I guess I am not reading the right sites this year, but I had to go looking for information on the 2011 TESOL EVO sessions. I finally found it here. I am signed up for the vocabulary session. I think that is all I am going to do this year. But I encourage you to check it out and see if there is anything that strikes your fancy. You do not need to be a member of TESOL to participate, and it is totally free — so there is no excuse not to check it out!
Although not all my students have given me the urls of their blogs, some of them have and they are listed on my classroom blog. They are going to begin posting soon. Please check their blogs out if you are interested in what they are doing.
Creating a video while driving isn’t the safest behavior in the world, I don’t think, but …
The idea of making use of small amounts of time to learn English is a good one, I think. Too often we put off doing something useful because we don’t have enough time. Usually I think it is an excuse rather than a real reason, but if we look at all the five minute time slots that we have empty, there is probably plenty of time for us to learn anything we want to learn — including English.
Can a beginner learn much in 5 minutes? Yes. If we think about the presentation portion of a lesson, 5 minutes is a lot. We can present almost any grammar point in that amount of time. It is plenty of time to present a dialogue and even practice it several times. The problem that I see is that the beginner may not know how to build on that five minutes. That is where technology can come in. Podcasts, videos, games, and other tools can provide that 5-minute chunk of learning and they are available later for the learner to go back and refer to again. I think it is much more likely that a student would review a 5-minute video than a one hour video, much less a one hour lecture!
More advanced students can fine-tune their langauge in a brief amount of time. Again, technology makes it more feasible. If I have trouble with verb tenses in conditionals, for instance, a 5-minute audio or video could help me really focus on that particular point and I could make real progress in a short amount of time.
Sometimes the short activities are the most fun, and often they provide an opportunity for real learning. Mini-lessons can be more helpful than an hour-long class on the same subject. We can only absorb so much at any one time. I would prefer to see my students make use of the odd bits of time that they have than to have them dedicate two hours once a week outside of class studying English. I think the more frequent shorter time periods are more effective.
Through my META account, I learned of an online opportunity — a semester-long course: Distance English Language Training Workshop, available here. I signed up for it and have started completing the activities.
This seems like it will be an interesting course. Because it lasts from now until May, there is more time than you get with TESOL EVO courses. At the beginning of a semester, it is always a challenge to find time to complete the activities in the 6 weeks of an EVO session. But this gives me fewer activities to cram into a week, and I think I will be much more likely to actually complete them. At least that’s what I hope will happen!
If you are interested, check it out! Scroll down until you find Distance English Language Training Workshop.
Over at EFL Classroom 2.0 there is a survey about standard English. He asks if there is such a thing as standard English and whether or not it should be taught. I have a little problem with the question as it has two parts and I might agree with one part and not the other, and there is no option for that. It is an interesting question nonetheless.
When I was in grad school, one of my professors told me that anything a native English speaker says is correct. (My MA TESOL came from a linguistics department rather than English or education or someplace else.) I have always believed that. English has no regulating body that determines correctness, and I like it that way!
That does not help us much when we think about what kind of English we need to teach our students, though.
I really believe that there is no single answer to the question of what we should teach our students. Everyone’s needs are different. In my English for Academic Purposes institute, I believe I have a responsibility to teach my students more formal academic English. I am not concerned that they be able to talk to people on the street as much as I am that they be able to understand academic texts. I have a more prescriptivist approach to grammar with these students than I did when I taught migrant farmworkers. With them I was more interested in them being able to communicate with doctors and police and their children’s teachers. If it wasn’t “perfect”, none of us cared.
Go on over to EFL Classroom and take the survey. And, if you want, let me know how you voted here!
I read Ken Starks’ Blog of HeliOS because he works more tirelessly to promote the use of Linux than almost anyone I have ever even heard of. Today I was surprised to see that he was talking about teaching English. This is not Ken’s usual topic by any means. I was intrigued, to say the least.
He starts out:
I’ve been told that English is one of the toughest languages in the world to learn.
I disagree.
I believe it to be the toughest language in the world to teach.
He then goes on with a hysterical – if all too predictable to us professional language teachers – description of trying to teach his first wife English. He, of course teaches her about silent e and long vowels:
“OK honey…this is simple. We are working with 4 letter words, every word has a vowel as the second letter and a silent “e” at the end. When you see words like this, you will know that the vowel carries a “long” sound. Like the letter “a” will sound like you are saying the letter “a”…not “ah”. Here are some examples.”
Home.
Bone.
Came.
Safe.
If you are a language teacher, you already know what is coming next, but for those of you who aren’t, let me continue.
The next day his wife wanted to know about the word gone. Why didn’t it follow the rule he had taught her the day before? But we all knew that, right? (I think the most important thing I have learned in my many years of teaching is not to talk about pronunciation rules! In English, that is an oxymoron!)
I laughed, of course. And I kept reading. Because I knew that eventually he would bring the subject around to Linux. And, of course, he did!
Those were just a couple of incidents that helped make the decision to send her to a professional English as a Second Language course. Teaching someone your language is not a task for the weak-willed or uncommitted.
But in remembering this, it brings to mind what new Linux users may be going through…and more to the point, what we probably need to remember in teaching them.
Sure, we speak the language…it’s second nature for us. We think nothing of a file system with identifiers such as .etc and .var. Sudo apt-get and sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list rolls off our fingertips as if we were navigating the simplest of tasks. Some find the /.init/.d folder and subsequent commands second nature.
But to the New User, it’s as if we are digital geniuses, blazing a trail through black screens and cryptic symbols running in endless strings. We are speaking a language they cannot understand. Hitting the tab key to complete a command string is voodoo to them…most of them anyway.
Linux users, like English speakers, speak in code all the time. We need to make an effort to explain things to people who don’t know that code. Don’t think they are stupid because they don’t know it but recognize that we ourselves had to learn it once.
But now I would like to turn this back around. If you have learned English, you can probably learn to use Linux! Why not give it a try?
Anyway, check out Ken’s post.
Mike Rose always makes a lot of sense to me. His most recent blog post Colleges Need to Re-Mediate Remediation is no exception. It reflects my attitude toward teaching academic ESL, too.
Describing a typical remedial English course, Rose says
The traditional remedial writing course typically begins with simple writing assignments and includes a fair number of workbook exercises, mostly focused on grammar and usage.. The readings are fairly basic, in both style and content. Powerful—and limiting—assumptions about language, learning, and cognition drive such a curriculum, although they might not be articulated: Students like Kevin must go back to linguistic square one, building skills slowly through the elements of grammar.
Simple reading and writing assignments won’t overly tax such students’ abilities and will allow a concentration on correcting linguistic errors. Complex, demanding work and big ideas—college work—should be put on hold until they master the basics.
He goes on to assert that this approach is not only unnecessary but also counter-productive. He and his colleagues looked at the kinds of assignments students are commonly called on to produce in their earliest courses at university and then designed a curriculum that would prepare a student to do those assignments. They
wanted to help him improve his writing in all aspects—grammar, organization, style. But we didn’t believe we needed to carve up language into small workbook bits and slowly build his skills.
They found readings, sequenced assignments, and structured the semester in a way that would truly help the student learn to write better.
To assist students, we organized instruction to include much discussion of the readings and a good deal of writing in which they could try out ideas and get feedback on their work as it developed. And because many students, like Kevin, displayed all the grammatical, stylistic, and organizational problems that give rise to remedial writing courses in the first place, we spent a lot of time on errors—in class, in conference, in comments on their papers—but all in the context of their academic writing.
That is a huge point, and one that is tied to our core assumptions about cognition and language: Writing filled with grammatical errors does not preclude engagement with sophisticated intellectual material, and errors can be dealt with effectively as one works with such material.
When I teach ESL at this level, I try to do the same thing. We do real academic work. In and around that, we learn grammar and vocabulary and whatever else the students need in order to be successful. For example, in one class this semester, we have each chosen a different country to study throughout the course. We are reading news reports every week and summarizing them. We are now in the process of learning to write a descriptive essay – introducing the country in general. This will take some time as we have to learn about citing sources, synthesizing information, and a whole lot more. In a couple weeks, we will move on to another type of essay, still about the same country. We will write opinion, compare-contrast, cause-effect, and analysis essays. They will build from one unit to the next. We will talk about their topics and about their readings. We will look at their writing and the problems in it, but we won’t stop there.
Rose says
Some studies have emerged that confirm the approach we have taken. Successful remedial programs set high standards, are focused on inquiry and problem-solving in a substantial curriculum, use a pedagogy that is supportive and interactive, draw on a variety of techniques and approaches, are in line with students’ goals, and provide credit for course work.
I try to ensure that my courses meet these guidelines. I don’t think I always succeed, but I always try. I think my students deserve it.
Imagine that you are an ESL instructor and you have $10,000 to spend this week. What would you buy? Just give me your ideas off the top of your head. I’ll tell you the back story later.
The first post I read today was on Doug Noon’s Borderland about his use of free and voluntary reading. It really made me think.I have used free and voluntary reading in my classes before. I did it in China. I did it in Louisiana. I was always very pleased with the way students really took to reading. So why am I not doing it now?
There is no good reason that I can come up with. I have just not structured my classes this way. I have not done it for any reason other than that I felt there was so much for students to learn that there was no time to lose. And that, this year, translated into no free reading. In part it may be because last year I was in adult ed, teaching beginners in a highly structured program. I got out of the habit. But I think it is something I need to try again. I have to see where it goes in the program. With only 150 minutes a week, I never seem to get everything done that I want to. That right there tells you I need to do some serious thinking about my classes, doesn’t it?
I am in the process of writing the curriculum for the program, and I hope that will help me find a way to better spread out the many things I think need to be done over the whole program rather than trying to cram them all into my classes.
Thanks, Doug, for the reminder! This is definitely something I need to work on!
I am looking at ESL placement tests. I am not happy with what I have, and now is a good time to make a change. If any of you are teaching in an intensive English program– or even in a non-intensive one — please take a minute to leave a comment telling me what your institution uses.
I have students write a short essay to give us an idea of their ability to write. And there is an oral proficiency interview, so I am covered on those skills.
Cost and ease of scoring are, of course, of vital importance. We test maybe 40 students in the fall and fewer in spring and summer.
Any suggestions?
