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It’s Wednesday and we made it!
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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-hump-day_31.html
As a new member of the TESOL Research Professional Council (RPC), it is a great pleasure to introduce the council’s new series of communications highlighting the TESOL Research Agenda. This agenda outlines trends in English language teaching and research, serves to connect research with practice in our field, and supports teachers who are new to research. With the understanding that systematic inquiry forms the basis for action in our classrooms, we begin with a look at the agenda as a resource for teachers of English.
The Research Agenda: A Resource for Teachers
How does the Research Agenda form a resource for English language teachers? Let’s consider four aspects of the agenda:
Each of these aspects affords a view into the dynamic classroom, school, and community contexts in which English language teachers generate questions about practice and policy (providing the rationale and structure for research). Teachers’ questions in turn create avenues for diverse researchers and methodologies (expanding parameters of research) to benefit students, families, communities, and the teaching profession (ethical research). Language teachers are positioned to examine questions as they surface amid currents of demographic change, new technologies, and policy environments (directions for research in changing contexts for teaching). Ultimately, the research agenda is a resource for English language teachers, whose research potentially advances equity and inclusion in education.
Research Design: Begin With Your Questions
English language teachers are uniquely positioned to examine both policy and practice firsthand in a variety of school contexts. The recent TESOL 2019 RPC Research Mentoring Workshop brought together a dedicated and diverse group of teachers at the cusp of their research in Pre-K, elementary, and high schools. In small-group discussions with RPC members, these teachers asked, for instance:
Questions like these are reflective of teacher leadership in language education—across the globe, most children are educated (at least for some part of their formal education) in a second or third language—within changing social and political contexts. Examples from recent research illustrate a few approaches:
The Research Mentoring Workshop at TESOL 2019 provided a forum and a supportive community for teachers pursuing research in varied classroom contexts. What questions about your language teaching practice might you consider researching? We invite you to share your questions, along with your context, in the comments section below.
Find more examples of practitioner research in TESOL Journal, free to TESOL members. And, to learn about issues and policy areas that TESOL strongly supports, check out TESOL’s Policy Recommendations for the 116th Congress (2019).
References
Newcomer, S. N., & Puzio, K. (2016). Cultivando confianza: A bilingual community of practice negotiates restrictive language policies. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19(4), 347–369.
Monsrud, M. -B., Rydland, V., Geva, E., Thurmann-Moe, A. C., & Halaas Lyster, S. –A. (2019). The advantages of jointly considering first and second language vocabulary skills among emergent bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/13670050.2019.1624685
Yol, O., & Yoon, B. (2019). Engaging English language learners with critical global literacies during the pull‐out: Instructional framework. Advance online publication. TESOL Journal. doi:10.1002/tesj.470
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/the-tesol-research-agenda-by-and-for-teachers/
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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2019/07/sale-on-tpt.html
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It’s Wednesday and we made it!
Enjoy the day!
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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-hump-day_50.html
A corpus is a collection, or body, of language. Though usually text-based, corpora (the plural of corpus) can include collections of spoken language as well. In fact, some of the most popular examples of corpora include TV news and U.S. Supreme Court transcripts. Other collections include religious texts, academic papers, Wikipedia, and, definitely the largest of all corpora, the Internet. Using a corpus to learn vocabulary can be a much more active experience than traditional, passive, approaches to learning vocabulary.
The Advantages of Corpora
One of the great advantages of a corpus is that it presents language in context. This is known as a concordance and allows learners to recognize relationships among words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In particular, this extended context allows us to see collocations, or the connections, between words in the various ways they may be used. For example, we can get a better idea which adjectives are commonly associated with a particular noun and what prepositions are associated with a particular verb.If you think of how you may use a dictionary to learn new words, you realize that there is typically a single sentence that serves as the example for any particular word. With a corpus, you may have dozens or even hundreds of examples. Further, these are likely to be authentic language rather than the one contrived sentence that is likely to be included in a dictionary. Having access to multiple authentic examples provides learners with lexical as well as grammatical models. Corpora may be most useful in order to encourage learners to experiment with different sentence constructions.
Traditionally, corpora have been very expensive and time consuming to construct and this has limited the accessibility for learning purposes. That has resulted in corpora being primarily used by researchers rather than language teachers, but technology has made it easier to gather, code, and archive large bodies of text and institutions, and instructors have created numerous new collections of corpora, including collections of their own students’ work.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is easy to use through a freely available website. COCA is a good example of conventional corpus-driven concordance tools. With a larger corpus like COCA and iWeb, users can find more examples of any given word, including numerous examples of context, collocations, and phraseology. This allows learners to observe various authentic examples of a given word in order to develop a more diverse and sophisticated understanding of the diverse use of a word or word root (using conventional corpora, users can search with an asterisk for various morphological forms of a word root). Users can search for a word or word root by using an asterisk at the end of the root. For example, you can see the results when I search for reach*:
And the results allow me to select the form of the word I would like to explore further, so I select reached:
I can see 55,905 examples of this word in context:
Recently, the COCA has launched a new English Corpora website that combines COCA with a number of other corpora, including a corpus of TV and movies, and the new Intelligent Web corpus (iWeb), which allows you to create a “virtual corpus” that is customized and still retains these powerful functions. Teachers and learners can gather a variety of texts into customized collections based on their own interests or around a particular academic topic. This can be useful if a class is organized around thematic topics or if students are preparing for a particular academic discipline. This can particularly useful for disciplines that have unique writing conventions or incorporate a lot of technical jargon. These virtual corpora can be saved for continued use and users can also save a history of their previous activity for future reference. The iWeb corpus includes 14 billion words that were systematically selected from across the Internet. This site offers users a lot of functionality for free as long as you make fewer than 250 queries per day. Additional searching and features are available as part of a paid individual or institutional site license.
Google can also be used as a basic concordance tool with the entire internet as a corpus. However, such use does not include the robust and sophisticated nature of a tagged corpus. In a future entry, I will share some practical suggestions for such use.
Additional Resources
Here are some additional resources:
How do you use corpora in your language classroom? Please share in the comments, below.
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/basics-of-using-corpora/
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It’s Wednesday and we made it!
Enjoy the day!
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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-hump-day_17.html
Recently, I came across a mention of quickwrites (QWs) on Twitter. I immediately felt that they were a terrific way to support English learners (ELs) as they learn to write. According to Linda Reif, author of The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Reading and Writing (2018), a QW is a short, quick response that students make to a prompt. That prompt can be a short text, a passage from a mentor text, a poem, or a picture. Students write a quick 1–3 minute reaction to the prompt.
Reif’s ideas can easily be adapted for ELs by choosing texts that are at their English language development (ELD) level.
This method gives ELs an opportunity to write quickly without censoring their sentence structure and spelling. Here is a step-by-step plan of how QWs can be adapted for ELs.
1. Provide Reading Time
Give ELs the necessary time to read the passage from which the prompt is chosen. This gives students a context for the prompt, which is usually one to two sentences long. Be sure the text is comprehensible to all of your ELs and that they understand the vocabulary.
2. Provide a Prompt
Assign a line from the text that will be their prompt. You need to decide if all students will respond to the same prompt. Remember that the ELs in your class are probably not all at the same ELD level. We need to accommodate instruction for those students who struggle with writing so that they can participate in the instruction. You may need to simplify the language in the prompt to accommodate the needs of all of your ELs.
3. Ask Questions
Depending on the ELD level of students, ask questions about the prompt. These questions should focus on how ELs relate the prompt to their own lives.
4. Have ELs Write
Have ELs write for 3–5 minutes about the prompt. The time is longer than is recommended by Reif but necessary for ELs who might be translating from their home language in their heads. You may want to adjust the length of time for the writing activity as you repeat the QW activity during the school year.
5. Provide Alternatives
ELs who are not ready to write can take part in this activity by dictating their ideas to you or drawing a picture that relates to the prompt.
6. Have Students Share
Ask students to share their writing with a partner or small group by reading directly from the text they have written. Students can respond verbally to peers’ questions. This gives them the freedom to write without anxiety. They know from the start that they will be able to read from their writing. Model to students how this sharing should work and what kind of questions they may want to ask.
7. Utilize the QWs
Have students use the QW as the first draft of a writing idea that they can develop.
The purpose of this activity is to give all students an opportunity to build a portfolio of writing ideas and the self-confidence to write in a nonthreatening environment.We all write from ideas that are sparked by others.
In fact, I often get ideas for blogs from Twitter posts. I recently saw a tweet from Alicia Owen, EAL Department Chair at American International School of Guangzhou in China, that sparked an idea for this blog. Owens tweeted a creative QW that she used with her middle/high school students that connected to their lives. During this activity, Alicia had students respond to a tweet posted by bilingual teacher Valentina Gonzalez, who wrote on Twitter, “Probably my most valuable human capital, the one I’m most proud of, is my bilingualism.” Alicia posed the following questions for her students to answer:
Student responses successfully linked their own ideas to Valentina’s quote in their QWs.
Another resource with examples of QWs for ELs is Cultivating ELLs’ Writing Fluency with Quickwrites by Tan Huynh, who is an upper elementary and secondary school teacher in an international school setting. Tan’s blogs are well worth bookmarking and following as he posts excellent information on a wide range of topics. He is very active on Twitter, so it is easy to contact him to discuss ideas.
I think QWs will work best with ELs in Grades 3–12. They make it easy for the teacher to tailor instruction to their students’ ELD levels. Let me know what you think in the comments, below.
Reference
Reif, L. (2018). The quickwrite handbook. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/linking-writing-to-els-lives-using-quickwrites/
Despite a broad range of professionally developed language teaching materials, we often prepare our own materials (e.g., worksheets, checklists, surveys, tests, assignments sheets) in order to provide learners with more personalized, individualized, or localized contents and tasks. How many of such materials have you designed yourself in the past year?
The effectiveness of our self-made materials depends on many aspects. They should reflect the theories of second language acquisition, principles of teaching, knowledge of language use, and experiences with materials in use (Tomlinson, 2010, p. 82). Moreover, I believe that they should also be informed by principles of effective visual design because “visuals, layout, and design are indispensable parts of meaning making and of language acquisition and development at all ages” (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2018, p. 326). Simply put, well-implemented principles of visual language can support the teaching potential of our materials. Visual design flaws of teaching materials, however, may hinder students’ learning despite the other positive aspects they may have.
Through multiple observations of print and online teacher-made materials, I have identified a set of common visual design flaws (Kleckova & Svejda, 2019). Here are six of them along with suggested fixes.
1. No Clear Hierarchy
[–] The level of importance of the presented information is not visually clear. It doesn’t have an apparent organization and structure.
[+] Use visual signs (e.g., typography, contrast) and cues (e.g., numbers, letters, symbols, icons) to help readers navigate the document efficiently. Indicate visually what the most important and the least important information is.
See an example of poor and effective hierarchies in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Continuum of visual hierarchies, from poor to effective. (From Creating Visually Effective Materials for English Learners, p. 41)
2. Inconsistency
[–] Visual elements, such as typefaces, space, or alignment, are used inconsistently throughout a document.
[+] Use visual elements consistently so your learners are not caught by visual surprises they must continually adjust to.
3. Too Much Clutter
[–] The material is cluttered, short of white space, and the amount of text and graphics overwhelms learners.
[+] Use white space to create a friendly look and support visual guidance.
Figure 2. White space shows connections among items. (From Creating Visually Effective Materials for English Learners, p. 38)
4. Irrelevant Visuals
[–] The material has unrelated images and space fillers for decoration or fun rather than learning purposes.
[+] Use pictures, clip art, frames, lines, emoticons, symbols, colors, and other visuals when they are relevant and support learning. They should play a communication role.
5. Poor Use of Fonts
[–] The material has either too many fonts or unsuitable fonts which lower the quality of learners’ reading experience.
[+] Use a limited number of font styles. Choose styles from one to two type families and use them consistently within a document.
6. Poor Use of White Space
[–] White space between items doesn’t communicate the relationship between them and connections across parts of the material.
[+] Use space to show connection among items. Place related items close and distant ones apart. Create visual space between them so a clear relationship is established.
See Figure 2 for an example of how the use of white space can help show the relationship between items.
Most design flaws do not occur in isolation. For example, in addition to the principle of hierarchy, Figure 1 also shows the principles of typography, contrast, and alignment. For an in-depth discussion of these and all other principles of effective visual design, check out my book from TESOL Press, Creating Visually Effective Materials for English Learners.
How many of these flaws have you come across in your own or other people’s teaching materials? Have you observed any others? Share your ideas, comments or questions about visual language of your materials in the comments below.
References
Kleckova, G. & Svejda, P. (2019). Creating visually effective materials for English learners. Alexandria, VA: TESOL Press.
Tomlinson, B. (2010). Principles of effective materials development. In N. Harwood (Ed.), English language teaching materials: Theory and practice (pp. 81–108). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Tomlinson, B., & Masuhara, H. (2018). The complete guide to the theory and practice of materials development for language learning. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/teacher-made-materials-design-6-flaws-and-fixes/
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It’s Wednesday and we made it!
Enjoy the day!
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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-hump-day_10.html
Greetings everyone, to this month’s TESOL games and learning blog. This month, we will wrap up our long look at gamification by highlighting tools for the classroom. Following is a list of tools to get you started—or to keep you going.
Classroom Tools
Classcraft
Classcraft is a web-based course management system that allows teachers to create custom quests students follow over the course of a class, week, or semester. These quests take on a role-playing element as students customize avatars that level up and earn achievements. Students can use an in-game reward system to further customize their avatars with unique armor and accessories.
ClassDojo
ClassDojo isn’t quite a gamification tool as much as an overall course management system that facilitates a teacher-created reward and badging system for students. It also has a system for instant feedback on students’ in-class performance that can reward students for their social as well as academic skills—all the standard gamification essentials.
Moodle
Moodle is a fantastic course management system with an established history in the language learning classroom. Its open-source design allows for an endless array of customization through the use of plug-ins. Currently, six gamification plug-ins are available for Moodle that can be used as a foundation for your own customized gamification scenario.
PlayBrighter
PlayBrighter is perhaps the most straightforward gamification tool on the list because it focuses on quest development, so consider it more of a quiz conversion tool, like Kahoot. Where it differs, though, is in an avatar creation system for students where they can use rewards and class points to accessorize their avatars.
Pen and Paper
Not all teaching contexts allow for a tech-heavy classroom, but gamifying your classroom is still possible. For example,
A dive into the myriad blog posts about gamification quickly shows a reliance on gimmicks and technology, but what is critical is creativity and an eye for design. A pen and paper approach to gamification can highlight poor design decisions or areas of your gamified class that need more iteration—as any game designer knows, if something is not fun on paper, it’s not going to be fun digitally.
A Closing Note: Caveats
Searching the Internet for gamification tools can be a quest in its own right. The reason is simple: Most websites conflate games, game-based learning, and gamification, making finding information and tools more challenging. One top search result, “13 Amazing Gamification Education Tools” by Ed Tech Reviews, lists Minecraft and Virtonomics, neither of which are gamification tools. Both are games, and both could be used in game-based learning, but neither are gamification: The application of game mechanics and design to nongame contexts. Even Classcraft’s “Why Use Gamification in Education?” weaves between discussion of games and gamification, comixing the rationale for their use into one topic, although game-based learning’s research literature is far more robust.
Gamification is tricky business. Those who write about it often lack a clear idea of what it is and how it should be applied, and examples often feature poor designs that show its inherently behaviorist roots.
Experts in games and game-based learning often decry gamification and for valid reasons. As Graham Stanley notes in his 2014 talk “Gamification: Magic Bullet or Broken Sword?“, the increased student motivation gained through gamification can be short lived once students realize levels and badges are grades and points by another name.
In short, gamification may be destined for the heap of teaching fads that have come and gone over the years, but there is still an opportunity in it to flex your creative muscle and play around with moving beyond a classroom that is skill drill, test, and repeat. I hope these last few months have clarified, even slightly, the nebulous idea of gamification and whether it is right for your classroom. Please feel free to share your thoughts and any other gamification tools you like to use in the comments, below.
Until next month, play more games!
from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/gamifying-the-classroom-part-iii-gamification-tools/
Joel Jackson 
