Contents
Content Type: 3
Title: Literacy and Cognitive Rigor: Layering L1 and L2 Reading Strategies
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Jessica Seator is the AVID Coordinator at Hillsboro High School in Nashville, Tennessee.
As an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) college readiness teacher/coordinator and a L2 Spanish teacher at an urban school with high levels of poverty, I am intimately aware of the relationship between educational access for students at low levels of socioeconomic development and literacy. Though teacher preparation programs tend to address these issues as they relate to L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition separately, I have found that educators are better prepared to increase access to high levels of education if they learn and consider how L1 and L2 strategies complement one another and can be used in concert. After all, even learners with high levels of fluency in the L1 may struggle in the L2 if they are unable to transfer their L1 literacy strategies to the L2. My experience implementing AVID’s framework for critical reading drove me to this realization.
The first step in AVID’s critical reading process is to help learners develop metacognitive strategies for reading. In this approach, learners begin by identifying key terms in a L1 source text. After teaching AVID, I soon realized that I could increase the cognitive rigor in my lower-level L2 classes by layering on this process to our previous reading activity of identifying cognates and using knowledge of linguistic patterns to decipher and predict meaning. As a result, students began to collaborate to analyze texts for discerning key words based on context rather than other indicators. For example, when students were identifying key words in a L2 source text, they began to consider if every cognate in the text was essential to understanding to the main idea or if the students selected those words as a mere function of their familiarity. The same result came to pass with familiar and polysyllabic words; learners began to focus on whether or not these words were actually key terms or if the students were overemphasizing the importance of the words due to their apparent levels of complexity.
In my experience, I find most students fall into two types of text markers- “polka dot markers” versus “zebra stripe markers”. Students who tend to randomly select any word as a key word have papers that appear randomly polka dotted in bright highlighter. Closer inspection might reveal students are choosing too many non-essential terms because they cannot determine which words should gain priority. The other extreme pattern found with novice text markers is that they highlight entire phrases or sentences and thus create the appearance of zebra stripes across the text. This tends to indicate confusion between identifying main idea and identifying familiar content.
In sum, conversations about text marking lay a foundation for reading critically and open opportunities for students at all levels of literacy to move beyond comprehension to textual analysis. While AVID’s critical reading curriculum delves much further than the identification of key words that what I have discussed here, the magic of the framework lies in the simplicity of asking students to proceed step-by-step from word-level analysis to textual analysis. With this approach, cognitive rigor becomes accessible in any language and at any level. Simply put, we can never solve the issue of access if we do not encourage students to take the first step.
Source: CASLS Topic of the Week
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Content Type: 4
Title: Textual Analysis
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by Jessica Seator, AVID Coordinator at Hillsboro High School in Nashville, Tennessee
This activity was developed to support L1 and L2 learners with textual analysis and is designed to complement this week’s activity of the week.
Learning Objectives: Students will be able to
- Identify key words within a text.
- Analyze marking patterns of key words to engage in self-evaluation.
Mode: Interpretive reading
Materials Needed: Written text, handout
Procedure:
- Ask learners to mark the words that they think are key words within a text.
- Learners reflect on what patterns they notice when marking terms. Do they tend to identify the most complex terms? Do they tend to identify unknown terms?
- Learners evaluate how a partner identified terms after engaging in self-evaluation.
- Learners work together in a teacher-led class discussion to discern what the most important terms in the text are.
- Learners reflect on what strategies they wish to employ so that they can better identify key terms in a future activity.
Notes:
- As learners become more comfortable with key term identification, they should work more autonomously.
- A possible, related activity is to have learners work together to predict meaning of a source text by using key words alone. Then, after the learners have interacted with the text, they can verify the accuracy of their predictions.
Source: CASLS Activity of the Week
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Title: Book: Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger
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From https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/impact.42/main
Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger: Issues of documentation, policy, and language rights
Edited by Luna Filipović and Martin Pütz
Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company
This peer-reviewed collection brings together the latest research on language endangerment and language rights. It creates a vibrant, interdisciplinary platform for the discussion of the most pertinent and urgent topics central to vitality and equality of languages in today’s globalised world. The novelty of the volume lies in the multifaceted view on the variety of dangers that languages face today, such as extinction through dwindling speaker populations and lack of adequate preservation policies or inequality in different social contexts (e.g. access to justice, education and research resources). There are examples of both loss and survival, and discussion of multiple factors that condition these two different outcomes. We pose and answer difficult questions such as whether forced interventions in preventing loss are always warranted or indeed viable. The emerging shared perspective is that of hope to inspire action towards improving the position of different languages and their speakers through research of this kind.
Visit the publisher’s website at https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/impact.42/main
Source: John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Title: Article: Cultural Diversity Virtual Exchange on Intercultural Competency
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Beyond the Walls of the Classroom: Cultural Diversity Virtual Exchange on Intercultural Competency
by Alejandro Méndez Betancor, Naomi Wahls, and Vicky Ariza-Pinzón
October 23, 2016
Technology integration is one of the challenges we face nowadays when teaching a language course. Every day, we are learning new ways to integrate technology in our teaching. Students have access to many online resources, and their lives and communication methods are shaped by the ever changing flow of information on the web. They have become more digitally engaged, yet classrooms language learning continue to take place within the confines of four walls. Today’s students and educators can connect with the outside world differently because of the use of technology, and universities cannot ignore that trend. This paper reports our experience on a telecollaboration project to virtually connect peers between a Central University in Mexico and a Midwestern American University as a way to infuse authenticity in language learning.
Read the full paper at http://fltmag.com/beyond-walls-classroom-cultural-diversity-virtual-exchange-intercultural-competency/
Source: FLTMAG
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Title: Free E-Book: Create a Communicative Language Classroom
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Create a Communicative Language Classroom: 15 Communicative Activities to Build Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking Skills is available as a free download from Transparent Language: http://www.transparent.com/ebooks/create-a-communicative-language-classroom.html?utm_campaign=ACTFL%20SmartBrief%2011%2F22%2F16%20ad&utm_source=email
Source: Transparent Language
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Title: Book: Emotion in Multilingual Interaction
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From https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/pbns.266/main
Emotion in Multilingual Interaction
Edited by Matthew T. Prior and Gabriele Kasper
Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company
This volume brings together for the first time a collection of studies that investigates how multilingual speakers construct emotions in their talk as a joint discursive practice. The contributions draw on the well established, converging traditions of conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and membership categorization analysis together with recent work on interactional storytelling, stylization, and multimodal analysis. By adopting a discursive approach to emotion in multilingual talk, the volume breaks with the dominant view of emotions as cognitive and intra-psychological phenomena and their study through self-report. Through detailed analyses of original recorded data, the chapters examine how participants produce emotion-implicative actions, identities, stances, and morality through their interactional work in ordinary face-to-face conversation, computer-mediated interaction, institutional talk in medical, educational, and broadcast media settings, and in research interviews. The volume addresses itself to students and researchers interested in language and emotion, multilingual speakers and settings, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.
Visit the publisher’s website at https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/pbns.266/main
Source: John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Title: Call for Papers: Annual Meeting of the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies
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The Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies (SCSS) will be held at the Westin Alexandria Hotel in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, April 6-8, 2017. The meeting will be hosted by George Mason University's program in Russian and Eurasian Studies. The SCSS is the largest of the regional Slavic and Eurasian Studies associations and its programs attract national and international scholarly participation. The purpose of SCSS is to promote scholarship, education, and in all other ways to advance scholarly interest in Russian, Soviet, and East European studies in the Southern region of the United States and nationwide. Membership in SCSS is open to all persons interested in furthering these goals.
Papers from all humanities and social science disciplines are welcome, as is a focus on countries other than Russia/USSR. We encourage participation from scholars of all Slavic, East European, and Eurasian regions. Papers can be on any time period and any topic relevant to these regions. Papers on the special theme of the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 are especially welcome.
The program committee is accepting panel and paper proposals until January 15, 2017. Whole panel proposals (chair, three papers, discussant) are preferred, but proposals for individual papers will also be accepted. Whole panel proposals should include the titles of each individual paper as well as a title for the panel itself and identifying information (email address and brief CV with institutional affiliation) for all participants. Proposals for individual papers should include email address, brief CV with institutional affiliation, paper title, and a one-paragraph abstract to guide the program committee in the assembly of panels. If any AV equipment will be needed, the panel and paper proposals should indicate so when they are submitted. AV will be of limited availability and assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Email your proposals to Emily Baran at emily.baran@mtsu.edu. If necessary, you may also send it by conventional post to:
Dr. Emily B. Baran
Department of History
Middle Tennessee State University
MTSU Box 23
1301 E. Main Street
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
For local arrangements or conference information other than the program, please contact Steven Barnes at scssalexandria@gmail.com. For questions regarding the program, please contact Emily Baran at emily.baran@mtsu.edu.
Kalb, J. [SEELANGS] FW: Southern Conference on Slavic Studies, Alexandria, VA, 6-8 April 2017. SEELANGS listserv (SEELANGS@LISTSERV.UA.EDU, 22 Nov 2016).
Source: SEELANGS
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Title: Call for Papers: 25th Annual Boston University Graduate Student Conference in African Studies
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Boston University's Graduate Student Conference in African Studies will be celebrating its 25th consecutive event. This year’s conference will feature the work of emerging graduate scholars engaging Africa from a variety of disciplines and focusing on the themes of xenophobia, disenfranchisement, and exclusion. The keynote address will be delivered by Professor Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation.
The 2017 conference will be held at Boston University, April 7-8th. The application deadline will be January 15, 2017.
The organizers invite rigorous graduate student papers that examine Africa’s past, present and future, exhibit methodological innovation, and/or yield fresh interpretative insights. Participation is commonly drawn from across the academic spectrum: Anthropology, Art History, Cultural Studies, Economics, Ecology and Environment, Geography, Global Health, History, International Relations, Law, Literature, Media Studies, Musicology, Policy, Political Science, Religion, and Sociology.
View the full call for papers at https://networks.h-net.org/node/28765/discussions/152863/25th-annual-boston-university-graduate-student-conference-african
Source: Boston University
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Title: Call for Proposals: 2017 Symposium on Second Language Writing
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From http://sslw.asu.edu/2017/proposal.html
The 2017 Symposium on Second Language Writing (SSLW 2017) will take place June 30-July 2, 2017, at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
The Organizing Committee seeks proposals for 20-minute presentations that address various topics within the field of L2 writing—broadly defined.
Any topic related to second language writing theory, research, teaching or program administration is welcome. The organizers especially encourage proposals that seek to challenge the status quo in the field by introducing new topics as well as new theoretical and methodological approaches. As with all previous Symposium iterations, the organizers are interested in L2 writing issues in any second or foreign language for any age groups in personal, academic, professional and civic contexts.
Given the theme, "Assessing Second Language Writing," the organizers particularly encourage proposals that address issues related to L2 writing assessment as well as the assessment of the field of second language writing.
The deadline for receipt of proposals is January 31, 2017.
View the full call for proposals at http://sslw.asu.edu/2017/proposal.html
Source: Arizona State University
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Title: Webinar: Authentic Listening at Every Level
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In this free webinar on Thursday 1 December, Lewis Lansford looks at how teachers can help students at every level to engage with authentic input. Using TED Talks as examples, Lewis looks at the brain science related to listening and offers practical tips for how to create success-oriented lessons for the classroom at any level.
For full details go to https://englishagenda.britishcouncil.org/events/webinars/forthcoming-webinars/engaging-ears-eyes-brains-and-minds-authentic-listening-every-level
Source: British Council
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