TESOL - Day #1

Thursday, March 26, 2015

One of the best things about TESOL this year was the TESOL app that I put on both my phone and iPad.  I was able to look through and mark sessions I was interested in for all three days before I even left Waukegan.  However, the downside was that when I looked at my agenda (a calendar with all the sessions you picked mapped out), I quickly saw that during some periods there were at least four or five things I was interested in AT THE SAME TIME.  Sigh.

However, I made my choices for Thursday before I started the day:

• Helping Adult ELs Meet Language Demands of College and Careers
• From Theory to Practice in SLW: Crossing Borders, Building Bridges
• Strategies for Countering Discourses of Deficit in L2 Writing

All three of these sessions were the longer workshop format so they were all 105 minutes long versus 45 minutes and that seemed to allow for more information and more time for questions at the end.  Here's a recap of these three sessions.

Helping Adult ELs Meet Language Demands of College and Careers

Though the primary audience for this session was ESL instructors who work with students in adult education and immigrant programs, the information and ideas could easily be scaled up to any developmental English or ELI course because the vocabulary gap exists for many CLC students as they transition into college courses.

Benefits of One-Question Interview Activity

 Each of the three presenters tackled a different level of learner and presented an activity that would help to develop students' language repertoires and move them toward more academic/professional language skills.  Patsy Vinogradov discussed how a volunteer program at a church thrift store, the Alley Shoppe, helped her beginning, low-level-literacy students develop vocabulary and grammar related to sorting and displaying clothes as well as other workplace skills.   Betsy Parrish shared an activity, the one question interview, that asked intermediate level students to collect data about their classmates and both analyze the data and share their findings in writing.  Finally, Susan Finn Miller talked about the importance for upper-level students to learn Tier 2 vocabulary (abstract but not super content specific) and introduced us to the idea of the "Vocabulary Workout."

This was a great session with lots of handouts and interaction.  Not only did each presenter have us do a thinking/talking/writing task connected to each vocabulary activity but they gave us a chart at the beginning that asked us to consider three questions related to each of the activities presented:

1. What is the academic language in the activities?
2. What are other transitions/college and career readiness present in the activities?
3. What could you do to adapt this to your context?

I found myself really excited about both the Vocabulary Workout concept and the "Collecting Classroom Data" activity and have already started to think about how to incorporate these into my English 109 class this fall.

From Theory to Practice in SLW: Crossing Borders, Building Bridges

This workshop had a lot of presenters including Dana Ferris (who I've been reading a lot of) and John Swales, who is a pretty famous linguist known for his work in genre analysis.  Each of the presenters made connections between research in Second Language Writing (SLW) and the classroom.  For example, Gena Bennett gave an overview of corpus-based research (corpora are giant databases of real textual samples that can be analyzed in all sorts of ways) and how they can relate to the teaching of academic writing.  Chris Freak discussed what qualities make an effective EAP (English for Academic Purposes) writing course.  John Swales discussed some research he did on citation using a set of 800 upper-level biology papers that had earned an A or B.

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My two favorite sessions out of this larger workshop both involved presenters I would see again during the conference.  Maria Estela Brisk, who works on using SFL (or Systemic Functional Linguistics) with elementary school ELs, described what a genre-based pedagogy would look like in early grades and the importance of teaching students both the language and the metalanguage they need to know to write different types of texts.

Dana Ferris,  not surprisingly, talked about "Connecting Error Analysis and Error Feedback for L2 Writing" and discussed the classroom implications of what she learned from two major research projects--research that has also generated much of the content of her recent books.  She did a nice job of showing the connection between what her research suggested and classroom principles:

• Research showed that "teacher variables" matter so teachers need to be "prepared and principled."
• Research showed that "learner variables" matter so teachers need to assess their students.
• Research showed that "error types" matter so teachers need to learn about these types.
• Research showed that "the mere presence of feedback" matters so "teachers should provide feedback rich environments."

Overall, I found this workshop gave me a good sense of how SLW research can be connected back to the classroom and I'm especially excited in learning more from Ferris and Brisk.

Strategies for Countering Discourses of Deficit in L2 Writing

This session also had a number of presenters (including Dana Ferris again) but focused on the important task of both identifying "deficit thinking" in relation to second language writers and also developing ways to combat that thinking.

Deficit thinking was defined by the presenters as "a rhetorical construction of students in terms of what they lack or are deficient in" and these constructions "ground decisions in the teaching, assessing, and administering courses for second language writers."

Christine Tardy discussed some of the forms these discourses take but also suggested strategies to combat them. For example, she mentioned how a "discourse of Essentialization" is used to lump students together--as ESL, as a certain nationality, as a visa designation.  One strategy to use against this is for teachers to get to know their students and to explore their diversity as well as notice the connections.  Another dynamic that Tardy pointed out was second language writers being framed as a "problem" that needs to be solved or dealt with.  She suggested that it would be better to see the institutional structures as a problem as well as to reframe students' multilingualism as a powerful resources.

Dana Ferris and Grant Eckstein outlined how deficit models can shape the classroom in terms of text selections, writing assignments, language instruction, and feedback approaches.  They then had us work in pairs to tackle one of three "deficit perspective" quotes and discuss both what problems we saw in the perspective as well as what a better approach might look like.  Finally, other topics discussed by the presenters included how deficit discourse can influence assessment as well as program structures and policies.

This was another strong session that gave me a lot to think about and had a lot of connections to what I do at CLC.

Deficit Thinking and Assessment