TESOL Convention - Toronto - Friday, March 27, 2015
Here are highlights from the four sessions I attended on the second day of TESOL.
Transitioning to College Writing: Language Use and Sentence Level Skills
This workshop involved a series of presenters, all who focused on the issue of supporting students' linguistics needs as they develop as college writers.
Ditlev Larson from Winona State University used the experiences of three students (from his larger study of freshman L2 writers) to highlight the gap between the way language issues are addressed in high school writing classes and the language expectations in college. All three students stressed that they felt unprepared to meet the new and more sophisticated linguistic demands of their college classes. Larson suggested that the concern over "deficit thinking" in high school and even college writing classes has led many teachers to avoid focusing on sentence-level issues, but he asked, "Are we doing students a disservice by not focusing at all on sentence-level issues? If the expectation is there, where and when should it be taught?"
Dana Ferris discussed how her institution, University of California-Davis, has begun to incorporate language development into their FYC (first year composition) program. Ferris began with the challenges the FYC program faced--an extremely diverse student population, a teaching staff not trained in ESL, a packed syllabus, and a broad range of student needs. Ferris and her colleagues wondered, "How can we have a more integrated, organized approach to language?" The answer was adding "guided self-study" to the curriculum. Students could pursue one of three options: Self-Directed Vocabulary Journal, Grammar-Mechanics Self-Study, or Style Analysis Journal. The materials for each of these options were provided (and didn't have to be developed by the teachers) and the students did the work outside of class. Ferris discussed how this Language Development Program (LDP) has evolved over the last three years and she also shared student feedback.
