CoTESOL Conference

By Terry McAnaney

I attended the annual CoTESOl conference in Aurora, Colorado in November. It was a two day conference for teachers of English to students of other languages. In addition to sessions Friday and Saturday mornings and afternoons, various publishing companies were available with sample books. I was able to get several sample copies of ESL books that will be available in the ESL storage room in Breckenridge.

There were many interesting sessions and some not interesting sessions. Two of the best were offered by the same presenters from the English Language Institute at the University of Utah. Two departments have combined forces (ESL and drama) to use acting to help ESL students with pronunciation, sentence and word stress, vocal expression and overcoming the fear of speaking in public in a foreign language.

In one activity they used a contentless scene. They used a general script such as:

"Hi"

"Hi, how are you?

"Fine, I guess"

and so on. . .

After the students read and familiarized themselves with the scene, they were given a situation such as: You are a young married couple. Last night after an argument, B left the apartment and stayed out all night. It is now the following morning. A is fixing breakfast. B returnes.

The students practiced the scene using the necessary stress and inflection dictated by the situation. Each pair was given a different situation. After sufficient practice, the pairs presented their situations to the class.

In another example, they downloaded a scene fron Utube of a portion of a Flash Gordon episode and deleted the sound. The students watched the video. They were divided into groups where they added their own script to the scene by dubbing in their voices using Audacity and Movie Maker. They did a great job!

In the second session by the same presenters, they used puppets to achieve similar objectives to the earlier session. They offered easy tips for making and using puppets. Stuffed animals were unstuffed then cardboard was sewn into the mouths so they could be worked with the hands. Gloves and socks with peepers also make easy puppets. Peepers are eyes connected with a "U" shaped plaxtic so they wrap around one's finger. Peepers can be found at http://www.peepers.com/.

To form a stage, the presenters used PVC pipe and connectors to form a structure on which to hang a curtian. They also suggested a curtain could be hung on chairs turned upside down on a table.

The scripts used were simple. Also used were conversations from the students text books. Students could also write their own scripts. It was great to hear the stress and inflection the students used behind the curtain when it wasn't really them, but rather the puppets talking.

Another very interesting session was a publisher session by McGraw-Hill presented by Pierre Montagan. McGraw-Hill has developed a very innovative online resource for instructors to design an ESL text for a certain class. As Mr. Montagan stated, ESL is different from other disciplines. In academic classes there is a set amount of information that is delivered. All texts for that subject matter have the same material presented, with slight variations, no matter the publisher. With ESL we have students with many different educational levels or no formal education at all. We have students from many cultures and students of various ages. One book does not fit all.
With "Create", a person can register on the McGraw-Hill website(http://www.create.mcgraw-hill.com/). Once registered, you have access to all McGraw-Hill textbooks and other third party materials. One can buy individual chapters from books, essays from third parties, add one's own materials and create a text book designed especially for your class. It is also possible to rearrange chapters or combine chapters from various texts. McGraw-Hill will publish your book with an ISBN number so your students or anyone else can buy it. It can be published as a print textbook or an e-textbook. The only problem I can see, especially in Breckenridge, is we don't generally know the demographics or exact level of our classes until after registration which provides limited time to compose a text.
Another interesting session was given by Lee Shainis and Rachel Fuchs; Teaching what every immigrant needs to know. Lee Shainis wrote a very informative guide of pratical information for immigrants living in the U.S. The language in the guide would be very difficult for levels below high intermediate. A Spanish version is due to come out in several months and he is planning on working on a simplified version in English.
He has developed activities to use with the guide such as doing a scavenger hunt with the table of contents or giving studenta a strip of paper with a question and then having them find the information in the guide. He also has a pdf of activities to use with the guide. You may email him at lee@intercabioweb.org. The website for buying the guide iswww.livingintheus.org.
The other sessions I attended weren't very helpful. Either the presenters didn't seem too interested in presenting or spoke with soft voices which were difficule to hear.
I did attend one last publisher session by Pearson Longman presented by Bill Bliss who is always entertaining. We were all given a copy of "Communication Games and Activity Masters" an activity book which accompanies the Word by Word picture dictionary. It has many great activities a lot of which can be used independently from the picture dictionary. I have already used an information gap activity with a chapter about directions from Side by Side.
In general I felt the conference was very worthwhile. I have attended a couple of CoTESOL conferences in the past, and I will certainly try to attend another in the future.

--Terry McAnaney