Volunteers needed!

I recently heard from Teresa Sims of the LIFT program at Aldersgate, and they are starting a new round of classes this week, with a strong need for some volunteer teachers. This class would run through the middle of June. If you are interested in volunteer teaching for LIFT, either just cause you love teaching ESL, or because you need some service learning hours, please let me know!

By the way, if you are interested in this for summer practicum purposes, then we will need to discuss that on an individual basis.

Portfolio as a Teacher's Assessment

I wanted to point out something that I thought was interesting when I read it in the chapter on Portfolios. (I know it's hard to believe I didn't point out everything that I thought was interesting in class.) I noticed that one of the benefits that the book gave to having students complete a portfolio is that the instructor has the opportunity to view it as a reflection of how effective the class has been. I guess this could be said of any sort of assessment (although I don't remember ever hearing it about tests or other assignments). I have never been in a class that had a portfolio requirement, so some of you who have (or require portfolios from your students) may have a more insightful comment on this. I am trying to imagine how this might work, and I guess that a teacher grading a portfolio of student-chosen assignments would first of all get to see which writing assignments were most meaningful or interesting to the students. Second, the teacher, like the student, would get to see how far the students have come, partially due to his/her instruction. Can anyone else think of how a portfolio might be informative to the teacher about his/her class?

As I think about portfolios and grading in general, I think it is important to not only think about the grades students get as a reflection of how hard they worked but also how effectively we taught the material. I know that as a teacher, there are times where I realize that I must not have taught something as clearly as I thought since most of my students did not know the correct answer. I have also been on the other side of the equation in a class where the professor assumed that we knew the material because we had "covered" it in class. There is definitely a difference between teaching something and covering it.

What do you think? How might our students grades inform our teaching?

busboy

question to class: a female who cleans tables at restaurants is a busboy? Although a quick search in the internet brought up some results that shows some people recognize the term busgirl. The main question is, if a non-native english speaker who was at a beginning level of confidence, telling her job to a native english speaker, would the term busgirl cause too much confusion in this situation? Or would it be best if the female worker stuck with the term busboy to describe her job?

Response to Wei-Fan...

Way to go, Wei-Fan! I think this is a great activity. I love the idea of you splitting the class into groups and giving them an assignment that is really specific yet subjective as well. Specificity/good instructions lets them know exactly what you're expecting from them (2 sentences each, personal pronouns, about their experience at ELI, etc.), and you allow them creativity at the same time by having them relate the article to/about themselves. The only thing I might do differently if I was teaching the class is use pairs or groups of three. I am more of a fan of smaller group work or pair work in general because I feel like the learners get more communicative practice instead of possibly letting their peers talk for them if they're in a larger group.

A group activity for teaching vocab

I just finished my first teaching session at ELI after 4 hours of observation. This is a reading class of 15 students, under the direction of Nancy Baum, at proficiency level 5 (out of 6 -- the highest). I've learned quite a bit from Nancy, in terms of her teaching style as well as class management. I can tell from the students that she is a well-liked teacher.

The activity I would like to share with you is about learning vocab in an ELI class. They use a book named Improving Vocabulary Skills as part of the curriculum to perform vacab drills. This is an excellent book, strongly recommended by Nancy. Basically the book uses tons of examples and blank-filling exercises to help readers internalize the new words, about 10 per chapter. I know most of L2 learners are struggling with this issue, so I'm quite intrigued to explore ways to provide new learning experiences. At the end of each chapter, the book has a section called Final Check which is an article composed of sentences with all 10 news words embedded but leaves them as blanks for students to fill in. Basically I adopted the same idea but went one step further -- I'd like students practice collaborative writing by putting together an article themselves. So, this is the activity: I divided 14 students in the class into 3 groups, and each group is responsible for composing an article entitled My Experience at the ELI. In average, each student is responsible for writing 2 sentences based on 2 different new words, and each sentence has to be subjective, using personal nouns such as I, me, myself, mine, etc. At the end of the given time -- 6 minutes, they can make modifications so that all sentences would fit together well. To illustrate my instruction, I gave them a story which I composed, and read it back to them in a way that new words get emphasized. At the end of the activity, all groups take turns in presenting the short articles, and authors are required to read their own sentences to the entire class. The result was quite positive as far as I can tell and students’ interest-level seems to be high.

My thought behind this activity was that if L2 learners make the new word subjective in writing, it would be easier for them to internalize how the word gets used. Furthermore, the teacher is able to integrate reading (vocab), writing, listening, and speaking -- the four strains of skills -- in a single activity.

How do you think? I'd like your comments on it and ideas to make it better, hopefully this activity would be a step in the right direction in making learning vocab more enjoyable for L2 speakers.

Spanish in class follow up

This week in class, it seemed like there was less Spanish spoken in my class. I think part of the reason might have been that I did the lesson out of order from the textbook significantly (made better sense to me to do this). Because of this, I had to tell them what page numbers to be on so they had to pay attention well. Also, I put stricter time limits on the exercises (so I think there was more focus).

A fun idea....

I was thinking back to my good ole undergrad days this last week...about which teachers I thought were effective (and why) and which ones weren't (and why not) and so on. When I started my first of six Greek classes, I was really excited! My teacher had us get a piece of paper out and write a short paragraph (or just a sentence or two) about why we wanted to take this class. Remember, this was the first day of class, so we were all pretty motivated to be there and learn Greek. Woo!

So, we passed those paragraphs up (not knowing why he made us write them), and continued on with the first day of class. (They were anonymous, by the way). About a month or so into the class, we were all complaining about how hard parsing was and 'this and that' and how we had to spend so much more time studying for this class as opposed to our other classes. The next day, he began class by busting out a few of those paragraphs we had written the first day about why we wanted to take the class. It was so great to hear them. We forgot so fast that we were ever even excited to take the class in the first place....we were so concerned with the 'now' of things being so hard and forgetting what our 'future' goals were for why we were there.

I thought this was a great idea that could be carried over into any class that we teach. I realize that not all (or any) beginning ESL students will be able to write a paragraph, but more advanced students would probably be able to. For the beginners, you could have them (if they were willing) share why they want to learn English or be better readers or writers of English. You could write them out yourself, then when the students become weary and overwhelmed about class, you could read those back to them.

Has anyone else done anything like this with their classes or something similar? I just think, with a bit of adaptation, this could really be useful in helping encourage our students to keep going when they are discouraged...to remember their goals and why they want to learn English.