Contents
Content Type: 1
Title: Article: Accurate Identification of ELLs With Disabilities Challenges Schools
Body:
From http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2014/07/accurate_identification_of_ell.html
Accurate Identification of ELLs With Disabilities Challenges Schools
By Lesli A. Maxwell
July 21, 2014
Pinpointing whether an English-language learner's academic struggles stem just from a lack of proficiency in the language or if there is another issue unrelated to language acquisition is a complex task.
And it's something that continually vexes educators in school districts.
Read the full article at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2014/07/accurate_identification_of_ell.html
Source: Education Week
Inputdate: 2014-07-26 16:04:47
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-07-28 03:04:47
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-07-28 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-07-28 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 1
Title: Icebreaker Activity – Circle of Life
Body:
From http://eslcarissa.blogspot.com
Here is a good getting-to-know-you activity based around numbers that are significant in your and your students’ lives: http://eslcarissa.blogspot.com/2014/07/circle-of-life-first-day-activity.html
Source: mELTing activities
Inputdate: 2014-07-26 16:05:32
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-07-28 03:04:47
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-07-28 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-07-28 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 1
Title: Station Ideas for the First Day (Or Any Day)
Body:
From http://sraspanglish.blogspot.com
Here is a collection of ideas for fun stations that students can work through on the first day back to class – or any day: http://sraspanglish.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-day-fun-stations.html
Source: Sra. Spanglish
Inputdate: 2014-07-26 16:06:08
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-07-28 03:04:47
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-07-28 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-07-28 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 1
Title: Activity Idea: Guided Collaborative Story Writing
Body:
Here is an activity idea in which students use picture prompts to write a story collaboratively: http://evasimkesyan.com/2014/07/10/guided-collaborative-story-writing/
And here is a great source of series of photos that tell a story: https://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/discuss/72157602235235141 (from a past InterCom article)
Source: A Journey in TEFL
Inputdate: 2014-07-26 16:07:00
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-07-28 03:04:47
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-07-28 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-07-28 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 1
Title: Incorporating Culture in Lessons
Body:
An FLTEACH listserv subscriber recently asked the following:
“I would like to incorporate more culture into my classes, but it seems time is always the enemy. How do you incorporate culture? Do you do it on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? Do you teach culture lessons while incorporating chapter vocabulary and/or grammar lessons or are the culture lessons separate projects/lessons?”
Other listserv members responded with many suggestions and resources. See the original query and their responses by going to http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1407&L=FLTEACH&P=R7340&m=237518 and then clicking on Next in Topic.
Source: FLTEACH
Inputdate: 2014-07-26 16:07:42
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-07-28 03:04:47
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-07-28 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-07-28 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 1
Title: Teacher Training Modules for Finding Internet Resources
Body:
Improve your efficiency in finding quality language teaching resources on the Internet with these new teacher training modules from the Language Materials Project at UCLA: http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/advsearchtech/
Source: Language Materials Project, UCLA
Inputdate: 2014-07-26 16:08:40
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-07-28 03:04:47
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-07-28 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-07-28 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 3
Title: What is it? Participant Interaction and MOOC Participation
Body:
Jeff Magoto is the director of the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon and a member of CASLS' Advisory Board. He has been teaching and researching Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) for more than 25 years.
Over the past year I had the opportunity to work with a talented team of teachers and instructional designers to develop two MOOCs (massive open online courses): Shaping the Way We Teach English: The Landscape of ELT and Paths to Success in ELT (see course outline here).
Sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Office of English Language Programs and the University of Oregon, the courses ran back-to-back in Spring 2014 on the Coursera platform (and are slated to run again in Winter 2015).
From the outset we wanted to build a cMOOC, a connectivist MOOC (Downes, 2009), which we interpreted as an online course where participant interaction would be fundamental. Besides the cMOOC’s roots in collaborative learning and constructivism, we saw participant interaction as the key to overcoming the challenges of the “massive” part of the course: the many different backgrounds, ages, prior teaching experiences, and kinds of training our anticipated 6000 regular participants would be bringing to the MOOC.
So with interaction as a primary goal, here are some of the key elements of our course design for our second course, Paths to Success in ELT. Each of these met with various successes and failures, but having learned a lot from our experience with The Landscape of ELT they brought us closer to our cMOOC goal.
- A predictable (but not necessarily sequential) path through materials and assignments. For most this meant a methodology of: experiencing, understanding, experimenting, and applying.
- Required forum participation (for content areas); a system for acknowledging meaningful contributions.
- Guest moderators in forums—they’d not only bring a fresh perspective to the weekly topic; they’d see and hear things about the state of the MOOC that we wouldn't.
- Peer-to-peer evaluations of lesson plans (this stretched over 4 weeks and was the major assignment of the course). A sample lesson and rubric as InterCom's Activity of the Week: The Ideal Language Teacher.
- Multiple opportunities for reflection and revision (and to catch up).
- Opportunities for informal interaction: we offered an optional weekly contest based on a vocabulary learning technique, What is it?, first described by Nation (1978). Participants see thumbnail-size photographs of artifacts from around the world (mostly everyday objects, but very culturally specific), and had to guess what they were. They could either post to the “I know it” forum, or the far more popular (and interesting) “Let me guess” forum. Winning guesses were chosen at the end of the course based on creativity, cultural insight, and helpfulness in leading others down the right track. Accuracy mattered less than fluency.
Below, I’ll briefly discuss the most surprising for us, the last one, #6, the optional weekly contest.
For fans of radio quiz shows the fact that a contest generated as much forum traffic as it did may not be surprising (on average more than 300 per week participated, more than 1200 viewed the posts). One of the big challenges of MOOC teaching is constructing tasks where both risk-taking and risk averse students have an equal chance and interest in taking part. And where even those not participating are moved to listen in on what’s being talked about. That’s what What is it? seemed to accomplish: encouraging participants to take part in a simple guessing game seemed to encourage their participation in other, more high stakes areas of the course. As one participant commented:
Thank you again for appreciating my answers in the contest forum—sometimes I was really at a loss about what the objects were—but I have learnt from my most creative students that it's worth giving it a crazy try, if that means reinterpreting the world around us in a positive and funny way! I will definitely use the "mysterious object" game in my classes.
References
Downes, S. (2009). Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. In Collective Intelligence and E-Learning 2.0: Implications of Web-Based Communities and Networking, Harrison Hao Yang and Steve Chi-Yin Yuen, eds. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Nation, P. (1978). What Is it? A multipurpose language teaching technique. The English Teaching Forum, 16(3), 20-23, 32. Retrieved from https://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul-nation/1978-What-is-it.pdf
Wilson, G. and Stacey, E. (2004). Online interaction impacts on learning: Teaching the teachers to teach online. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology . Retrieved from http://ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/wilson.html
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
Inputdate: 2014-07-30 17:34:13
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-08-25 03:04:45
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-08-25 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-08-25 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 4
Title: What Makes an Ideal Teacher
Body:
Contributed by Jeff Magoto
This lesson plan, What Makes an Ideal Teacher, was developed by the course team and used as one of the examples in the peer-evaluation phase of the first MOOC course, Paths to Success in ELT. (See Mr. Magoto's accompany Topic of the Week here) The lesson plan below and the accompanying rubric (available here) were the topics of our “massive” course webcasts (more than 50 attendees in each) where we used a combination of lecture and small group learning to further our goals of increasing interaction among participants.
The intent of our lesson planning tasks was, of course, methodological: improving the process, substance, and critical awareness of language that a teacher brings to her daily preparation.
But as in most MOOCs where computer grading is not possible because of the size of the course, peer evaluations serve two purposes: they provide feedback, and they open up another area of inquiry for the course community, in this case, learning about different teaching contexts and the opportunities and constraints that are inherent in them.
Download the lesosn plan here.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
Inputdate: 2014-07-30 17:56:33
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-08-25 03:04:45
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-08-25 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-08-25 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 3
Title: Quick and Easy Interaction with technology – The SAMR Model and related apps
Body:
Lara Lomicka Anderson (lomicka@sc.edu) is Professor of French and Applied Linguistics at the University of South Carolina where she serves as the Graduate Director and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in French and in language education.
In this column, I will discuss some simple yet engaging ways for teachers to facilitate interaction using technology in the classroom. When I lead workshops with teachers, we typically begin by looking at the SAMR model, where the focus is on the tasks and process, rather than the technology. Developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, this is an important model to keep in mind and includes four levels of integration: substitution, augmentation, modification and redesign. (Please see http://www.hippasus.com for more information).
This model is not specifically designed for language learning, and it can be applied and integrated into all disciplines. I find this model to be especially helpful to teachers who are new to technology as it is easy to understand and teachers are not overwhelmed with pedagogical jargon. At the first or lowest level, technology is used as a direct substitute for what teachers likely do already, with no functional change (example – word processed notes). At the next level, augmentation, technology is also a direct substitute, but there is some functional improvement over what teachers did without the technology (example – back channeling tool). At the third level, technology allows for significant redesign of the task (example – concept mapping notes). And at the final level, redefinition, technology allows teachers to do what was previously not possible without the technology (example – sketchcasting). These steps are important to keep in mind when designing tasks for the classroom.
Now I will briefly mention a few apps that will help you to integrate some quick and fun interaction in the classroom. These apps also provide interesting ways to assess student learning and make their participation interactive and engaging. First, Kahoot! (https://getkahoot.com/) is a fun game based classroom response system that allows you to create a quiz, discussion, or survey. Students only need access to a browser to interact with their classmates (no login information necessary). Kahoot! encourages competition, is engaging and dynamic for learners; it also builds in thinking time to each question, which allows for all students to ponder answers before they are permitted to respond to the question. Results are made available in real time. Infuse Learning (http://www.infuselearning.com/) allows teachers to elicit questions, prompts, and quizzes to students' devices in private virtual classrooms. Infuse Learning has a useful drawing board feature, which allows students to interact through a drawing pad with various activities. Finally, Socrative (http://www.socrative.com/) is similar to the other tools but has been around longer. It limits users to 50 for each activity but offers a variety of quiz types such as speed race, short answers, multiple choice and exit ticket.
To return to the SAMR model, apps like Kahoot!, Infuse Learning and Socrative fit into several levels of the model. One way to begin to explore one of these apps while keeping in mind the SAMR model would be to substitute the drawing board feature of Infuse Learning instead of actual whiteboards. As you continue to explore these apps, you will find other ways to continue to move forward in integrating technology and interaction in the classroom.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
Inputdate: 2014-07-31 09:18:53
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-08-18 03:03:44
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-08-18 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-08-18 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
Content Type: 3
Title: Interaction and Language Learning
Body:
by Julie Sykes, CASLS Director
Regardless of one's theoretical perspective on second language acquisition (SLA), interaction is a central component of learning a new language. Interaction is one of the most prominent features of numerous approaches to SLA and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways within a complex, multifaceted theoretical debate (see Lafford, 2007).
The interaction hypothesis (Gass, 1997; Long, 1983) posits that interaction is crucial for producing scenarios in which negotiation for meaning (NfM) can occur. As a learner interprets input and produces relevant output, instances of miscommunication can occur which require NfM, and, as a result, can lead the learner to notice gaps leading to the miscommunication. Designing tasks to facilitate frequent and meaningful NfM is critical to facilitating meaningful interaction.
Socially informed accounts, such as sociocultural theory and language socialization view interaction as a complex social phenomenon and posit that learning and internalization occur beyond instances of miscommunication. Drawing on Halliday (1978), interaction from this perspective includes ideational meaning (i.e., basic information being exchanged), interpersonal meaning (i.e., pragmatics of the interaction), and textual meaning (i.e., the context of the interaction). Attention to all three types of meaning is viewed as essential for the language classroom.
From Theory to Practice
Despite differences in perspectives, most agree a key element in successful learning is the application of what is being learned in a variety of contexts and through multiple interactional opportunities. Drawing on research from a variety of theoretical perspectives, three guiding principles inform the facilitation of meaningful interaction in the classroom.
- Tasks require real communication through the sharing of unknown information or completion of a product through collaboration. This could include, for example, sharing schedules to find a common time (assuming the learners do not already know each other's schedules) or a jigsaw task where learners read different parts of an article and then used the distributed information to solve a problem.
- A task should engage learners in contexts and tasks relevant to their own experiences. Caution should be taken to avoid placing learners in scenarios they are unlikely to encounter. Tasks should focus on communication in meaningful contexts structured around ways language is actually used. Giving learners choices can be one way to provide relevant contextual options.
- Interactional success should be measured not only on task completion, but on success across ideational, interpersonal, and textual dimensions as well. When evaluating learning outcomes, rubrics can include structure, content, strategic language use, pragmatic behaviors, and other elements relevant to meaningful communication. A comprehensive view of interaction adds depth and meaning to interactions in and out of the classroom.
References
Gass, S. (1997). Input, Interaction, and the Second Language Learner. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
Lafford, B. (2007). Second Language Acquisition Reconceptualized? The Impact of Firth and Wagner 1997. Modern Language Journal Focus Issue, 91, 735-756.
Long, M. (1983). Linguistic and conversational adjustments to non-native speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 37–63.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
Inputdate: 2014-07-31 14:43:00
Lastmodifieddate: 2014-08-04 03:07:32
Expdate:
Publishdate: 2014-08-04 02:15:01
Displaydate: 2014-08-04 00:00:00
Active: 1
Emailed: 1
Isarchived: 0
