Organization Do you begin and end classes on time? I virtually always begin class on time. I ask my students to show up a few minutes early, so we can begin exactly on the minute. Rationale: We have limited time in class and I don’t want to waste any; and punctuality is an important academic skill.…
Mina P. Shaughnessy, New York: Oxford University Press (1977) “… [T]he young men and women who were to be known as open admissions students fell into one of three groups: (1) those who met the traditional requirements for college work, who appeared from their tests and their school performance to be competent readers and writers…
It is the end of the first week of a new semester. The longer I teach, the grumpier I get. I am still very warm to my students, encouraging and supportive, but I have diminishing patience for students with attitude. If a student is engaged and trying to understand, my fuse is fairly long. But…
I’ve just finished another semester at Ohlone, and my first of being half-time teaching and half-time administration. (I taught Level 4 Grammar this past summer.) Here are some things I’d like to consider before I begin another semester. Some come from what I’ve learned the past few months, and some from what I’ve read. This…
A last speaker with no one to talk to exists in unspeakable solitude. Increasingly, as linguists recognize the magnitude of the modern language die-off and rush to catalog and decipher the most vulnerable tongues, they are confronting underlying questions about languages’ worth and utility. Does each language have boxed up within it some irreplaceable beneficial…
I don’t think that makes sense, that title. I’ve been making less sense lately. I hope to start making more sense soon. In the meantime, bear with me. Tomorrow is the first day of a new semester. I have never maintained the practice I should have, to register my thoughts and experiences about teaching: to…
Maybe I won’t retire this blog after all. It occurs to me that, if I am to practice what I learned at school, this would be the ideal place to “reflect” about my life as a teacher. I have just finished my third week of teaching in an intensive English program. Too much time has…
This is the culminating post in this blog. Ginnama.com began when my odyssey into the world of academia was just a germ and my application to SIT pending. Now I am Ginna MA, in both the senses I initially intended: Ginna with an MA, and Ginna as a ma. The latter has expanded since a…
“Hvileløs is a Norwegian word for restless. But restless doesn’t come within a mile of being as restless as hvileløs, which evokes someone who is fitty restless — as restless as a bewildered bedbug. Norwegians have a word for that, too: forvirre veggelus. Which, again, is ten times as bewildered as your average American bewildered…
Txtng: The gr8 db8. David Crystal. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2008. p 52 Texting is typically between people who know each other well. Language “intimate and local,” and make[s] assumptions about prior knowledge.” “It is a basic principle of discourse analysis that the meaning of words cannot be grasped in isolation, but must take into…
Outliers: The Story of Success. Malcolm Gladwell. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Chapter Seven, The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes pp 177–223. He analyzes an account of a 1997 plane crash of Korean Air, one of several by that airline, to show how it was caused by cultural misunderstanding. One factor was mitigated…
The Brain That Changes Itself. Norman Doidge, MD. New York, Penguin Books: 2007. Use for GATESOL Presentation p 308: “Listening to an audio book leaves a different set of memories than reading does. A newscast heard on the radio is processed differently from the same words read in a newspaper.” 298: He writes of “the…
Title of your presentation Extending Community: Stories, Culture & Technology in the Language Classroom Objectives of the presentation To introduce the audience to ways that the language classroom, student stories and digital technology intersect to create potential for the ESL classroom; to envision ways that, when extended to the Internet, they can build community among…
They call it a Wonder Wheel!
I wish there’d been time for more writing of reflections. The things I reflected upon in real-time tended not to be the predictable byproducts of the curriculum, but rather tangential and sometimes in opposition to what was happening in the classroom. Documented reflected practice is impossible without sacrificing something else important. I decided to pour…
Dear Mr. Firsten: I teach English in Upshur County, West Virginia. In these parts, it’s very common for people to say things like I’m waiting on you and The dog just drug our braided rug outside instead of I’m waiting for you and The dog just dragged our braided rug outside. I don’t accept those…
Hidden Dynamics For every thought we express during a conversation, there are probably several others that never emerge: ideas that are off-topic (or off-color), discourteous or otherwise inappropriate. And often what we do say is not really what we mean. For personal, cultural or other reasons, many of us are reluctant (or unable) to express…
Final Internship Evaluation Ginna Allison By Elka Todeva May 8, 2010 I supervised Ginna Allison during her winter 2010 internship in Pachuca, Mexico, where she taught adult and youth learners at the ABC Escuela de Inglés, a small private language school with a long history of offering language courses. While Ginna has tutored immigrants in…
May 18, 2010, by telephone “The StoryCorp Method” interviews exist (about 30,000) in the Library of Congress. Different than the ones people do on their own. Interviews are [he didn’t say ‘edited’] shaped by a “facilitator” (I think he called it). There’s a DB of their stories. He’s created a National Day of Listening. One…
Informal v. formal assessment For tests: Warm up (don’t make it instantly hard) Let Ss know how they will be assessed Let Ss check for comprehension of transactional language of test before beginning Make sure you’re assessing your goals, so Ss know what to prepare for Don’t use assessment as threat or punishment Sometimes not…
www.americancorpus.org (Corpus of American English) Definitions First computerized in 1971 [http://iteslj.org/Articles/Krieger-Corpus.html] A corpus consists of a databank of natural texts, compiled from writing and/or a transcription of recorded speech.A concordancer is a software program which analyzes corpora and lists the results.The main focus of corpus linguistics is to discover patterns of authentic language use through…
past oriented/factual = gerunds forward oriented (can be past form, however/hypothetical = infinitives <—————-| (backward) |—————-> (forward) Infinitives are the optimistic verbs. You can’t finish or enjoy something hypothetical, so they’re in the future “Enjoy” takes only –ing form “Do you like” versus “Would you like”: one is real, one is hypothetical “I like” (present…
As with any group activity, my experience was colored by the people I worked with. As before, I was fortunate to work with Curtis and Joseph, whose perceptive ability and sense of humor made learning a pleasure. I’m glad. I kept you in your memoir groups with the hope that you had established relationships that…
Week Reading Culture Writing Likely Grammar Points Week 1 THE FOLK STORY Aesop: Lion & the Mouse (Greek) Intro narrative storyline Identifying key words before reading (S) Sentence strips Phrasal verb collection (S) Ice-breakers Community-building Class “scrapbook” Class norms Meaning of name Paraphrasing moral of assigned story (S) Student experience: a personal moral Dialectical journal…
This is a semester-long course for college-age and older students at an intermediate level in an American private school or college. It uses traditional folktales, legends and fables as a tool for developing reading and writing skills, and for examining cultural beliefs and experiences. The class meets twice a week for 2.5 hours each session,…
Final Internship Evaluation [my changes underlined] By Elka Todeva May 8, 2010 I supervised Ginna Allison during her winter 2010 internship in Pachuca, Mexico, where she taught young and adult learners at the ABC Escuela de Inglés, a small private language school with a long history of offering language courses. Ginna had not had any…
Extending Community: Stories, Culture & Technology in the Classroom Paper How can cultural experience help to develop language skills? How can we reach beyond the classroom to create a sense of community? This session explores the spheres of personal narrative and technology and how they intersect with ESL to open rich opportunities for teaching and…
Interview with Leslie at SIT Graduate Institute, May 7. 2010 MISCOMMUNICATION Leslie: Calif Institute for Integral Studies. PhD. Many incredible benefits to being an online learning communiity. Three years. When you go online, you had to bring a quality of presence: suspend judgment. Norms of being as well as of participation. Benefits: I think just…
By William ZinsserA talk to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, August 11, 2009 [formatting added by Elka] Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some extra help with their…
The Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching Volume V- 2000 TESOL: Art and Craft by Henry Widdowson So TESOL practitioners, I suggest, are, as individuals in the particular circumstances of their own classrooms, acting as artists in the exercise of their craft. They are not scientists seeking to eliminate variety in the…
This presentation explores three separate spheres — the ESL classroom, student stories and digital technology — to discover how they can work together to build cultural awareness, computer literacy and language skills, and to extend the student community beyond the classroom. When first-person narratives meet the realm of technology, digital storytelling is one result. Whatever…
Last speech, day before assassination. Filled with 3rd conditionals. You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, “Are you Martin Luther King?” And I…
Phone Interview with Sue Schardt, Executive Director, AIR What gives shape to whatever is created in that realm is determined in large part by if you have a platform. The classroom is the platform. The manner in which they engage: there’s a wide range of possibilities. Is there a common platform? Build idea around whatever…
April 23, 2010. In person-interview with Sean Conley at SIT Graduate Institute. [Sean Conley recently became the Associate Dean of the Marlboro College Graduate School. Formerly he served as the chair of the department of English language studies at The New School University in New York City. He has designed computer labs for language teaching, integrated…
During college, I was talking with two classmates about what we’d learned in various classes: what had (and hadn’t) been tangibly valuable. “You know the class that I thought was great?” I asked. I told them. One started nodding her head in enthusiastic agreement, and the other looked at me as though I were from…
TGB Condition and result Imaginative Hypothetical (unlikely but possible — future and present) Counterfactual (impossible — present or past) Problems Inconsistent tenses Use of “were” Confusion with ___ conditional: ‘if it rains, I will…’ versus ‘if it rained, I would…’ (The former expresses more confidence in the likelihood.) If: confusion with non-conditional; also, if sometimes…
Students “out-word each other.” “Language is a vehicle to name and make real what we imagine.” April 30, 2010, Dr. Tricia Kress (U Mass, Boston) speaking at Language Learning and the Imagination Symposium, New Jersey City University Young Researchers Club, Urban HS, Boston __________ Lyn Thompson Lemaire (EFL) Not “Where did you spend your vacation?”…
Polina: April 28, 2010. Phone interview. Polina Vinogradova’s dissertation is: Development of Multiliteracies and Creation of Critical Multicultural Environment Using Digital Stories in ESL Instruction. AAAL conference, Atlanta. Glynda A. Hull, Mark Evan Nelson: digital stories and community. Middle and high school in different countries: US, India, maybe China Polina is not artistic (writing, drawing)…
In-person interview at SIT Graduate Institute, April 27, 2010 He uses iMovie for Mac and Window MovieMaker for PC. Comes with PC systems and available for free download. Easy. His Capstone is on digital storytelling as a tool for reentry after experience abroad, to explore these issues: affective; professional development; academic; civic. His people do…
Reading Develop comprehension strategies and skills that will transfer to reading activities in the future. Objectives: SWBAT… Infer meaning of vocabulary from context. Select key words that carry meaning for the story. Identify topic sentences and major supporting details. Chart a reading on a timeline to identify sequence in the narrative genre. Identify explicit meaning;…
[download sequence] This is a semester-long course for college-age and older students at an intermediate level in an American private school or college. It uses traditional folktales, legends and fables as a tool for developing reading and writing skills, and for examining cultural beliefs and experiences. The class meets twice a week for 2.5 hours…
As with any group activity, my experience was colored by the people I worked with. As before, I was fortunate to work with Curtis and Joseph, whose perceptive ability and sense of humor made learning a pleasure. Happenstance led to our choice of Top of the Hill Grill as our object of study. We were…
During college, I was talking with two classmates about what we’d learned in various classes: what had (and hadn’t) been tangibly valuable. “You know the class that I thought was great?” I asked. I told them. One started nodding her head in enthusiastic agreement, and the other looked at me as though I were from…
Learner Data * I lived here since six months but can’t find no job. (Puerto Rican student, lower intermediate) A. Student’s problem: wrong tense, wrong adverbial, double negative B. What the student got right: pronouns, adverb, syntax, lexicon (except adverbial), modality C. Interlanguage: L1 Transfer: In Spanish, the present perfect is not used in this…
Linguistically sensitive content teaching (a) versus content based language teaching (b): (a) Teaching geography: testing what they know know about geo, but build writing skills. (b) Texts from geography, teach reading strategy, vocab bldg, ling structures: assessment more linguistic. FOCUS ON LANGUAGE. Tales are tools to get to language.
Linguistically sensitive content teaching (a) versus content-based language teaching (b). (a) Teaching geography: testing what they know know about geo, but build writing skills. (b) Texts from geography, teach reading strategy, vocab bldg, ling structures: assessment more linguistic FOCUS ON LANGUAGE. Tales are tools to get to language.
4a. What is working in EAL for you? I like the classes in which we gain a greater familiarity with a concept AND discuss (or practice) how that knowledge can transfer to the classroom. I thought our phrasal verb classes did that. 4b. What isn’t working and why? Sometimes I’m frustrated that we don’t have…
Interview Reflections Question 4: Who I Am in the Classroom I noticed a surprising thing in one of Elizabeth’s classes last semester: that who I am in the SIT classroom is not someone my old friends would entirely recognize. In a small-group project for The Four Skills, Sarah presented a lesson in which we thought…
When to decide whether to use a supplementary doc as an attachment at the end or simply a citation: Am I using the doc to show progress (for which a larger context of the writing might be useful) or to show background material? Is it something that a reader might learn more by reading, or…
I didn’t like Barnga, a game we played in ICLT last week, because it made me feel rotten. That was part of the point: not to make us feel rotten, but to get a sense of the massive challenges faced by those who enter a new culture. In our first group, four of us learned…
