Hello everyone!
The definition of quote is to repeat someone else’s statement, phrases or thoughts.
Here is today’s!
Happy Teaching!
from Fun To Teach ESL – Teaching English as a Second Language http://esleld.blogspot.com/2016/10/mondays-quote_31.html
Thinking back to the beginning of my doctoral studies, I remember having an enormous fear of writing a dissertation. Everything appeared to be intimidating: choosing a topic, collecting data, analyzing and interpreting results, writing chapters, and, of course, defending the complete project. I remember asking my fellow graduate students who were ahead of me in the process about tips and suggestions for writing a dissertation.
I know that I am not alone in my fear and uncertainty, as I often hear graduate students asking the same questions that I once had. So in my next two blogs I’d like to feature six young scholars—second language writers—who have recently graduated with their doctoral degrees from Purdue University and who are now working in various educational contexts both in the United States and abroad. I asked each of them to share their experience in writing a dissertation and provide a piece of advice to current students pursuing their doctoral degrees in the language teaching field. The suggestions from three of them are below, and the other three will be introduced in my next blog.
Aleksandra Kasztalska (Linguistics)
“Even though I was happy with the finished product, I couldn’t wait to put it down and ‘move on’!”
My professors always told me that “a good dissertation is a done dissertation,” and I think that single sentence is one of the most important pieces of advice I received while in grad school. When working on research, I—like many other graduate students, no doubt—tended to set unrealistically high standards for myself, which meant that I was always a little too ambitious about what I could accomplish in the time I was given. Above all, I always felt that there was so much more literature “out there” that I needed to familiarize myself with and as a result I had a hard time putting away all those articles and actually starting on my own papers.
I feel like I approached my dissertation in a similar manner. My original goals and scope were rather broad, and my dissertation committee immediately asked me to narrow down what I wanted to research and write about. Although a little uneasy at first (I wanted to do ALL THE THINGS!), I quickly realized just how right my committee members were. As I started reading the literature and then collecting and analyzing my own data, I found that several months had passed like a blur and that there was still so much more to get done before the defense date! Clearly, my professors were right: This was taking me much longer than I had expected. Sure, I’d done research before, but the dissertation was a whole new ballgame because there were more steps to follow, more unexpected problems to figure out, and because there was a lot more at stake than just a class grade. I was thus extremely relieved that I had narrowed my scope because it allowed me to deal with a more manageable data set and gave me more time to actually write up my findings and make all the necessary revisions without pulling all of my hair out.
Was my dissertation perfect? Of course not. But I gave it my best and I was proud of my work. And, above all, I was able to graduate on time. Which was probably for the best, because, even though I was happy with the finished product, I couldn’t wait to put it down and “move on”!
Ksenia Kirillova (Hospitality & Tourism Management)
“If I have something interesting and new to think about, then I have something to write!”
From the start, I have been a good writer in my native language, Russian. Somehow I always knew what to write and how to write it. Continuing my education in the USA, however, proved that my writing skills were not very relevant in the U.S. academic discourse. Particularly, I struggled with the organization of a logically coherent argument and sentence structure. Although I had improved my writing by the beginning of the PhD program, I had also developed tremendous anxiety about the very act of writing in English. When I inquired with one of my PhD teachers, for whom English is also not a native language, I received an unhelpful piece of advice: “Just keep writing, and it will get better,” ultimately leaving me (and many others) in a swim-or-sink situation.
In this context, writing a dissertation seemed a formidable endeavor. Yet, somewhere in the process I learned a couple of useful lessons. First, no matter how much I dislike writing, I had better get it on with and do it. I made it a personal goal to write at least 500 words a day, and I did not allow myself to go to bed until this objective was fully achieved. Second, writing is thinking: If I have something interesting and new to think about, then I have something to write! I also carefully studied my advisor’s (who is a successful second-language writer herself) published work in attempts to imitate her writing style.
I personally have never been able to benefit from free writing or many other techniques normally suggested by writing teachers. Choosing a dissertation topic that inspired my thinking and fueled the passion was the best writing technique for me.
Masakazu Mishima (Second Language Studies/ESL)
“Are you committed enough to break through all the obstacles to achieve your objective?”
“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” This is a well-known quote from an established American business professional and prominent writer, Paul J. Meyer. As I now look back, all the struggle and joy of writing my dissertation as a second language (L2) writer, his words precisely encompass the particular mindset that I maintained throughout the process of dissertation writing.
Writing a PhD dissertation in the language that is not your own sounds daunting, but I have never really paid attention to the fact that I am an L2 writer. In fact, I have never felt that I am at a disadvantage by any measure. Having been in the field long enough and read many scholarly works, the most obvious fact to me is that quality work is never really about your language status. Look around you! How many of the now-established scholars in our field are L1/L2 writers? And who really cares about their language status? I never really hear people asking at a conference, “Your recent publication was phenomenal. You are not an L2 writer, are you?”
What we (should) care about is whether or not your work contributes to the field and whether or not it demonstrates your in-depth knowledge with keen insight that thrusts into and fills “the gap” in the field. Of course, the quality of writing matters, too. But writing a quality piece for any purpose is a challenging task, and this challenge applies to anyone regardless of his or her language status. That is why it boils down to the question: Are you committed enough to break through all the obstacles to achieve your objective? There are a number of practical tips that I can offer as a former PhD student, but they are all subsumed by the single word—commitment. From finding resources to concocting ways to deal with obstacles of any kind, it is all within you waiting to be discovered.
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/writing-a-dissertation-tips-from-former-phd-students-part-1/
For as long as I have been teaching, I have witnessed a similar pattern occurring time and time again in my various classrooms. Regardless of whether it was 40 Japanese high school students, 20 Chinese university students, or even just 5 ESL students from different countries in my classroom, when a question is posed to the entire class, the comprehensible response comes from just a small portion of students.
Sometimes students who want to answer will raise their hands and wait to be called on, or I may even call on students to answer. Then I have one response. Other times, the whole class more or less answers at the same time, and I have a majority or perhaps simply the loudest response. Sound familiar? The traditional call and response format cannot give educators a clear picture of what each individual student understands. After making it through a whole class review session where every single question was answered correctly, it may be surprising when some students score poorly on an assessment. Depending on the type of review, that could be due, at least in part, to the call and response format presenting an inaccurate representation of student understanding and knowledge. This is a problem that I have struggled with in the past but have now solved with the help of a student response system.
Student response systems, which used to be characterize by infrared clickers, have come quite a long way in recent years. There are many options to choose from, with Socrative and Kahoot! being two that I would recommend for one-to-one classrooms, where each teacher and student has a device, and Plickers being the best option I have seen for one-device classrooms. All three of these and many others are free and easy to use for both teachers and students.
Personally, I have used Socrative the most because it was the first one I stumbled upon and I have not found a reason to switch to another yet. In Socrative, I primarily use the multiple-choice or true/false questions in the “Quick Question” feature. With each student on his or her own device, I open up a quick question and ask every student to respond. I can watch the percentages change and see how many students have responded in real time. With this information, I can immediately determine if students need more practice or are ready to move on to the next topic. It is truly eye-opening to see a true/false question I perceived to be an easy question divide a class right down the middle. Other features like the Quiz can also be useful for gathering information about student comprehension, and Socrative’s reporting format makes it easy to see patterns in the data, too.
If you have ever wondered what your introverted, shy, off-task, quiet, or lower-level learners are really comprehending, start using a student response system. The 10–15 minutes it might take for students to adjust to whatever resource you choose is well worth the investment. Honestly, they will probably catch on even faster than you do, and that is 100% okay! You may even find other instructors at your school start using it, too—and why not? As teachers, don’t we want to know how ALL of our students are doing?
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/problem-tech-solved-comprehension-checks-1/
Hello everyone!
The definition of quote is to repeat someone else’s statement, phrases or thoughts.
Here is today’s!
Happy Teaching!
from Fun To Teach ESL – Teaching English as a Second Language http://esleld.blogspot.com/2016/10/mondays-quote_24.html
What Is a Corpus?
Corpse, marine corps, corporation, and corpulent all derive from the Latin word corpus, meaning body. That Latin word corpus also exists, intact, in English, but rather than an anatomical body, it refers to a body of language. A corpus is a large collection of language, traditionally written, but nowadays, corpora (the Latinate plural) of spoken language can be found.
Corpora in Language Teaching
The big benefit of using a corpus is that it’s data driven, and that data is based on actual language usage. It’s pretty much descriptivist heaven.
When a professor was first explaining to me the value of corpus data, he used this example: if asked to define the phrase par for the course, you’ll find “what is normal or expected in any given circumstances.” But if students depend only on definitions like that, from textbooks or dictionaries or teachers, they’re likely to miss some crucial information. Though that definition may be accurate, a quick corpus search reveals that the phrase is almost always used with a negative connotation, as in, “These tantrums are par for the course.”
As corpora have become more readily available and more representative of spoken, day-to-day language, they have become valuable tools for those in the field of TESOL. Most often, it’s researchers and materials developers, but there are some classroom applications for the corpus as well. Let’s look at the basics of how to use a corpus and check out a couple of introductory techniques for incorporating corpus data into your classroom.
Using a Corpus
When you use a corpus, you’re generally performing a search, just like you would in Google. The difference is that when you Google “kitten in a tree” you’re most likely looking for pictures of kittens in trees or information for getting kittens out of trees. If you search for the phrase “kitten in a tree” in a corpus, what you’re looking for is instances of that actual phrase in use. The language is your end goal.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is my go-to. Search a phrase just like you would anywhere else:
Your results will be every instance of the word tree found in the corpus. You could do the same for a string of words.
Along the left you have the year, type of source, and specific source, and then along the right is the actual context in which the word was found. This isn’t terribly helpful yet, though.
Let’s say I’m an English learner, struggling with prepositions. I want to know which prepositions commonly precede the word table. Let’s select the Collocates tab:
We’re also going to select “prep.ALL” from the [POS] dropdown next to “Collocates.” What this means is we’re searching for the prepositions that most commonly occur with the word table.
The scale of numbers below tells the engine where to search. By selecting the 2 on the left, I’m searching only for prepositions that occur one or two words before the word table. Any prepositions outside of that range or after table will be ignored.
Here are the results:
The frequency at the right tells us that on is by far the most common, with 12,830 hits, and in and at come in second and third.
That’s just a very brief primer, but corpora are extremely powerful tools for getting loads of language data. There are some tutorial videos out there to get you more familiar with using corpora.
Introducing ELs to the Corpus
Beginners
With beginners, I recommend doing the work for them. When presenting students with new vocabulary words, print out the results you get, and help them to notice important patterns related to syntax and collocation.
Intermediate
As students progress, show them how the corpus works, perhaps using an LCD projector while you search, narrating the process as you go.
Advanced
Once students can do some limited searching on their own, give them assignments that they can use the corpus to complete. For instance, design a cloze activity based on simple corpus searches that you have performed.
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/corpora-in-adult-ed/
I’d like to introduce you to guest blogger Sandy Nahmias. I met Sandy through NJTESOL/NJBE where we are both on the Executive Board. She is an experienced ESL/bilingual teacher who has also been active on projects for WIDA and has consulted with the N.J. Department of Education on numerous projects. Here is Sandy’s blog.
There was recently a query on the NJTESOL/NJBE discussion list in which a participant asked, “Are mainstream teachers with ELLs in their classrooms legally required to modify lessons for them?” I answered the question on the discussion list and would like to elaborate in this blog.
A good place to start would be the “Dear Colleague” letter of 7 January 2015 that was issued jointly by the The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the USDOE and the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). These agencies share authority for enforcing Title VI in the education context. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act (EEOA) confirmed that public schools and state educational agencies (SEAs) must act to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by students in their instructional programs. The Departments issued the joint guidance in the “Dear Colleague” letter “in order to assist SEAs, school districts, and all public schools in meeting their legal obligations to ensure that EL students can participate meaningfully and equally in educational programs and services.” The bottom line is that a school district’s programs must enable EL students to acquire both English and content knowledge, and there are several ways a district may choose to go about providing the equality of instruction that is required by law throughout the United States.
What Could Have Prompted the Question?
I asked myself what could have prompted this question and took a look at the research. Between 1980 and 2009, the number of school-age children in the United States who spoke another language in the home increased from 4.7 million to 11.2 million. ELs are found throughout the United States in growing numbers. They are represented in every socioeconomic level and speak more than 470 different languages, although Spanish is the home language for at least 75% of these students (Linan-Thompson, & Vaughn, 2007). In “Teachers’ Dispositions and Beliefs about Cultural and Linguistic Diversity,” Vázquez-Montilla, Just, and Triscari (2014) cite that ELs “represent the fastest growing student population in the U.S.; of the estimated 5 million ELLs currently in American classrooms, approximately two-thirds (66%) are in at least one course taught by mainstream teachers” (p. 577).
Attitudes of Teachers Toward ELs
In a blog by and about mainstream teacher attitudes towards ELs, A. Athas reviews an article entitled “‘Not in My Classroom’: Teacher Attitudes Towards English Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom.” He cites a study where 422 K–12 teachers and 6 EL teachers were surveyed about attitudes concerning ELs in mainstream classrooms. The authors of the study, Walker, Shafer, and Liam (2004), found considerable negative to neutral attitudes held by mainstream teachers toward ELs. They broke down these attitudes into five categories. Here are the factors that the authors cited:
Clearly the rapid escalation of linguistic and cultural diversity in the United States over the past 30 years poses challenges for schools, districts, and school systems. However, these challenges are not insurmountable. Professional development on making content accessible for ELs; resources including websites, blogs, and texts; and collaborative efforts between mainstream teachers and teachers of ELs are several of the many ways to effect a positive change in attitudes.
I will end here in the hope that this will help in the future to continue the conversation about working with ELs in mainstream classrooms. Please write a comment below if you have additional ideas about this topic.
References
Linan-Thompson, S., & Vaughn, S. (2007). Research-based methods of reading instruction for English learners, grades K-4. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Vazquez-Montilla, E., Just, M., & Triscari, R. (2014). Teachers’ dispositions and beliefs about cultural and linguistic diversity. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 2(8), 577–587.
Walker, A., Shafer, J., & Liam, M. (2004). “Not in my classroom”: Teacher attitudes towards English language learners in the mainstream classroom. Wheaton, MD: NJRP.
Sandra Nahmias is a bilingual/ESL teacher in Linden, New Jersey, and has been an educator of ELs for 19 years. She is the Bilingual Elementary SIG Representative to the NJTESOL/NJBE Executive Board and a World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) Certified Trainer. Sandra has consulted for the NJDOE on a number of projects involving the CCSS and WIDA’s English Language Development standards.
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/public-school-teachers-of-els-a-look-at-the-legal-requirements/
A guest post by Luciana C. de Oliveira
In this blog, Luciana de Oliveira reflects on the eight worldwide conferences she’s attended in the past 3 years as a participant in the TESOL Affiliate Speaker Program.
This past March, I ended a 3-year term on the TESOL Board of Directors. Those were a very busy 3 years in my professional life, and among the best in my career. Part of what made them the best was my participation in the TESOL Affiliate Speaker Program. I was invited to and participated in eight conferences led by eight affiliates: Uruguay TESOL (URUTESOL), Louisiana TESOL (LaTESOL), Yakut TESOL, California and Nevada TESOL (CATESOL), North and South Dakota TESL (Dakota TESL), Illinois TESOL (ITBE), Sunshine State TESOL of Florida, and Asociación Costarricense de Profesores de Inglés (ACPI-TESOL).
2013: URUTESOL
In March 2013, I went to my first conference in Uruguay, hosted by URUTESOL, where I met amazing scholars and teachers. My plenary “Using audio feedback in EFL/ESL classes” opened the conference, which occurred in beautiful Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. I also had a chance to go around the city and explore its monuments, city life, and—of course—amazing food. That was the beginning of a wonderful experience through the program!
2014: LaTESOL, Yakut TESOL, and CATESOL
In 2014, I had the privilege of doing plenary and featured workshops at LaTESOL, Yakut TESOL, and CATESOL.
At LaTESOL, I presented the plenary “Navigating the waters of the Common Core State Standards: Expectations for writing” and the featured workshop “A genre-based approach to writing instruction for ELLs: Addressing the demands of the CCSS.” Plenary and workshop participants were specially appreciative of the ideas I presented about how to address the demands of the CCSS with ELLs by focusing on writing through a teaching/learning cycle that leads students through three phases (deconstruction, joint construction, and independent construction) and provides the kind of scaffolding that is so crucial for second language writers (more about this approach can be find in my CCSS and ELLs TESOL Press series).
Yakut TESOL in Yakutsk, Russia, was next, and it was my first time in a country where I didn’t speak the language! (I wrote about my experiences in a TESOL blog post). There I presented a plenary “A genre-based approach to writing instruction” applied to teaching English as a foreign language and a follow-up keynote “A genre-based approach to writing instruction: Tips for implementation,” in which I described what EFL teachers can do when teaching writing in their respective contexts. I led teachers in jointly constructing an informational report to model how they can focus on genres with their students. Lastly, I presented the session “About TESOL” and spoke about what a TESOL membership can offer.
Luciana leading a workshop with Yakut TESOL 2014 conference participants.
At CATESOL, I presented the plenary “Thinking about Common Core Standards: Connecting, creating, and sharing insights” in which I discussed the expectations and demands of the CCSS English language arts standards and connecting these to the new English language development standards that were released in California in 2012. I also participated in a discussion session put together by the Non-Native Language Educators’ Issues Interest Group in which we discussed issues related to professionalism, discrimination, and the job market for multilingual teachers.
Panel about nonnative English speaking professionals’ issues at CATESOL 2014. Featured from left to right: Stefan Frazier, Luciana de Oliveira, Lia Kamhi-Stein, Tünde Csepely, Julia Schulte, Scott Phillabaum.
2015: Dakota TESL
At Dakota TESL, serving both South Dakota and North Dakota, I presented the plenary “College and Career Readiness Standards for K–12 and Adult Education and ELLs: Expectations for writing” and the featured workshop “A genre-based approach to writing instruction for ELLs: Addressing the demands of the new standards and beyond.” The conference organizers requested that I speak about both the CCSS and the College and Readiness Standards for Adult Education, as many of their conference participants and members work in adult education programs. This was a new area for me, but one for which I am grateful as I was able to discuss similarities and differences between these standards.
2016: ITBE, Sunshine State TESOL of Florida, and ACPI-TESOL
Luciana and an ITBI conference atendee who received one of Luciana’s books as part of a raffle.
At ITBE, I presented the plenary “Planned and interactional scaffolding: Six Cs of support,” in which I discussed and provided examples of planned scaffolding and interactional scaffolding used by K–12 teachers in real classroom situations.
Sunshine State TESOL of Florida—now my home affiliate—came next. I presented the plenary “Academic language in WIDA, the Florida Standards and beyond.” This session provided examples of academic language in various standards documents. Participants analyzed texts in mathematics and science and identified the different ways that academic language presents challenges and possibilities for ELLs in K–12 and beyond.
My last conference was ACPI-TESOL in Costa Rica, where I met a number of wonderful colleagues who immediately became friends! My workshop, “A genre-based approach to writing instruction,” led teachers to experience the joint construction of a descriptive report. We deconstructed a descriptive report about Spain that served as a mentor text by looking at its stages of “positioning” and “description” and identifying how the text started, moved sentence from sentence, and made connections to other parts of the text. We then moved on to the joint construction of a similar text, with me as the “teacher” and the workshop participants as my “students.”
The TESOL Affiliate Speaker Program provides affiliates the opportunity to have TESOL Board or staff members at their conferences. I am so thankful for the opportunities this program afforded me as a board member, for the contributions I was able to make, and for all of the amazing people I have met. Affiliate leaders, please take advantage of this wonderful opportunity!
Luciana C. de Oliveira, PhD, is chair and associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami, Florida. She was a member of the TESOL Board of Directors (2013–2016).
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/the-tesol-affiliate-speaker-program-reflecting-on-the-last-3-years/
Hello, ESPers worldwide!
It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Philip Chappell from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where I received my PhD in linguistics. I first met Phil in Tokyo, Japan at a JALT conference where he was head of the Macquarie University Showcase. Phil was also one of the leaders of the TESOL Research Network Colloquium (2015) at the University of Sydney and made it possible for me to present at that conference. (I am very grateful! You can read about my Sydney adventure here.) Phil’s bio highlights his expertise in TESOL:
Philip Chappell is senior lecturer in applied linguistics and TESOL at Macquarie University. He convenes the Graduate Certificate of TESOL, conducts research in a variety of areas of TESOL, and supervises research students at Masters and PhD levels. Phil regularly publishes in leading journals and book series. Recent publications are a book chapter, “Creativity through Inquiry Dialogue,” in Jack Richards’s and Rodney Jones’s, Creativity in Language Teaching: Perspectives from Research and Practice (Routledge), and his book Group Work in the English Language Curriculum: Sociocultural and Ecological Perspectives on Second Language Classroom Learning through Palgrave Macmillan. Phil is the executive editor of the English Australia Journal.
I am also excited to be able to publish Phil’s profile because this means that the ESP projects in the 23 ESP Project Leader Profiles to date have been conducted on six continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, and Australia!
Dr. Philip Chappell, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Philip.chappell@mq.edu.au
Twitter: @TESOLatMQ
1) Define leadership in your own words.
I think the most productive and potentially successful form of leadership is focused on the premise that you are aiming for creative collaboration. The traditional form of leadership emphasises structure and control. The leader assigns roles, divides the task into manageable activities, tracks progress on a timeline, and coordinates the team members. Leadership in a creative collaboration approach is less structured. Following the ideas of Keith Sawyer (2007), I like to think that leadership for creative collaboration is distributed. The leader is first and foremost responsible for creating the environment for creativity to flourish. This entails creating an environment where team members are intersubjectively engaged. Each member shares the perspectives of each other member, and there are those magical moments where a member can say, “I know that you know that I know what you mean” (Chappell, 2014). This is when the team is self-managing, motivating and supporting each other, and in the creative flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997), which is “a peak state in which people are free to concentrate on a goal-oriented task, and become fully absorbed in it, letting go of their immediate environment” (Chappell, 2015, p. 134). The leader is an active participant in the task, working as a peer, ensuring the environment is conducive to creative collaboration.
2) Tell me an ESP project success story. Focus on your communication as a leader in the project. How did you communicate with stakeholders to make that project successful?
In an EAP program that I comanaged with a colleague, we were interested in introducing dynamic assessment (Poehner, 2008) as a way to assist us with determining which level to place the students in prior to commencing their class. Our premise was that since many of the students had not been in an English speaking environment for some time, although their proficiency levels were reasonably high, they may not perform as well as they would have had they been using English recently. The principle of dynamic assessment is that an understanding of a learner’s ability is best understood by examining the process of development while it is being promoted by the teacher. Our vision was to introduce this teaching/learning principle into a placement test setting, where we could get the best out of the student, rather than merely what they could do unassisted.
The first task was to brainstorm how this might occur. As a team of four, we got away from the fast-paced college setting and into a closed-door meeting, where no one else could disturb us. As the team leader, I wanted to create a setting where we had the space to be creative. My communication aim at this stage was to ensure all four of us had a shared understanding of the problem we were setting out to address, and also the principles of dynamic assessment (all of us were familiar with Vygotksy’s work on which it is based). This took us a good couple of hours, and the outcome was that we had not only agreed on the problem and the overarching solution, but we also had some strategies to think about.
In the spirit of wanting to create the best environment to continue our creative collaboration, I suggested that we spend some time thinking about this and come back together in a few days’ time. We had several informal chats about it between ourselves in between those two meetings, and it became clear that a particular team member had developed some great ideas to take us forward. At our next meeting, this team member naturally and spontaneously took the lead and threw out his ideas for implementing dynamic assessment. I was working with the team as a peer—indeed we all were, and the leadership was distributed amongst us as we got in the flow and knocked the ideas into a manageable approach to conducting a placement test interview based on dynamic assessment.
As a team, we decided to write this up together so that we could ensure all our voices were heard and we had joint ownership of the proposal that we would then take forward to the teaching staff. That took us a good couple of hours around a computer, and we spontaneously did some role plays to work through some of the steps in the process we were developing. In the end, this allowed us to present the proposal as a team, modelling and demonstrating the steps for the teaching team. Again, this collaborative approach allowed the communication to be instructive and developmental rather than institutional and top-down.
The proposal was accepted by teachers and we instituted the new placement test interview process over the next few months, fine-tuning it with feedback from teachers and students.
Phil’s leadership definition resonated with me, particularly the following: “The leader is an active participant in the task, working as a peer, ensuring the environment is conducive to creative collaboration.” Further, he clearly outlines how the team communicated to create and to achieve the vision, which matches my conceptualization of leadership.
Please feel free to contact Phil directly, or post your comments below! Thank you!
All the best,
Kevin
References
Chappell, P. (2014). Group work in the english language curriculum: Sociocultural and ecological perspectives on second language classroom learning. London, England: Palgrave MacMillan.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
Chappell, P. J. (2015). Creativity through inquiry dialogue. In R. H. Jones & J. C. Richards (Eds.), Creativity in language teaching: Perspectives from research and practice (pp. 130–149). London, England: Routledge.
Poehner, M. E. (2008). Dynamic assessment: A Vygotskian approach to understanding and promoting L2 development. New York, NY: Springer.
Sawyer, K. (2007). Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York, NY: Basic.
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/esp-project-leader-profile-philip-chappell/
Hello everyone!
The definition of quote is to repeat someone else’s statement, phrases or thoughts.
Here is today’s!
Happy Teaching!
from Fun To Teach ESL – Teaching English as a Second Language http://esleld.blogspot.com/2016/10/mondays-quote_17.html
This is the second of two posts by guest blogger Raichle Farrelly, a longtime TESOL educator and advocate who is currently assistant professor of applied linguistics at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, USA. “Rai” has worked in multiple ESL and EFL contexts across the United States, Africa, and Europe, and focuses much of her work and advocacy on preparing teachers to be effective with adults, particularly immigrants and refugees. In this post, she discusses LESLLA—the acronym for Low Educated Second Language Acquisition and Literacy for Adults—which is becoming more commonly known as both an association and a field of study.
In the growing field of LESLLA, symposia take place in various locations around the world. LESLLA symposia tend to be small (but growing) with attendance ranging from 60–200 participants. Because groups are small, participants enjoy activities outside the symposium together. This year in Granada, Spain at LESLLA 2016, attendees enjoyed a passionate flamenco performance, a group dinner with plenty of sangria, and tours of La Alhambra. At the symposium, there were concurrent sessions presented by professionals from 13 countries. Topics included LESLLA teacher preparation, LESLLA learner agency and identity, developing handwriting skills, digital storytelling, language learning apps, assessment of LESLLA learners, and much more! Here are a few highlights:
It’s a fish. It’s a bug…No, that’s actually a pen. Jenna Altherr Flores of the University of Arizona gave us a glimpse into her research on multimodal assessments in the LESLLA context. She presented LESLLA learners with various written assessments and later, through interpreters, asked them questions about their responses and perceptions of the test questions and layout. It was fascinating to see how learners interpreted elements of tests that we take for granted. Common features such as tick boxes after choices and lines used to separate sections of the test were wildly confusing. Typical icons and graphics on tests and handouts can also be misunderstood. Clip art of a pen to reinforce “Write” represented very different things for various learners, including a fish and an insect. Cartoon eyeballs, sometimes used to signify “Look at…” were perceived to be eggs by one learner. The take-away: we have to be very mindful in our test design to make sure that we are giving our non-Western learners with emerging literacy skills the best chance possible to demonstrate what they know.
Invite them to tell their story. Language Experience Approach (LEA) and personal narratives emerged in several sessions as champion strategies for developing literacy and oral language skills with LESLLA learners. Annie Schneider from Saint Michael’s College in Vermont shared what one student said after they wrote a story about a shared class experience: “Teacher, I was so tired of reading about Pooja. I love reading about myself.” LEA keeps learning meaningful and relevant, which is essential when working with adults. For an amazing demonstration of an LEA lesson built around a field trip to a hardware store, watch this video of Andrea Echelberger as she takes a Whole-Part-Whole approach to literacy instruction with adult refugee background students in Minnesota.
Study circles and lesson study for teachers. Teaching LESLLA learners is demanding and requires that teachers have a wealth of LESLLA-specific professional and practical knowledge. There were several sessions on LESLLA teacher education and professional development. Our group from Saint Michael’s College presented on its experiences with teacher-led professional development that used study circle and lesson study approaches to investigate and try out LESLLA appropriate classroom strategies. Patsy Egan Vinogradov introduced the Low Lit Study Circle II Guide—a sequence to her first study circle, which has been used widely around the country by various teachers and program directors to help professionalize the work of LESLLA teachers. Currently, there are few courses available in TESOL programs that prepare teachers for work with LESLLA learners. However some institutions are beginning to introduce such courses into their curriculum (e.g., Grand Valley State University in Michigan, Saint Michael’s College in Vermont). The number of sessions on LESLLA teacher preparation is, I hope, an indicator that professionalization of our field is accelerating.
If you are teaching adults with interrupted formal education or are preparing teachers to do so, please get involved with LESLLA. Join us next year for the 13th Annual LESLLA symposia to be held 10–12 August 2017 at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Information about Calls for Proposals and much more will be posted to the LESLLA website in the coming weeks! In the meantime, join us on Facebook, and be sure to also participate in the Adult Education and Refugee Concerns Interest Sections in TESOL.
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/3-effective-strategies-for-leslla-education/
Joel Jackson 