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PIE Teaching Materials/Ideas

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In this post I've listed a number of ideas and resources to help me in my upcoming course I'll be teaching this fall for NAU's Program of Intensive English. At the moment this is simply a list of websites and blog postings that I hope to reference and add to as my course planning progresses (more to come).


Introductions and Warm Up Activities

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We broached the subject of introducing activities and warm-up exercises in my teaching development class today. This class is linked to the experience graduate students have in teaching through the university's Intensive English Program, so it that sense it is a very practical hands-on sort of course.

We watched a series of videos where ESL teachers used different strategies in introducing their class lessons. One teacher began by stating what they had been covering previously and how the grammar lesson for the day's class fit in with overall big picture. Another teacher began his class with no introduction, but rather dived into a game that got students got involved immediately.

When we watched a video of one of the teacher's being interviewed about these different intro activities, she explained why varying these warm up activities was important. Sometimes, say in a grammar course, students need to be informed how the class objective relates to previous grammar lessons and activities, whereas in a conversation class, a teacher might want to trigger the class's instant engagement into the topic to be covered in order to get them in the right frame of mind and trigger their schema.

Despite these points, it was brought up that for lower levels, such as in the level 1 reading lab I'm currently teaching, a certain sense of continuity for each class introduction may be required. Variance at this level in introduction activities may simply cause confusion or panic, especially when students are still adapting to the American classroom culture and styles of teaching.


Motivating Students to Read

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One of the classes I'm currently teaching is a reading lab for beginning ESL students. In some ways this class is a love/hate relationship for me.

Growing up, I had a distinct love for reading, and still do. I remember taking part in the summer reading programs that our town's library would host, where I could win prizes and books for reading. As I grew older, I entered the sleuthing world of the Hardy Boys, while my sisters, followed exploits of Nancy Drew. In high school I eagerly devoured Stephen King's "The Stand" and the Gunslinger series along with a slew of fantasy series books. There was something so stimulating and enthralling that drew me into to those imagined worlds that television or movies could never come close to replicating.

Thus my motivation for reading was often tied to what I personally gained from it. Sure there were the prizes given to me by teachers and the local librarian--those aspects of extrinsic motivation--but these dimmed in comparison to the worlds that the words on the page transformed into. Thus the motivation for me was strictly intrinsic.

I think about these experiences when I stand in front of my class and encourage my students to read. With beginning readers like this, I know I can't speak of goal setting or how reading will benefit them later in their studies. Rather, I've been told by an expert in second language reading that I need to find ways to match students with books tied to their interests, to get them to recommend books they find interesting to others, to build their self confidence and to find other ways of drawing them into extensive reading.

This is a big responsibility, especially when I constantly find myself playing technology police and taking away cell phones that are cleverly hidden behind the books that they are reading, or should I say, pretending to read. The question of how I can find ways to pierce that shield of disinterest that seems so prevailing is one I continue to struggle with as a developing teacher.

Considering Classroom Observations

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For a developing teacher, the thought of having another teacher in the room observing you when you are teaching is nothing short of unnerving. He or she sits in the back madly scribbling in their notepad, so if you make eye contact you can't help but wonder what they might be thinking, might be writing, or worse, judging about you. It is a scene that I have now been on both sides of, as both the observer and observed.

The Observer

The class that I observed for my practicum requirement was a L2 writing workshop that involved four advanced esl students workshopping their papers with an experienced teacher acting as the facilitator. I came to the classroom to specifically observe the group process in a writing workshop environment, while keeping my own experience of hosting writing workshops during the year I taught EAP writing in China in mind. In the class that I observed, the students were going through drafts of a rhetorical analysis paper, an assignment that I've seen even L1 English writers struggle with in the writing center.

During the two workshop sessions I observed I attempted to transcribe as much of the dialogue as I could as well as describe the actions that took place between the participants. Overall, I was amazed by the level engagement by the students, how with only a little prompting from the teacher they were able to provide constructive criticism to one another and cite examples using supporting details from their peers' papers. When they were asked to find thesis statements and three of the students looked through the student's paper that was being discussed and found three different thesis statements, it took little commentary from the instructor for the student to realize that he/she had failed to provide his readers with a clear direction. The instructor seemed to have truly mastered the art of facilitation in always asking just the right questions to elicit responses.

I am wondering how much of what I witnessed was tied to the actual amount of in-depth instruction in rhetorical analysis students had prior to the workshop. Or was their ability to provide higher levels of feedback more related to how the workshop was facilitated and structured? I suspect the answer is a little of both. Nonetheless, the experience made me wonder how much of my own Chinese student's ability to provide valuable feedback in writing workshops back in Xi'an were either because of instruction, level of fluency or workshop facilitation. I would like to argue that it was due to the level of fluency, yet now I'm not so sure.

The Observed

I think the hardest aspect of being observed as a new teacher is having to face up to seeing the areas where you need to improve. In hindsight this seems rather absurd, to think that you might object to an aspect of professional development that can only contribute to making you a better teacher. In fact the majority of teachers find a great deal of benefit from observing or being observed (Richard & Crooks, 1988). Why is it then that myself and my fellow graduate students almost cringe and tense up at the very mention of a scheduled observation my a senior teacher? I suspect that part of this fear is tied to the notion of someone seeing you exposed and revealed as an amateur to someone who has learned the ropes and may be passing evaluative judgements along to you following the observation.

So far though, in the first informal evaluation by one of my coordinators, the process has not been as painful as I had suspected. I say this despite having been observed when one activity went well beyond the time I had allotted for it in my lesson plan and another that went terribly awry. I now feel that for this observation I was fortunate to have these things blow up in my face. The teacher/supervisor was able to point out to me that I needed to use more gambits with my speaking activities as to provide the appropriate amount of scaffolding for students. She explained that if I begin to do so, then I may see my activities more closely following the allotted amount of time that is set aside for them in the lesson plans. I understood how providing more scaffolding was tied to my issue of pacing.

My second informal observation occurred during a low level reading lab, where the focus is mostly on extensive reading, increasing fluency and building comprehension. Here again I encountered the similar issue of my pacing seeming to lag and I found that I was spending much more time explaining things and fretting over classroom management issues than I should have been. When I went for a walk with the observing teacher to discuss the observation, she focused mainly on the issue of classroom management. She explained to me that I needed to split up some of the male students in the class who talked a lot and seemed to take most of my attention and time. She suggested that if I were to place them near the front of the class, then I might see less issues with both pacing and management. But she pointed out that most of all I need to be more firm with them, to stop being Mr. Nice guy.

Now that I've gotten through these initial informal observations, I'm actually looking forward to hearing what my coordinating teachers have to say through the formal evaluations when they focus on specifics. These observation experiences made me realize that even when things don't go according to plan, the end result is usually beneficial in the long run. Had everything gone well, the opportunity for development and learning may have been missed.

VOICE Project and Teaching English as a Lingua Franca

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This week I've been working on writing a research paper for course requirement in my graduate program. The topic I chose to research was pronunciation instruction of English as an International Language (EIL) or English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).


One of the important research agendas of ELF scholars is to provide a description of ELF usage. Jennifer Jenkins efforts to create a English as a Lingua Franca Core (ELFC) for pronunciation instruction is one such example. As a result of her research, Jenkins' ELFC focuses more on the teaching of segmentals (consonants and vowels) while downplaying the teaching of suprasegmental features.

Barbara Seidlhofer has also carried out descriptive research efforts to capture ELF through spoken interactions between NNSs of varying backgrounds through a corpus project in Vienna, Austria. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) is a corpus that is dedicated to describing the use of English as a Lingua Franca by speakers from a variety of first language backgrounds and in a wide range of settings and domains. The corpus currently contains 1 million words of spoken interactions between nearly 1250 ELF speakers with approximately 50 different first languages.

Barbara Seidlhofer describes the objective of the corpus as attempting to discover what "salient common features of ELF use emerge, irrespective of speakers' first languages and levels of L2 proficiency" (Seidlhofer, 2004, p. 9). One of the aims of Seidlhofer is that this corpus might complement work that has already been carried out by those such as Jenkins in describing what linguistic features are most important for international mutual intelligibility.

Despite the efforts of ELF scholars, I'm still not certain about how feasible ELF instruction is for many English teachers. In the September, 2005 issue of the TESOL forum, Jenkins herself discusses the results of interviews of 8 NNS teachers on teaching ELF pronunciation. She found that many of the teachers did not view the teaching of ELF pronunciation as a viable option for their students, regardless of how they accepted and understood the concept. The teachers demonstrated a lack of confidence in their NNS accents and in teaching such accents to students.

At this point I'm inclined to believe that it will take a major conceptual shift in thinking for NNS English teachers to adopt ELF approaches to teaching pronunciation. Providing descriptive research and pedagogical approaches plays an important role in making ELF teachable, but the perceived socio-economic benefits of a learned NS accent by both NNS teachers and NNS students, despite however unachievable it may be, remains a major obstacle to teaching ELF pronunciation.

Teaching Listening and Speaking Strategies

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This break between teaching has given me time to consider how I approach teaching. Specifically, I'm thinking ahead to the advanced listening and speaking course I will be teaching this spring. Last semester my low-level students seemed to struggle with exercises that focused on inferencing. They also had difficulty with paired speaking tasks.

So I'm wondering if I can take the approach that I used in my reading lab and apply it in the listening and speaking task I'm going to be teaching, namely creating tasks that will require the students to use specific approaches to interacting with other students and developing inferencing strategies.

In my reading lab last semester I focused on a set of specific strategies and returned to them throughout the semester in order to attempt to automatize the strategic approaches my students took towards the reading tasks they were faced with. For example, I used a number of tasks which required them to look up words in the dictionary and highlight them in the text, while writing the translated word in their L1 in the margin of the text they were reading.

I wonder if I can take a similar approach to teaching listening and speaking strategies. I don't think it would deviate much from the present curriculum to make my teaching approach in the classroom more focused on developing strategies.

AZ TESOL Mini-Conference

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I recently presented at a small TESOL conference that is connected to the state of Arizona TESOL. I presented on the use of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom as instructional resources. I talked about social bookmarking, wikis, and screencasting. There were about fifteen people in attendance at the conference, three of which were my professors.

The wiki I created for using at the conference is located here. I created a short demonstration video using Jing so that teachers could get an idea of how this social bookmarking site might be beneficial. In my tutorial I stress the use of the highlighter, which is specific to Diigo.

I also discussed the use of the screeencasting software Jing, mostly for use in the writing classroom to provide feedback and for tutorials. Because some of these free screencasting software are so user friendly, I said that teachers could experiment a lot with making instructional tutorials, especially for those teaching in computer labs and Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

I also touched upon some of the ways I've used wikis in the classroom. While many educators stress the use of wikis for intensive writing classes, I pointed out there are a number of other uses for ESL teachers, such as learner created vocab glossaries and gap-filling exercises with sample texts.

Reading-comprehension processing and grammar

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At the moment I'm currently teaching an advanced Vocabulary and Reading class in an IEP. I have been working on getting my students to do more main-idea comprehension and summaries from their reading, skills they need in order to carry out the large volume of reading required of them in regular university courses. An issue came up within my class that I found rather perplexing. I discovered that many of the students were distracted from finding the main ideas in their reading by problems with syntactic processing.

In our course textbook, Focus on Vocabulary, by Schmitt and Schmitt (2011), the following excerpt on a unit about influencing the consumer seemed to completely confuse my students:

One of the fundamental principles of consumer behavior is that people often buy products not for what they do, but for what they mean. This principle does not mean that a product's primary function is unimportant, but rather that the roles products play and the meanings that they have in our lives go well beyond the tasks they perform.
Many of my students wrongly identified the main idea in this section as "people often buy products not for what they do" or "a product's primary function is unimportant." What I realized later is that these students were having difficulty understanding "disambiguation processes", which Grabe (2009) identifies as the process of "suppressing alternative meanings, activating semantic priming with clauses that spreads across all lexical items within the clause" (p. 201). Because students did not have the grammatical knowledge that serves as cues to what is most important in the discourse structure, which in this case is the phrase that comes after the alternate meaning being suppressed, they could not identify that the text was trying to show them that the meaning of products and the roles they play are the most important parts of the passage.

The use of correlative coordinators such as not (only) but (also), either [x] or [y], and or neither [x] nor [y] (Biber, Conrad, Leech, 2002) are not what I would consider common coordinators used by L2 writers, so it makes sense that many of my students are unfamiliar with them and how they contribute to meaning within a sentence. This gap in syntactic processing makes a strong argument for including some grammar instruction within the L2 reading classroom. While grammar is not typically thought of as being connected to the receptive skill of reading as it is to the productive skill of writing, I think that when students lack the ability to notice and process grammatical signaling systems in texts they should be explicitly taught how to develop their syntactic processing abilities.

References

Biber, D, Conrad, S. and Leech, B. (2002) Longman student grammar of spoken and written English. New York: Longman.

Grabe, W. (2009) Reading in a second language: Moving from theory to practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Schmitt, D and Schmitt, N. (2011) Focus on vocabulary 2: Mastering the academic word list. White Plains: Pearson

Including Students With Different Learning Backgrounds

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Today I met with another teacher who observed my class in order to give me feedback about my teaching. Her feedback gave me a couple of points that I see can be improved upon and also gave me some things to reflect upon in terms of how I include students in whole-class activities.

During my summer reading and vocabulary course I had two students join when the class was half over. They were not the majority demographic that made up the class, and despite beings studious and advanced, rarely volunteered information when prompted by me during whole class discussions.

It seems apparent to me now that I'd grown accustomed to the vocal interchanges between myself and the majority of the class, something that had become a style of my classroom community. However, when the new students joined my class who brought with them the learning experiences from their home countries that did not favor the type of spontaneous answers I was encouraging from my students, I did not vary my style of interacting and using questions. Thus, these new students were often left out of class discussions.

I realize that I need to be more reactive to the classroom environment and be ready modify the way I do things to accommodate the changing dynamics of my students. This, I think, is often difficult because as a teacher I often get accustomed to routine. The routine can be comforting because once it is established it becomes reliable. You've built up the expectations of how a classroom is going to run and to deviate from that can be a source of stress for both students and teacher. But I do think that altering one's classroom structure to accommodate the class is an important thing for a teacher to take into consideration.

Helping Students Understand Similar Vocabulary Words with Concordance Lines

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I'm currently teaching an advanced course in my university's IEP on Reading and Vocabulary. One of the things that my students have difficulty with is discerning the difference between words with similar meanings.

One of the most recent examples that came up in our class was the word "ultimate" and the word "outcome." A definition given for ultimate is "happening at the end of a process or activity." Similarly, one of the definitions for outcome is " the final result of a process, meeting, or activity, etc."

It was pointed out to me by a teacher observing my class that I could make the distinction between these similar words by showing how they are used in context. A way that I could get at that difference was to use concordance lines and have students identify the patterns of use for both of these words.

So I adapted example activities from vocabulary textbooks and, by using COCA and the MicroConcord Corpus Collection, created seven different concordance lines of text for the words "ultimate" and "outcome." I then crafted four questions to help learners analyze the usage of these words and then write sentences using some of the collocates they identified.


Below is one of the activities that I used for outcome. I purposefully chose the concordance lines that contained a preposition after the word so that students would see this reoccurring pattern as well as the use of adjectives before outcome in the other examples (question 2 & 3). The idea then is that they can use a similar pattern in their own writing (question 4). Again, my aim is to get students to understand how these words with similar definitions are often used very differently based on the words they often co-occur with.


D. Read the concordance sentences containing the word outcome and answer the questions below.
  1. they are not the risk of a tragic                 outcome              is more likely. Understandably,
  2. ated that in order to predict the                outcome              of a change of context it is necess
  3.  because the supposedly inevitable            outcome              of that choice is not really neutral
  4. stol or Coventry, depending on the           outcome              of their game against each other. T
  5.  nt which did not have a very good            outcome              , probably because the therapist did
  6.   iated that in order to predict the               outcome              of a change of context it is necess
  7.   estored by contextual change. This           outcome              can be predicted if it is allowed t
1.  List the words or phrases used before outcome.

2.  Find two patterns in the words or phrases in the examples and write them here.

3.  List the words or phrases used after outcome.

4.  Write two example sentences using the word outcomewith one of the words that usually goes with it.


I plan to continue to look for other ways that I can integrate corpus into my teaching. For now, using concordance lines to help learners understand the difference between words with similar meanings is the most practical and important for my own pedagogical purposes.




Experiences With Moodle Reader for Extensive Reading

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In this blog post I discuss some of my thoughts and experiences with using Moodle Reader, a module that provides quizzes for graded readers.

The creator of the site, Tom Robb, describes the purpose of the module to provide "support the Extensive Reading approach to language acquisition which advocates the reading of a large volume of material that is easier than the learner's language level, rapidly with little dictionary use, of material of the learner's own choice. Through this massive amount of reading the student can internalize the grammar and vocabulary that has already been studied."

My experience with trying to hold students accountable for their extensive reading both in and out of class led to a discussion with my schools' administrators about the implementation of Moodle Reader in order to encourage more participation in extensive reading. Prior to this term, students were asked to fill out a reading log on what they had read, and the majority of students were simply opening their books and commenting on a few lines from a particular page.

Struggles of Implementation

I assisted teachers in our school's IEP with getting accounts set up at the beginning of the school term, but ran into a number of setbacks during the initial set up period.

First, I found it difficult to set up the different courses and to have them categorized under my school name. After a number of attempts I had to contact the creator and have them set up for me.

Teachers also found that even after registering students for their courses their students still had difficulty accessing the class site. Random students had to enter a course enrollment key, while others could not log on with their password that the teacher had registered them with. I ended up having re-enter their password by using the "change password" command.

Another challenge we encountered was that teachers had to try and figure out the head word level of the books their students were choosing and see if they matched those provided by the publishers of the graded readers. For instance, in our library we have books organized by the levels of headwords from 1-6. However, a publisher might assign a book to be level 3 while in our library it falls under a level 4 or 5. For my own course, I ended up taking off the level restriction of the site. However, this meant that students had many more choices of books under the publisher to choose from in order to find their book for taking the quiz.

An addition complication is that when getting students used to taking these quizzes a number of them fail their quizzes and then are not able to retake them. This was useful in getting a dialogue going between myself and students about the appropriate level of book they were choosing from our graded reader library, but then I felt compelled to allow them to retake the quiz as it required information from the text that they perhaps had not focused on when reading it. So I had to go into the "view and delete attempts" and look up the student by name and then delete their quiz so they could retake it.

Benefits of Moodle Reader

Since I don't intend for this post to be a criticism of Moodle Reader, I must point out that there are some benefits to using it.

Most important, I think that using the module allows for more accountability for student's extensive reading. Teachers can easily view student's performance on quizzes and levels of books that they are reading and use this information to guide students in their extensive reading experiences.

Compared to my prior experiences of using reading logs to hold students accountable for their reading, I feel that Moodle Reader is a much better use of time. I don't have to think about grading reading log entries that I feel were written at the last minute and do not demonstrate that the student read the book. In short, this seems to be a much more meaningful way for students to demonstrate their extensive reading performance.

I think that on the student end, the instant feedback that they get can be valuable in letting them know how well they comprehended what they read. They will know instantly whether they passed or not and what grade they received.

The time limit feature also ensures that students can't just pick up a book they have barely read and answer all the questions by thumbing through the book. I tested this myself on a couple of books and find the 15 minutes were sufficient to answer the questions if I had read the book, but not if I was just skimming it to answer the quiz questions.

Is it Worth it?

I suppose the big question is whether I believe implementing Moodle Reader into an extensive reading program is worth the effort?

My answer is yes, but that it should be piloted first in one class before considering implementing it program wide. Many of the kinks of this interface make it rather cumbersome to get going. In addition to going through the videos and supporting materials provided to help teachers use Moodle Reader, I ended up corresponding extensively with the site's administrator in order to figure out some of the intricacies of the site.

Hopefully teachers will consider experimenting with Moodle Reader for encouraging accountability in their extensive reading programs,  but only after a trialing period first.

Graphic Organizers for Encouraging Reading Comprehension

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One of the frequent issues that comes up in teaching L2 reading is finding effective ways to teach reading comprehension. Reading comprehension instruction is often limited to having students answer comprehension questions at the end of a reading passage. Sometimes teachers discuss with students how they got their answers, but even this only goes so far in helping students better comprehend texts. These methods of instruction are more in line with means of assessing students' reading comprehension as opposed to teaching them better ways of comprehending a text.

One way to encourage effective reading comprehension skill is through the use of graphic organizers (Jiang & Grabe, 2007, 2009). It takes some time to get used to creating graphic organizers (GOs) for specific texts, but once you get used to looking at text for the purpose of identifying the texts structure(s) within in it, this becomes quite routine. Many of the graphic organizers I've created tend to have a cause/effect or comparison/contrast structure. And often times the cause/effect text structure can be combined with a problem/solution structure, since problem and solutions often include cause and effects.

Below are some example GOs:









 

Timeline Graphic Organizer: Gets students to scan for details and see how sequencing is an important text structure in describing a historical timeline of events


 


Cause and Effect Graphic Organizer: This GO has students identify some of the causes and effects from the article. It also gets them to focus on how the problems of ocean noise are related to the harmful effects to whales.



These graphic organizers also function in the awareness raising of ways that texts are organized (Jiang & Grabe, 2009). Students' attention is directed towards understanding the ways that main ideas connect with supporting details through the graphic representations of the text. I have also found it necessary to include partially completed GOs to aid in effective scaffolding. This saves the teacher time in having to model how to fill out certain parts of the GO. And once students have become familiar with using GOs they can be given out after an initial reading of a passage without having to provide much direction by the teacher.

Jiang and Grabe (2009) encourage teachers to make a bank of graphic organizer templates that can be adapted for use with specific texts. Such a bank can be simple to create after reviewing the resources below and some online resources from the website Instructional Strategies Online. Once a bank of GOs is created, more can be added to them as teachers work with different text types. 

Using GOs in your L2 reading class goes beyond the fall back technique of using reading comprehension questions to encourage the development of students reading comprehension skills. 


References

Jiang, X., & Grabe, W. (2007). Graphic organizers in reading instruction: Research findings and issues. Reading in a Foreign Language, 19(1), 34-55.
Jiang, X., & Grabe, W. (2009). Building reading abilities with graphic organizers. In R. Cohen (Ed.), Explorations in second language reading (pp. 25–42). Alexandria, VA: TESOL.

Digital Curation and CALL

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There has been a growing use of web platforms for the purpose of what has been termed "digital curation" or "content curation." In this post I want to briefly describe this technology and how it might be beneficial for teaching English language learners.

What is digital curation? 

 

Digital curation refers to the technique of searching for and presenting highly selective online content around specific topics aimed at a particular audience. According to the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), digital curation also involves "maintaining, preserving and adding value to digital research data throughout its lifecycle." Scholars' discussions about the conceptualization of the term "digital curation" relate how it has been viewed by archivists, historians and museum curators. Thus curation is not simply collecting or aggregating material, but rather involves placing content in a context and interpreting it.

Options for web-based platforms that provide digital curation have grown significantly over the last few years. Examples of such platforms are Scoup.it, Trap.it, StumbleUpon, Zemanta, CurationSoft, and Bundlr. There are many more of these platforms on the web, and I will return to discussing the use of one of these tools later, but it is important to realize each of these platforms are slightly different in terms of how they use complex algorythms and link to other social media sites to suggest and share content.

How might digital curation be used by language teachers?



 One of things we must keep in mind as language teachers interested in curating material from the web is our audience. The question arises who are we curating for? The social element of digital curation through the web provides the potential for sharing materials that other teachers within our field will find useful. For example, when I collect pedagogical information from the web, I annotate it with the thought of how this might benefit teaching specific skills, strategies and techniques that I am currently teaching or have taught. I do so with the notion that other teachers in the field of TESOL will most likely be having to teach similar language courses and may find my annotations and interpretations beneficial as well.

So I think that when we assess whether we might curate an site/tool from the web, we should do so in a way that conceptualizes how it relates to our pedagogical goals and practices. In my own curation process using the web tool Scoup.it, this principled approach has meant that I create categories that relate to specific types of language courses and/or skills. And when it is applicable, I try to consider how a particular resource might relate to a classroom objective or activity. One of my interests as a teacher and researcher is vocabulary instruction, so I have created a Scoup.it category for curating resources on the web that relate only to vocabulary teaching and learning. At my university, many of our faculty members do research related to corpus linguistics and how it relates to vocabulary learning. So I continually look for materials that apply corpus linguistics to the teaching and learning of vocabulary.

I mention this above example to demonstrate how I believe we can move towards using digital curation to better inform computer assisted language learning (CALL). In order for curation to prove meaningful to other teachers and myself, I think it is very important that curation is seen not only as a continual process of adding to one's collection of curated resources, but also the refinement of those resources. In the past I have added resources on a specific topic, but have then went back and deleted or edited my annotation for a resource because of my own experiences with it in the classroom or based upon research articles I've read relating to the application of it.

Philip Hubbard of Standford University recently proposed that digital curation could possibly lead to greater learner autonomy. In his talk at Eurocall 2012, he gives an example of how curation can be used with Ted Talks to curate content for supporting autonomous language learners. While my experience using digital curation has been more for the collection of class materials to inform my teaching, Hubbard provides an example of content curation can be used in language teaching as well.

There is lots of potential for using content curation, but caution must be taken in terms of the evaluation of curated resources. I think this step of refining and re-assessing the resources we curate is essential if we are to have meaningful content that can be applied to our teaching. This also ensures that we are not simply collecting a mass of resources without relating it to our classroom contexts (something Hubbard also mentions in his talk). There are numerous curation topics out there that seem to be an unprincipled mass collection of web technologies, which as pointed out earlier, is not so much curation, but resource collection or aggregation.

Thus for digital curation to become an aid to teacher's ongoing knowledge and development, I believe we must continue to think about how it relates to specific teaching contexts and proven pedagogical practices.

Note: If you are interested in ways that you can develop your own Personal Learning Network (PLN) as a way of continuing your own professional development with digital technology and especially content curation, you might want to check out Nik Peachey's talk on this subject from the 2012 IATEFL Annual Conference.

Commentary on "Learning participatory practices in graduate school: Some perspective-taking by a mainstream educator"

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Through this post I intend to reflect on my reading of Casanave's chapter and my own related experiences as a "mainstream" graduate student. 

In this chapter Casanave relates her own experiences as a graduate student and interprets them using Lave and Wenger's (1991) notion of communities of practice and situated learning. Through this lens, her progression in graduate school is seen as moving from being a peripheral participant to a more active participant within her disciplinary community of practice.

One of the things Casanave notes is how she struggled with learning the lingo of her graduate coursework and participating through in-class conversations. She recalls feeling "like a silent, intimidated observer" (p. 18). This is a sentiment that I can relate to when I consider my own experiences in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) course I'm currently enrolled in. Like Casanave, I've often felt that I don't have enough exposure to some of the technical vocabulary to adequately contribute to class discussions and then turn to some of the similar avoidance strategies she mentions.

Another aspect of academic literacy she touches upon is how citation practices are not made explicit in graduate school. Despite the fact the citation conventions can easily be taught through style manuals, Casanve explains how she was given little guidance in why one would cite specific authors and not cite others. I would agree that an understanding how different theoretical camps are drawn up within a specific field and how one might cite certain authors in order to situate and align themselves with a chosen theoretical approach is rarely taught.

However,  I would add that one assignment often assigned to partly address this purpose is an annotated bibliography. One of the thoughts behind this assignment is that one will begin to take note of certain authors' theoretical stance and research paradigms by carefully annotating a body of research within a specific topic area. If this assignment was assigned to particular groups of students and they were to present upon their topics as part of their ongoing research process on a class topic for a paper, then an awareness might be raised on the sociopolitical aspects of citations. I feel that this was one way that I was made aware of the sociopolitical realities of citation practices by researchers within a discipline.

In the final part of her chapter, Casanave laments upon the silence and avoidance she had during graduate school to cover up her insecurity. She predicts that more open dialogue between old timers of the profession and the new comers would lead a more transparent understanding of what it takes to participate in an academic community. I wonder if some faculty might find this transparency runs counter to what they feel simply comes through multiple conversations, research, and reading, that participation in the academic community comes through hard work and struggle. I know that more transparency of the type Casanave suggests certainly might make the academic enculturation process I'm currently undergoing a less frustrating process.


References

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Casanave, C. P. (2008).Learning participatory practices in graduate school: Some perspective-taking by a mainstream educator. In C. P. Casanave & X. Li (Eds.), Learning the literacy practices of graduate school: Insiders' reflections on academic enculturation (pp. 14-31). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Commentary on "Data-Driven Learning: Taking the Computer Out of the Equation"

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Concordance lines from COCA.

In this blog post I comment on Alex Boulton's 2010 article from the journal of Language Learning, "Data-Driven Learning: Taking the Computer Out of the Equation." I presented on this article with my roommate Nick Velde for an SLA course at NAU. I find this article to be relevant to my own teaching context, where many graduate TAs teaching in our university's IEP have been heavily influenced by research and courses in corpus linguistics, which is a specialty of our faculty here. There is often a desire to then apply corpus linguistics research via data-driven learning to the classroom so that students can inductively learn about patterns of language in their actual contexts.

 

 Background on data-driven learning 


While this
constructivist approach has its critics, there are many proponents of it as well. Boulton points out in his article that one of the arguments for Data-Driven Learning (DDL) is that it can lead to greater learner autonomy. He describes DDL as a process where "learners are not taught overt rules, but they explore corpora to detect patterns among multiple language samples" (p. 535). A benefit of this learning process is that it is likely to promote a number of cognitive skills like predicting and interpreting. However, critics have questioned whether the investment of time, money and resources results in a justifiable payoff. In the studies reviewed in his article, Boulton points out that much of the research on the effectiveness of DDL involves small-scale qualitative studies. And for the few quantitative studies that have been performed in this area results have thus far been small with relatively few statistically significant outcomes. Much of this research has to do with students preferences and responses to DDL and does not answer the question of overall effectiveness of the approach.

An additional issue is that much of the research demonstrates that DDL is often used with more advanced learners, implying that it is of limited effectiveness for lower level students. Boulton points out that this may not be the case and that a few studies have shown DDL can be effective to the same degree that it has been with advanced learners. But research with lower level learners seems to be lacking at this point. This research gap is likely due to the assumption that the cognitive burden that comes with this type of DDL will be much harder for lower level learners to process than higher level learners.


Boulton makes the argument that paper-based corpus materials might help to lessen this cognitive burden of using a new software, a new learning approach and new materials. By using selected concordance lines in paper-based materials for classroom instruction, he posits learners will be provided with they type of scaffolding and guidance that they need, especially at the lower levels. He proposes the use of paper-based materials as an alternative to hands-on concordancing techniques, where learners interact with the concordance lines via computer in computer labs, which, Boulton notes, is the dominant approach to DDL taken by most of the studies he reviews.



The study

 

Boulton's study involved 89 students enrolled in a 2nd year architecture school in France. Nearly all the students were French and were non-native English speakers. He was able to collect 71 questionnaires following an experimental session. The students in his study "had compulsory 90-min English classes once a week in groups of 15–20, but none had any prior experience of DDL" (p. 542). Based on the student's TOIEC scores, they are described as low-intermediate learners.

He chose language items of difficulty from student's in-class essays. Then 10 items were chosen to produce paper-based concordance materials for. 1-5 items were used for part of the group and 6-10 for the other participants as a control group.


 The teaching materials Boulton used in his study consisted of "two short booklets covering the same language items for all students, but reversing the traditional and DDL treatment for each" (p. 543). He also describes how the materials included "two introductory questions for each item followed by a single page of either corpus data or dictionary information, interspersed with specific questions to focus attention" (p. 543).


These materials were given to teachers who had no prior experience using DDL methods, a point the researcher felt distinguished this study from previous ones where the researcher is also the teacher. A pre- and post-test were given in addition to the questionnaire.


Results showed only a 19.38% improvement on the post-test. Results from a one-way ANOVA showed that a minimal significant difference between the dictionary items and the corpus items (p = .15). The results of the questionnaire showed that 51 students preferred to do more DDL work whereas 28 students wanted to do more dictionary activities. 58 students felt that corpus work would help them avoid certain errors in the future as opposed to 37 who felt dictionary work would allow them to do this better.


An open ended question asked students whether they preferred paper-based learning to hands-on instruction. The response to this question is perhaps what I find most interesting in this study.
Boulton reported that "nearly half (25 of the 55 who responded) believed that prepared exercises would get straight to the point and avoid wasting time, and teacher guidance would be essential to avoid drawing wrong conclusions from the mass of data" (p. 553). I think this provides some insight on how learners might view the hands-on approach to DDL verses the paper-based approach Boulton used in his study. It gets at a sort of cost verses benefits ratio, which I think is important for considering the implementation of a DDL approach.

One of the other interesting results of the study is that the lower-level learners did show improvement on some of the language items. This runs counter to the perception that advanced learners benefit more from DDL than lower-level learners.



Take away message for teachers? 

 

The conclusions that Boulton draws at the end of is article are that the use of paper-based materials should be used to help scaffold learners to use hands-on DDL. He also suggests that the elimination of the computer makes learning easier. However, these paper-based materials are very time consuming to prepare, which threatens the practicality of such an approach. Then there is the issue of teacher expertise using online corpus tools. The technical knowledge required to manipulate and query corpus data might limit the accessibility of such an approach to a relatively small group of teachers. It appears that their is still much more research needed in this area. But I find this article does contribute to DDL approaches and gives me something to consider in terms of scaffolding instruction using concordances.


References

Boulton, A. (2010). Data-Driven learning: Taking the computer out of the equation.
Language Learning, 60 (3), pp. 534–572.
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The Last Class of the Fall Semester

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Today I finished up teaching my last class of the semester at the IEP. So in this post I spend some time talking about what happened in the class and how I think it is important to better prepare our students for adjusting to university life.

Because after this class is over many of my students will be transitioning to life at the university, I wanted this class to be more about what they need for taking that next step and how to adjust to the changes they will face.

I started off class by having students respond in an open free-write about what strategies/tips they think are important for being successful in the university. Once students were finished I had them go around the circle we were sitting in and each share one thing they had written. Their list looked something like this:



Tips/Strategies for Success in the University

  • record lectures and review
  • make friends with native speakers
  • ask classmates or the professor if we don't understand
  • don't cheat!
  • study and review vocabulary
We talked about how professors will probably speak very fast and they will not often get much of the what is being said, so recording the lecture to review later will be an effective way to study the material. I pointed out to students that many of their cell phones come with technology they can easily use to record lectures. I related how I sometimes use the application Dropvox to upload recordings of lectures and meetings to my online Dropbox account. 

We also discussed how important it is that they make friends with native speakers. I explained that the process of learning English will continue and that they are now in charge of their own English learning. So having a native speaker to compare notes with and help them study would be very beneficial. 

I stressed the need for visiting professors during office hours too. This is something I don't think we encourage our students to do enough of. I have even considered making office hours a mandatory part of my class. Perhaps next semester I will do this. I think that ESL learners are sometimes seen as mediocre students by university faculty when they may in fact be trying very hard in their coursework but are simply struggling because of language issues. Without discussing these learning issues with their professors, their professors have no way of knowing an issue exists and how they might be able to assist them. 

When one student mentioned "don't cheat" I used it as a segue into the seriousness that professors feel towards academic dishonesty and what this word means. 

After this discussion about their strategies we analyzed a syllabus from an entry-level Biology course. We talked about the large amount of reading that was on the syllabus, the quizzes and exams that the course grade depends upon, and the academic honesty policy. I then passed out a sample calendar and had students think about how they could plan the reading and studying time into their weekly schedule if they were taking courses like this next semester.

Our class concluded with an end of course reflection writing task and then the course evaluation. 

As I left the class so the students could fill out their evaluations, I wondered how many of them would truly implement the strategies and tips we discussed in class that day.


GSAAL Journal Club: Incedental Vocabulary Through Reading

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Applied Linguistics and TESOL students at GSAAL Journal Club.

In this week's Journal Club for the NAU's Graduate Student Association of Applied Linguistics (GSAAL) group, we discussed an article that looked at the incidental vocabulary learned through an ELT course book. Ph.D. student Anna Gates led the discussion on the following article:

Matsuoka, W., & Hirsh, D. (2010). Vocabulary learning through reading: Does an ELT course book provide good opportunities? Reading in a Foreign Language, 22, pp. 56–70.

Anna opened the discussion by asking the following questions: As teachers, do you feel the textbooks you have used in our own teaching have provided guidance in what vocabulary to teach? Or,  have you thought before about what kind of vocabulary the textbook is providing your students?

Most of the the teachers mentioned that the activities provided in our textbooks leave much to be desire and and often contain no systematic approach to the vocabulary used in the texts. For us, this means we end up having to supplement the textbook with activities and materials of our own.


The Study and Discussion


The study looked at the text book New Headway Student’s Book Upper-Intermediate (Soars & Soars, 2005). In our group discussion we mentioned how it seemed strange that this was a text book that none of us had heard of. The study seemed to provide little rationale for why they chose this particular textbook. Although it could be this textbook is common in universities in Australia, where the study took place. It would have been more helpful if this had been mentioned in the study.

There were two different research questions considered in the study:

1. What are the vocabulary demands of reading an ELT course book?
2. What vocabulary learning opportunities are provided in an ELT course book?

What the researchers wanted to find out was how many repetitions and occurrences occurred in the text. This study was also a case study of only one text, which is a limitation pointed out in through our discussion.

The researchers built a corpus of 45, 000 words from the text. Then they created different vocabulary lists that fit into 6 different vocabulary lists, such as the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) and the GSL. Some of us found it somewhat odd that this study used the GSL, especially since it is based on West's (1953) work. But the convenience of these lists through Tom Cobb's website is probably part of the reason for this popularity despite the GSL being so dated.

Anna mentioned how they identified the 187 words that fell into those categories and put them into increasing frequency, then divided this number by six. So every 31st word on the list was the one they were going to look at. This seems to have not been much of a random sample, as Anna pointed out.

The program used in this study was the Range software, which Tom Cobb's website has adapted.

Results from the study showed that 83.1 % of the words fell within the first 1K word list, while 6.9% fell in the 2nd 1K word list. Only 2.1% fell within the AWL. The authors of the study point out the pre-teaching of AWL words would allow for students attaining more than 95% coverage of words in the chapters of the text, that is provided students already knew the words from the 1K and 2K list.

Anna pointed out that the textbook used in the study did not provide a lot of opportunity for acquiring new academic words. This might critique might be applicable to other coursebooks, but it was pointed out that this might be changing due to the influence of corpus linguistics and publishers attempts to provide a rationale for sequencing content to better cover the AWL. Still, our own impressions as teachers is that some of these publishers could do a lot more to help address the teaching and integration of vocabulary. Most teachers commented that the textbooks they are using generally make an attempt at covering AWL words, but how they go about doing this varies and is not always effective.

A further limitation of the study we discussed was that it is not apparent how much of the text students actually read. One teacher pointed out that even after almost a semester of reading from a course text, students in her class still didn't understand the meaning of a word that had occurred in numerous chapters. So it would seem that there are a lot of assumptions being made about how much noticing of vocabulary is occurring through incidental exposure, not to mention whether students are actually reading a portion of the text that includes the vocabulary words. I pointed out that a common way that teachers use to get at reading comprehension (other means such as graphic organizers are more appropriate) is through the use of comprehension questions, which problematically result in students scanning for the answers in the text. This means it is unlikely students will actually read all of the text, which makes incidental vocabulary learning through a course textbook questionable.

As I'm currently teaching an advanced reading and vocabulary course in the IEP, I felt this article was effective for eliciting some great discussion about the lack of vocabulary gained through reading course texts. It reaffirmed to me that as a teacher I need to bring in supplementary vocabulary materials and explicit instruction because the textbook publishers are not likely to make vocabulary the priority it needs to be.


References

Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213–238.

Soars, L., & Soars, J. (2005). New headway student's book (Upper–Intermediate). UK: Oxford University Press.

West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. London: Longman, Green & Co.

Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Graduate School Through Action Research

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In this blog post I discuss how I see Lave and Wenger's (1991) conceptualization of situated learning and "legitimate peripheral participation"(LPP) applying to my graduate school enculturation. The notion of LPP, as it has been described applying to graduate school, is that graduate students engage in tasks that take them from the periphery of the field through contact with old timers towards more fully participating in their community of practice.

One of the participatory practices I feel is important to engage in as a graduate student is conducting research. I have been fortunate to have a TA-ship where research is part of the IEP's mission, which makes attaining IRB permission a more stream-lined process. This past semester I began an action research project related to vocabulary learning strategies based around my own classroom. Throughout the project I have had to make choices about different data collection techniques and how to fit my research goals with the semester schedule of the class.  The process of transcribing data from interviews and computing numerical data from questionnaires has also made me feel more confident in my ability to conduct research. The guidance and mentoring of Applied Linguistics faculty from NAU has been instrumental in guiding me through this process. Overall, the process has helped to demystify the research process and also help me get accustomed to the messy nature of research. I view action research as a step towards more fully developing as a researcher of Applied Linguistics.

Another advantage of taking on action research projects is that I think they help you feel more confident in making different pedagogical decisions. Exploring issues for improving various aspects of your class ensures that what you are doing as a teacher is informed by current research and your own classroom context. In reading and reviewing the different approaches I have students take in developing their vocabulary knowledge, I have felt more confidence in guiding my students to explore different techniques for self-directed vocabulary learning.

Presenting at conferences is the second participatory practice that I feel has helped me develop the ability to 'talk the talk' of the field. I remember when I gave a practice talk involving the use of correlation statistics  and writing assessment in preparation of an upcoming state conference. I was describing the statistic using terms related to significance rather than strength of correlation. A minor mistake, but one that could certainly undermine my own credibility while presenting at a conference about my research. I have come to see these practice conferences as instrumental in preparing me for the larger state and national conferences. This process I feel is exemplar of the type of increasing participatory roles that Lave and Wenger (1991) speak of in their conception of 'legitimate peripheral participation. '  Looking back, I realize that my professors facilitated this type of participation by assigning conference type presentations as course requirements.

I feel the apprentice type of model that Lave and Wenger describe is an appropriate view of graduate school enculturation. I think that keeping this type of framework in mind can help graduate students consider the choices they take in activities they engage in while attending graduate school. Additionally, it can also inform the choices that faculty members make during the mentoring of graduate students.



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Preferred Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategies of EAP Reading Students: Prestation at TESOL 2013

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In this blog post I have included information regarding my presentation at TESOL 2013 in Dallas, Texas.

On the second day of the conference I presented about using vocabulary self-collection techniques for EAP Reading, which is part of an action research project I conducted in the IEP I teach at under the supervision of Dr. Fredricka Stoller. I was also asked to provide a brief write up of my project for the AL Forum Interest Section of TESOL.

Below is a copy of my presentation that I presented at TESOL.



  Here is the handout that accompanied my presentation at TESOL.
I would like to add supplementary materials to this blog post in the future for teachers who are interested in using vocabulary self-collection techniques in their classrooms. If you decide to use any of my materials, please cite my presentation appropriately. And if you have any questions regarding my presentation, please feel free to email me.

Why extensive reading?

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I have always felt that extensive reading is a challenging thing for teachers to get their students to do. In the reading classes I have taught, I find myself continually reinforcing the need for our silent reading time in class. I think that at times students can simply cease to see the value in it and see it as busy work. Here is graphic that I found on the extensive reading website that I think spells it out really well.


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