TPR in Chickasaw

Hi everyone! I just had to share about what we're seeing this weekend. I am currently in Ada, OK (along with Jill) for a service learning trip with another class on Endangered Languages, and we have been meeting with people who are Chickasaw. We went to a children's language club on Saturday morning where they used TPR (total physical response) to teach the kids Chickasaw. The kids were completely into it, and the teacher did a great job of letting them roam around in organized chaos and then bringing it back in to review. He commented that he actually reviewed a few English translations to help with classroom management and also make sure that they were getting some key grammatical points along with the vocabulary. Tomorrow we go to observe a high school classroom where I think they also use TPR, as well as TPRS (which adds Storytelling as a main component). I know that this isn't related to teaching English, but it is teaching a second language using techniques that we've discussed in the past. We'll have to report back with more.

Thought provoking speeches

Along the lines of the Jobs speech, this link is to a speech by Carnegie Mellon professor and alumnus Randy Pausch who was diagnosed with a terminal disease and wanted to deliver one final lecture. This passionate oration, while directed to students and faculty, was actually written for his family. There are many passages that can be excerpted and used more probably in writing classes, although I am sure somewhere the written text appears. You can purchase the DVD for a nominal amount through Amazon.com.

P.S. Not sure if the "Link" feature works, but here is the link, or you can Google "Last Lecture" and find it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Mini-lesson reading material: 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Here is a video link of good quality to his commencement address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM&feature=channel

I wish everyone would be so blessed that someday, if not now, you can say the same thing from deep down inside of the soul: 'I've found what I love.'

Keep the faith, don't settle, follow your heart!

BTW, this is the link to the transcript: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505

What's the deal?

So, I apologize to all of you....I cannot seem to be successful at 'commenting' but only creating new posts. I don't know what the deal is because I have commented on posts prior to this. So, here I am created a new post in order to respond to other posts. :)

In response to Sharon's 'visiting' teacher' post:


Sharon, this is great! Thanks for sharing about it in class the other night as well. I'm so glad to hear that the pilot is going well! And Kari, I loved your lesson last semester, and it's great to hear that it was a success, not to mention great experience for you! What a great thing for the ELI department and a great connection to make between our department and ELI. I hope it's the beginning of a continuous, successful program.

In response to Lori's 'Activity 3' post:

I think the ideas here are really good. I especially keyed in on your ideas on assessing listening because that is what I'm working on with the guy I'm tutoring through Arlington Reads. I like the idea of watching a scene from a show or movie, then trying to improve the comprehension score. I think shows/movies are relevant to students, and it gives them a different way of hearing natural speech.

Also, Cindy gave me a good listening activity that went over really well with my student. I wrote down some sentences beforehand (for me to look at only). I took one of those sentences and said it really fast, and he tried to see what he understood (if anything) from the sentence. Each time I repeated the sentence, I slowed it down a bit until he comprehended every word. I hope that makes sense. He really like it and was especially excited once he was able to understand it. At first, I was having him write down any words he comprehended, but I realized fairly quickly that his writing proficiency is rather low, so then he just told me what words he was able to understand. If you want to work on listening/comprehending with your student, I recommend trying this one. Thanks, Cindy!

Activity 3

I looked online for a while to see what other people have done to track student progress, but by using keyword searches, instead I found articles on "How to Teach ESL Students to Read a Chart/Graph" and "How to Track ESL Students' Progress" as they move on from the ESL program into the mainstream classroom. I'm sure that other charts or graphs like the one Nation suggests for speed reading exist; I just was not able to find any examples online. So, this post will reflect on my own ideas for tracking student progress in reading, writing, listening, & speaking.

As for reading, if we're trying to encourage our students to do more extensive reading and increase their reading proficiency (both in speed & level), then something as simple as have a piece of paper with a table that has the different levels on each row and blank space beside it where they could put a sticker beside the level for a book they have finished reading. You could set a class goal to read a certain number of books by the end of the term, but they would have some control over how many in each level they felt they could read. By the end of the term, they would have a great overview of how many books they have read and at which level.

As for writing, there are a couple of ideas for students to track their progress. You could have students keep a journal where they write for the first few minutes of class each day. If you keep the time consistent and ask them to count how many words they write at the end of the time, they could see how quickly they are able to think in English and then find the words to write it down. Similarly, you could do a timed writing once a week where again the students tally how many words they have written, but you also give them a 1-10 score on comprehensibility. Remembering our discussion about balancing fluency & accuracy, we don't want to produce students who can write a lot of English words that no native speaker could ever understand as a coherent thought. Again, students could keep a chart of their word count & comprehensibility score throughout the term.

Listening seems a little harder to measure in this way. If you had the equipment available, you could have a student listen to a passage or watch a scene for 10 minutes and answer comprehension questions that go in order. Students could be allowed to rewind it as much as they wanted to re-listen to a section of the passage. Students could see how many questions they were able to answer accurately. Perhaps the first time they only answer 2, but maybe by the end of the term, they can answer 10. You could also take a high level passage & work through it throughout the term, having students first just pick out individual words they hear. The next phase could be to identify phrases or topics that the passage is about, with the final goal of being able to summarize the passage. If you use the same passage each time, students will recognize it is familiar and hopefully that they are improving in comprehension & listening skills.

Speaking seems even harder to measure without the student individually speaking with the teacher (which could be hard with a large class). Perhaps the students could self-evaluate after speaking activities. Maybe they could keep a log and rate things like:

-How confident did I feel speaking? or

-How well did my partner understand me?

You could also give them topics and ask them to tell their partner certain things. For example, the topic could be Introduce Yourself and the certain requirements could be to tell your partner your name, where you're from, how long you've been living in Arlington, what you do for work, who your family is, etc. There is certain information that we repeat over & over again when we meet people and being able to at least say those key things confidently and with ease helps our students gain confidence in a conversation. Perhaps the first time you try this, they are only able to tell their partner their name, where they're from and how long they've been living in Arlington. But, hopefully, by the end of the term, they can spout off all sorts of things about themselves and other topics that you've introduced. For example, as an L2 learner of Spanish, I am really great at introducing myself, explaining how I learned Spanish, and talking about George W. Bush (in 2004, a common taxi cab conversation in Spain once they learned I was from the US) all in Spanish. Being able to say those things with confidence allows me to sort of warm up my Spanish skills in a conversation before delving into topics I'm not as fluent in.

I think I want to create a "visiting teacher" program

As you may know, ELI is piloting a new program this semester, a "conversation club." Debra Basler is overseeing it, and I was lucky enough to get a section for my service learning this semester. The class meets from 5-6 pm on Mondays; there is another section that meet at (I think) 10 am on Wednesdays. We're in Room 200 in Trimble. First session was about 30 students. Attendance is voluntary, the idea is to be able to chat with native English speakers. The class began in late January, and has levelled off to a repeat crew of about 15-18 students of various levels (generally 3 & 4 on a scale of 1-6, with a few 5's and 2's).
In the first session, students said that they would like to talk about dating and parties. That made me think about this great presentation Kari did last fall in the SLA class ... and she very graciously agreed to reprise it for the ELI group last Monday night. Well, she was a rip-roaring success. This was, it became obvious, a topic of critical interest to the students. After introducing the topic, we broke into pairs to practice social chat and asking the partner for a date, or to hang-out and get to know you.
It is great to know that you have achieved at least two very important objectives with your students: hitting the targeted task - in this case, converation, and hitting a matter of great importance in their lives, especially in this rather strange and different place in which they currently live.
Facilitating this class gave me the opportunity to both participate and observe, and to reflect on the benefits of team-teaching, and of finding issues and concerns of my students and using that as the vehicle to carry the structure and tasks of the language lesson at hand. I like the idea of periodically inviting colleagues to contribute to the class. It is good for the students. As a teacher I benefit from learning from others and it gives me new and fresh perspectives as to how I can best approach the language lessons at hand. And let's face it ... there are some topics that benefit from a teacher's additional "street cred" with the students.
My thanks to Kari for her time, energy, and a fabulous class.

Some learning from observing ELI class

Last Fri., I went to observe Ms. Brown's Listening/Speaking class in ELI of UTA. I surely learned a lot from the class.

It was a level 5 listening/speaking class. There should be 16 students in the class, but two were absent. According to Ms. Brown, every Fri. is the presentation day. Students get topics or directions of topics every Tue. and they do presentations on Fri. Therefore, when I was there, I actually observed students' performances on their presentation skills and how Ms. Brown managed the class.

First of all, I felt that Ms. Brown created very pleasant classroom atmosphere. She is good at telling jokes and making fun so that students feel comfortable to talk or ask questions. Secondly, Ms. Brown provided wording recast whenever students got stuck on describing something after she negotiated meaning with them. Thirdly, Ms. Brown insisted students use accurate descriptions when they talked about details. She always said, "We are not monkeys. Talk to us. Don't say, "Then you do like this and this." Between the presentations, Ms. Brown got up the stage to remind the presentation skills to make sure the following presentors revise their skills. If the presentors still did not get it right or confused everybody, Ms. Brown got on the stage to help the presentors clarify their key points by writing on the board. There were at least five or six Chinese speakers in the classroom. When some of them talked in Chinese privately, Ms. Brown was not happy, but she just asked, "Jane, what did you say? What did you say? Share with the whole class." and she used the movement of her eyebrows to remind the students of the class regulation about speaking native language in the English classroom.

Ms. Brown was very easy going and flexable. She didn't mind sitting on the floor and she asked everybody to sit on the floor when one of the presentors presented how to do Yoga to relax the muscles. She made a lot of jokes during the Yoga presentation and everybody seemed enjoying the class very much.

Before ending the class, Ms. Brown clarified the attendance policies and let students know the consequences of skipping classes. When the students said some excuses about being absent, Ms. Brown said, "I can totally understand that, but you have to talk to Vickie, who is in charge of your attendance records."

Overall speaking, I really appreciate Ms. Brown's teaching skills, especially the way she invited students' participations and the way she created the pleasant classroom atmosphere. Her insisting on classroom policies also impressed me very much. A teacher can be demanding and easy going at the same time as long as he/she knows when to be easy going and when to be demanding.

A visual approach of teaching/learning vocabulary

The other day when I chatted with Clint, we both shared the same concern that many ESL students need to beef up their vocabulary. One important component of my teaching philosophy is that I would coach students to use the best tools as they can get their hands on. We're fortunate to live in this Internet age when many tools are available online and are priced in a very affordable way. I found this website http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ of Visual Thesaurus and I really like what they have to offer. The related words (beyond thesaurus) get represented in a dynamic tree structure, and the colors and re-balancing behavior and the whole design just make this software a pleasure to use. You may check it out. The only improvement I would like to see at this time is to provide some basic-level of image for words of physical nature -- objects such as apple, horse, etc. However, that will create negative impact on the Java software performance. So, I think I'm happy to live with their current design.

word frequency (Jill)

I apologize that I started a new post. I meant for this to be a comment to Kris' post on the frequency word count below, but for some reason I could not get my comment to post.

I took a look at the word frequency website (http://language.tiu.ac.jp/flc/), and it actually seems quite helpful. All you have to do is cut and paste (or type) your sentence, paragraph, etc. into the box, and the frequency word count is done for you. The website Chris lists above separates the words into various levels (which are explained), and you also have the option to color code your results as well.

I decided to try it. I cut and pasted one of the blog posts into the box, and voila! I had a color coded paragraph along with the which words are more or less frequent. This tool may not be the most accurate (i.e. it parses 'words' such as websites or initials in the counts), but it's very helpful in general and could save us time in choosing whether a specific article/section is appropriate for our students reading level and/or appropriate for what we're using it for (intensive reading vs. extensive reading).

Something about Classroom Management- by Ruby

Today, I taught two Chinese classes in UTA to have my Chinese teaching recorded. One was the beginning level Chinese; the other was the intermediate level Chinese. Although it is not about English teaching, I think it is still relevent to second/foreign language teaching.

In my beginning level Chinese class, I asked students to practice telephone conversations because they just spent one whole month on Chinese telephone conversations. There were two activities; the first one was I assigned, for example, Kevin to call Glady to ask her to help him prepare his Chinese exam on next Mon. They did a good job. They used whatever they had learned to finish the task. Then, I continued assigning different pairs to accomplish different tasks through telephone conversations. Students seemed kind of nervous, but basically excited and enjoying the activities. The second part of the activity was : I pretended using my cell phone to call one of the students at one time. The one got called by me had to pick up his/her cell phone to talk to me. It was fun. Students enjoyed doing that.

As to the intermediate level Chinese class, the atmosphere in that class was very WEIRD. There were two to three Chinese native speakers sitting in the classroom without doing anything except for using their own laptop getting on internet. They looked so indifferent and RUDE. They looked at me as if I were an idiot or a clown something. For the rest of the class, whenever I asked them to repeat some sentences after me, only two to three students followed the direction. (There were 10 students in the class.) I stopped and talked to them. I said, "This is a class of ten, but I only hear three people repeating after me." Then, I heard them read louder. I don't know how to describe the atmosphere in the classroom. I wonder whether that was the atmosphere they have been used to or not (SO COLD!!) or that was just because they were not familiar with me (I am not their TA, but the TA of beginning level class). However, according to my teaching experiences, I think that is exactly the way they have been since 2008 Fall.

Since I was there just for recording my teaching demo, I should not get involved too much in their classroom management. However, I really did not feel comfortable about the classroom atmosphere. (I don't think students can learn a very difficult foreign language like Chinese well under such atmosphere.) That choked me to death!! Now, I realized how different the classroom atmosphere can be in terms of different instructors. Have anyone of you encountered any "COLD" or "FROZEN" classroom atmosphere? Any suggestion?

Need Service Learning Partners

It looks like I have my observation hours pretty much scheduled for the semester. However, I am still looking for a partner to do some instruction with. If any of you know of a student who is looking for a tutor or if you have a student who would like more time than you can provide, please let me know. It seems that my schedule has limited my availability, so I'll include it below. As of right now I'm basically available during the times not mentioned.

Work and school schedule:

M 8-1:30, 5:30-7
T 8-2:30, 5-6:30
W 8-1:30, 5:30-7
H 8-2:30, 5-6:30
F 8-1:30

Response to Activity #6

For everyone's reference, the following is the content of Activity #6:
Nation notes that in order to be valid, comprehension questions should "measure reasonable comprehension" and not things that "a proficient native speaker would not remember from the text" (page 89). Look for a set of comprehension questions that you think have a low level of validity due to this. Comment on what kinds of things are asked and why they are inappropriate.

I am currently using a textbook called College Reading 1:English for Academic Success. On page 19, it includes a simplified text from an Introductory Psychology book--including five findings of the American Psychological Association. Then, on page 20, the students are asked to "restate the five conclusions in your own words."

While this may seem to be a reasonable task, try to imagine yourself standing in line at Walmart and you pick up the current edition of Reader's Digest (as opposed to Cosmopolitan!). You quickly find the lead article titled "10 Scams to Avoid." After skimming the article for about 3 minutes, you put the magazine back on the rack. Now, how many of those 10 scams could you recite without looking back at the article?

I'll bring the book to class this week, if anyone would like to see it.

Activity 1 Blog Post

This website has a story meant for learning English. It might be good for a University student to read: http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-stories-university.htm

It also contains some True and False comprehension questions which I think the student would have to read the story to be able to answer.
According to Nation’s recommended word list evaluator http://language.tiu.ac.jp/flc/), there is 85% of level 1 words. 4.89% for level 2 and 1.12% of level 3. Then 8.99% from outside lists but many of these were proper names and places. Therefore it seems like it might work well as extensive reading homework exercise for a lower intermediate student. It is something you could do an exercise on vocabulary before going home and grade the comprehension questions when they got back to class.
Based on the level and content of the vocabulary I think it could be an effective extensive reading assignment. It was also an interesting read with several different characters. It is also an extensive reading activity which could be shared by the whole class.

Checking word frequency

after reading some of Nations book, I decided to go back and listen to his presentation on tesol.org titled, "Teaching vocabulary, is it a waste of time?" from 1/30/2007. I noticed he had recommended the following website for checking word frequency in an article:
http://language.tiu.ac.jp/flc/

Teaching a class of 20 or so- by Ruby

I just realized that I had to write journals to record my volunteer teaching. OK. From now on, I will put whatever here just in case I got nothing to turn in for Teaching & Observation as well as the Portfolio.

On Feb. 9th, Tue., it was my turn to be in charge of teaching the whole class (or 20 students or more) in Arlington Library. Although I had very rich experiences of teaching EFL in Taiwan, that was the first time for me to teach English to a big class in USA!! I was kind of excited about it because it sounds very strange for a Chinese to teach English in USA. Haha.....

I also asked my husband to record my whole teaching process so that I can turn it in as my first ESL teaching video to Dr. Park. (If Dr. Kilpatrick is interested in evaluating my teaching, I could turn it in to her, too.) Basically, I taught according to the material created by some educators hired by Texas government. The material is very good, very practical (job-oriented). However, I was kind of doubting whether the educators took reference from the most frequent 1000 or 2000 English vocabulary lists or not because we encountered a lot of TOEFL vocabulary like: categorize, purchase, synonym, antonym, perishable, consumable, durable, etc. Most of my students cannot even spell: milk, beef, shampoo.... I really wonder how they can learn those higher level vocabulary. There must be something wrong. Either the placement tests are not accurate, or the educator didn't consider the appropriateness of the levels of vocabulary. They told me that my class is a level 3-4 class. How come level 3-4 cannot pronounce: soap, alarm clock correctly?? Well, I am just a volunteer teacher; I don't complain. I teach.

According to the material, it only differentiates English vowels into: long vowels and short vowels and the geniuses created the symbols by putting a straight line or a curve line on the top of "a, e, i, o, u" and that's it. On Feb. 2nd, when my supervisor was teaching that part, even I, an eighth-year Linguistics & TESOL majored student, got confused very much, not to mention those Hispanic & Vietnamese level 2-3 students!!(I highly doubt that some of the students are just level 1!!) I was thinking: OK, you create a new way of teaching English vowels, but will any one see those strange vowel symbols on any versions of English dictionaries in the world?? If the system is so unique that no one can see it anywhere else except for on this material, can you be responsible for their loss?? How can they themselves connect this system to IPA or other symbols frequently used in English dictionaries in the world?? Can anyone successfully learn English without looking up vocabulary in dictionaries in the world?? I know someone will not be happy about it (and that was the case in the end, Haha......), but I made up my mind to use my expertise in English Phonetics to teach them the 11-12 vowel chart according to "A Course in Phonetics" by Peter Ladeforged (because students deserve a fair opportunity!!). Suddenly, I recalled one of my undergraduate phonetics professors' words. She said, "Everybody can teach English as long as they can find some students to teach in Taiwan, but what makes you guys different from those self-qualified English teachers is: you know English phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and even pragmatics and sociolinguistics. It is LINGUISTICS that makes you different from other English teachers in Taiwan!!" I used to hate the professor because she was very very arrogant and rude, but now, I think what she said makes sense at this moment (although it is SEVEN years later)!!

I emphasized pronunciation very much. Since our supervisor got different teaching philosophy about correcting and drilling students' pronunciation, I do what I can because somebody has to do it!! On that day, my teaching was base on Audiolingual Method and Communicative Teaching. I asked students to repeat after my pronunciation on vocabulary as well as sentences. I negotiated meanings with students a lot and I also asked students to communicate with their classmates a lot. Basically, students felt kind of excited about getting a teacher willing to correct their pronunciation on words they cannot get them right. A lot of students came to me to express their appriciations to me and tell me that they liked my class individually. Although I will not take TESOL as my life time career, it is always a happy thing to help some people around me in my life.

Blog discussion(s) for Feb 11

Okay, so the University is closing at 3pm today, so all afternoon and evening classes are canceled. I'm still posting the activities I told you about, but you can choose for yourself whether or not to use them.

After completing your activity, start a new post that describes it. If you want to link to a site, feel free to do so, or if you create a document that you want to share, the easiest thing to do is post it to googledocs and then link to it there.

Activity #1: Look online for any formal reading assessment that you can find. Evaluate it based on reliability, validity, and practicality.

Activity #2: Google around for some informal reading assessments. Create a list of possibilities, and then discuss the one that you think would be most effective, and/or the one that you think would be least effective.

Activity #3: One possible way to boost retention could be for students to have measures of progress that show them that their English is improving. One example of this is the Speed Reading Graph that Nation discusses. Can you find comparable measures of progress for speaking, listening, writing, and reading (not just speed reading)? What might these include? How effective do you think they would be in illustrating to students that their proficiency is improving?

Activity #4: Look in Nation page 80 (or on Nation's webpage) at the bilingual vocabulary tests, and think about them in terms of effectiveness in a classroom. What do you think of these? Would you use them? HOW would you use them? In what ways are they effective measures of vocabulary? Ineffective measures of vocabulary? What advantages or disadvantages do these tests have?

Activity #5: Find a reading online that has comprehension questions that go along with it. Then have 5 native speakers of English try to answer the questions without doing the reading. What does it tell you about the validity of these questions? How might you change the questions to make them more valid?

Activity #6 (sorry, couldn't stop at 5!): Nation notes that in order to be valid, comprehension questions should "measure reasonable comprehension" and not things that "a proficient native speaker would not remember from the text" (page 89). Look for a set of comprehension questions that you think have a low level of validity due to this. Comment on what kinds of things are asked and why they are inappropriate.

SNOW!!

What a beautiful morning, which might turn into a not-so-beautiful afternoon/evening if temps fall :-( As of now, we are still planning for class, but I'll keep monitoring it throughout the afternoon. I'm considering giving an alternate blog assignment that folks can do i lieu of attending class - what do you think? I know some of you have quite a drive and might be worried about what the roads will be like that late in the day.

CSL Tutor for Panda

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/panda-tutor-wanted-chines_n_450578.html

Link to Panda tutor article from 

Learning???

This past week as I've been reading your reflections, it's been interesting to see what everyone is getting out of their volunteer experience. As a comment to this post, I'd like to see more specific details of what YOU have learned (not what you have observed, or what you have done, but what your own personal take-home message has been) so far in your service learning. The things that you are learning may be important for other students as well, and may lead your classmates to look more closely at different aspects of their own experience.

Selection??

A second issue we are going to discuss tonight that is directly related to our service learning is selection of an appropriate partner. Several of you have mentioned your dissatisfaction (some for different reasons) with the partner that you have chosen to work with. Others are still having trouble even getting one session completed. First, let's think about the reasons behind the trouble. Is it last-minute planning? Is it lack of communication? Is it lack of motivation on the part of the student or the volunteer? Second, let's think about whether our issues with dissatisfaction would be made irrelevant if problems with retention were taken care of (if so, see previous post about retention). If the issue is not retention, how can the problem best be solved? If you LOVE the partner you are working with, what do you love about it? Is it the way the partner's organization is run, or is it due to the student(s)? If you are dissatisfied with it, why? is it related to the partner organization or to the student(s) you have? How can you overcome the problem to make the volunteer experience more relevant and more of a learning experience for you?

Note that not every partner is a good choice for everyone! As we develop the service learning component of the TESOL program, part of what we want is a better understanding of how different partners can help meet the needs of the different students that we have in the program.

Retention??!!

Okay, tonight we are going to diverge purposefully from the syllabus to discuss several issues with service learning. One of these will be about RETENTION - how can we keep our students coming back? Obviously in many school settings, attendance is mandatory, so that is not an issue. However, there is also a business aspect to the ESL industry - if students finish a level, the program wants them to enroll in another. In addition, the case for many of us in our service learning is that our students have nothing invested in their participation; some have internal motivation, but that is not always enough to motivate them to attend class. So, let's talk about how we might encourage retention in ESL classes. This might be from either a business perspective (how would we get them to enroll in the next level) or from a volunteer perspective (how could we encourage them to attend our FREE sessions). What do you think?

class dynamics

Having taught groups of three for so long, I am find the classroom dynamic interesting. Although I am having some trouble with the back of the classroom. I find I do better when I pair students and then walk around and set up on the right tracks in their pairs.
Actually, on the tesol.org mailing list recently, a big topic has been how to get a classroom to use EO (English Only). This is not my goal but I do find my service language students speaking a lot of spanish. Interestingly, some of the respondants on the mailing list talk about hanging slips of paper up in class with people's names on it and points they deduct everytime someone uses a non-English language, someone else points out that their students are surround by Spanish 22 hours plus a day and it creates too artificial environment to start inhibiting their ability to speak it in class. Any additonal thoughts?

USA beyond my imagination- by Ruby

You won't believe what I did on Thur. I taught ESL students how to use MS Word (although for my whole life, I consider myself as a computer idiot). Most of them had never touched a computer before they got into the computer lab. I had to teach them the vocabulary like: mouse, click, document, copy, cut, paste, etc. in the beginning of the class. Then, I had to show them how to hold the mouse (by holding their hands to do it) and move it and then how to click the left button with their pointing finger to select what they want. 90% of the students do not know how to type in English. They use both of their pointing fingers to type their very limited vocabulary.

For my whole life, I have the American Dream. However, at that moment, I saw a completely different America, which is beyond my imagination. My students come from Mexico, Vietnam and some African countries. Their English is so limited and the pronunciation is so poor that I can barely understand what they say to me. So far, I've made up my mind to try my best to correct their terrible pronunciation as long as I got any chance and time.

My supervisor used to be an elementary school teacher. She is very good at creating a pleasant classroom atmosphere. However, I notice that no matter how poor the studetns' pronunciation is, she does not stop for a minute to 'recast' or 'correct' them at all. She treats all the adults as kids and keeps on encouraging them by "Great Job!", "Good!" and "Yah!!". As an EFL teacher from Taiwan, it is incredible to me. When students never get anything right, how can you keep on giving them compliments?? How will they know they are not on the right track?? If professional ESL teachers do not take the chance to teach them, who else is going to save their English? Can they really get any job in USA with such terrible pronunciation and grammar??

One thing I realize about American culture is: no one wants to be the "bad guy" who always says something honestly but not so "sweet". Everbody just wants to be "polite" and "diplomatic". Now, I am struggling with this issue: if I am going to live in USA for the rest of my life, whether or not I should just keep my mouth shut and hide my true opinions and feelings and try to be "polite" and "sweet" in the typical American way??

To me, teachers teach. Politicians are those who must be diplomatic all the time. Teachers must let students know how to make progress no matter how little it can be. (That is exactly the reason why they got paid.) Otherwise, we are wasting their time (and money), not to mention ours. We can lie to students that there is a beautiful dream that maybe someday they will achieve some proficiency in English (TOEFL 400 or something), but actually, we are not so sure whether what we are doing makes any sense or not, are we?

This very different world in USA triggers me to ponder about a lot of things that I have never thought about before. Go back to the reality, I am just a poor volunteer ESL teacher earning service hours for my diploma. I am thankful to have the opportunity to see a completely different world in USA. However, I am going to teach Mandarin Chinese in USA for the rest of my life. Maybe it should not be me to think too deeply about those issues, right?

ESL & Illiteracy

I have a interesting situation in my service learning exercise, and I hope to share insights and updates about it on this blog.

As I mentioned in class before, my ESL learner is illiterate in not only English but in her native language as well. She has been in the US about 10 years, and can communicate in English with some difficulty, but is really striving to learn to read and write English. She has three children and her husband remains in thier native country. I can only imagine how difficult it must be.

Last semester I worked on teaching her phonics and that worked well for a while, but she has become tired of that and wants to read texts (the Laubach book). She still cannot sound out a word and relies on chunked memorization and association (saying "dollar" as "money"). I am still working to get her to increase her phonetic realization.

Many of us have students who can't read, but not in their native language. This presents a unique challenge which I hope you can occasionally help me out with by providing ideas, advice, etc. I will also post progress on here sometimes as well. If any of you have students in interesting situations, I'm sure we'd love to hear those too!

Super Bowl article (Jill)

I wanted to mention something about the idea of the Super Bowl article being a possible good exercise for intensive reading for our L2 learners. Ruby, Lori, and I discussed numerous ways that this article can be used as a an effective activity, but the whole time we were discussing things, I couldn’t help but notice that whereas Lori and I were excited about the ‘theme’ of the article, Ruby was fairly indifferent. We chatted about it as a group a little bit, and it’s been on my mind off and on since class. Most native speakers (at least in America) have grown up with the excitement and social culture of the Super Bowl. Even those who don’t like football often still watch ‘the big game.’ I’m not real sure what my questions are stemming from my jumbled thoughts….maybe a number of things.

What is the best way to go about using something to teach from (like the Super Bowl article) that you are uninterested in or maybe unfamiliar with? Do you use it to teach at all? If you choose to use it anyway, (aside from personal research about the topic), how might you find a way to make it useful and relevant?