Today I received the student evaluations from last semester - the moment of truth! They were a lot better than the fall ones, so I am not feeling too bad about myself. One comment, which I am sure was meant as a compliment, turned out very ambiguous. When writing about my strengths and weaknesses as an instructor a student wrote "She don't have any weakness", which actually points to my mistake of not spending enough time on grammar. Who would have thought, on the other hand, that a class of 25 native speakers would need a refresher on the usage of the -s ending in present tense third person singular? And plural.

Reflection

I honestly believe the AccuPlacer (and I might have misspelled it) was the highlight of last class. The essay was especially fun - for a while all of us thought that we got 4-6 out of 10 on the composition scale. It later turned out that the scale only had 6 points, which made us feel better.

Reading 04/20

This week's reading seemed strangely familiar until I realized that we have, in fact, read it last semester.

I think that purely norm-referenced tests don't have a place or purpose in a language classroom. Whatever test you give your students has to come back with plentiful and constructive feedback. I try to comment more on my students' first rather than final drafts, so that they would have more chance of fixing things before the actual grading.

One problem that I have been having is students forgetting/failing to send me their first draft for feedback. I don't want to make them do it, by giving credit just for submitting it. My idea is that students are responsible for their learning and if they choose not to have my input, it's their right.

Reflection

It was really nice to actually see/hear Ahmet presentation. Jodi's sample of reading assessment was engaging and fun, too. And the activities that have us walking around and designing things from the shelves are my all time favourite.

To be nice or to be fair?

It so happened that this week we discussed writing and assessment of writing in two classes that I'm taking. During the testing class we had a big discussion about how to grade the work of international students and I want to reflect on that. I feel that this would be an appropriate venue, since the subject matter is relevant for this class as well.

So, with international students - should we take into account that they are, in fact, non-native speakers of English and give them higher grades? My answer is no. I believe in standards-based education and the policy of double standards does not appeal to me in any way.

When an international student decides to come and study in the US-college they need to know that they will be studying the same material as native speakers. They will be expected to read the same volumes in the same time, to produce work of same quality. There are no programs just for the international students, and rightfully so. Why should they be graded according to different standards? I am all for providing the international students, ESL students, academically challenged students, with all linguistic and academic support that they need, but once they get to content classes - it has to be the same principles of grading.

The purpose of education in general is not to be nice. It is to give the knowledge and check for its acquisition. If you don't get it - that means that you need to study more, or take an easier course or reconsider your career objectives. I think that part of the problem is that a college diploma is viewed as something everyone should have, on pain of death. So people go to college not because they want to, not because they need to, but because everyone does so.

Coming back to international students, writing, and grading. I would be all for it, if ALL incoming students were required to take a writing exam, so that colleges would know how to scaffold the course difficulty to the necessary level, but in the end, if you want a higher education you have to be able to do certain things, such as write an essay, do math problems, see relationships between facts and processes, draw conclusions, warrant your reasoning, and master the content of your specific field.

Another problem is that very often international students think "I know my stuff, and English is not really important, people will understand me". Not quite. If you want to study in an English-speaking academic environment, you need to speak/write academic English. I am not applying to, say, Berlin University on account of knowing some German. I can make myself understood, but it's not good enough.

The tests that international students have to take prior to admission are meant to see if they will be able to master content in a language other than their own. If we are nice and lower the standards and give the poor souls a higher grade, they will have a terrible time in class. And, by the way, TOEFL is called the golden standard of ESL-testing, because it gives a reasonably accurate account of the person's ability. It's not about taking pity. It is about giving information.

Speaking of admissions I will have to re-do GRE and TOEFL to be considered for admission to the Ph.D programs. I am not really happy about it, since it means losing a lot of time on preparation (GRE!!!) and then paying quite a lot to take the actual tests, but I can see the reasoning there. It is fair that I should take a TOEFL to prove my English skills, and GRE to prove my reasoning, verbal, and math skills. Fair is fair.

If anyone believes that requirements are too high for the international students, they need to protest about the admission policies that are too highly set, not about the test scores. It's not the test's fault that the test taker can't write a coherent essay. It might be the admission office's fault that they demand too much, but do they really?

For some reasons, when people are discussing this with me, one of their favorite arguments is "It's different for you", which amuses and outrages me at the same time. I am an ESL-student. I was not born speaking English. It took me 15 years to go from mono-lingual to almost bilingual. I had to submit a TOEFL score to be accepted in this program. I had to write an essay. It is fair.

Reading

This week's reading is about assessment and, considering the fact that I am now taking a course in assessment it seems that one chapter does not really cover all of it.

language assessment is a very tricky business. What exactly are we assessing? Knowledge of vocabulary? Ability to carry on a conversation? Ability to write a thank-you note? A research essay? General language ability? It seems that language assessment raises at least as many questions as it gives answers.

In my composition class I have two main means of assessment - writing projects and in-class discussions. Of course, we have a bunch of easier, shorter assignments, but I don't put too much faith in them. 85 percent of the students' grades are the four big writing projects. The rest is attendance and participation.

I try to make my assessment procedures as clear as possible - I develop very specific rubrics and try to give plenty of feedback at all stages.

When I taught adult basic ed our main assessment procedure was the administration of the CASAS multiple-choice tests, which has many problems, the main ones could be called teaching to the test and teaching for the test.

In general, the problem with any test is - how far are you willing to go to make sure that your students pass the test? Do you give them candy or show a movie after a successful test? If using test is reasonable for a certain program, purpose, and population we need to make sure that we teach what we ask, and that it is relevant.

Reflection

It was interesting to hear more about the Korean school system. Lately, I have been reading a lot about it, and the more information I have the clearer it is that they need to make some changes. One of the more interesting articles I read was about the tendency for Korean families to educate children abroad, in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada mostly.

Aaron and Kizuna had a fun presentation, too. Finally, it was helpful to discuss our final paper and presentation. I now have a better idea of what to do.

04-06 Reading

This week's reading is kind of close to my heart - grammar and writing, the best possible combination.
The MCM chapters discuss the teaching of writing as a process, an approach first introduced and popularized by Peter Elbow in the 1970-s. basically, process writing involves pre-writing/brainstorming activities, several drafts, and peer reviews. This emphasis on revision process is meant to help students develop a more careful attitude to their writing, keeping in mind the writing audience and purpose.

There is an on-going huge debate on how grammar should be taught, and how it can be combined with the writing instruction. it would sound weird coming from a grammar-freak like me, but I don't teach grammar in my composition class. At this stage I am more concerned with their ideas, and critical thinking skills, or lack of those. I might comment on grammar as I am going through the paper and then explain the rule/refer them to a section in handbook, but that's about all. and I strongly encourage them to take advantage of the Center for Academic Success. I sometimes talk in class about the mistakes that everyone makes and that drive me up the wall, which are there-their-they're and its-it's. Brrr.

With ESL students (depending on the proficiency level) grammar instruction may be necessary. In that case it needs to be as context-embedded, contextualized, and meaningful as possible.

03-30 Reflection

the most memorable part of last class's was definitely the video analysis peer review. I was freaking out about doing it, because I am uncomfortable with videotaping myself and showing the clip. In the end, it was pretty nice, Jayne and I took our time to work on the analysis, we discussed both lesson plans, how the lessons went etc.

03-30 Reading

This week's reading is all about teaching writing, which is especially relevant to me since I am teaching a composition class.
Teaching ESl writing and writing in general has several big debates in it. One of the debates is product vs. process.
What is more important - focusing on a good product (traditional), or focusing on how to write and revise (Elbow and further on)? It's a many folded argument, process writing allows students to grasp the essentials of writing steps, necessity of the revision process, the need to draft etc. However, in real world it is mostly product people are concerned with. In my teaching I focus on writing process that would lead to a good product.

Another thing that every writing teacher has to consider is the first language influence (contrastive rhetoric theory of Kaplan). I notice how in my bi-language career I am switching from the Russian paradigm to the English one.

03/23 Reflection

The best part of the class was definitely the small group teaching presentations. I love the whole process, from wandering around the library, picking up books, games, and whatnot to teaching a small activity. I think we also had a great time in our group pretending to be adults, kindergarten kids and elementary schoolers. I also felt nostalgic reciting "Betty Botter".

It was also interesting to do some more video tape analysis, as I mentioned in class we did oral speech analysis of the same girl, Barbara. After hearing her read I am starting to think that, maybe, I was too generous in the other assignment and overestimated her skills, which speaks again for the need to look at all skills before making a conclusion.

Reading 03/23

The MCM chapter talked about methods that could be used for teaching reading to children and adults. I think that it is best to try a variety of methods, hoping that at least something would work.

The brown Brown book was about motivation and I have a feeling that we have read this chapter last semester. Either that or I read the wrong chapter at one time or another. Anyway, I know that sounds blasphemous in a way, but I want to say, that I don't believe the Maslow pyramid to be absolutely correct. History knows many examples of hungry, cold, sick people caring about freedom, dignity and intellectual needs more than about food, clothes, and medicines. My greatgrandfather went to school when Russia was still an Empire and getting education meant all kinds of troubles for someone Jewish. He practically starved for a number of years, when he was tutoring kids, and trying to pass high school exams. His university years funnily coincided with the civil war. My grandparents and parents used to buy books and pay tutors instead of investing in better clothes or newer appliances. That's why I speak English fluently - my parents preferred to pay for my education all through the hardest post-perestroika years, when my mom would take translations to make ends meet and dad had up 10 5 jobs. My point is - lack of met basic needs does not necessarily mean that the person will not care about something else. French and Russian revolutions speak to that :)

Since I come from this knowledge prioritizing environment, which has been a part of our tradition for several thousand years, I have a problem with people, who are not motivated. I am not talking about little kids here - they are a different story and it's their parents responsibility to create and maintain their motivation. I think that it's my job as a teacher to teach a subject, and teach it in a way as interesting, engaging and challenging as possible. It is also my job to explain how different parts of the course work together, and how something can be useful in the long run. However, if the students are not interested/don't care there is not much I can do. If an adult (and I do consider 18-year olds adults, I know it's not a popular point of view), so if an adult has no motivation to succeed in a class and is bored by the thought of it - what exactly are they doing in it? If the student's motivation evaporates at the thought of a reading to be completed or an essay written - why are they getting a college education again?

Basically, I choose to work with adults in a hope that they know what and why they are doing in my class. I can take it from here, not before.

P.S. I am an idiot, who is unable to read the assigned chapter. Talk about reading skills. Ironic, isn't it? Need to catch up.

03-15 Reflection

I really enjoyed the book analysis assignment, although it was funny that two groups had almost opposite conclusions of the College Reading 4.

It was interesting to analyze the video tape, since it is what we are supposed to be doing soon. However, the group analysis made me want to not record myself. I am very apprehensive to the idea of being on tape in general (I have very few photos, too) and the kind of analysis I saw was way more than I would be able to handle without quitting the school.

Reading 03/16

This week's reading focused on teaching reading skills and developing literacy. There are several points that I would like to touch on.
It seems to me, that one of the things that are extremely important to teach is recognizing and interpreting discourse markers. Several weeks ago my composition students were making an annotated bibliography, as one of the practice activities I offered them several articles and asked to look at the abstracts and write out the information necessary for an annotated bibliography. They could not complete the task without reading the entire piece, and they had trouble reading it because of the new words.

Brown briefly talks about the adults, who are illiterate in their first language and the trouble they have with acquiring literacy skills in the second language. I am now tutoring two Somali teenagers and this is the problem I face twice a week. They have incredible trouble believing that the same word will have the exact same spelling every time (not counting the endings of course), I think it's the correlation between the funny marks on paper and the sounds that we acquire at a very early age and almost subconsciously that they lack. I have seen examples of people acquiring reading skills and progressing beautifully, but unfortunately, they were very few compared to the opposite. I know that many ABE/GED/ESL programs complain of lack of staff, who are trained to work with people having such problems.

Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about the adapted texts. It is my firm belief that it is possible to find original texts at any level of complexity. In ENG 583 we analyzed the lexical density and linguistic features of a 5-th grade textbook and an adapted 12-th grade textbook with the latter being oversimplified and lacking in content and linguistic features.

Presentation Reflection

I spent a lot of time choosing the format and content of the presentation, originally I planned to do an activity that I could offer to upper-intermediate students as a demonstration of task-based/role-playing speaking activity. It is called "The people of our neighborhood" and I really like both administering and taking part in it. The storyline goes like this: there are several families in the neighborhood, so the students are split in 3-4-5-6-10 groups with same number of people in each group. Then the roles are distributed: mother, father, son, cousin etc. Each family also has a secret, so the groups receive a sheet describing their mystery. Maybe, one family sold a fake Chinese vase to another, and the third family accidentally killed the dog of the first family, you get the picture. Anyway, the family gets together, reads their secret and decides on one person, who will tell the real secret. The rest come up with cover ups. Then members of different families meet to talk about the secrets, like all fathers get together and all aunts, and all uncles. After everyone had an opportunity to talk to everyone the families reconvene and try to decide what is the secret of other families. Then it moves to an all-class discussion. It is a fun activity to do, and it also gives opportunities to talk about question techniques, answer evasion and other discourse problems.

And now to something completely different like things that I have actually included in my presentation. After I did some time calculations, I realized that "The people of our neighborhood" are not going to happen, so I decided to do a small warm-up discussion and then do two application activities. I probably should have done some more time calculations, but I always over plan.

For the discussion I chose two questions that seem most controversial to me, fluency vs. accuracy and pronunciation. I was thinking about including feedback instead of pronunciation, since pronunciation is a huge topic, I mean, we spent half a semester on it alone, but then I remembered that we have already talked about feedback, so I went with those two. For the activities I had the teaching scenarios, and for the second activity I was going to split everyone into pairs and have each pair design one activity that would enforce one of Brown's principles. But we didn't have time for that.

Overall, I felt that the presentation went pretty well, although the discussion part took longer than I expected, but I decided not to break it up, since we were having a really valuable conversation about really important topics. The scenario activity also went pretty well and it was, I thought, a nice change from the discussion format.

Teaching speaking is a huge topic and there is no way to touch, even briefly all of its issues, but I hope we got a chance to talk and think about at least some things tonight.

03-02 Reading

Speaking is our main way of showcasing our knowledge of the English. The opportunity to proudly reply "Yes, I do" to "Do you speak English?" is priceless. The better we speak English, the more coquettish our responses tend to be, I know a couple of professional English-Russian simultaneous interpreters, who say "Well, I can manage English conversations if need be".

Teaching conversational English is one of the most intricate and complex parts in our difficult trade. One of the reasons why I am such a strong advocate of early learning is that a three-year old child is never self-conscious. They don't go thinking "Oh, what will the teacher/cute classmate from the next row think about me if I make this horrible and embarrassing mistake", they just talk, and by the moment self-consciousness arrives at the scene they are fluent and accurate enough to keep discussing new subjects without protective giggling and blushing.

Teaching speaking to adults is a challenge beyond challenge. Unlike children and teens they know the influence of language as a tool of power, they are aware of what can be done with these funny words and sounds, so they prefer not to speak or say the bare minimum. The way I targeted this problem was by creating a positive and encouraging atmosphere. I laughed at myself, and encouraged my students to join in and then even if they made a mistake, it was no big deal. An ideal teacher is, of course, able to keep their face straight at all circumstances, but there were occasions when I could not help laughing, so we laughed together.

02/23-Reflection

The highlight of last class was definitely the technology breakdown. I don't remember another occasion, when I would be so happy that something did not work. Since we were not able to watch the video and analyze the ELL's speech, we ended up ransacking the library shelves and finding props to use in all kinds of activities. I never knew that we had access to all these board games, toys and whatnot, so the opportunity to discover these was really valuable.

Reading 02/23

It is interesting to see how the language pedagogy moved from placing grammar in the center of instructional activities to placing speaking there (and I don't mean that speaking does not have a rightful place in this spot). When I was in school (as in before college), we focused on the form mostly and then starting with middle school we started to have classes aimed at oral skills development, where we would mostly give prepared speeches, it was boring as hell, except for two years when we had a Peace Corps volunteer. In college we also had oral skills classes, and on the contrary to any logic, we had to write at least two essays for every class meeting. This logical discrepancy bothered me to no end. The bottom line is that out of 75 kids in my high school class and about 200 in college the only ones that were fluent, really fluent in English, were the ones who had been to the US on FSA/FLEX exchange program. So much for the form-focused instruction.

I think that now ESL and EFL instruction settings are becoming more similar due to the development of technology. We can use podcasts, movies, live broadcasting and what not. I also think that role playing and communicative activities are a lot more productive compared to prepared speeches, which are basically academic writing and reading out loud combined (not too communicative, eh?).

02/16 Reflection

I really liked the activity we did with drawing pictures to the text, although I quickly ensured the role of the reader - I am a hopeless painter. There was a point when I tied to draw a maple leaf on the board, and miserably failed. I think it's a great activity for children or adults (it might not work so well with teenagers, as they are usually more self-conscious).

It was also great to hear Solen's presentation on teaching English. It is interesting how many of the behavioral patterns are spread across the freshman population. Do they get some secret handouts, saying "Never come to the instructor's office?".

Wonderful clip about impromtu translation.

Reading 02/16

I totally agree that listening is one of the most important skills. I was even thinking that technically it is possible to survive somewhere with listening, reading, and writing.

I really liked reading about possibel listening comprehension teaching techniques, although it seems that they might be a bit harder to implement in academic environment. One problem I have - is references to Jack Richards. I understand that he is one of the big figures in SLA, but last year I taught using his textbook, Interchange, and it was one of the weirdest textbooks I experienced.

Reading 02/09

It's interesting how this week's MCM and HDB chapters go along the content of the English Structure and Pedagogical Grammar class.

Grammar-wise I agree with Larsen-Freeman that grammar is more a skill, than a fixed body of knowledge. You could say that it's even not a skill, but an ability to express yourself and structure your speech\communication. She also gives a three-fold scheme of grammar, with form, meaning, and use. Our texts described form and meaning, but did not say a word about use, which tends to be the most important and tricky part.

So, form is pretty obvious, it is concerned with the word forms, derivatives, suffixes, formation of tenses etc. Nothing fun here. Meaning can be a little more intricate, especially for polysemantic words (the absolute majority of English words). And finally comes the use - where and how is it appropriate to use this unit? What register and social context create the best environment for it?

This is where the corpora come into play, both in terms of grammatical structures and lexical units. On a side note, we were talking a lot in classes about using corpora, but I have been asking fellow TAs and it turns out that nobody is using it. I feel that corpora is not appreciated enough :)

Anyway, according to me, as many of our students like to put it, the extent of grammar instruction should depend on the person's goal. The more their profession is connected to English, the more grammar instruction they should get, and the more they should be taught to play with rules. On page 434 Brown gives a sample grammar exercise on Present Simple vs. Continuous. The last sentence is "The woman is very lonely because her children never (visit/are visiting)". The expected answer is kind of obvious, but actually both variants are perfectly acceptable. They would just mean different things.

The woman is very lonely because her children never visit -is a mere statement of fact.
The woman is very lonely because her children are never visiting has emotional appraisal and a negative one, I have to say. That is what grammar is all about to me. Using what you have to say what you mean. It could become a bit unclear how to determine whether the students is applying the rules in an unorthodox way or making a mistake. To me the borderline is their understanding of what exactly they are saying.

And by the way, what's with the "so-called exceptions to rules" on page 425? They are no exceptions anymore? Mans and womans decided to cancel this obsolete stuff?

Vocabulary teaching is also very unstraight forward. In ENG583 we recently read an article by Lewis, where he advocated for teaching vocabulary in chunks, as either semantic fields of words or collocations\institutionalized phrases and it makes perfect sense to me.

MCM describes various methods for tackling unfamiliar, and probably the most popular one among both students and teachers is guessing the meaning from the context or associating one word to another. I remember reading a text about alternative energy sources, where it talked about solar energy as one of the most promising alternatives. As I was 12 or so years old at the moment, I had no idea of what "solar" means. So I guessed that it is a type of fuel and associated it with a Russian word that actually means diesel oil (solyarka, солярка). You can imagine how close my comprehension was. Since then I am a bit skeptical about the whole guessing thing, although i have been successful with it except for this one instance.

Reflection 02/02

I really liked the discussion about cross-cultural communication, that's always a fun topic to talk about, whatever side you're on.

The unit plan assignment was very useful in the sense that it let us feel what we are supposed to be doing for the actual graded assignment. I did not anticipate the sub thing, so I knew that my plan was not detailed enough. Maybe we could get an extra heads-up on the fact that we are writing it for someone else. It kind of goes without saying that the lesson plans we hand in are as detailed as we can make them, but with class work that is not always evident.

02/02 Reflection

It was interesting to have a class discussion on cultural differences, although I feel like I was the mean one in it. I haven't said it in class, but I actually believe that just being polite and tactful can cover for the most of the above said differences. And if you are not 100% sure that what you are doing is appropriate in this situation then either ask beforehand or don't do it. It might take some of the impulse off things, but bring in peace and quiet. I am pretty relaxed about people doing something I wouldn't do, usually it is obvious if they did not mean to insult you.

The unit plan assignment was interesting, and I feel like I have a back-up plan in case I don't come up with anything better.

Week 4 Reading

This week's reading has basically two parts: teaching culture and integrating the four skills. I will start with the latter - I think that integration is one of the most promising ways of organizing instruction. I had courses, where we would do reading one day, writing another, grammar next week and listening comprehension some other time. And I could never understand why we wrote the longest essays for the Conversational skills part.

Teaching culture is especially acute for me as an ESL teacher and student. I think that it has to be done both implicitly (by modeling behaviour and showing examples without putting emphasis on it) and explicitly, with specific tasks and presentations. Another part of teaching culture is teaching or informing the students about cultural references. Just last week we read an essay in my comp class, which was about an African-American woman, who changed her name from Jill to Itabari to demonstrate her identity. The essay had a number of cultural references, c.f. someone called the author Miss Idi Amin. If you don't knw, who Idi Amin was, the scale of assault escapes your attention. We discussed the references in class and I was surprised that nobody mentioned the title. The essay about changing the name in search of one's true identity was inconspicuously titled What's In A Name?. For me that was a bit weird, since the message of the monologue is that a name does not define who we are, where as the message of the essay was the opposite, so the title created a nice little conflict, which I wanted to discuss. To my surprise none of my 25 students identified the title as a quote.

Week 3 Reading

One of the things that I find most different in the US graduate education, and education in general, is the idea of reflection. I can not imagine a professor in my alma mater, i.e. Ukrainian University, assigning us to write a reflection on our attitude to grammar or pronunciation, or teaching. I also never saw most of them reflecting on their own classroom practices. We had a course called Home Reading, which was basically a lit-based class, where we would read a couple chapters from a fiction book at home and then do all kinds of activities in class. We had three professors teach that course in different years. They all had books they were teaching for 5+ years, where they knew every line by heart and made it boring as hell. I remember wondering, how they endure saying the exact same things over and over, year to year. I could never do that, I remember thinking. Last year I taught three different groups of three levels, and I loved it, because no class was the same. This year the idea of reflective teaching was one of the central ones in the TA-workshops, and we had assignments and discussions that promoted it. We were composing teaching narratives, observing other people's classes etc, and I think it's wonderful. Teaching is an ongoing process, the moment you think you have it and you're ready to rest on your pedagogical laurels, you are done as a teacher, especially if we are talking about a practical course (I can sort of see the argument for basic lecture-based courses, although not quite).

I also liked the MCM chapter on classroom research, since that is something I am doing at the moment. A quick digression. Last semester, when we were doing the multi-genre paper in this class I was totally puzzled for the first ten weeks at least. I had never done anything like that before and it made sense to me only while I was listening to the explanations, five minutes after it was a blur. So, I started reading books on the multi-genre, and ended up taking this approach with my comp class (there were two of us doing that, out of 25). Finally, multi-genre papers became my thesis topic and I am now collecting the data. So, it was interesting to read about something I can really relate to.