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| Jaime Haile (right) and a visitor |
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| Carrie Woods |
ELS was proud to have several staff presenting poster sessions at TESOL this year. In one particular poster session, Tammy Johnson, LaVerne, discussed the implications of explicit grammar instruction, and Carrie Woods showcased "Creating ESL Newsletters",giving many examples of successful student work. Jaime Haile of Thousand Oaks also explained her presentation, "Fostering a Positive Self-Identity in Bi-Multicultural Individuals," to a convention-goer.
Jaime is one of five ELS staff now pursuing a Masters degree through the ELS collaboration with Adelphi University in New York. Jaime's poster discussed challenges and coping strategies for bi- and multicultural individuals developing identifies. Conclusion: "those with high identity integration have high levels of success in their academic endeavors and optimism about their professional futures."
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
For a list of most notable academic sessions throughout TESOL 2013, see this link:http://www.tesol.org/convention2013/education-schedule/academic-sessions
GAMES
Mona Maklouf, Tampa instructor, reports on a number of icebreakers and games that will serve to motivate students and get them eager to use English. For a copy of her associated powerpoint, write smatson@els.edu. A sample activity:
Call on students at random to be in the spotlight. The student gets 30 seconds to share/open up about any of the following:
--A proverb that they know, and what it means
--The best moment of my life (depending on the student: possibly the worst moment, as well)
--The best decision I ever made
--What the past/present/future means to me
If time allows, have more than one student do this, to break the ice! Spending the first 5-8 minutes of class on this (it's best for SSP) is a good motivator for getting students to arrive on time.
VOCABULARY
Practical Ideas for Learning Vocabulary. Keith Folse, University of Southern Florida. (scm)
Your takeaway: Gagne is better than Bloom for vocabulary learning. Always keep these nine tips in mind!
Most ESL practioners know about Bloom's areas of learning: knowledge, comprehension, application, synthesis, and evaluation. However, Gagne's nine "events of instruction" can be more helpful in terms of helping studain attentionents make meaningful connections with vocabulary and to retain what they've learned. Folse's very entertaining and memorable presentation stated:
1. First, gain attention. Use red markers on the board if necessary. Pose questions. Attention is essential!
2. Stimulate recall of prior knowledge. What do they already know about the word or its context? Explore and elicit knowledge.
3. Present the material to be used. As you explain, have students fill in a grid - going from smallest to largest, for example, or some other continuum that they can relate to - or otherwise have them perform a task to process what you are saying.
4. Describe the goal. This helps students frame the information ("Ah! I can use this in engineering and around the house...")
5. Provide guidance for learning. For example, an acronym might help, or a chart, or a chant. Teach mnemonics where useful. "Our job is to make it seem manageable at all times."
6. Elicit performance. Students must do as much as possible with the words: speak, write, think, compare, share. Idea: "Can you find two words on the board that mean the opposite of each other? What are they? How are they spelled?"
7. Provide feedback. Are they using the word correctly? Are they pronouncing the words right? Be objective. Avoid "good/bad" judgements. Be factual.
8. Assess performance. This could be by means of a quiz, but also with open-ended quizzes the same or the next day using the target words.
9. Enhance retention and transfer. Don't expect vocabulary to show up immediately in writing. The environment for production has to be simliar to the environment that they learned the words in. For example, if they learned a word in the context of a story, you might have them stand up and summarize the story, putting a check mark on the board every time they used the target vocabulary (or have another student put the checks on the board). Or--do a dictation, have students recite a poem - anything that requires them to remember, process, and produce the word again. The more exposures, the better - always.
But wait, you may be saying. These steps are very similiar to what we do in ELS lesson plans! Yes - and that's why the lesson plans work! They focus, at all times, on the student outcomes.
Anchoring Academic Word List Vocabulary One Touch at a Time. Presenters: Bill
Acton, Mike Burri, Karen Rauser, Brian Teaman. Submitted by Amy Broadsword.
Your takeaway: Use kinesthetic activities for vocabulary teaching. They enhance understanding and pronunciation.
I have followed Bill Acton's work in kinaesthetic pronunciation and haptics over the past few years, so I was delighted to attend this session. His team demonstrated how the use of haptics, the involvement of movement and resonance, could assist language learners in true learning of whole vocabulary. A word is more than just its meaning; to truly know a word, one must know its properties such as stress, pronunciation, syllabification, collocations and prosodic features. Attendees watched a demonstration of haptic anchoring (movement and touch) where the presenters used various gestures and movements to represent stressed and unstressed vowels (using their "vowel clock"), syllabification, intonation and stress shift across word families. In groups, we were given words to practice these movements. The methodology behind this approach is to provide
I have followed Bill Acton's work in kinaesthetic pronunciation and haptics over the past few years, so I was delighted to attend this session. His team demonstrated how the use of haptics, the involvement of movement and resonance, could assist language learners in true learning of whole vocabulary. A word is more than just its meaning; to truly know a word, one must know its properties such as stress, pronunciation, syllabification, collocations and prosodic features. Attendees watched a demonstration of haptic anchoring (movement and touch) where the presenters used various gestures and movements to represent stressed and unstressed vowels (using their "vowel clock"), syllabification, intonation and stress shift across word families. In groups, we were given words to practice these movements. The methodology behind this approach is to provide
- More effective ways of
integrating new or improved pronunciation into spontaneous speech
- More systematic use of
kinaesthetic/body engagement in pronunciation/vocabulary teaching
- Improved self-monitoring and
self-correction
- Better integration of
pronunciation teaching in the curriculum and classroom
I encourage you to visit Acton's website and peruse his publications on this subject to watch a demonstration and stretch your creativity when it comes to helping a student truly learn vocabulary.
http://hipoeces.blogspot.com/
http://hapticpronunciationteaching.blogspot.ca/
video demonstration: http://vimeo.com/60271213
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