Flipping

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Image courtesy of the San Jose Public Library

When I was a young boy growing up in British Columbia, we had an educational channel on TV called The Knowledge Network. One of the unique features at the time was that you could take distance classes from Athabasca University that used content being broadcast on The Knowledge Network as part of the lecture material for the course. I remember thinking as a kid that this was pretty cool.

Fast-forward to today and this is hardly groundbreaking. We can access material on-demand and on various platforms. We can even interact with one another using Skype or Google Hangouts, attend webinars, and tweet with professionals from around the world including renowned authors, professors, and other professionals.

So, where does this leave us? The latest trend is in the area of blended learning called flipping. Continue reading Flipping →

Switching

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 Image courtesy of Kelly Sikkema

Not because I want to, but because I feel I need to, I am going to address that linguistic ‘Pandora’s Box’: the use of the student’s first language (L1) in the target language (TL) classroom. Yes, the proverbial ‘English only’ policy. I have yet to work in a place that does not emphatically endorse this rule. You can see it on the classroom wall, doors, and even in the school bathroom. I even had one place put the sign on the back of the toilet stall door (still not sure who you would be talking to in your L1 while sitting on ‘the throne’).

As you can probably figure out, I am not a big supporter of this policy. Something about it has always bothered me, and not just as a rule, but as a philosophy. So, as I have started to do more regularly, I decided to dip into the research pool to see what others have found out regarding this approach to language education. Continue reading Switching →

Inquiring

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Image courtesy of Dr. Marcus Gossler

Yesterday, I missed another valuable #EAPChat on Twitter due to my mixed-up schedule at the moment. I really feel I missed out on the discussion, but, thanks to the work of Tyson Seburn, I can always catch up with the summaries. The discussion was instigated by three questions:

  1. Should EAP practitioners also be researchers?
  2. How much does research play into your practice?
  3. What are your favourite sources for research reading?

It wasn’t that long ago that I found myself on the outside of that conversation thinking, “That’s for academics. I’ll leave the research to those who are smarter and more experienced than I am.” Sadly, that is the case for many people. Journal articles are often stuffed full of research data, supporting evidence, and are written in a very academic (sometimes even a bit pretentious) manner. Is that bad? Sometimes. I think that there are certain authors who try really hard to make themselves sound intelligent which often alienates those who need to read the article. Most of the time, the information that is presented is there to show that things have been thought through in a manner that filters out the poor suppositions and misinterpreted data. Leaving all of the raw data in the article gives readers the chance to critically analyze the information for themselves.

This is all great and wonderful, but who has time to read all of these articles and where do you find them? Continue reading Inquiring →

Mentoring

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Image courtesy of Christoph Rupprecht

Today marks the beginning of another week of TESL practicum observations for me. While I have enjoyed watching these new ESL teachers starting off their journey, I have to say I am a getting a bit tired. I realize that this is an important step for these trainees, but I feel like this is taking a whole lot more out of me than I had anticipated. It is funny considering that I’m not the one doing the lesson preparation and having to teach the class. I am not entirely sure why it takes so much of my energy, but I think I have a partial reason. I think it is because I care about helping them.

Long ago, I was in their shoes. I remember being that energetic, enthusiastic, nervous-to-the-core, rough-around-the-edges teacher in training. I distinctly remember the disaster of my first class and the not-so-interesting second class. But what I remember the most was the support I received from my TESL instructor, Gail Tiessen. I am so thankful for her. She was kind, firm, direct, and quick to help. Her comments kept me going, thinking, and improving. I am happy to still call her my mentor.

Yesterday, I was in church and the pastor was using the analogy of a pair of oxen being yoked together to work the fields. These oxen would not be able to finish the work on their own. Also, young oxen might not know what is expected of them without the support and guidance of the more experienced oxen by their side. The yoke isn’t there to punish them, or to say they can’t do it, it is there to give them support and guidance.

This analogy got me thinking about how we support and mentor those who don’t have the same amount of experience as ourselves. Continue reading Mentoring →

Praising

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Image courtesy of  Evan Hahn

I was doing a practicum observation the other day and I asked the instructor what she would like me to focus on. She mentioned a couple of other items before mentioning how she gives feedback to the students. “I think I praise them too much,” she stated. It got me thinking, can we praise students “too much”?

Giving correction in the classroom is something that most teachers struggle with. How can we give students correction without making them feel discouraged? I find it interesting that we talk about give out too much correction, but we rarely discuss too much praise.

Continue reading Praising →

Processing

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Image courtesy of Bill Bradford

A topic that has been on my mind a great deal lately is in the area of extroversion and introversion as it pertains to the language classroom. Confession time, I am a extrovert and I tend to dominate the conversation. I am also married to an introvert who is kind enough to gently let me know that I am talking too much. As a result, I have become more conscious of how myself as an extrovert affect those who are introverts, particularly those of whom are my students. Watching Susan Cain give her TED Talk was a pivotal moment for me as it started my consciously looking at how introverts are treated as language students.

Continue reading Processing →

Standardizing

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Image courtesy of C. G. P. Grey

The other day, I came across an interesting article from Andrew Littlejohn called Language Teaching Materials and the (Very) Big Picture (2012). I have had the opportunity to read through some other articles by Littlejohn in the past and I was intrigued by what he had to say about material development since that is something I am working on presently.

Defining

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Photo courtesy of  Piotr Bizior

Growing up in a bilingual country such as Canada has some real benefits. Oh sure, there is the vast spaces and the diverse landscape, but most of all, I love our culture. I love the fact that we embrace our linguistic diversity and, even though it can be difficult at times, I love that fact we have access to so much in two languages. I always find it odd when I visit the United States and find only English on packaging, signs, and announcements. I remember as a child sitting at breakfast and reading the cereal box, comparing the English to the French and seeing how word order and word choice was different between them. Even though I was required to learn French in school, I never was able to ever learn it properly (it’s a long story involving moving from one province to another and getting a nightmare of a teacher) which is really sad. There are so many times I wish I had stuck with French and had practiced it more. Ah, c’est la vie.

A number of years later after finishing my university degree, my wife and I moved to Lithuania and I started work as an English language instructor for a shipping company. During that time, we made a commitment to take Lithuanian language lessons from the university in town. We had started with an intense summer language course and then moved on into the regular program in the fall. Our teacher was extremely nice and very knowledgeable, but her experience in teaching was primarily focused on historical linguistics, especially the history of Lithuanian as an Indo-European language. Her approach to teaching us involved a great deal of time learning word lists and memorizing charts for declensions and conjugations. Over time, I was able to define a large number of words, mostly nouns and verbs, and I could spout off the declensions or conjugations for those words as they were laid out in the chart. The problem was I couldn’t speak. Someone could talk to me and I could mostly understand them (although, that took time and practice on my own) if they talked a little slower and didn’t use a lot of colloquial language. Funny thing is, I couldn’t answer making it a fairly one-sided conversation. I couldn’t even call for a taxi, but I knew all of the endings for house!

As an English teacher, I have often thought about how I can help my students increase their productive skills. It is the balance between learning and acquiring a language [see Earl Stevick’s comments on this here pp. 29-30]. In my case, I learned a ‘whack sack’ of vocabulary (or is plethora more appropriate here, Dean Shareski?), but couldn’t make the necessary connection to real life, that is, being able to acquire the language. I knew the definitions for words, but not the application of them.

Continue reading Defining →

Respecting

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 Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Ask any language student where they feel the majority of classroom time should be spent and you will get a variety of answers. Students who have grown up in a more traditional educational system may believe that teachers should be at the front of the classroom running exercises based on grammar and lexical structures. Others advocate for more language usage such as conversational groups or essay writing. Whatever their reason, what students feel is important and what is actually going to help them is often disconnected. There are a those who are going to argue that students need to be in control of their language learning of which I would whole-heartedly agree. Anyone who has spent time in my TESL training classes would hear me push for a more learner-centred classroom based on each student’s needs. What that means is that we need to be helping guide them through the process of finding what they do need, not what they have trained to believe they need. Often times, the reasons they choose one system or method of learning over another is simply related to something cultural or familiar. Even the way we approach teaching is strongly influenced by what has happened in our past.

Continue reading Respecting →

Writing

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Photo courtesy of kristja

In her article What research on second language writing tells us and what it doesn’t, Eli Hinkel (2011) synthesizes the current research on L1 versus L2 writing differences and discusses the next step for research in this area. Teaching writing to students from various backgrounds and cultures can be a difficult task for English language teachers. As an English for Academic Purposes(EAP) instructor, this challenge is heightened by pressure to get students prepared for the different education streams they are pursuing.

While the list from Hinkel isn’t that long, a total of 22 items, I have decided to focus on 5 major areas that most of those points would fall into: audience factors; text organization; language usage; text components; and content.