CoTESOL Convention Nov. '10

This past November I attended the annual CoTESOL (Colorado Teachers of English to Speakers o f Other Languages) Conference. There were many workshops and presentations available to participants. In addition to visiting the publishers’ exhibits, I also attended nine other sessions. Some of these sessions I found very disappointing perhaps because I have high expectation of other teachers to present their materials and findings in fun and engaging ways. Sadly, I found this not to be the case for more than a few sessions. That said, there definitely were some engaging presentations.

I was quite impressed with the presentation by McGraw-Hill’s Pierre Montagan. The new use of technology in the publishing industry is astounding and I felt I had a glimpse into the future of classroom textbooks. McGraw-Hill’s new program called CREATE allows any registered educator to have access to all of Mc-Graw’s materials and lets a teacher cut and paste any relevant chapters, articles, charts, graphs, etc. into their own custom made textbook. If, for example, a teacher normally uses one textbook for their course, but is unhappy with a few chapters and how the material is presented, they can keep their favorites and replace others with chapters they like better. They can design their own textbook with the most current articles, charts, chapters and research and easily update their book each semester with the freshest content. Pretty amazing.

I also really enjoyed two presentations by the same group from the University of Utah. The first session called “Dramatic English –from understudy to star” used great examples and video of ESL students using theater and drama to improve their English. It was enlightening to see the students open up once they were playing a character. Their tone and inflection noticeably changed when their scene was set depending on whether their character was angry, suspicious, guilty, etc. The students were given “contentless scripts”—scripts that were neutral in their words and could be adapted to the situation depending on if the characters were told to be happy, sad, excited, etc. Their second presentation, “Perfecting pronunciation through puppet performance” was similar (using theatre and drama), but rather than having students stand up and perform they used hand puppets to play the character. This appeared to be especially beneficial for the shyer students to try out their acting chops. Since the student is hidden behind a screen they were more apt to try different voices, tone and emphasis that they often don’t try in other classes in front of their peers.

I found that the most engaging sessions—aside from the University of Utah—were hosted by publishers. Their enthusiasm was much more palpable than from many of the teacher-hosted workshops. They were better prepared, engaging and fun, but I suppose that is how you’d need to be if you’re trying to sell something. Hopefully, more teachers will adopt these traits if they really want to “sell” education.