November, 2009 COTESOL Conference

My main motivation for attending the conference was to gain knowledge about the TOEFLiBT test, or Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-Based Test. I attended one session by Tamara Milbourn of CU Boulder. Tamara explained the differences between TOEFL and IELTS, which is the European version of TOEFL. IELTS stands for International English Language Testing System. Essentially, TOEFL scores are much more widely accepted than IELTS, except for in Europe. TOEFL is a typed test, more academic and analytical with less stress on grammar and spelling. IELTS is a more traditional English test which has easier reading and writing tasks than TOEFL but stresses grammar and spelling.

Dana Harper of the Emily Griffiths School in Denver shared her many years of teaching TOEFL in a very informative workshop. She reviewed all the possible TOEFL textbooks. In addition she pointed out how important note-taking, summarizing, and paraphrasing skill development is for successful TOEFL completion. Harper suggested all activities be timed and offered some wonderful classroom aides and suggestions. I handed out copies of "Word Forms" at the last Basalt meeting. If you would like a copy please contact me.

A very interesting workshop called exploring language ideologies with video presented by Madeleine Adkins highlighted cultural differences for native English speakers worldwide and English language learners. Video can be a powerful learning tool. I like to use the learning English site at bbc.com for podcasts and vocabulary building.

Academic Vocabulary Acquisition by Beth Skelton was packed with attendees. She was a dynamic and eloquent educator who went over all the latest research-based vocabulary acquisition techniques. TPR, Realia, opposites or negatives, drawing pictures, visualizing, affixes (word roots), acting, cognates, repeating abstract words in various contexts, use story or context to explain words, define words used in stories.

Shades of a Word...

Beth also took color samples from paint stores and used a simple word like pretty on the lightest shade, then beautiful on the medium shade, and gorgeous on the darkest shade. That was fun!

Native Speakers + International ESL Students

Rebecca Wasil from Colorado State Pueblo gave a great presentation about a three day mixer between students at an alternative high school and international ESL students. The first day they did many community building activities, the second day a debate, and the third day readers' theatre. The students met at the college campus, at a riverside park, and at the alternative high school. It was an extremely positive experience for both groups since both student populations were marginalized amongst their peers. The high school students started thinking about college and travel. The college students were able to impart their wisdom and gain confidence with their English skills.

The most beneficial session that I have ever attended at CoTESOL has been "Improv" Your ESL Classroom given by Jon Wilkerson. The session gives teachers the tools to help students feel safe and committed to speaking and supporting classmates through graded group exercises. They are forced to use authentic language as the very engaging exercises get progressively more difficult.

The five principles of improv are to: Commit, Accept Offers, Listen, Support Others and Have Fun.

Guidelines for the teacher are: Unconditional positive regard, the teacher must not be critical of students decisions; Failure is okay, praise students for courage and effort; First into the breach, teacher must be over-the-top in word and action; Small steps, simple warm up exercises through strenuous exercises increase student's confidence and empowerment; Explain and demonstrate clearly, show students the activity to erase any doubt as to expectations.

After using this in my classroom, students often comment that it was the bestl class ever. Contact me for more information pollyvr@rof.net

Language Study and Global Perspectives

While attending the ACTFL conference (Foreign Language!) in November, I had some interesting experiences and learned about some new trends in foreign language instruction, but I would like to share just a bit about a day-long workshop in which I participated. It was a Spanish immersion session put on by the Spanish Embassy. We, as Spanish faculty, knew a lot about Spanish culture, language and history, but found that we had quite a bit to learn about contemporary Spain. We did several activities related to Spain’s current government and its work in sustainability. This was a great study of language, science and culture alike.

Since I regularly take students abroad, conservation and sustainability are often discussed in Costa Rica for example, but in a country like Spain which was mostly deforested many centuries before, it was interesting to learn about efforts to support and sustain this population in semi-arid southern Spain. Indeed, we in the U.S. have a long way to go in this area and can learn much from what is being done abroad. Europe has a longer industrial history than we do and they have perhaps a shorter time to correct their environmental woes.

While in Andalucía, Spain I’ve stood at the base of the huge wind turbines that produce electricity for vast sections of southern Spain. I’ve also seen the great invernaderos (greenhouses) that produce the rich varieties of fresh fruits, vegetables and flowers sold all over Spain and Europe. Beyond the agricultural richness, the Almeria province houses Europe´s largest solar energy plant, and stages an important EU solar energy research center.

In the workshop, I also learned that Spain has some beautiful national parks that I've somehow missed in my study of language, history, art and their monuments. I will add some of these parks to my itinerary on future trips. I'm glad for the fresh perspectives I gained at the conference that I will share with my students along with the challenge to study everything with an interdisciplinary approach.

Global thinking -global perspectives - global skills, our planet's future will require them. Language study opens the door to many other disciplines. Open your eyes to our world and your potential in studies abroad.

Mary Ebuna
Timberline Campus

CMC Student Dylan Derryberry will Blog at 2010 Winter Olympics

If you have not seen this on eNews, check it out. Dylan Derryberry is a CMC student who won a contest to blog at the 2010 Winter Olympics. He's an aspiring journalism/ed major and a CMC campus blogger. http://enews.coloradomtn.edu/2010/01/26/microsoft-announces-office-winter-games-contest-winners/#more-1033

Facilitating a Conversational Class

In November, I attended the annual American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference in San Diego. The conference was invaluable, and I am grateful to CMC for the opportunity. I could write for days to process all that I learned and saw, but for you I will sum it up! I teach Conversational Spanish in Carbondale, but the following tips could be used in any class where dynamic discussion is a goal.


Strategies for Facilitating Discussion (from a workshop with Dr. B. Rifkin from The College of New Jersey)

Activity Frameworks:

• Discussion contribution coupons: each student has 3 (or any number) of coupons or tickets for the discussion. Each person must use one ticket to make one comment in the discussion. No one may make more comments than the tickets they have until all tickets have been used. This engages the students in the discussion (they are plotting when to speak) and forces the more vocal students to wait and the quieter ones know they must contribute.
• Image without sound: Show a video- a film, a clip from Youtube, etc., but turn off the sound. The possibilities are endless: write the script, make a vocab list, write the ending, guess the country. When the sound is removed, the students really focus on the visual clues.
• Provocative image or statement: Show a photo or a quote, something that engages the students. Allow conversation. It's that easy!

When facilitating a conversational class, certain things are important for the instructor to remember, including:

• Create a safe environment with ground rules for respect
• Use open-ended questions
• Don't look students in the eye when they are speaking (this forces them to address the class instead of just to the instructor)
• Ask students to respond to each other, each comment doesn't need a teacher validation
• Paraphrase what the students say, write it on the board, attach their name to their idea

Please contact me if you would like any further information about facilitating discussions or ACTFL! ldeare@coloradomtn.edu

CoTESOL 2009

Several ESL faculty attended CoTESOL November 13th and 14, 2009. Please read faculty comments on what they learned and brought back to us.

At CoTESOL 2009, Keith Folse's presentation "The Least You Should Know About ELL Grammar," offered interesting research based principals for pedagogy. Folse researched numerous college preparation ESL writing and grammar courses and found that instructor error correction on student writing made no difference in improving student performance. In other words, the practice of "the student writes and teacher corrects" in order to improve writing outcomes is not effective.

Rather, Folse suggests that in order to best prepare ESL writers for college level writing courses, instructors should focus only on the worst ESL grammatical problems and teach the same kinds of writing skills that native speakers need to know. Folse also notes that ESL writers benefit from having their papers evaluated one category at at time, for instance vocabulary or organization. Finally, he encourages writing instructors to collect student papers and then return them to students to edit themselves one week later.

These practical principals based on research of numerous ESL writing and grammar courses, help ESL students take the leap to college level courses. For further information about Folse's research, please visit kfolse@mail.ucf.edu or view his Great Writing

text series 1-5, Heinle Cengage Learning.

Moyers on Democracy | THIRTEEN Forum

Moyers on Democracy | THIRTEEN Forum

Margaret Maxwell's Brainy Professional Development Experience

Greetings, All,

Margaret Maxwell attended a conference on Learning and the Brain in November 2009, funded at least in part by the Faculty Professional Development Fund--here is a reflection she prepared to share some of her learning experience. If you have questions for her, please feel free to write to her a mmaxwell@coloradomtn.edu.

Learning and the Brain Reflection by Margaret Maxwell:

Please use the following link to get started.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQtmGcdSDAI

Now answer the following question: What techniques does the teacher use to “teach for long term retention?” If you answered “the teacher tapped into a combination of semantic and episodic memory to increase retention,” you would be right, according to Willy Wood, one of many presenters at this year’s Learning and the Brain conference. By this he means that educators have the ability to improve student memory retention by combining necessary but no-so-effective “lecture” or semantic memory with “movement or environment” (episodic memory).

Wood argues that another key element that educators by instinct know about but don’t always find time to exercise is accessing students’ prior knowledge. Notice how Robin Williams states, “you’ve walked past them many times (the photos of “lads” just like themselves).” He personalizes and accesses prior knowledge again in the lesson by comparing the pictures with their own characteristics: haircuts, hormones, invincibility. He shocks them with what they know already (prior knowledge) that one day the students will be dead, just as the lads they are looking at are “fertilizing daffodils.”

By having you watch the video first, I am actually attempting to mimic another of Wood’s key lessons: teaching by inference. By providing the film segment, I have given you a context for learning that taps into what you already know about teaching (your prior knowledge). If this were a discussion, which I hope it turns out to be in some other venue, then the lesson might turn to lecture (no more than 10 minutes and I really have, inadvertently, already lectured you), and then some sort of exercise in which the concept of teaching to maximize learning retention would be solidified or “initially encoded” (check in with your neighbor, short writing exercise, journaling).

But I have more to cover in looking at Wood’s work. A typical lesson plan in a Social Science class? Access prior knowledge of what students DO know at least 10 days before the lesson itself by way of some type of assessment. The topic? McCarthyism. Lesson is broken into what Wood calls “chunks,” and each student, to begin, is given a card that is either blank or has a dot. The rules? Some students have dots and others, no dots. The purpose of the game is to find people without dots to enter your group, and deny access to dots. But dots are told to lie, to tell the dotless that they are dotless as well, so as to be accepted and included. The result? The bigger the group, the more likely it is that there is an imposter in that group. On the other hand, to win the game you need a group with the most people who legitimately have no dots. This simple although wordy example represents a lesson plan that begins with episodic memory, which research tells us is much more powerful than semantic memory. Instructor then asks students how students feel when they are forced to lie (the dots) and the dotless are forced to be suspicious in order to win the game. This gives a context for the lecture on McCarthyism that follows (10 minutes) and the final pause or reflection on relevance for the last part of this lesson which Wood calls “Initial Encoding.” As Wood writes, “While simply having an engaging experience places the event in episodic memory, reflecting on the experience puts it into words and it becomes part of our story of how the world works, our mental maps. The experience, and our description of the experience, thus becomes part of long-term memory” (Wood 349).

Learning, as you know, is greatly influenced by relevance and relevance is greatly influenced by framing. Try this: recount to a colleague or friend an experience that happened that made you very angry. Be vocal. Now reframe to find the positive. Ask yourself: which version of this is true? If you answer a little of both, that is because, according to Wood, both are most probably a bit wrong. We lose information and fill in the blanks by inference, by what we know to be true. The brain’s instinct to infer means that our brains can’t always be trusted. A study including Harvard professors and graduates subject to the question why do we have seasons, revealed that 1 out of 10 of these “educated” people could not answer correctly. Most answered that seasons were directly related to when the earth is closest to the sun when the correct answer actually is the angle and tilt of the earth. All were taught the correct answer and tested fine. Six months later they retested and got it wrong again. Why did they get the answer wrong again? Because their prior knowledge from childhood formed their impressions: the closer you are to the sun the warmer, and the farther from the sun the colder. What the brain didn’t know, it filled in with inference rather than fact. Wood argues that looping back to the correct information or to any learning event again and again is essential since the human brain or Hippocampus is subject to changing and revising information for up to ten years before the learning moves to permanency.

Wood quotes John Medina who writes, “one of the most depressing facts in all of education: people usually forget about 90 of what they learn in a class within 30 days…The majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours of class”(Wood 347). However, Wood answers that depressing claim with many solutions, many of which I have mentioned here. I will point out his 3 P’s principal, most important of which, I find, is the “prime.” Lecturing, the necessary evil, is most productive when the instructor primes the lecture by pointing out 1,2, or 3 concepts to be discussed. This he calls “scaffolding” the lecture. Pause and process, the other P’s have been discussed previously, especially when I discuss the value of “initial encoding.” Pausing, as defined by breaking lesson plans into “chunks” also seems obvious to the practiced teacher.
But consider the elephant in the room: what about all that material we have to cover—the objectives, the curriculum? This is the question we pondered at the conference and the reality for every teacher reading this. But more content does not translate into more learning, Wood argues, and the research supports this fact. Therefore, it is imperative for teachers to make careful and responsible choices about curriculum and trust that in covering less “content” we have made a positive choice, as long as we employ practices that maximize memory retention such as those I have discussed here.