metacognitive level they can see what they need in ways I am not privy to.
I am always looking for ways to involve students more in the conversation through games, activities, discussions and learning situations. In answer to Joan River’s signature comedy routine, “Can we talk?” My students would respond with a resounding, “Yes we can!”

The Lowly Index Card

2011-09-14T00:48:00.000-07:00

On the first day of a new semester I used to attach tape to each desk with an identifying letter and number, a-1, a-2, b-1, b-2 and so on. I didn’t scatter these randomly, but put them in a logical order to be located quickly. I waited at the door as students arrived and handed each one an index card with a seat number printed in the upper right hand corner. I greeted each student by saying, “Welcome to the first day of school, here is your reserved seat. Match this number with the desk bearing the same number.” Students were kept busy finding their “reserved” seats while I greeted their classmates at the door. This solved a couple of beginning term conundrums. The student didn’t have to worry about seeking a place to sit, and the teacher needn’t worry about troublesome couples upsetting the first day of class. I always shuffled the cards before handing them out so that people entering together would not be seated together. An added bonus is that I could arrange student placement exactly as I wanted without having a few shy students plastered against the back wall.
Once students were all seated, I had them fill out the information that would be useful to me in our class. This has changed over the years, but basically I asked for first and last names on the second line left side, their birthdate on the right side, and a nickname or “American” name at the top in the center. It has always been a helpful conversation starter to also have them skip a line and write down their interests and hobbies.
First day roll is very easy at this point. I could call out a seat number and have the student in that seat say their name. If it were difficult, I would repeat it until the student was satisfied I could say it correctly. Then I would make phonetic notes in my roll book so I never caused mispronouncing embarrassment or unwittingly saddled them with a silly new nickname their classmates would be certain to take note of.
Before the end of class I would collect all the cards and now had a readymade seating chart.
As the year progressed I used the cards to call on students equitably, as well as keep notes on speeches, homework, and contacts. To my surprise, my students were especially delighted when I called them by birthdate or personal interests instead of by name. It became a guessing game and added a lighthearted touch to our lessons. Incidentally I originally got the idea for index cards from a lecture by Harry Wong when I was a brand new teacher, circa 1987. His book, “The First Days of School” is a must for new teachers as well as old timers.
There is much more to be said and celebrated about the lowly index cards, but I will keep this entry dedicated to the first day. With ESL students my trusty cards are still a mainstay of my first day and become quite dog-eared by semester’s end. I now use a separate card with all students’ names to keep roll. I appreciate not lugging my roll book wherever I might be in a classroom. All the information I need is compact, portable and easily accessible. You might say, it’s all written in the cards.
C.Clarke Ed.D.

Focus on Homework

2011-09-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

Several years ago one of my seventh grade boys waited after class and mournfully stated, “Mrs. Clarke, I can’t do all of your homework. It’s too much, I work hours and hours and it never gets finished.” I was somewhat taken aback, as I thought I was only assigning 30 or 40 minutes a night. After I had ascertained that he had a set time and place to do his assignments, I then gave him this instruction. “When you go home today, I want you to borrow your mom’s kitchen timer. As soon as you are ready to begin tonight’s homework, set the timer for 35 minutes. Set to work immediately and when it rings, you are done. Close your books. Now talk to friends on the phone, play video games, listen to music, or better still go outside and play. We will talk again tomorrow and see what adjustments need to be made to the homework.”
The next day I was most interested in seeing how my little experiment had turned out. My student came up to greet me at the beginning of the period and I enquired how much work he was able to complete in his 35 minutes. “All of it!” He fairly bubbled. “I finished it all before the timer even went off.”
There was no magic at work here. My little fellow had just never mastered the concept of time management. Many children are sent to their rooms to do homework in isolation. The implicit message being that they work until completion. It is rare parent who imposes a time limit on when they will no longer be banished. It is hardly a wonder that they seek solace in kid friendly amusements. Note, I did not put any stipulations on my student’s homework time distractors. The caveat that he well understood though, was that things such as phones, video games etc. would all be available after the timer rang—thus unavailable while it was in progress. Since his study time was cleared of the usual clutter of outside influences, his focus was on my English assignment and the slight pressure of the ticking of mom’s kitchen timer.
While this was successful with a middle school student, I think it can have larger implications for our adult student populations as well. Teachers often pleadingly exhort students to practice English outside of class. Research (and common sense) tells us that this sort of homework gives extraordinary growth in language learning. The majority of students want to practice, but lack of opportunity, shyness, time constraints, all conspire to let it fall, all too often, by the wayside. My conjecture is that if we gave them a “kitchen timer” type crutch rather than the open ended admonition to go out and practice, we would see improved results. While listening to the radio or TV students could translate or answer in English for a set length of time, perhaps 15 minutes to start. While driving home, sing along with a favorite song, but sing the lyrics in English. For reluctant readers, we might suggest they choose a book written in English and open it randomly and read a paragraph aloud, only one.
The key is that students see an end and not just a lengthy study session out of their comfort zone and out of their control. Most of us will tackle a disagreeable job with better attitude if the end is in sight. If we can show our students the end, they will have a much less difficult time beginning.

An Effective and Adaptable Way to Teach Synonyms

2011-09-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

I've just received an emailed newsletter from a publisher that often contains nuggets of pedagogical wisdom. My latest favorite is using a card game to teach the difference between "look," "see," and "watch." It looks like something to engage our students not only in learning the synonyms but also in practicing speaking and teamwork. I believe the method can be adapted for practicing other word families. I am excited to share this activity with you. Just click here.

You Make the Choice

2011-08-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

This image reminds us of Robert Frost's famous poem. We make choices all the time, maybe not in the woods, but at the traffic lights every day for sure. Should I slow down and wait, or should I speed up and charge through? In life and in school, our students and ourselves--there is no difference in making choices per se. The difference, though, is in the kinds of choices we make and the extent to which we take self-responsibility as a consequence.

Skip Downing, the creator of the On Course approach to student success, advocates a more direct method to make our students become aware of the choices successful students make versus those struggling students make. If we as educators teach not just what is in the syllabus but what fundamentally counts in the future (enduring attitudes, likes and dislikes, etc.), such collateral learning will lead to more wise choices on the part of our students. We can then hope to make a real difference, not the least of which is the retention of our students, because they have now become active and responsible learners.

Here is a handout that you can adapt to explicitly teach about making choices for success in school.

You've Gotta Risk It

2011-08-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

On the eve of our new fall semester, I'm considering an analogous approach espoused by Clark Little. You see, Clark lives by his passion for waves and sees a niche. A surfer turned an underwater photographer of stunning waves. He seems to be one of the few daring enough to dive under crushing waves in order to capture amazing shots of a powerful shorebreak. The result? His rich and unique gallery of art was born.

As classroom teachers of our chosen career, turning out successful ESL students is our passion. The niche? Maybe a promising practice that few others have tried, like the flipped classroom where students do homework in class and read lectures at home. If we are brave enough to break away from our ineffective ways of teaching and make real learning happen that is student-centered, fun, and transformative, perhaps more than 80% of our students will feel engaged and empowered enough to keep coming to school and stick around until the end of the semester? Just a thought.

Classroom Presentations from "I Love a Clean San Diego"

2011-08-11T20:41:00.000-07:00

As you prepare for your fall lessons, you might want to consider incorporating a classroom presentation from a local green organization. "As one of San Diego County's oldest and largest environmental education agencies, ILACSD works to promote region-wide awareness of environmental issues including resource conservation, waste reduction and recycling, community enhancement and pollution prevention." That is according to Samantha Quinsey, an education coordinator of I Love a Clean San Diego (ILACSD). This year, ILACSD has expanded its number of free ESL classroom presentations and is able to accommodate more schools, not just the rural ones. If you are interested, please open this flyer for more details and for the contact info as well.

Teaching Real Writing

2011-08-04T23:35:00.000-07:00

Martha C. Pennington of Georgia Southern U. has teamed up with a colleague in Hong Kong and come out with a timely anthology for writing teachers. The authors of The College Writing Toolkit ask what teachers can do to really engage today's college students in writing classes, many of whom are ESL. The contributors, by sharing and explaining their learning activities, seek to turn the table on literature-based approach to teaching writing and give us knowledge about the best practices in the field today when our students are tech-savvy and speak English as a second language. Here is a review of the book and an interview with the authors that came out a couple days ago.

A Babyboomer's Tribute to His Father's Generation

2011-07-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

I was quite moved by the eloquent eulogy Kevin delivered two weeks ago for his recently deceased father. The 5-minute eulogy was as much a tribute to "the Greatest Generation" Kevin's father belonged to as to his father. I thought you would be interested in hearing it. Thanks, Kevin, for giving me the permission to share.

Here's the link to the MP3 file: http://daphne.palomar.edu/lchen/Eulogy.mp3

Mark's Way of Teaching Vocabulary

2011-07-21T12:39:00.000-07:00

Last month, I shared here some of writing teacher Mark's work as part of my CATESOL final report. Now, I'm excited to introduce you to this 24-page compilation that Mark has once again given me permission to share. Not only do I see a great variety of vocabulary learning activities, but I also learn much from the competent and methodical manner in which Mark created these exercises. Thanks, Mark!

NBC Learn Within Blackboard

2011-07-14T17:02:00.000-07:00

If you are using Blackboard for your class, you should try a new feature called "NBC Learn." It allows you to quickly search for and deploy video content that enriches your teaching. A couple of weeks ago, I was able to find a 2008 NBC animated clip about the word stem for "phobia" as my class was engaged in a "phobia" project.

Palomar has this feature only on a trial basis through Oct., though. So you might want to hurry if you want to add media-rich content to your BB site.

This video shows you how easy it is to find and deploy NBC Learn archive video clips. Academic Technology is soliciting users' feedback on this unique feature at onlineclasses@palomar.edu.

English Skills: A Condition of Prosperity Worldwide?

2011-07-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

A recent statistical research commissioned by the British Council claims that English is the key to an individual's prosperity in developing countries. Read the full news story here.

A Story from the Other Population

2011-06-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

In today's America, two populations coexist: the legal citizenry and the illegal immigrants. The latter group easily conjures up an image of day laborers who are here to do the dirty, dangerous, and difficult work that few others would like to do. But this is not the whole picture as many "illegals" are our Generation 1.5 students, and some could even be our professional colleagues. They want to pledge allegiance to the only country they know and love and contribute to, but a country that still rejects them categorically. What follows is the link to a really poignant and moving self-portrayal by a former Washington Post reporter, Jose Antonio Vargas, who will undoubtedly spend another bittersweet 4th of July this weekend, pondering his identity.

"My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant" (URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my-life-as-an-undocumented-immigrant.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1)

Everybody Blogs!

2011-06-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

Now you can blog, easily. Palomar has just made it possible for everyone (read: faculty and staff) to have their own free blog site with a Palomar address. Just go to "Palomar College WordPress Central" at http://www2.palomar.edu/pages/, scroll down a bit to find "Log in" under "Meta" on the right side, sign in with your Palomar login credential, and blog away. The good folks at AT say that even though it is super easy to start your own blog site, they are willing to help. They also provide an example.

One Who Makes the Palomar PACT

2011-06-16T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Palomar Academy for Collaborative Teaching (PACT) under the auspices of BSI/HSI held its first ever year-end presentations in early May. Much of the content was nicely summarized and disseminated in Sheri Ortega's Student Peer Mentor Newsletter that she sent campus-wide on May 23. In this post, I'd just like to add what history prof. George Gastil did for his PACT piece: teaching students self-assessment to achieve goals. Since the first of George's three-stage self assessment process takes place at the beginning of a term, a review of George's way is timely as we get ready to begin summer school next week.

George's purpose is twofold: to help students see their strengths and consider how they can become more effective students, and to help them recognize their own progress instead of relying on recognition from the instructor all the time.

Self-Assessment I
Students first write a brief learner profile of themselves, which includes helpful information such as years in school and interests. They also include a picture of themselves that they don't mind other people seeing.
They then write three goals for how they are going to grow and develop during the class, which usually involve skills such as writing and expressing ideas. Examples of goals that are useful and goals that are not are provided to the students.

Useful ones:

"Start each assignment at least a week before it is due."
Learn to write with short paragraphs and complete sentences."
Learn to explain to a classmate.

Not so useful ones (because they don't tell how to get there):

"Get an A."
"Don't procrastinate."

Finally, students indicate how they will measure progress on each goal. They are told that most goals work best if their progress can be measured on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Self-Assessment II
About half way through the course, students assess their experience with the goals by writing a one-pager and answering these four questions:

How have you been doing with respect to your goals?
Have you found that any of your goals need revising or changing?
In what ways have you found the goals helpful so far?
What are you going to do about your goals for the rest of the term?

Self-Assessment III
For the final self-assessment, students answer these four questions:

How have you done on goals?
How has the goal-setting process worked out for you this term?
Are there other ways you have grown and developed this term?
What goals do you expect to have for future classes?

George is keen to provide feedback. For example, he makes suggestions while reading his students' first self-assessments, telling them how their goals could be more clearly focused.

At the end of the semester, most of George's students report that they have made significant progress on the goals. One of the students comments, "this is the first time anyone has asked me to think about my own goals in a course."

George also sees a side benefit of doing this activity on Blackboard: it serves as an easy way for his students to start using Blackboard if they have not used it before.

CATESOL Roundup, Part 9

2011-06-09T13:22:00.000-07:00

Adding a Few of Our Own

Several colleagues from our dept. presented at the conference. Kevin shared his signature research on a framework of a general language proficiency scale and how it links with modern-day SLOs.He blogged about his conference experience as well as his presentation here right afterwards.

Larry teamed up with Oxford University Press and promoted a promising set of new academic textbooks. He and his wife, Karen, also demonstrated their innovative Language & Lunch program that extends language passion beyond the classroom and allows students to practice speaking with a native speaker of the language they are learning.

Angela once again showed how even beginning students can build confidence in technology and increase their English skills at the same time by creating basic PowerPoint presentations. She has also summarized her conference experience here earlier.

Writing teacher Mark addressed the need for a large college-level vocabulary and the ways to teach it. He has given me permission to post his materials here: his PowerPoint slide show, his handout with brief examples of vocabulary activities, and his bibliography list.

(The end.)

CATESOL Roundup, Part 8

2011-06-02T00:41:00.000-07:00

Using Corpora for Language Instruction

CATESOL's Sunday workshops have been my favorite. Every time I attend a state conference, I make sure I don't miss its value-added Sunday fare. So, as usual, I stayed for one of the three-hour sessions this year.

It was not the first time I heard Dr. Randi Reppen talk corpus linguistics, but over the course of a few years, reception of corpus-based analyses had seemed to grow quite a bit. The big three - Oxford, Cambridge, and Longman - have all published corpus-based dictionaries along with teacher-manual-type resources. Real Grammar, a completely corpus-based high-level grammar textbook, has been on the market. The University of Michigan Press and Cambridge have even come out with low-level textbooks that are corpus-based (e.g. Cambridge's Interchange series).

Dr. Reppen opened her presentation by defining a corpus as a large, principled collection of natural texts analyzed both qualitatively and qualitatively using both automatic and interactive computer techniques. In her talk, she listed four ways to use corpora in the classroom:

inform the syllabus to serve our students' needs
develop materials and activities
create specialized corpora
use online resources

In terms of making our decision as to what to choose to teach and present, Dr. Reppen shared these findings from the corpus-based text analysis field:

the 12 most common lexical verbs (as opposed to auxiliary verbs) don't get much use in the register of academic writing
simple aspects are more common than perfect aspects (Ever notice the popularity of the historical present tense?)
most common words that are not function words (i.e. articles and prepositions) in business classroom teaching are mostly the same heavy-duty verbs as the 12 most common lexical verbs, but the most common words in business textbooks are more noun-heavy (e.g "win" used as a noun)
suffixes are more productive than prefixes, and the six most productive suffixes are -tion, -ity, -er, -ness, -ism, and -ment
to demand something, Americans use "you must" in written discourse, but "you should" and "I'd like you to..." in spoken discourse
progressive tenses are for actions actively controlled by the subject while simple tenses emphasize a situation experienced by the subject
"everybody" is more common in conversation than "everyone," especially as an object pronoun

In terms of creating corpus-based activities and materials for students to do and study, Dr. Reppen mentioned the following:

give students a page from an authentic article to identify the most productive suffixes and create a matching exercise for them to do
create a word frequency list from readings (and skip the function words)
model language use and role-play actual dialogues at service counters (e.g. opening: "Hi." "Hi." closing: "Thank you." "Thanks.")
teach the function of fillers (e.g. "uh" and "umm" uttered before a decision-making point or used to hold the floor)
create a KWIC (key word in context) activity (e.g. gap "must" to show that it has a strong collocate with "be")
gap articles

In terms of creating specialized corpora, Dr. Reppen suggested class readings, student papers, and college textbooks as sources. As an interesting side note, Dr. Reppen pointed out that content words (e.g. "matrimony") are often highlighted in college textbooks while polysemous academic words (e.g. "comprise") are hardly ever visible.

To find out how error treatment progresses over a few years across elementary grades, Dr. Reppend once collected and created a writing corpus by hand-coding for three types of errors:

noun morphology (Me and Rebbecca are friend.)
verb morphology (Last night I stay up late.)
S/V agreement

Since the textbooks were not designed to address the errors influenced by the students' first language or dialect, Daily Oral Language was used to tackle the issues.

When a learners' corpus of errors reveals preposition issues such as confusion over "result in" vs. "result of," you can gap out the word after "result" and create a worksheet for the students to fill out.

Corpus-driven activities are hands-on opportunities for our students to play with the language; they are the language equivalent of a science lab session. In my opinion, they can result in real learning because the students are required to use inductive reasoning while drawn to authentic text. They need to notice the context, analyze the discourse, and generate new knowledge. Dr. Reppen cited a couple examples that can lead students to a more enduring understanding of the language point at hand.

Passive Voice

Collect four examples of passive sentences and four examples of active sentences, with each passive/active pair sharing the same verb.
Prepare a checklist of the characteristics of these kinds of sentences.
Have students examine the example sentences and check off only the characteristics of the passive

Collocations
Have students do a KWIC search to find out the most frequent left collocate (adjective) of the noun "range." (They will find "wide" and "broad" are most common and thus most idiomatic.)

Semantic Prosody (i.e. flavor of the word)

Have students use a special corpus of economics textbooks and do a KWIC search for the verb "cause."
Ask them to analyze several of the concordance lines by paying special attention to the nouns that comes after the verb. (They will see a pattern in the way the verb "cause" is used in the economics corpus: often used to convey a negative connotation.)

In creating corpus-based practice and testing activities, Dr. Reppen recommended the guidelines that we first go by register - asking ourselves what it is we are teaching (conversation, research, writing blogs, etc.) and that we drill down on synonyms so that our students may not sound very different.

In terms of available online resources, Dr. Reppen

How do I want to use this site? (For me, or for my students?)
Does the site match my goals?
Does it say what it says it will do?
Is the site stable? Does it crash often?
Are the instructions clear and easy to follow?
Does it charge a user fee? If so, is it worth it?

The three best free online corpora in Dr. Reppen's opinion are:

COCA, which is part of corpus.byu.edu (a word of caution: the "spoken" register there does not mean natural, everyday conversation. Rather, it refers to TV scripts and the like.)
Time Corpus, which is also part of corpus.byu.edu (Dr. Reppen once had her students click on "chart," type "hippie," and analyze the result chart.)
Michigan Corpus Linguistics, which links to MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) and the new MICUSP (Michigan Corpus of Upper Level Student Papers that got good grades). With the former, you can listen with or without transcripts. There are also lesson plans, too.

Dr. Reppen's checklist for developing activities using online corpora:

Know what you want to teach!
Select the best corpus resource for your lesson.
Explore the corpus completely for the point you want to teach.
Prepare directions that are complete and easy to follow.
Always have a backup plan.

A few more examples of online corpus activities:

Expressing Opinions

list the language frames such as "I believe"
have students use the chart function of COCA to see which context (register) is "I believe" used under (answer: "spoken")

Multi-Word Verbs vs Single-Word Verbs

have students use COCA to find out the register difference between "look into" and "investigate," for example (answer: multi-word verbs are not as academic)
have students rewrite the sentences in their academic paper changing multi-word verbs to single-word verbs

Formal vs. Informal

spend half an hour training students on how to use a relevant online corpus
have students produce an activity on using formal language vs. informal

There are many things learners interacting with corpora can do, according to Dr. Reppen:

learn vocabulary, which forms the bricks of a language
practice
explore extended collocations
compare against model texts
discover patterns of use

In terms of concordancing tools and additional reading, Dr. Reppen highly recommends the following:

MonoConc - an easy-to-use and inexpensive concordancing package
University Language: A Corpus-Based Study of Spoken and Written Registers, a comprehensive book written by her corpus linguist husband Douglas Biber
"A New Academic Word List," published by Averil Coxhead in TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 34, Issue 2

Dr. Reppen termed the last item as a must-read, but she also cautioned that the AWL should be used as a kind of launching pad and can certainly be expanded. She said that Coxhead's list only covers words that appear in a set number of disciplines, so we shouldn't think that a word missing from the AWL is not an academic word to teach.

(To be continued.)

CATESOL Roundup, Part 7

2011-05-24T13:13:00.000-07:00

Providing Corrective Feedback

My former colleagues from my Long Beach days Barbara Jonckheere, Karen Fox,and Rosemary Hiruma gave a well-attended presentation to address such common issues all writing teachers are faced with: to correct or not to correct, and how best to do error correction.

To determine what kind of corrective feedback students find most useful for improving their writing, Barbara, Karen, and Rosemary designed a 19-question survey for 542 credit students in two university-affiliated IEPs to fill out. The students ranged from intermediate to advanced levels.

Key findings from the research project indicate that peer editing is not popular, as most students picked "least preferred" for Question 9, which asked "Do you want another student to help you fix your writing before you give it to the teacher?" With resistance to peer editing came a nod to the workshop format where the students wanted the teacher to correct a student's writing (with no name on it) with the whole class and to show them good models of real student writing (also anonymously). The results also show that students wanted the teacher to highlight mistakes so they could fix them themselves.

Informed by these findings, Karen's solutions take the form of something called "Karen's Complaints." She would jokingly complain about student mistakes, hand her students papers with anonymous incorrect sentences from their papers, and have them correct the errors on the board. She would also have her students circle target language structure such as noun clauses in the reading selections before they write to apply the structure. She also encourages her students to use tutors, even though some complain about tutors not helping if they only coach.

Other suggestions offered by Karen and her co-presenters include:

stop using codes and start using different color highlighters
use limited marginal comments
list some errors at the bottom of a student paper
provide class time to review the errors
give students time to correct the errors
use a rubric: provide it before writing and staple it behind corrected writing
have students self-grade according to the rubric using a pencil
have students keep an editing log or portfolio for tracking their errors and review it once every three weeks or with each assignment

I totally agree with the presenters that we don't want to raise a generation of frightened writers by raising their affective filter. To that end, their suggested practices are certainly worth a try.

(To be continued.)

CATESOL Roundup, Part 6

2011-05-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

Students Taking Charge

Suzanne Woodward of MiraCosta College has devised creative projects that incorporate all skills areas to reinforce classroom teaching. The multiple-week projects allow her students to demonstrate that they have got a handle on what she has taught them. Here are some sample projects she shared at the conference.

Individual Book Reports

From a lending library cart, each of her students chooses and signs out their own reader based on what interests them. They are told not to pick a book that is too hard for them. That way, they can have a sense of success more easily. In class, they are given some time for silent reading of their books. At the end of their eight-week session, they are to prepare ONE poster or ONE PowerPoint slide with at least one picture and a succinct book report with only a few key words. Although they are given a report format to follow when they write down the main ideas of their read books in the report prep phase, students decide what to summarize and include in their presentations. Then, they practice giving their oral report in groups before giving it to the whole class. They are not allowed to just read from their poster or PowerPoint slide. Each presentation is limited to 2 to 5 minutes. A student is used as the time keeper.

Group Pronunciation Project

This is designed to tailor students' backgrounds and needs and to reflect what they do in class:

syllables
minimal pairs (e.g. look-rook; lip-rip; light-right)
tongue twisters
poems (especially the Shel Silverstein kind)
similar/difficult words

Each group is given a different minimal pair to create a PowerPoint show with slides for:

the minimal pair
a tongue twister involving the difficult sounds in question
a poem involving the sounds under study
a practice activity to differentiate the "odd men out" (e.g. rat-rip-lip)

The groups then present their PowerPoint shows to a lower-level class.

Phobia PowerPoints

After watching a video clip showing compulsive behavior and gaining some insight into the concept of phobia, students discuss places and/or activities a person with a certain phobia would need to avoid. They also come up with a hierarchy of treatment for the phobia. Individual students then create a PowerPoint presentation for different phobias, with each presentation consisting of the slides for

the phobia described (e.g. small place phobia)
official name (they search on the Internet for this)
a plan of treatment (i.e. a list of steps to take, from easiest to hardest)
the first step(s) detailed

The Spring 2011 issue of CATESOL News has a pullout section that details this project of Suzanne's. You can click here and scroll down to page 11 for that "center fold."

Passive Food Project

Suzanne admits that this particular project is aimed at having students practice passive voice sentences, so it is somewhat contrived. She gives each student the name of a food that is typically eaten in the US along with these four questions:

What meal is it eaten or drunk at? (What time of day is it eaten or drunk?)
How is it eaten or drunk?
How is it prepared?
Are there any holidays or traditions associated with it?

She cautions the students not to use both "eaten" and "drunk" in their presentation. She gives hard food names (e.g. s'mores) to high-ability or more talkative students and asks all to interview any American in order to obtain the answers. The culmination of this multi-week project is that the students each prepare a PowerPoint slide and give a 30-second presentation.

Random Acts of Kindness

These can be something the students did, something nice that happened to them, something they could do, or others' stories. Students write and share on a "wall of kindness."

Unreal Animal King

This project doesn't sound like it would take weeks. Students are asked to find 5 facts of an animal of their choice by searching on the Internet. They then practice unreal conditional sentences using this pattern: If (my animal) were in charge of the world, then _____________.

All of Suzanne's project ideas have the students take charge of their learning. And that is what I like best about them.

(To be continued.)

CATESOL Roundup, Part 5

2011-05-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

Creating Paired Readings

Jayme Adelson-Goldstein of Lighthearted Learning, who has also co-authored of the famed Oxford Picture Dictionary, and Lori Howard of UC Berkeley advocate using a special kind of jigsaw reading to develop and expand students' reading strategies as well as to get the point across that reading is all about interacting with the author.

Here are the steps:

Choose two full reading selections that express opposite opinions ("Broccoli: What's Not to Love?" and "Broccoli Haters in the US") or are otherwise complementary to each other ("A History of Mother's Day" and "Different Ways Mother's Day Is Celebrated").
Copy the two articles in two different colors.
Front-load with some pre-reading and vocabulary work, which does not have to be done only by the teacher. In this phase, though, start with a couple low-level comprehension-type questions about the topic to be read.
Have students preview the articles and choose one to focus on. If the majority of the students choose one and not the other, you can strong-arm them by saying, "Would you read this other one?"
Have students read their article individually and silently without a dictionary, on different sides of the room, and within given time limits. Assign a couple focus questions as a task for the students to accomplish during this reading.
Pair up the students according to their articles: A-A, B-B, to check their understanding of the same article which they have just read.
Form groups of 4: A-A-B-B, to present their read information to each other.
Hold a whole-class post-reading discussion to deal with cross-cultural issues and critical literacy by using the information from the articles, prior knowledge, more analytical questions, and future-oriented questions to go beyond the articles and further process the read information.

The presenters suggest newspaper pro/con columns as one of the sources for paired reading lessons. They also suggest searching for Kate Kinsella's academic language framework (such as this) for ideas while designing paired reading activities and discussions. If you would like a copy of their handouts, you can email them at lightheartedlearning@gmail.com.

CATESOL Roundup, Part 4

2011-05-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

Using Pictures for Language Routines

Julaine Rosner of Mission College demonstrates how she uses pictures as part of her classroom routines such as games, dialogs, and mixers, all designed for beginning and low-intermediate students to build vocabulary and fluency or practice grammar. Pictures are fun, and with fun in learning, the students come back, according to Julaine. Pictures also bring the outside world into the classroom since we can't take field trips. Pictures assist learners to search their mind for a structure, remember it, and use it.

Sources of pictures include:

the famed Oxford Picture Dictionary and its "Classroom Presentation" tool
books that have photocopy reproducible ancillary materials including art (Julaine mentions that black and white line drawings are the best if you want your photocopies to be very clear.)
Top Notch Fundamentals (2006 edition)
your own or your students' social photos

Games with pictures include concentration games which require a minimum of 4 words and 4 corresponding pictures. Julaine pre-teaches the vocabulary for the pictures. She also teaches the dialogue that she wants her students to use while playing the game. She uses a cleverly designed PowerPoint slide to demonstrate to her students how to play the concentration game in pairs.

Another game with pictures is Go Fish with 16 pairs of 32 cards, half picture cards and half corresponding word cards. After learning the intended dialogue and the directions to play Go Fish, students play in groups of 3.

Still another game with pictures is Bingo. You just need to have enough of the same pictures to ideally make eight versions of the cards so that students will not all have identical Bingo cards. Julaine lets her students be the caller. She typically plays this game at the end of the week's class.

Dialogs practice with pictures can be done in pairs, especially for kinship terms, occupations, clothing, personality, physical descriptions, age, etc. With one of the social pictures students bring in, you can model a conversation like this:

A: Tell me about...
B: Well, he/she is a...

As a follow-up to the dialogue practice, students can write about a picture. A final step in this fluency practice activity can be a gallery walk with all the photos on display.

Another use of dialogue practice with pictures is to present and practice prepositions of location. Ideal pictures are those with furniture items in them. Students can draw pictures. They can be engaged in an information-gap activity that uses two pictures that are identical except for five or six details. Students discuss (without peeking at their partner's paper) to find the items missing from their picture. They draw the items. At the end, the original picture and the drawn picture should look the same.

Mixers with pictures are good for practicing making requests. First, you make decks, which are pairs of duplicate cards, in order for students to look for the same card. Then, you model a dialog such as this one:

A: Can you please...?
B: Yes, I'd be happy to.
or B: No, I'm studying right now. (Tell them "I'm busy" is not an acceptable excuse.)

Julaine provides these links to online sources of pictures:

http://www.eslactivities.com/picturebingo.php for picture bingo
http://www.eslflashcards.com/ for flashcards with pix
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/ for free clip art & photos

(To be continued.)

CATESOL Roundup, Part 3

2011-04-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

Learning Grammar While Learning about Real Life

The author of Grammar in Context, Sandy Elbaum, insists that successful students learn language holistically, that, to communicate, we need to communicate about something, and that other than grammar teachers, few people are interested in "naked" grammar. Her grammar teaching approach seems to be based on the principle that context promotes collateral learning. That is, students are interested in knowing about the world around them while they learn grammar in an authentic way. Teachers can thus embed grammar teaching in real-life settings and topics such as culture/customs, inspirational people/successful immigrants, personal stories/people's names, history, YouTube videos/Web pages, etc. For example, to teach and practice location prepositions and have some real fun, teachers can use the cute pictures found at http://cuteoverload.com/.

Sandy offers many more examples to personalize or customize context in grammar teaching.

To teach comparatives and superlatives, one can try comparing cities using http://www.bestplaces.net/, comparing cars using http://www.kbb.com/ and http://www.nada.com/, comparing fuel economy using http://www.fueleconomy.gov/, or comparing grocery prices on a local supermarket site.

To teach possessive forms and pronouns, one can try having students tell about their names.

To teach modals such as "must" and "can," one can try looking for tenants' rights in the local city or on a government website like this one: http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/discrimination.shtml.

To teach imperatives, one can try having students fill out a citizenship form.

The Occupational Outlook Handbook found at http://www.bls.gov/oco/ is not only a good resource to find careers that interest you, it is also a good resource for teaching future tense, etc.

To teach "used to," have everyone bring in old photos.

To teach telling time, use http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/.

Sandy is very enthusiastic and jokes about how addicted she is to her computer. She says for everyone to feel free to email her with any request. So if you want her email address, let me know.

(To be continued.)

CATESOL 2011

2011-04-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

Although CATESOL has come and gone another year, I must admit, this year's conference was one of the best I have ever attended. The memories are implanted in my mind as though the conference took place yesterday! I enjoyed the beautiful ambiance of the Hyatt Regency and all the spectacular views of Long Beach that surrounded the conference, networking with colleagues from southern, central and northern CA and seeing Katherine Garlow, Marty, Lee and Kevin there. All the workshops I chose to go to were informative, organized and well worth attending. As always, I came away with some new ideas that I look forward to implementing in my class.

It was also a pleasure to share my presentation entitled Teaching Basic PowerPoint Presentations to Low Level ESL Students. The objectives of the lessons are to have students in low level ESL classes increase their basic computer skills and their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills in English by learning how to put together basic Pp presentations. Needless to say, all who attended the session saw that not only could it be done, but it was also a great success! The highlight of my presentation was being able to showcase some of our own Beginning ESL students and their presentations. Four of them were from my 7:00 class and one of them was from Joanna's 4:30 class.

If you would like more information about what was shared at the session, feel free to contact me.

CATESOL Roundup, Part 2

2011-04-20T10:50:00.000-07:00

Using Students' Life Stories

Lynn Walker from Coastline Community College shared how she used her the low-intermediate students' life stories as the content for teaching. For example, to teach and practice past tense, a student first tells his or her story and she writes it on the board in the correct way. Then, she erases the verbs in order for the students to figure them out again. A list of the verbs mixed up can be provided for this activity. For more advanced students, the teacher can erase every other clause/sentence and have the students supply what is missing.

To teach and practice the infinitive used to express a purpose, Lynn devised a sentence-combining exercise for students to do either individually or in pairs. But the twist here is to use students' own stories about home improvement projects. For example, she elicits two sentences such as: I bought some wood and some shingles. I wanted to make a patio. She then leads students into producing the target sentence with the infinitive: I bought some wood and some shingles to make a patio.

Other topics to draw out students' "enchanted stories" include:

Describe something you find in your house
Describe a time you made something from scratch

Lynn models with a real story for her students, helps them with their language needs, and even provides them with the first sentence frames such as

I made ______(or My wife made ______)
A strange thing happened ______

She then collects the students' stories and puts them together on one sheet for groups of her students to read, discuss, and vote for the top three winners. Students are also asked to think of three oral comprehension questions for each of the winning stories, expand on the stories, and come up with an interesting title for each. More advanced, inference-type questions can also be asked.

(To be continued.)

Kevin at CATESOL 2011

2011-04-13T21:43:00.000-07:00

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.

CATESOL Roundup, Part 1

2011-04-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

As always, last weekend's annual CATESOL state conference in Long Beach brimmed with tips and insights shared by participants, many of whom see the landscape of ESL teaching changing rapidly, in good ways and not so good ways.

For example, in light of California's budget situation for public education, folks shared a "what's up at your college" discussion during the community college level rap on Sat. and reported the impact of budget cuts on their ESL programs. Some districts cut the entire summer school. Some cut the lowest levels of ESL. Cypress College cut their elective credit courses in order to preserve the core ones. College of the Desert turned their noncredit ESL classes to fee-based ones. Most colleges reported that their ESL program administrators were given different scenarios to cut 10%, 20%, 15%, etc. Ventura College had already stopped offering noncredit at all. Someone reported that their ESL and Basic Skills faculty began to fear how soon they would lose their jobs, a fear allegedly mongered by the administration and the academic senate in her college. In all, we all seemed to stand at the brink of some sort.

However, I liked when someone else asked for input as to what we could suggest to our students to continue with their language learning even when we were to lose our jobs. Kathy Llanos from Cypress College suggested making and sharing a list of language activities our students can do on their own.

(To be continued.)

Course Change Information

2011-04-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

As you know, there will be some program and course changes in our dept. effective this coming fall. For your information and reference, here is a PowerPoint presentation that was created by Tracy and edited by our dept. chair, Carol, who used this file at a faculty meeting a few weekends ago.

A Health Benefit from Bilingualism

2011-03-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

"Mastering a second language can pump up your brain in ways that seem to delay getting Alzheimer's disease later on, scientists said." To read this recent story in its entirety, click here.

Mentor Program Continues Its Classroom Success in Dept.

2011-03-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

As you know, the Peer Mentor Program that got started in Fallbrook has spread to the main campus in recent years with much success in the classrooms.

Additionally, Sheri Ortega, who coordinates this tremendous effort in Fallbrook, has taken upon herself the task of creating and sustaining a remarkable newsletter in order to keep the momentum going and get more colleagues involved. In case you have missed the latest newsletter that she sent campus-wide, here is the link to the latest issue, which, like all the previous ones, is both informative and inspiring.

Kudos to Sheri Ortega and all others who are part of this grassroots movement for a job well done, not because you are responding to some administrative mandate, but because you passionately care about everyone who ever enters our classrooms.

Language & Lunch featured in Telescope

2011-03-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

Language & Lunch, a two-directional conversation partner program co-coordinated by Karen Hamilton (me) and Lawrence Lawson, is in its 4th semester. This month our program was featured in the student newspaper, the Telescope. Please click the link below for the e-version, or pick up a copy around campus!

Telescope article about Language & Lunch

Our program has really hit its stride this semester. We have made small improvements each semester and they have paid off. In the past, we had more ESL students than World Languages learners, which made our partnerships uneven. This semester, with the help of improved advertising and better exposure in the World Languages department, we have found more partners for our ESL students.

Larry and I presented on Language & Lunch at the San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference and are presenting at the upcoming state CATESOL in Long Beach. Hope to see you there!

To contact us about Language & Lunch, email: languageandlunch@gmail.com.

UURISE Will Provide Counseling for Immigrants

2011-03-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

UURISE, or Unitarian Universalist Refugee and Immigrant Services and Education, Inc., is a non-profit organization that "provides affordable, trustworthy legal immigration counseling, representation and resettlement services to marginalized immigrants and refugees, and presents educational advocacy to the larger community," according to a program manager with the organization.

This Saturday, 3/19, UURISE will organize a free service event called "Legal Immigration Clinic" in Vista. Please click here to share a bilingual flier with details about the event.

Retain New Vocabulary Through Multiple Associations

2011-03-08T12:37:00.000-08:00

It began 12 years ago when Gary Hopkins and Thomas Bean published the vocabulary square strategy in their report on how they had implemented it while teaching in a native American community. Today, as direct vocabulary strategy instruction seems to be having a comeback, it is little wonder that Palomar's reading prof. Erin Feld has reminded us of the effectiveness of teaching students to retain new vocabulary through multiple associations to the word. In the context of helping students with math vocabulary, Erin has devised this handout. But it can be used by virtually any discipline, not just math. I especially like the example and non-example portions of the square. For example, suppose the new word to be recorded and studied on the sheet is "diversity." I would put "My friend went on a trip to Costa Rica, where she saw many unusual birds and animals" as a personal-association example for the meaning of the word "diversity." I would put "Irma (or another student's name) cooks tacos, rice, and beans every night for dinner" as a non-example. These examples and non-examples can come in the form of pictures and symbols, hence visual associations. See the last bullet point in my Feb. 15 post for a procedure to implement this vocabulary teaching and learning strategy in your class, courtesy of Erin Feld.

State of Our Profession

2011-03-01T18:31:00.000-08:00

Mark Lieu, an ESL professor, former president of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, and a long-time CATESOLer, gave the following keynote speech at San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference last October. In it, he shared his vast knowledge about the state of our ESL profession during the ongoing budgetary crisis.

Compliments of Chris Brown of 3C Media.

Two Possible Models for Connecting Technology and Langauge Learning

2011-02-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

At a recent PD event organized by the Reading Dept. (see my last entry), I met Dr. Linda Nolte, who turned out to be an experienced ESL/ELL teacher as well. Today, I am glad to have her permission to share two PowerPoint projects designed by her.

The first one is a six-slide PowerPoint presentation that she says "models what a beginning ESL student created." She had asked her ESL students to share information about them and their countries of origin prior to this PowerPoint project. With lots of help, especially with editing, her students were able to copy/paste web links from where they obtained pictures (otherwise, they would be plagiarizing, according to Dr. Nolte). She reported, "The students were very proud of their products and found that they had more self confidence afterward." I know my colleagues in our dept. such as Angela have been using a similar model to enhance teaching and learning of literacy skills in our lower-level classes. And I'm glad that many teachers in our field see the benefits of using technology in this regard. You can download Dr. Linda's model here.

The other PowerPoint project is a book report, which is more appropriate for upper-level ESL students to do. I don't see why it cannot be adapted for a short story or even a biographical account. You can download the model here.

Myriad Tips for Reading Instruction

2011-02-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

A very informative and practical PD event took place last Friday at the Reading Services Dept. where several of their adjunct faculty members gave presentations full of tips useful in the classroom. Let me give you a sampling of highlights from these reading experts.

After making us go through a puzzle-solving exercise using this PBS resource to simulate dyslexia, Dr. Kelli Sandman-Hurley led a very lively discussion on understanding dyslexia and other neurological issues that impact reading. The takeaway is to give the students more time to process. In response to the frustration expressed by an audience member over not being trained to help students with similar learning disabilities, one of Sandman-Hurley's colleagues suggested asking the students how they learn best and how we can be the best teacher for them and then adjusting our way of teaching accordingly.
Covering the topic of reading in social sciences, Dr. Linda Nolte offered these techniques:
- SQ4R
- Survey
- Turning the headings/subheading into questions
- Textbook scavenger hunt on day one to get students to familiarize themselves with their textbook
- Take sentences randomly throughout a reading section and have students fill in the blanks to ensure they are reading
- Use popsicle sticks with student names to randomly check comprehension
- Teach and grade Cornell notes
- Use the higher end of Bloom's taxonomy to review
Shawna Schenk wanted everyone to teach our students to fall in love with their textbooks, saying reading is a process, not just opening a book or doing something quick; it is connecting with reading. Schenk said that the best way to interact with the textbook is right there in the margins, using a pencil or sticky notes and a personalized color-coding system. In addition to a textbook journal for writing study summaries and a vocabulary journal to record and study the words students don't know, Schenk told the audience to give students a different study tool each week to focus on using these tools with an appropriate reading assignment:

Textbook feature analysis
Venn Diagram
Conversational roundtable (to identify four different aspects or perspectives of the topic)
Judge's notes
Outline notes
Interactive notes (with "before," "during," and "after" columns)
SQ3R chart
Summary notes
Time line notes

here

As part of the workshop, Erin Feld gave a talk entitled "Reading in Math." Despite the fact that no math faculty were in attendance, one particular technique would help with just about any school subject. The verbal and visual word association helps students retain vocabulary through multiple associations to a word or term under study. Here are the specs:

Divide a piece of paper into four squares. This can be done by folding the paper twice.
In the top left square, write down the word or term under study.
In the the top right section, record a personal association with the word (e.g. an anecdote, a graphic, etc.).
In the bottom left part, jot down the definition (and, I might add, an example sentence using the word if that helps).
In the bottom right part, record a non-example or non-association (i.e. what the word/term is NOT used for).

Key Takeaways from the PD Roundtable on How to Use ESL Tutors Effectively

2011-02-08T10:11:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, Gary and I co-hosted a PD roundtable where 22 faculty from ESL, English, Business Education, and Counseling brainstormed together and offered their best advice on how to use our ESL tutors effectively. Below is the gist of the notes I took.

Using an Embedded ESL Tutor in Your Classroom

Siegrid, a lead tutor (via Heather):

• Please take advantage of us.

• Give guidance, and ask us if we’re comfortable with doing an activity in class.

• Don’t forget to give us a copy of your textbook and your handouts.

Susana, level 1 teacher:

• Have students raise their hands when needing the tutor’s help.

• Have the tutor help with dictation.

• Prepare a “flipper” chart for the tutor for easy reference to key sections of the textbook.

Heather, level 3 and level 5 teacher:

• Relinquish your power as a teacher in the new dynamics in the class.

• Organize two reading circles so that the tutor can work with one of them.

• Have the tutor circulate with the teacher during the practice phase of a lesson, helping students with short answers, vocabulary, spelling, correct grammar, etc.

• Have the tutor work in peer review groups, helping students with the content, organization, and grammar of their papers.

Colleen, academic writing teacher:

• Give the tutor a teacher’s manual of the textbook with answer keys for exercises.

• Appreciate your tutor taking notes in class.

• Work as a team with an eye on student success. For the past year, I’ve found myself giving more A’s because I’ve had embedded classroom tutors in my writing classes.

Katrina, level 3 teacher:

• Prepare a plan and go over it with the tutor quickly.

• Have the tutor anchored in a corner to help go over something (words, sounds, pronunciation, practices, etc.) that individual students really need but I cannot do individually.

• Create a rapport with your tutor from the get-go.

• Give a tutor who is overzealous a moment of glory.

Angela, level 1 teacher:

• Get to know a tutor’s qualifications ahead of time.

Richard, academic writing teacher:

• Make personal contact with your tutor. It’s very important to have a rapport with your tutor.

• Don’t patronize your tutor. Don’t make your tutor the student.

Nimoli, level 3 and academic writing teacher:

• Don’t give your classroom tutor work to do out of class.

• Realize that not all tutors are prepared for academic writing.

• Realize that it does not take much to develop a rapport with your tutor.

• Have your students show the tutor your classroom rules.

• Have your tutors help with checking student sentences.

Roberta, level 1 teacher:

• Have your tutor help translate for your students if strategically necessary.

Using ESL Tutors Outside of Your Classroom

Heather, level 3 and level 5 teacher:

• Have tutors give after-class workshops.

• Limit error finding and treatment to 3 per session. Have the tutor circle 3 errors, for example.

Colleen, academic writing teacher:

• Write specific feedback comments asking your students to go see a tutor for assistance with their writing issues.

• Require students to see a tutor and return with a tutor’s signature on their papers.

Tamar, English 10 teacher:

• Make visiting a tutor a requirement for certain needy students and demand proof.

• Send along an outline for a tutor visit.

• Take your class on a “field trip” to the tutoring center.

• Emphasize that it’s A students who hang out at the tutoring center.

• Showcase the best results of the students who have been to the tutoring center.

Heayoung, level 2 teacher:

• Take your class to get to know the tutoring center physically.

Richard, academic writing teacher:

• Realize that just writing a suggestion to go see a tutor does nothing.

• Devise a tutor slip to attach to their papers every time your students have a tutoring session.

Nimoli, level 3 and academic writing teacher:

• Realize that a tutoring session can’t take care of everything, so focus on a selected chunk.

Katrina, level 3 teacher:

• Design your own tutor slip with your email address listed.

Mariko, academic writing teacher:

• Realize that some students will complain about their teachers. So tutors should not go along with this negativity. Instead, focus on the task, the prompt, and the assignment instructions.

Tarma, English 10 teacher:

• Welcome any contact from tutors with feedback from students they have seen.

Gary, level 2 teacher:

• Develop DLAs (Directed Learning Activities) as additional practice for your students to do at the tutoring center. (Note: Santa Barbara City College has used DLAs extensively. Click here to see.)

Leaving No Room for Fear

2011-02-01T10:54:00.000-08:00

This 1947 teacher training video is still very relevant today. It has a before and after contrast showing how a math teacher, or any teacher for that matter, can change from teaching by seeming intimidation to teaching by intentional scaffolding, thereby losing the fear of losing student respect. The 13-minute clip is definitely worth watching and learning.

A Great Resource

2011-01-25T11:24:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the continued support from the dean and the Basic Skills Initiative funding, our nascent ESL Tutoring Program not only continues this semester, but we are also able to expand our services by adding a classroom embedded tutor in Escondido and offering more continuous open tutoring hours in San Marcos.

Our open tutoring flyer for Escondido is here. Our open tutoring flyer for San Marcos is here.The schedule of the tutors on duty in San Marcos is here.

If you would like to meet our ESL tutoring team, please come to their meeting this coming Saturday, 1/29, between 11:30 and 1:30. The location is the ESL Lab in A-19 on the main campus.

Additionally, on Friday, 2/4, the college's PD Office has scheduled a round-table discussion on "How to Use ESL Tutors Effectively." Gary and I will facilitate this workshop where faculty (and possibly a couple tutors) will share ideas and suggestions so that we can all, to quote our dept. chair, Carol, "gain the maximum benefit for our students" while we have this great resource available to us. I hope to see many of you there.

Winning an Award

2011-01-18T10:20:00.000-08:00

If you plan to attend this year's CATESOL State Conference in Long Beach in April, consider applying for one of the many awards available, such as Rick Sullivan Stipend for yourself, Adult Level Essay Contest for your noncredit students, and Community College Level Essay Contest for your credit students. See more details at http://www.catesol2011.org/awards.html. In addition, if you have a knockout lesson plan, you may win the Gordon Johnson Memorial Award. Details are here.

Finding a Cornucopia of Your Reading Materials

2011-01-02T23:37:00.000-08:00

Just as emailing, blogging, texting, twittering, and using Facebook have made people write more, the recent explosion of online e-books has increased access to diverse reading materials, thereby allowing people to read more. The good news for many is, there are freebies galore. On Christmas Day, Yahoo News shared a piece from Mashable, a site devoted to news about our runaway web culture, that lists six sources where you can find free e-books of both fiction and nonfiction. Acting on the tips, I easily found and even downloaded a few for my upcoming travels. Here is an example I found on Google Books: The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson. Although the free version is dubbed a preview, it is only missing two chapters.

So in addition to Happy New Year to you all, Happy Reading to you and, perhaps, your students.

Google's New Features That Are Easy to Love

2010-12-26T23:55:00.000-08:00

Google has unveiled several features that are useful for teaching and learning purposes. The latest readability feature can be found in "Advanced Search." You can use the drop-down menu next to the heading of "Reading level" to request that your search results show "basic," "intermediate," or "advanced" level. Although Google folks do not divulge detailed criteria used for their categorization system, they claim that the system was developed based on the way their hired teachers sorted web pages into the "basic," "intermediate," and "advanced" piles, so to speak. This advanced tool should be handy when you want to filter out web content that is full of hard words, for example.

Another Google feature, which has been around for some time, is instant search, meaning as soon as you start typing in a search term, Google provides you with instant suggestions, trying to help you complete your search term. I've heard some ESL teachers creatively use this feature to teach word order, sentence patterns, word collocations, etc.

Still another feature is translate, found on the drop down menu when you click on "more" at the top the Google homepage screen. The neat thing about this feature is that you can have Google translate an entire web page into another language and use the URL of the translated page however you want to. Simply type the URL of a web page in the text window, specify the translate-from and translate-to languages, and voila, you have just helped someone to understand the gist of some important information in their native language, in spite of the imperfection of the translation.

The fourth feature is books, again found on the drop down menu when you click on "more." On the next screen, you can "Browse books and magazines" on the left panel in order to read hundreds of thousands of old books and magazines as well as preview newer books, all right on your computer screen. Or, after you click on "Books" from the drop down menu mentioned above, you can go directly to the Google eBook Store, where you can find thousands of free eBooks to read online or download to your e-reader device. The direct link to the Google's new eBook Store is: http://books.google.com/ebooks.

Finally, Google has tried to pre-group similar images together and present them in a fun way with a feature called Google image swirl. Click http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/ to see for yourself how your can utilize these picture exhibits for your classroom teaching.

A Collage of Reality

2010-12-19T23:19:00.000-08:00

In today's UT, columnist Logan Jenkins wrote about 10 local occurrences of 2010 that might not be forgotten. Number 6 is about how Don McKinney, a MiraCosta College board candidate, bungled his statement for voters by misspelling the name of the college as "Miracosta Collage."

Several commencements ago, the same misspelling appeared on the cover of Palomar's program booklet. Today, if you walk up to a counter in a Palomar office that welcomes new students, you may find the same spelling error on a well-intentioned business-sized card designed to remind them of the student eServices on one side and to hand write their new Palomar-issued ID number on the other. Makes you wonder who gave the final approval on these important print jobs.

Or shall we not compete with the reality of this impossible spelling? McKinney, incidentally, petitioned a judge to allow him to correct his embarrassing errors on the grounds of the "false and misleading information" that the abused word amounts to.

Nostalgia and Cultural Criticism in Colleaugue's Postings

2010-12-12T17:50:00.000-08:00

Our colleague Kevin Staff has contributed regularly to San Diego Reader's Neighborhood Blogs. In fact, he has his own blog page there: http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/kstaff/ and has also won their monthly top honors a couple times for writing great essays. As you can see, ever a talented writer, Kevin has posted entries that reveal a medley of nostalgia and, occasionally, a palpable sense of cultural criticism. I enjoy reading his blog entries very much.

Bilingualism Has Drawn Close Scrutiny of This Scholar

2010-12-05T12:27:00.000-08:00

Last week's entry may be worth a follow-up. Dr. Francois Grosjean, an internationally-known scholar and author of several books on bilingualism, has started a new blog called ''Life as a Bilingual'' on Psychology Today's website: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual.

Is English Enough for the US?

2010-11-28T18:11:00.000-08:00

Even though I am in the business of teaching my ESL students more English, I like to tell them to be very proud of themselves, on account of their bilingualism. I point out the fact that most Americans don't bother to learn another language. These days, even many institutions, policy makers, and lawmakers seem to accept the lingua franca status of the English language all too readily. They cut foreign languages departments. They ban the use of Spanish in classrooms and at work. They pass English-only laws. You can say they are arrogant. You can call them complacent. You can call them myopic. For what these people are doing bodes ill for the leader of the world. Already, many rational scholars have been expressing their concerns about this troubling trend. Below, I gather and present a small sampling of some well-thought-out arguments against those who get locked into a sense of self-security, thinking the future of our nation needs English only.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/23/berman ("Foreign Language for Foreign Policy?")
http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/deficiency-in-foreign-language-competency-what-is-wrong-with-the-u-s-educational-system/27558 ("Deficiency in Foreign Language Competency: What Is Wrong with the U. S. Educational System?")
http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138 ("A Faustian Bargain")
http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-research-english-next.pdf ("English Next")

A Tool for Teaching Sentence Completeness

2010-11-21T16:35:00.000-08:00

More than a quarter century after New York ESL teacher Helaine Marshall first presented her Glue technique to eliminate fragments and run-ons, it's refreshing to see her once again promote the idea in the latest issue of The CATESOL Journal (see p. 175).

"Glue" stands for all the coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, relative pronouns, and noun clause introducers. A teacher, however, doesn't need to rely on these somewhat advanced and esoteric grammatical terms in order to benefit from the Glue method, as long as the students already understand the concepts of S + V = a sentence and can identify S and V in a sentence. Just as real glue is needed to paste two sheets of paper together, one syntactic Glue is needed for every two sentences. A basic Glue list (and, but, or; because, if, although; who, which, that) introduced in advance of the task will facilitate the students' editing goals.

Using the Glue method, students will find it easy to understand that their "Glue + S + V" sentence (e.g. If you enjoy visiting distant, unfamiliar places.) is not a complete one because for every Glue, two sets of S + V are needed, not just one. Likewise, the students will be able to recognize that something is missing from a run-on sentence like The official name for this region is Nunavut it means "our land" in the Inuit language. I think this commonsense technique should work for ESL students who are beginning to acquire academic writing skills. The article in The CATESOL Journal also gives an example of how a teacher uses hands to exemplify the Glue rule. So get a hold of that journal or ask me for it if you wish to read more about this promising tool.

Incidentally, Glue is always capitalized in Marshall's writing. I guess the big letter is intended to communicate its big job: joining two sentences while glue with a small "g" might be reserved to explain the function of "and" as in She was beautiful, intelligent, and warm; it is still a glue but it doesn't join sentences.

New Recording Website from Japan Could Give a Lift to Fluency

2010-11-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

EnglishCentral.com is an innovative website started in Japan a little over a year ago. It allows users to view a short video clip with close-captioning and shadow (i.e. repeat or imitate) the line heard by recording it in their own voice. The flash-based interface provides a clickable feature to drill own on any new word on the close-captioned line for its definition and its pronunciation as well. Users will need a USB headset with a microphone in order to record their imitation of the close-captioned line. As soon as a user records his or her line, an instant speech analysis mechanism of the website makes the native-sounding words glow and turns the worst-pronounced words red. Instant points are also assigned to let the user know how well they are doing as well as how many points they still need to earn until reaching the end of the video clip. There is even a competition-like scoreboard to compare users' accumulated points, if they so choose while setting up their free account. The instant visual feedback looks very motivating and useful for anyone who wishes to increase their oral fluency.

The site looks like a perfect tool to be used in a computer lab.

Origins of Words and Expressions

2010-11-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

In a classroom where ESL students learn, there will always be questions where certain English words and idioms come from. How to field such questions? Share online resources like the following with your students, especially if they are expected to attain an intermediate or advanced level of proficiency. (By the way, I often tell my students that there is only a limited amount of English grammar to be learned, but when it comes to English expressions, their learning possibilities are almost limitless.)

"Words and Their Stories" (http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/words-stories/) - part of Voice of America's "Special English" radio broadcast, now also available as online podcast; focused, interesting, student-friendly
"Phrases, Expressions & Sayings" (http://www.joe-ks.com/phrases/phrases.htm) - a glossary of the etymology of many commonly used phrases, expressions, and sayings
"Dictionary.com" (http://dictionary.reference.com/) - seemingly the number one choice for many US-educated students; has a section called "Word Origin & History" for some words (try "shellacking" to see for yourself)
"A Way with Words" (http://www.waywordradio.org/) - a weekly hour-long San Diego-based public radio show now gone national; also available as online podcast; also receives emails and phone calls from people with questions about definitions, grammar, and pronunciation; very advanced
"A Phrase a Week" (http://www.phrases.org.uk/a-phrase-a-week/index.html) - out of UK; a free emailed weekly newsletter subscription

What Great Teachers Do

2010-10-31T12:34:00.000-07:00

A national debate is taking place on the quality of teachers. Many Americans seem to equate students with manufactured products that can be mass-produced and pass high quality control marks at the end of an assembly line. They want to define great teachers only by retention rates and test scores.

One of the most prominent proponents of this drive (and one of the richest men in the world), Bill Gates, still points to three character traits of his great teachers in his interview with Parade: using class time well, not letting confused students behind, and pairing up high-ability students with low-ability students in a significant learning activity.

Bill Gates also seems to emphasize the need for "understanding great teaching." Dr. Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade of San Francisco State University has studied exactly what it takes to be an effective teacher. His five pillars of effective practice are summarized in this earlier blog entry.

In his tireless fight for quality education for all, Dr. Duncan-Andrade seldom stops talking about his five pillars and how they really contribute to student engagement and achievement. If you are interested, you can watch his February speech at Harvard Graduate School of Education entitled "Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete." The lengthy but dynamic and inspirational talk is available on YouTube. The link is here, but skip to about 13:40 to avoid the technical glitches before his speech. (Thanks to Gary for this info.)

By the way, if you wish to voice your opinion on whether a teacher should be rated by their students' test scores, you can cast your vote at the end of the Bill Gates interview here.

Reduce Disabilities Everywhere

2010-10-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

On Friday, I learned a valuable lesson from Lisa Brewster of Miramar College, who is also the California Community Colleges' Success Network Coordinator for San Diego/Imperial Valley. While we teachers tend to begin with textbooks, lessons, and favorite activities, simply covering content leaves out the students that struggle the most, including those with disabilities. Instead of teaching to average students, we should design our teaching in such a way that it is for the lowest denominator of our class, so to speak, and help everyone else in the process, too, according to Lisa, who was giving a talk titled "Teaching Students As If They Were All Basic Skills Students."

The Universal Design (UD) principles require less in-depth coverage of everything and call for intentional flexibility in presentation, clarification, engagement, and assessment. Such practices reduce the disabling effect of our curricula.

But a more immediate challenge may still remain: deciding how to help that student who is demonstrating severe difficulty learning in class. Our college already has a Disability Resource Center (i.e. DRC) whose staff welcome faculty referrals, have an established procedure to screen a referred student, and offer a variety of assistive or adaptive technology, practical techniques, professional advice, as well as PD workshops and presentations.

Many of the area schools feed students to us. Also, many of our current adult students are parents whose children attend public schools in our community. So wouldn't our common interests be well served if we could be more proactive about sharing resources such as workshop information? Thanks to Katrina Tamura, we now know that North Coastal Consortium for Special Education (NCCSE) regularly offers workshops for parents and educators. For instance, there will be a two-day Specialized Brain Gym Course “open and free” to parents and educators who are able to attend on a weekday (11/1 and 11/2). Please click here to download a 13-page handout announcing free workshops (given in Spanish and English) for North County parents and educators. Click here to download a one-page Spanish flyer for parents to sign up to learn about an individualized education program (IEP) for their children. Click here to download a one-page English flyer promoting parents' awareness of the IEP. You might want to distribute a few copies of these flyers in your class. Making sure that every student learns despite obstacles is a major goal of NCCSE and UD. It should be ours, too.

What Every Cartoon Junkie Would Love to Know

2010-10-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

I use cartoons a lot in teaching. If you are a cartoon junkie like me, you would love to find a place to locate a favorite old cartoon if you have its publication date. Well, http://www.comicstriparchive.com/comicarchives/ is just such a location, albeit online. It archives more than 100 cartoons dating back several years by using publicly available links and grouping them in one place.

The archive is also a perfect place for random browsing if you have some free time on hand and are in the mood for entertaining the brain.

Once you find a favorite cartoon, you can link to it online. But if you want to save it, the usual copy-and-paste won't work. You'd need to use the print-screen command or another software like the free Jing to capture the image.

Communicative Board Game Templates

2010-10-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

The other day, my graduate mentee sent me a link to about three dozen communicative board game templates, which I would like to share here: http://www.esl-galaxy.com/board.htm. These are all PDF files that you can print out and tape to vanilla folders. After you finish teaching a grammar point, your students can then play with each other using a die and the homemade game board to reinforce what they have recently learned while practicing speaking English.

What You Can Expect from CATESOL Regional

2010-10-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

As you all know, our dept. is organizing this year's San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference, to be held at the County Office of Education on Saturday, 10/16.

If you would like to see what the more than 45 exciting workshops are about , here's a list of them arranged by the rooms, courtesy of the conference's site chair, Marty Furch.

There is still time to get a discount on your conference registration. Click here for pre-registration online and here for a mail-in registration form.

Our conference site provides further information you may need.

These Pictures Tell Stories

2010-09-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

"A Mirrored Memory" is an 8-piece series by photographer Tom Hussey. Each of the creative photos shows a representative profession--firefighter, scientist, teacher, nurse, soldier, etc.--and the poignancy of aging that each figure is experiencing. I wish I had discovered these photos this summer as one of the short stories I used for my level-5 class was "The Mirror." Imagine what lively expansion activities would have been generated by these intriguing pictures!

Another "picture story" resource that I have recently come across is "America's Artist" by Pamela Krol in the March/April issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It is a fascinating piece detailing how Norman Rockwell captured America's ambitions and emotions. For example, the facial expressions at right are such authentic rendering of emotions, be it embarrassed, proud, surprised, anxious, disgusted, determined, wishful... And isn't it a boon for us ESL teachers looking for a resource to teach/discuss these emotion all in one place? Moreover, the print issue carries more than a dozen Rockwell pictures that tell a story, even though the online version has only five. Check them out and see how Rockwell's labor of love can be turned into something to teach by.

When That New Computer Acts Up...

2010-09-19T17:31:00.000-07:00

Well, that title is just a nice attention getter. Error messages can pop up on any computer. Besides, we sometimes make a mistake on the computer and want to make amends. So what can you do if no one is around to ask for help?

The raft of video clips on the Internet comes to the rescue. You can try the various video sites such as "YouTube," "Google Videos," "How to Videos," "VideoJug," etc.--scroll down a bit on the side panel at left--and enter an natural-language question, like "How to choose a printer when printing a Word document?" or "How to cancel a print job?" You will invariably come across a video clip that can provide you with an answer to your typed-in question or to something close to it, if you persevere.

That was what I did to get this clip on "VideoJug":

It's a well-known fact now that you can type in just about anything you want to learn on YouTube and other similar video sites and get a demonstration to address your question, although the quality of the answers varies.

And isn't finding a visual answer online to our everyday questions a desirable skill to model for and share with our ESL students?

Announcing CATESOL Student Essay Contest

2010-09-12T23:05:00.000-07:00

Oxford University Press is once again sponsoring the $500 cash prize for the winner of the CATESOL Community College Student Essay Contest. The winner need not be present at the 2011 CATESOL State Conference in Long Beach to receive the award. Please click here for the flyer with all the details about this worthy contest.

A Play, a Scholar, and a Follow Up

2010-09-05T21:02:00.000-07:00

This week I will make my blog entry a threesome of sorts.

First, believing some of our compadres might like to go, Sharon Hightower wanted me to share the following information about the 14th Annual Free Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing at the Coronado Playhouse.

Shakespeare's classic comedy has everything: Soldiers returning from war, lovers, a wedding, a villain determined to end the romance, and friends who set a “lover’s trap” for Benedick, a confirmed bachelor, and Beatrice, his verbal sparring partner.

For more information and to get your free tickets, click on the image above to go straight to the Coronado Playhouse' webpage.

Making learning accessible to all students including disabled ones isn't my strong suit as a teacher, but I'm glad that I now know who in the dept. to turn to as a resource person. Angela Webster acquired the coveted title of a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Scholar and join their team during the summer break. A UDL Scholar designs course instruction, materials, and content to make learning accessible to all students. Angela's project, which will be shared at conferences and learning communities, is a step-by-tep PPT presentation that low-level ESL students, literacy students, non- or semi-computer-literate students, students with learning disabilities, and disabled students will all be able to create, thus increasing their reading, speaking and writing skills. The UDL Scholar program is part of San Diego State University Interwork Institute, and is partially funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education.

Last, but not least, Sharon Hightower sent me a couple lab lesson plans to share with you all as a follow up on my last blog entry on using online calendars in the classroom. This one uses the web. This one involves Microsoft Word.

Monthly Activity Calendar

2010-08-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/activitycalendars/ is a webpage with a monthly activity calendar and teachable ideas for the timely events. Although the webpage is mainly geared towards grade-school teachers, the ideas are very applicable to our ESL classrooms. You also don't have to pay in order to use the ideas. Thanks to Sharon Hightower for sharing this webpage at a recent teachers' meeting.

Told by Students

2010-08-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

This summer, I finally tried an idea I had learned from my former colleagues at Cal State Long Beach. I used Discovering Fiction: Student Book 1 as the textbook for my level 5 students. We read and discussed all 14 short stories in the textbook. We did expansion activities by including other relevant stories and/or listening to or watching the stories in a multimedia format.

We also tried a "short story anthology" project whereby mostly paired students created their own fictional stories and then did a dramatic reading in the final days of summer school. I've found that given proper guidance and ample opportunity, our ESL students can create, write, and tell great stories, too.

Here's a sampling of the stories told by my summer students. Clicking on each link will open a PDF file.

The University by Hasan & Aqeb
Fate or Miracle by Martin & Rubi
Sandy, the Dog by Javier & Karina
The Moon Shine Dream by Jeffery & Herminio
American Dream by Saul
Do What You Believe by Alberto & Elias
A Scary Day by Asuncion & Steven
The Unexpected Night of That Man by Lucio & Hector
A Terrible Loss by Francisca & Yenisley

Grammar Performed

2010-08-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Woodward's Fun with Grammar offers over 200 game-like activities that enable classroom teachers to make their grammar lessons more lively and engaging. This wonderful resource has been made freely downloadable at http://azargrammar.com/materials/FWG_TOC.html.

No-Cost E-Edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune

2010-07-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

Did you know that as a classroom instructor, you can order a free e-edition of The San Diego Union-Tribune for your class?

It only takes a few minutes to get started at http://nie.uniontribune.com/. Never mind the outdated content on the homepage there, but just click on "Order" on the left side to create a new account. Enter all the required info and wait for a confirmation of your order to arrive in your email inbox. You will be given a username and a password to access the free online newspaper at http://sandiegouniontribune.ca.newsmemory.com/nie.php.

When you share the username, the password, and the newspaper's e-edition URL with your students, everyone will be reading the life-like SD Union-Tribune in no time. Think about the authentic language input, the conversation starters, the comic strips, the sports, the editorials, the relevancy, the resources...

How to Find Textbook Information Before the Fall Semester Starts

2010-07-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

Click on the following link to view a quick screencast I made using the free Jing software. An new window will open to allow for scrolling and full-screen viewing.

How to Find Textbook Information Before the Fall Semester Starts: A Screencast

Collaborative Efforts Required

2010-07-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

Did you know that our dept. is in charge of 2010 San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference, a once-in-every-five-year manifestation of a significant contribution we make to our profession in general and to CATESOL in particular? There are projects we could do together--from volunteering for a subcommittee (registration, program, etc.) to sending in a proposal now to present the next big thing at our conference.

For more information, check out our conference site at http://sites.google.com/site/sdregionalcatesol/

A Powerful Tool

2010-07-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

The bountiful fields of cyberspace are awash in solutions to problems. One just needs to have the ability to tell the good from the bad. This is where our tech-savvy colleague Larry comes in. He has recently shared a free, open source media player that can open all kinds of audio and video files. Believe me, a source of a lot of frustration will be effectively ended with a quick and easy download of this powerful VLC Media Player software from VideoLAN. Thanks, Larry, for the newest find.

Proceedings of Online Teaching Conference 2010

2010-06-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

All recorded sessions of 2010 Online Teaching Conference are now available at this portal: http://otc.remote-learner.net/. Just click on the Login button and then select the "Login as a guest" option. Besides watching some live sessions via Elluminate or YouTube, you can download handouts for many presentations, too. The following specific sessions may be of particular interest to some of you:

Textbook Deathwatch
Students Speak Up on the Future of Online Education
Free Online Tools and Success Stories for Teaching in Lean Times
Interactive Online Assignments to Engage All Learning Styles
Experience It! Google Wave
Communication Tools for the 21st Century
Our Best to You: The Best of CCC Confer 2010

Free Online Tools Galore

2010-06-22T12:47:00.000-07:00

Isn't it an innovative teacher's dream to be able to fall back on a ton of free online tools in lean times like this? At the OTC 2010 Conference at San Diego City College last week, I learned many such freebies.

Prezi offers a way to create non-linear presentations. Students and teachers can get a license to use the tool for free at the level that normally costs $59 a year.
Dropbox offers 2GB's free space for storage. After you download its software, you can sync your files across your computers and the Dropbox server.
KompoZer offers free software for you to download for web page creation. Gone are the needs to know HTML codes and web design theories.
MorgueFile is a wonderful source for free images.
Resizr is a free image tool for your basic graphic editing needs such as cropping, rotating, resizing, and re-saving to another file format. The quality of the edited image is very good.
Wordle generates word art for your web page as well as for print. The story we are reading today in my summer school class is "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros. So I tested this wordle by typing in the first paragraph of the story and generated this graphic. Pretty cool.
Animoto allows you to piece your pictures and video clips together as a movie-like slide show. Look for the education application at their site.
Vocaroo is a free web-based recording tool. They say you can use it for sending audio emails.
Jing is free software for screen capture.
Wikispaces offers a free version with 2GB of space and a 10MB per file limit. They say wikis encourage student-centred learning.

For more free or low-cost Web 2.0 tools, check out this web page prepared by presenters Kirsti Dyer and Katie Palocios.

Trends in TESOL (part 4)

2010-06-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

Incorporating Critical Thinking in ESL Teaching

Not All Websites Are Created Equal

In an EV mini-workshop, George Chinnery of DLI Foreign Language Center shared a very detailed handout for critical website evaluation. The handout listed about two dozen questions to serve as evaluation criteria. He had participants check pairs of websites that deal with the same subject matter against some of those criteria in order to determine trust online. To many, the exercise was quite an eye opener. If we as teachers have trouble differentiating the real and the fake, how can we expect our students to do the same?

George's 20 pairs of website for evaluation are here at: http://sites.google.com/site/webeval4all/test-sites, but you should have your students scroll all the way down to the bottom to download his attached handout, which is a PDF file called "WebEval," first.

GOs Are Not Just for Pre-writing

Greg Rouault of Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan shared an excellent idea of using graphic organizers to practice critical reading beyond the micro word level. Greg's intermediate-level ESL students are required to turn in their graphic organizers as evidence of them having unpacked some meaning from their reading. Greg provides his students with blank or partially-filled graphic organizers, using such resources as:

A Kiss Is Not a Kiss

Films in the classroom are not just for fun. Patreshia Tkach of Pamukkale University in Turkey demonstrated the role of the film in enhancing critical thinking. She stays away from such questions as "What do you think?" "What do you like about it?" and does more analytical questioning. An ideal teaching sequence with selective film use, in her opinion, runs something like this:

discuss the theme
read a related article
do a minimum pre-viewing comprehension question discussion
view the film
do a deeper discussion
view the movie again before assessing with open-ended essay questions

Patreshia would even let high-level students choose a film and devise questions. To further enhance critical literacy, Patreshia suggests having students study the director, too, and figure out why he or she made the film--Is it to entertain, to shock, to offer propaganda?

Patreshia is kind enough to allow me to share her handouts here.

Trends in TESOL (part 3)

2010-06-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

Leveraging Microsoft Office?

Tom Justice of North Shore Community College in Danvers, Mass. showcased Turning Point clickers that requires and enhances PowerPoint. In an advanced L/S class, for example, he first gives a multimedia PowerPoint presentation, and then moves to the practice and assessment phases by having the students use the clickers. In this way, he not only gets his students engaged, but is capable of assessing a large number of students quickly.

Elizabeth Visedo of the University of South Florida shared how she uses free online tools for all stages of the writing process:

a mind-mapping tool for pre-writing
Open Office for drafting and revising
Google Docs for collaboration and feedback
Blogger for publishing the finished product

Of these non-Microsoft tools, Google Docs is her favorite because there is no need to download or save anything anymore. If you want to bring your writing class into the Web 2.0 cloud computing era, every class member can conveniently have a gmail account and the enormous Google-provided storage. Then, a student can invite and give full-collaboration authorization to a teacher, a peer, or a tutor to go in, read, and edit his/her paper right on the Internet. Also, with Google Docs, when two people work on the same document, they can easily see the action of each participant, which is a unique feature only offered by Google. Elizabeth claimed she now has no more weekend waste of time grading papers. Instead, she schedules simultaneous collaborations with each student at 10-minute intervals. She even couples Google Docs with Skype to give audio feedback/conferencing at the same time. With this additional method, she can meet her students once a week for 18 minutes to go over their papers, which are done outside of class.

Elizabeth has developed a "Tech-Tools for Writers Tutorial" for everyone. To download this self-access tutorial, follow these steps:

Click here to go to her website
Click on Files on the left-hand side menu
Right-click on the "Tech-Tools for Writers Tutorial" link and save it to an appropriate folder on your computer
Find the file where you saved it and open it

Elizabeth says that trying to open the file by clicking on the "Tech-Tools for Writers Tutorial" link directly will cause the Tutorial to malfunction, so you should open only the file you saved. She also says that she welcomes everyone's feedback. She can be reached at elizabeth.visedo@gmail.com.

Incidentally, PBWiki was mentioned during Elizabeth's session as something better than the sequential PowerPoint slides.

Ben McMurry of Brigham Young University led an Electronic Village session on how to use the free Google Sites to create a class website. He claimed that you can make your own class website in just a few minutes with the still add-free Google Sites and add a blog, maps, videos, calendars, web documents, and quizzes with only a few clicks. He has assembled a few video tutorials on his website at http://tutorials.benmcmurry.com.

(To be continued.)

We Are the Problems

2010-06-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

"We are the problems, not our students." That is according to Dr. Myron H. Dembo, Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology, USC.

Dr. Dembo, who has done research in community college classrooms and has developed a PD training program for community colleges, believes that teachers play a key role in bringing about needed changes.

At a recent LINKS event, Dembo called for an end to the "jumping to the solution" mentality when a student performance gap is observed. Teachers, counselors, support staff, and administrators at any community college have to overcome the challenge of understanding the causes for performance gaps first. That means analyzing three types of interacting factors that determine academic success in community colleges:

lack of knowledge
the role motivation plays in understanding the causes
aspects of the organizational culture (including instructional strategies) that contribute to the performance gap.

There are many examples of how a teacher can interfere with or facilitate a student's ability to learn. For example, most instructors do not do study skills, let alone have the foresight to plan weeks of practice for the students who need those skills.

While a teacher is quick to point out and blame those few students for having zero motivation in a just-ended class, he fails to realize that those students were actually the most highly motivated ones, only they were motivated to avoid failure! The teacher has in fact failed to teach self-regulatory processes/skills in an academic setting or to be engaged in "possible selves" intervention that gives students hope and does not allow them to see themselves as deficient.

Many teachers favor competition as a motivation method, not knowing that a group of their students, especially the low-achieving ones, are not motivated by this method.

When an instructor only warns students in his syllabus that they'll fail if they don't do A, B, and C, he is giving the wrong syllabus emphasis, and his belief will have a negative impact on his students and their beliefs. A student-centered syllabus would reflect a different belief:

"Teach the students you have, not the students you wish you had."

A two-page basic syllabus would include a statement of teaching philosophy and supplemental additions of "Resources," "Study Skills," "Ways to Succeed in This Course," and the like. A student-centered teacher would make sure his students read and understand the syllabus by giving points to some activities with the syllabus such as a quiz or a class discussion. On the first day of class, a good teacher says, "I only care about your success. In order to succeed, you're expected to...," and his students say, "I can't wait to come back tomorrow."

"Read and underline" is the most ineffective strategy. Teachers ought to try "Use headlines to generate questions and then underline only the answers" in order for their students to form a habit of reading and responding to academic texts meaningfully.

Other specific advice from Dembo during his talk:

Never ask students, "Do you understand?" Why? Because it shows you do not know what to expect.
Don't tell me you need more time to cover the material. Time is not the issue. It's the strategy for reading that counts.
Ditch final exams. Use a term paper instead.
To get the students to read the book and do homework, give quizzes at the beginning of each class meeting throughout the semester. Throw out the 3 lowest scores in the end. This daily quiz can double as attendance taking.
Teach Cornell notes.
Be a smiling teacher. Have students sign up for lunch with you to talk about anything other than the class. These help provide a homelike environment and contribute to the social-contextual factors for motivation.
Have students open their textbook on day one and show them how to use the aids in the book to help them read the book.
Teachers with a high level of failed students year after year are inadequate teachers. Time to focus on self-regulation.
Two key questions to ask teachers:

Are the students getting it?
How do you really know?

San Diego Union Tribune Comics Survey

2010-05-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

If you regularly read San Diego Union Tribune and use its comic strips in your teaching, you may want to participate in an important survey this week and vote for your five favorite and five least favorite strips. San Diego Union Tribune is reassessing their lineup of comic strips. The survey closes this Saturday, 5/29.

The survey link is here: http://uniontrib.com/comics-survey.

They Are Our Own Advisory Board

2010-05-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

Four student representatives formed a panel at a recent LINKS (Learning in Networks for Knowledge Sharing) event at Santa Ana College. They shared their beliefs about themselves as learners, about their motivation, and about our institutions' beliefs about them. Their advice for our teaching profession was really candid. Here's a sampling.

"Don't ever tell students that you're getting paid because of their attendance. This makes us feel like we are just some money machine."

"Focus on the students in the back and the quiet ones. They have a lot to say."

"Put a smile on your face. We like passionate teachers."

"Get to know your students. Combine different personalities. Make school the students' second home."

"Make students feel important."

"Be flexible."

"Require outside study groups. Require students to do their own research in the library."

"Encourage students to take notes."

"We like dictionary.com as a tool."

"Don't overuse or overdo PowerPoint. It makes no sense to copy lots of information from the textbook on the PowerPoint."

"Don't make everything available online only. Don't make extra mandatory online requirements."

"Make Blackboard's online chat available for student to use for real-time chats."

"Use Blackboard's 'Discussion Board'."

"Help us see the big picture of an issue with a blog dealing with both sides."

"Faculty is responsible for having a well-planned lecture with a dynamic discussion. Don't make mistakes in front of us."

"Students first. Everything else is secondary."

Interacting with Text (Part 2)

2010-05-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

At the first CalADE meeting in Anaheim last month, Chris DeBauche and Sylvia Garcia-Navarrete of Southwestern College reiterated the need to select reading materials that are relevant and beneficial to our students as well as the need to paraphrase read ideas in clear and complete sentences. They also offered more ways to make reading worthwhile. For example, they advised against using multiple-choice activities and advocated designing high-quality, thoughtful prompts such as:

create a headline that you think expresses the main idea of the reading
select the one sentence you think is the most important in the reading and tell why you selected it
ask a question to the author or someone in the reading that you would really like an answer to
state why you think this reading was written
state in your own words, elaborate, exemplify, and illustrate certain vocabulary or concepts in the reading that you need to understand better
identify what you think is the most important conclusion the author comes to in the whole reading (not just the last paragraph)
state what you think should be done to deal effectively with the issue or problem being presented in the reading
state ideas or answer questions about the reading as if you were the author himself

The two presenters demonstrated strategies designed to help students understand what they read as well as bring learning alive in the classroom:

semi-circle seating arrangement
name tents (used also to take attendance and assign random seating)
popcorn reading (i.e. ask students to just read without being called upon)
silent reading (done simultaneously by both the students and the teacher)
think-pair-share
jigsaw reading (with home groups and expert groups)
focus on a few well-chosen concepts
require the use of a "speaker's voice"
require the addition of "yet" after the common answer of "I don't know"
use Zynergy Chimes signals

One of the several quotations that the presenters shared really conveyed their teaching philosophy: "The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think than what to think."

Once again, if you need a copy of their handout, just let me know.

Interacting with Text

2010-05-04T22:01:00.000-07:00

About ten days ago, I attended the first CalADE Conference in Anaheim where I participated in two workshops about effective instructional techniques to promote student thinking and interaction with text.

The first workshop was given by Vickey Aubrey and Michele Marta of San Joaquin Delta College. The ART (Authentic Reading Techniques) program starts with authentic and current materials collected from Gale database, which most college libraries subscribe to, and made into a thematic packet with five articles in each packet. Packet titles include Healthy Minds, Child Development, Nutrition, Criminal Justice, Business, and Medical Ethics, all content areas very popular among students. I immediately thought that here we have a way to create and own our own textbooks and cut the skyrocketing textbook costs for our students at the same time. We can do the same using Palomar library's databases and put our own packets on the Blackboard server for students to download.

ART at Delta College requires the students to start with a summary writing handbook that teaches them strategies for annotating and summarizing expository text. When students finish the handbook, they select a packet of five articles described above.

The students follow a 7-step procedure and complete one article at a time:

What do you already know about the topic?
What would you like to know about the topic?
First reading: Find new words for a vocabulary journal, where students

copy the sentence in which the word appears in the article
look up the word in a dictionary and write the definition that applies to the sentence
write an original sentence using the new word

Annotate the article using a triple entry journal which has column headings of "Main Idea from Article," "Main Idea: Own Words," "Reactions and Questions." Students must have a tutor or instructor check this work.
Summarize the article using this template: In the article, " (provide title of article here),"(provide author's full name here) (provide an appropriate verb from a supplied list here) (provide the main idea in your own words here). Students must have a tutor check this work.
What did you learn?
Apply what you learned by writing about a similar situation, etc.

Thus, the students proceed from article to article. After the 5th article, students complete a writing assignment based on the information they have learned in the packet.

There are two simple, no-nonsense rubrics to assess annotations and summary.

Delta's ART program gives students substantial hands-on experience in interaction with text and is particularly applicable for reading-writing-thinking integration in our academic ESL classes. I have a few extra handouts from their presentation that I can share with anyone who may be interested. Just contact me to let me know.

(To be continued.)

Effective Urban Teachers

2010-04-27T22:26:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the first conference of the newly formed CalADE (California Association for Developmental Education) in Anaheim last Friday. I felt even more fortunate to hear a very inspiring keynote speaker, Dr. Jeffrey Andrade of San Francisco State University, describe four effective urban teachers that he had studied during a three-year period in South LA classrooms.

In a nutshell, highly effective teachers genuinely connect with their students and the community.

According to Dr. Andrade, who has a background as an urban high school teacher himself in east Oakland, all the educational acronyms--BSI, SLO, etc. included--don't hit the target because they fail to address the issue of educational equity.

Dr. Andrade portrays our school system as a balance scale that is being kept level by the following three kinds of teachers.

On the far right are "Gangsta" teachers, who are generally unhappy, are very vocal, and tend to get all the attention for their demands for more rules and regulations against the students and the community. Fortunately, these teachers are few and far between.

On the opposite side of the scale sits another "far and few between" group of teachers called "Ridas," who will "ride or die" with the community. These are the ones who would say to their students, "I'd rather die than see you fail."

The vast majority of teachers are "Wankstas," who are talkers, not doers, when it comes to creating an environment where every student really learns. As fence straddlers, these teachers could tip the scale to the left by improving themselves if strong support were available to them.

Thus, the balance of failing urban schools continues.

Dr. Andrade then extols the four "Ridas" and five characteristics these four exceptional educators exhibit.

1. Critically conscious purpose

When asked "Why do you teach?" these "Ridas" responded that they teach because they believe that their students from urban schools can be the agents of change.

These "Ridas" allow risk-taking by their students in the class. They understand the lives and the community of their students. They adopt a "take the best and leave the rest" approach to following the curriculum because they want to motivate their students by responding to their needs in their daily teaching. For example, a 5th grade "Rida" in Watts changed a prescribed prompt for a persuasive letter writing assignment from "Write a letter to convince the reader that students should be allowed to pick their own teams at recess" to "Write a letter to your principal persuading him to change something."

2. Duty

The "Ridas" believe that teachers are not defined by what they do, but by who they are. They see themselves as responsible for serving the community. They know students want them to talk about stuff that really concerns them. They find ways to hear from and to genuinely connect with their students.

3. Preparation

The "Ridas" own what they are teaching but deliver it differently each time they re-teach it. They are always preparing for their lessons and units even though they are already master teachers. Not only do they customize detailed "Before You Read," "As You Read," and "After You Read" questions and prompts, they also choose vocabulary words based on students' life. For example, a list of words to study is no longer called a "Vocabulary List." It is titled:

Social Criticism

race _________
class _________
...

4. Socratic sensibility

"The unexamined life is not worth living." "What is worth while is always difficult." The "Ridas" all have such Socratic sensibility by being engaged in the pain of examining their own practices.

5. Trust

The "Ridas" have trust in their students, and they have trust from their students. They accept their students as who they are, but they expect more out of the students. They see their students as smart persons, first and foremost. They have moved from empathy for their students to solidarity with them.

A 23-page report by Dr. Andrade can be downloaded here.

Trends in TESOL (Part 2)

2010-04-20T22:44:00.000-07:00

A Video Revolution Is Upon Us

English learners the world over are turning to the Internet for resources. For example, The popular JenniferESL Channel on YouTube gets 40,000 hits per day. The pretty host, Jennifer Lebedev, herself a former ESL student from Russia, facilitated a discussion session where participants shared the pros and cons of using instructional video for teaching and material writing online. The mode of video is particularly suitable for explicitly teaching vocabulary and idioms as well as showing common mistakes. Jennifer's video lessons are so popular because they are:

authentic and approachable
free
creative and engaging
inspiring
original
always available
very visible
down-to-earth.

The downside? You really need to learn to transition to teaching to a camera with limited interaction. Figuring out the level to teach to can also be tricky.
Nevertheless, a point that Jennifer kept making is that since we are content experts and we know pedagogy, there is no reason for us not to package what we do best differently (e.g. by means of instructional videos, audio podcasts, and blogs) and deliver it online.
Click here and here for two handouts supplied by Jennifer.
How to make a video from scratch? I attended a half-day workshop given by a very experienced group of technology-using teachers.
David Smith of Ohio University opened by emphasizing the need for storyboarding, which does not require the skills of an artist, however. In fact, he claimed that we can use storyboarding as an activity itself to teach prewriting, improving organization, analyzing a film, etc.
He recommended http://dvplace.com/ for information about video editing and production as well as making tutorials.
Next, Peter Vahle of OxfordTEFL, Spain, covered several necessary aspects regarding video production equipment. He said that if you go to YouTube and type in "(whatever) tutorial," you will find anything. But the quality may be too poor. Therefore, we should avoid the pitfalls of easy mistakes like poor sound quality. However, we don't need high-end equipment. A basic home video camera such as Canon FS200 is just fine. But we need at least one other microphone than the built-in camera mic. Peter advocated the use of video as a class project. Have students show a cool way to teach something, he said. Incidentally, from his extensive overseas travel experiences, Peter also shared a very interesting new meaning of blended learning: learn two things at the same time, for example, learn piano and English.
Laura Lau of the Petroleum Institute, UAE, then demonstrated how to use Microsoft Movie Maker to edit videos. Her helpful booklet is here.
Robert Elliot of the University of Oregon kept everyone on the Desktop and talked about screencasts as video. He shared a definition: screenshot + movie clip = screencasts. Screencasts are ideal for creating tutorials for procedures that are very repetitious, for example, a language lab login procedure. He compared the pros and cons of three screencasting software programs: Quicktime (free), Jing (basic version free), and Snapz Pro (annual subscription). A more comprehensive comparison of such software is here.
Katharina Schuhmann of SUNY wrapped up the session, which was sponsored by Video and Digital Media Interest Section (VDMIS) of TESOL, with her talk about Ning and Twitter. Her handout is here.
(To be continued.)

Trends in TESOL

2010-04-13T23:26:00.000-07:00

Howard Gardner's Five Minds

The famed Howard Gardner, the creator of the multiple intelligences theory, was the plenary speaker on the opening night at TESOL 2011. He talked about the need for society and teachers to nurture five minds in the digital age:

the disciplined mind
the synthesizing mind
the creating mind
the respectful mind
the ethical mind

Click here and scroll down to his new book Five Minds for the Future for a more detailed definition of these fives minds.

I feel Gardner's new multiple minds model nicely sums up what each learning institution should establish as its "SLOs" for the 21st century.

Twitter in Class

I heard a big buzz surrounding Twitter as an instructional tool at this year's TESOL Convention. This means you would have to allow cellphone use in the classroom. One presentation illustrated how students sent tweets as a way to provide instant feedback on a fellow student's speech. The instructor used the TwitterFall site to gather and display all the feedback, which was non-structured, spontaneous, as well as anonymous. Talk about engaging all the students in an ideal, just-in-time setting!

Teaching Vocabulary Per Se--An Idea Whose Time Has Come

At TESOL 2010, I attended several vocabulary-teaching presentations, one of which was given by an adult ed teacher from Illinois. Laurie Martin advocates and practices explicitly teaching academic vocabulary to help students transition to credit. She offered tons of practical ideas to teach the so-called "tier 2" academic words, including personalizing examples and utilizing interesting pictures. Her handout is here. At the bottom of page 4 of her handout, you will also find a web link to 10 units of vocabulary lesson plans that you can download and use.

A vocabulary guru, Dr. Robert Marzano of Englewood, Colorado, presented to a packed room a comprehensive approach to vocabulary development. He shared research stats and declared that the vocabulary wars are over, that wide reading is insufficient, and that explicitly teaching vocabulary is highly necessary.

He explained Isabelle Beck's distinctions between Tier I words, Tier II words, and Tier III words. They are differentiated based on frequency and importance. For example, Tier I words are the most basic ones that if you don't know, you'll be in trouble. Natives don't have to learn these Tier I words because they are encountered so frequently.

He said that there is no longer an excuse for any student to leave school lacking a general knowledge of

the basic general terms
the advanced general terms
the academic terms

necessary for success in the US society. He went on to propose non-negotiable lists of critical terms to teach, terms that are standardized at the school district level. He praised the statewide academic vocabulary lists of Tennessee and Oklahoma.

As he introduced a 6-step process for teaching new terms, which does not favor students looking up definitions at early stages, he shared his list of 420 semantic clusters of basic and advanced terms. For example, his Cluster 1 is modals with such terms as

can, cannot, could
may, might, must
shall, should, will, would
ought, used to

The 420 clusters are further organized into 60 super-clusters. For examples, his Super Cluster 10 is all about animals and includes Clusters

#32 Birds
# 35 Baby Animals
#64 Cats/Dogs
#70 Land Animals (General)
#82 Sea Animals
#95 Insects
#117 Action Related to Animals
#155 Parts of Animals
#188 Rodents
#189 Dwellings of Animals
#194 Animals (General)
#309 Shellfish
#310 Equipment Used with Animals
#341 Primates

His system has both teaching and testing implications. He distributed a list of paired words called "Snapshot Test Words," which, with simple instructions such as "Use it" and "Explain it," he said could be used for placement/assessment. If you would like a copy of his 21-page handout about the "Snapshot Test Words," please let me know.

If you want to explore more of Dr. Marzano's work, you can go online and check out his website at http://marzanoresearch.com/site/.

(To be continued.)

Report on the TESOL 2010 Convention

2010-04-06T23:24:00.000-07:00

For anyone seeking my presentation documents through a link to this blog, they are available in the previous entry, dated 4/5/10.

Though the BSI Committee no longer requires us to submit a report after attending funded activities, I found last year that writing about CATESOL 2009 helped me retain more of what I’d learned at that conference; hence this report on “The Big One” in Boston two weeks ago, from March 25-27.

I attended several presentations on corpus-based studies, and many on various aspects of language testing and language proficiency assessment. A few miscellaneous presentations will be addressed at the end under “Other.”

Corpus-based Studies

These are becoming increasingly mainstream in the language teaching field. I was glad to have been able to learn a bit about it last semester by returning to SDSU for a course in corpus linguistics. To provide a brief background, a corpus-based study can consist of analyzing in different ways an existing corpus, such as MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English). One can also construct an original corpus, selecting a large body of related texts, inputting them electronically if necessary, converting them to plain text and saving them as a single text, then running them through a program such as WordSmith or NLTK that tokenizes and tags the text. This means that each word is individually coded and identified—with varying degrees of sophistication—for POS (part of speech). The process takes only a few seconds with one of these programs.

Using a computer language to manipulate variables, the text can then be analyzed in various ways. Corpus studies ordinarily focus on word frequency, or on word collocation—trends in the interrelationship of one word to another—such as verb + preposition in phrasal verbs. Perl has been the most common language for corpus studies in the past, though my course at SDSU employed the more user-friendly Python with the Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK) developed at the University of Pennsylvania and available online. Several presenters at TESOL ‘10 were interested to hear about NLTK, and I hope it will become more widely known and used in the future.

One of the most prominent corpus linguists is Douglas Biber of Northern Arizona University, who attended and presented at the convention. I missed his, but attended presentations by several of his former students. A group of four from Miami Dade College and Georgia State University presented on the use of a corpus-informed curriculum for content-based instruction in four general education courses: Biology, psychology, freshman composition, and humanities. Four classes in each area, covering 16 hours of class time, were transcribed using Panopto for video capture. It was found that words from the Academic Word List (AWL) are used differently between courses, that the most common words are discourse organizers such as know, going, now, you have to. Academic language in general features hedging, frequent defining of terms, and “sign-posting”, i.e. “Now that we’ve tokenized the text, we can manipulate it in different contexts.”

Eric Friginal of Georgia State University presented on the integration of corpus-based approaches in ESL writing instruction, showing how simple concordancing software such as MonoConcPro can be used by advanced ESL writers to improve their use of appropriate academic discourse, focusing in his study on linking adverbials, reporting verbs, and verb tenses. He cited a number of studies and recent publications that explore trends in vocabulary acquisition and the mastery of grammar, as well as the use of corpus tools for the teaching of specific skills in genre-based writing.

My own opinion is that there is still enough novelty to corpus-based research that it retains a bit of snob appeal, and is employed at times more as a sophisticated toy than as a tool to supplement common sense and native speaker intuition.

Testing & Language Proficiency Assessment

Teresa O’Donnell of CEA (Commission on English Language Program Accreditation) conducted a pre-conference institute on student learning outcomes and their assessment. Though unable to attend it, I emailed her before the conference to see if I was leaving out anything in my own presentation that I ought to be aware of. She replied that my presentation was consistent with the objectives of her workshop, and apparently recommended it to some of the workshop participants.

Alicia Munoz of Cuyamaca College presented with a group of California community college teachers on the CB-21 coding project. Though I can talk to her just about any time in San Diego, we discussed aspects of it that I hadn’t been clear on and it was interesting to hear the historical perspective on it as a teacher-based initiative.

Jim Pettersson and Tom Henry of Utah Valley University gave a very detailed workshop on practical guidelines for reliable grading. Little in it was new, but it was an impressive compilation of information about rubric development, types of grading, approaches to disputes over grades, types of feedback, and the legal implications of The Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act. The latter led me to add a disclaimer to the writing samples from my own presentation and to further modify them to protect student confidentiality.

In a surprisingly sparsely attended colloquium moderated by Deborah Kennedy of CAL (Center for Applied Linguistics), a test developers’ panel representing ACT (The COMPASS Test), CASAS (Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment Systems), CTB (The TABE Test, and most famously the inventors of the #2 pencil), and CAL’s own BEST Test (Basic English Skills Test) gave presentations that were almost but not quite sales pitches for their respective assessment instruments. Another frequently used acronym was NRS (National Reporting System requirements, U.S. Department of Education). Apparently, none of these instruments are at this time usable as placement instruments under NRS requirements, which is why the CELSA is still the only acceptable instrument in California. The COMPASS Test has an optional capability for artificial intelligence machine-scoring of writing samples with instant feedback. The ACT representative talked with me about it afterwards and called it “scary”. The company that developed the AI software is very secretive about it, though from my single computational linguistics course it seems a very sophisticated use of naïve Bayes.

In a colloquium on the use of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and other proficiency scales, JoAnn Crandall and five others discussed the implementation of standards for EFL contexts. The CEFR was frequently encountered throughout the conference, and the panel enjoyed my Rip Van Winkle-like perspective on the development of CEFR from the work of Van Ek in the early ‘80s, which was prominent in my own master’s thesis. The CEFR and the ACTFL scale (which begot California Pathways which begot CB-21 coding for ESL) are distant cousins, with a certain amount of “cross-pollination” between them.

For the remaining presentations, the titles give a pretty good indication of the topic and content: Differentiating Language Proficiency and Developmental Writing Skills for ELLs (children), Teacher Created Benchmark Assessments of Writing Aligned With ELP Standards (secondary school learners), Student Writing Without Teacher Death: Low Workload Supplements for Composition (the perennial problem of time-consuming grading), and Assessing a New Writing Task Type: Short Answer Responses (SARs).

Other

The Thursday plenary, TESOL: Past, Present & Future was a sleeper. I wonder if officers and former officers of the organization realize how boring they are when they joke around for an hour about matters and past events few others know or care about.

The Friday plenary by Maryann Wolfe on the other hand, The Evolving Reading Brain: Implications for Cognitive and Linguistic Development, was fascinating. The visuals included a number of brain scans showing the parts of the brain used during reading in various languages, including those with syllabaries and pictographs.

I attended a whimsical presentation by Greta Vollmer on The Visual Rhetoric of Everyday Genres, which included the analysis of cereal boxes and CD covers. I commented that she was apparently a fan of Roland Barthes, and several of us got into a discussion of semiotics afterwards.

The last presentation I attended on the last day of the conference was Social Responsibility: What and Why? This was mainly because Kip Cates, a founder of the Social Responsibility IS (Interest Section), was an old friend from Japan days whom I hadn’t seen in fourteen years. Several former presidents of TESOL, retired or nearing it, have become active in this IS. The session seemed a bit touchy-feely; I felt like telling one of the officers at one point to “man-up!” It is, however, the newest IS and an important development in the organization.

Conclusion

The language teaching field seems to be going through a rather self-confident phase. There are conference presentations on brain function, an almost smug knowingness among corpus linguists, and a tremendous renewed interest in general proficiency scales (particularly CEFR). The latter was my main area of interest until the mid-‘90s, when the “eclectic method”, task-based learning, and the "Gosh, we really don't know as much as we thought we did!" attitude then in vogue encouraged such scorn for the concept of general language proficiency that I basically went into hibernation for a decade and a half. It would be wrong to say that I missed nothing during that time, but with a certain amount of effort it wasn’t hard to get back up to speed. It was nice to give a well-received presentation of my own and to contribute something to the discussion.

Kevin's Presentation at TESOL 2010

2010-04-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

With his blessing, I am publishing Kevin's work here. He has done a ton of research on the topic of the connection between language proficiency assessment and SLOs. He recently gave a presentation entitled "The Missing Link: Student Learning Outcomes and Language Proficiency Assessment" to a roomful of very receptive attendees at TESOL 2010 in Boston.

Here are his documents to share, all in PDF format:

Feedback on a Statewide Integrated ESL Rubric Sought

2010-03-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

Did you know that the ASCCC (Academic Senate of California Community Colleges) Basic Skills Committee and ASCCC Noncredit Committee are currently seeking final feedback on a statewide integrated ESL rubric?

All ESL teachers are urged to review the "NONCREDIT and CREDIT Integrated ESL Rubric (For Reference with Survey)" at http://www.cccbsi.org/cb21-information and then complete a brief survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RGLFYQF.

If you have difficulty downloading the rubric from the Basic Skills website, you can click here for a PDF version that I converted from Word.