More Notes from CATESOL 2009

• Our very own Colleen Weldele and Jerry Pike gave a very well-attended, well-received presentation on the topic of helping Generation 1.5 students in writing classrooms. The handouts they shared on the steps to develop the students’ critical reading skills and on a group project in which students plan a one-hour grammar lesson to teach their fellow students in a fun way were particularly welcomed. [My own comment: They should give the talk to others on our campus, particularly to colleagues who have Generation 1.5 students in their classes.]
• Barbara Jonckheere and Rosemary Hiruma of Cal State Long Beach shared three class project ideas:
  o A class journal. Students take turns taking the journal book home to read others’ entries and to add his or her own.
  o Program Newsletters. Two classes join in producing an annual program/dept. newsletter. Both classes meet for planning, writing, and revising sessions. The final products are professionally published on glossy paper and widely distributed as good publicity for the program/dept.
  o A short story anthology. The two presenters claimed that using short stories for ESL students are more appealing than using a big novel. After reading the stories clustered thematically, learning the literary terms, writing in response to questions triggered by the stories, and having discussions that were entirely student-led, the intermediate and the advanced classes joined to form cross-level pairs and groups in a creative writing project. The brainstorming session ended with each team having a plan ready (character details, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution). To help alleviate writers’ block, the teachers had put on cards 50 story starters found here: http://library.thinkquest.org/J001156/writing%20process/sl_storystarters.htm. During the subsequent collaborative writing session, the students used one laptop per group to write first drafts of their short stories. For the last class meeting, both classes came together for a dramatic reading of the stories by the student authors themselves. The student-generated short story anthology became souvenir books.
• At the community college level rap session, CB21 codes and ESL rubrics were clarified, revised, and approved. It is now clear that “one or however many levels below transfer” in the ESL rubric refers to the level(s) below Freshman Composition. During the discussion, someone emphasized how important it is for ESL and English departments to cooperate now that we are faced with the same set of basic skills students. It was suggested that colleges should find funding to support ESL faculty to attend developmental education conferences and English faculty to attend ESL conferences like CATESOL annual state conferences.
• Kristi Reyes and her colleagues from the noncredit ESL program at MiraCosta demonstrated how to use the free Microsoft Movie Maker in the classroom for students to make digital stories.
• Jayme Adelson-Goldstein, co-author of the famous Oxford Picture Dictionary, gave one of the popular Sunday workshops termed as “A Lexical Feast.” A few key points from her workshop, which was attended by Kevin, Grace, Elizabeth, and Angela, too:
  o An educated person has 10,000 to 20,000 words as his/her active vocabulary and 100,000 words as his/her passive vocabulary.
  o Minimum number of words required to get by: 2,000.
  o There are 5,400 word families (example of one family: involve, involving, involved in, involved with, involvement, etc.)
  o Vocabulary needs to be
  
  • Explicitly taught
    
  • Linked to a lesson
    
  • Retained
    
  • Expanded
  
  o Five stages of vocabulary acquisition
  
  • Get it (classroom comprehension)
    
  • Remember it (retention)
    
  • Recognize it (recognition out of the original context)
    
  • Use it (production in speaking and writing)
    
  • Own it (use of higher-level thinking skills)
  
  o Specific vocabulary teaching strategies include:
  
  • Providing a word list before a reading
    
  • Designing a paragraph for students to fill in the blanks using a word family
    
  • Following an early production question sequence
    
  • Using peer dictation
• Next year, it is our turn to host San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference on the 3rd Saturday of October. Five ESL programs/departments in our county have taken turns hosing this annual conference. The ESL Dept. of Palomar College last hosted the conference in 2000.