2008 Palomar College ESL Resident Scholarship Recipients

Congratulations to these five very deserving students who are the recipients of 2008 Palomar College ESL Resident Scholarships.

Saturnino Alonso Reyes with his teacher Marianne Uribe

Zoila Maria Amador

Abigail Avila

Omar Bello with his teacher Joanna Murphy

Pablo Lorenzo

Like all other scholarship honorees, these five ESL students received their award certificates at the annual Honors Night event on May 23. The following video clip is courtesy of Zoila Maria Amador's teacher Katrina Tamura.

Episode 38 of our "Voices of ESL" podcast is devoted to the speeches by these five students. You can listen to the episode by clicking here.

TESOL 2008

TESOL Notes and Handouts: Information Gathered from TESOL 2008
Heather Weldele: hweldele@palomar.edu
(These notes are much easier to read in word and include a scanned handout on "using the novel as a textbook." I can send this word document via email to anyone interested.)

Plenary Speeches
The best, in my opinion, were the plenary speeches. In a nut shell, Penny Ur spoke about her research on correcting in both speaking and writing. In spite of some research which suggests corrections interfere with fluency, may hurt students, and are not actually helpful to the students learning, overwhelming, students stated that they want to be corrected and they felt that corrections were helpful. Still, Ur agrees that correcting presents some problems. For one, she notes that we need to be corrected about eight times before we can conquer our mistakes. However, gradual improvement through correction is better than no corrections at all. She also addressed the evidence of the best time to correct being in “real time,” but the problem of interrupting fluency. Here, she says, a good teacher must decide when it is appropriate and useful to interrupt.
A few things I found particularly interesting…. Students prefer (in written correction) to be told exactly how to fix their errors rather than being told what the mistake is and correcting it themselves. (ie: rather than telling them to add a transition, write it in for them). Ur insists that this is not because the students are lazy but because they find it most helpful.
Lastly, some numbers:
Type / Correction
1. Recast (say again correctly)
55% = Frequency of Use
18% = Uptake
2. Elicitation
14% = Frequency of Use
46% = Uptake
3. Clarification of Request (“I didn’t understand.”)
11% = Frequency of Use
28% = Uptake




Aida Walkee: “Quality Teaching for ESL”
Walkee discussed how we define accomplished practice and what it should entail. Her main point was that teachers must offer both high challenge and high support.
Principles and notes:
Academic Rigor: Substantial ideas, deep disciplinary knowledge / develop central ideas and establish complex relationships between ideas / use higher order of thinking skills.
High Expectations: scaffolds are provided / **believe all members can achieve / provide clear criteria for higher expectations.
Quality Interactions: Talk about subject matter of discipline encourages reasoning, application of ideas, argumentation, forming generalization, and asking questions.
Language Focus: explicit discussion of how language works / characteristics of language.
**Students should be given the principles.

Articles: Discussion group
Activities for teaching articles:
Cut out newspaper articles and blacken the articles in the story
Cut out newspaper headlines (these are usually missing articles)
We discussed the difficulties of each of these activities. It seems to make the most sense to blacken the articles in a short story or fable similar to the one below.

A Fable for Articles:
(Use to teach “second mention.”)

A hungry wolf was eating its dinner when a piece of bone got stuck in its throat. It was quite painful, so the wolf went to his friends for help. The wolf said, “I will give anything to anyone who helps me.” No one could help the wolf. So the wolf ran to the shore of a pond and found a crane fishing for frogs. The wolf begged the crane to help, and at last the crane agreed to try. The wolf opened its mouth wide, and the crane put its long beak and neck into the wolf’s mouth. The crane found the piece of bone and carefully removed it from the wolf’s throat. “Now what is my reward?” asked the crane. The wolf grinned and said, “You put your head inside a wolf’s mouth and you still have your head. That is your reward.”

Websites and Videos (from Judie Haynes’ presentation on “DSL”).
Judie Haynes, creator of everythingESL.net presented on using technology in the classroom. Although she was presenting on how to use technology in an elementary classroom, much can be used at the college level as well. Below are some websites that she mentioned that might be useful:
Hotchalk: www.hotchalk.com
This site has NBC news for students, as well as several lesson plans.
United Streaming: www.unitedstreaming.com
This is a website you have to pay for, but a free 30-day trial is available. (Discovery Channel online educational videos and teaching resources).
Inspiration: www.inspiration.com
For writing: Make outlines, peer review activities, clusters, etc that students fill out on the computer.

My CATESOL Conference Report, Part 4

"Formative Assessment: A Powerful Tool for English Learner Instructors" was the title of the talk given by Comfort Ateh, a high school science teacher with Sacramento Unified School District and a doctoral student at UC Davis. It was that title that first attracted by attention as I wanted to see what's new in assessing students formatively. Three techniques Comfort demonstrated were:

1. Associated group analysis (AGA). An example of this technique is to give a key word and ask the students to write the words/phrases that come to mind when they think of the word. AGA seeks no overt right or wrong answers and can be done in 30 seconds. I think this is great for a targeted warm-up or pre-lesson activity.
2. Selected response, or "select and explain." An example of this technique is to give a list of organisms and ask the students to put an X to each organism that is an animal. They are then asked to describe the rule or reasoning that guided them to select the animals and to explain it. This activity is particularly suited for eliciting only one correct answer.
3. Interview protocol, which is basically heuristic questioning between a teacher and a student. During the exchanges, the attentive teacher gives students cues, but not the right answer directly. An application for this technique would be for teaching parts of speech.

In addition, Comfort reminded us of many formative classroom tips to help ESL students build self-confidence and overcome the many academic challenges they face.

• let the students explain back
• let them re-do a test for half of the original points
• refrain from making a student paper turn bloody red, but target select areas to focus on
• always write a positive comment to start with, e.g. "I like your ..."
• remember good feedback does not always come with marking student assignments with a number or a percentage
• use a "check plus, check, and check minus" system to emphasize and encourage improvement, especially for low-achieving students; explain the connection between the "checks" system and the points the students receive only at the end of the semester
• remember 40% of the students can be passed with a "C" if they have improved from "0" with efforts

It's freshening to hear such a caring approach to facilitating student learning. It's in stark contrast to the seemingly ruthless over-dependence on summative tests that is the hallmark of NCLB, for example. Listening to Comfort talk, I thought of a Chinese teacher I had heard about who would go around and put a check mark next to a correct answer as her students took a test.

On my way back to the hotel, I stopped by Ma Jong Asian Diner on L Street and ordered a shrimp/vegetable take-out dish. I was happily surprised to see that they offered brown rice in addition to the ubiquitous white rice. Needless to say, I enjoyed the yummy dinner in my hotel room and then packed up to get ready to check out early in the morning.

Sunday workshops have been my favorite benefits of CATESOL state conferences. For one thing, you get three hours' worth of a focused PD without having to pay extra, like for the pre-conference workshops. For another, the presenters are usually well-chosen. For this year, I chose "Corpus Linguistics and the World of Teaching" given by Randi Reppen of Northern Arizona University. Even though I had used collocation concordance programs online recently, corpus linguistics was not taught when I was in grad school. I would like to see more of how corpus linguistics gets applied in classroom teaching. Some highlights of Randi's talk:

Corpus basics:

• a corpus refers to a collection of naturally occurring texts stored electronically
• the collection is principled, not of the "anything goes" kind
• corpus users interact with the computer
• collocates are words that occur together, i.e. word friends

Popular programs for searching texts (in .txt files or plain text files only):

• MonoConc, $80+; the best according to Randi
• Wordsmith, $100+; an older version crashed Randi's computer
• AntConc, free,; though not the most user-friendly, it comes with a useful "readme" file and gives you lexical bundles; it was created by Laurence Anthony, who teaches in Japan and is himself very friendly

Classroom applications:

• produce a frequency list on three pages of a reading for a pre-reading check; use green and yellow highlighting for "know" and "may know" respectively; if the students don't know every third word, they cannot be expected to successfully comprehend the reading.
• generate a list of words in frequency order and another one in alphabetical order, then use the lists to teach
• collocation, e.g. ability to, abandoned by, etc.
• function words vs. non-function words
• select parts of speech
• sentence formation/creation
• word families
• use chunks of language (i.e. lexical bundles) as productive tools; generate distribution of 4-word-lexical bundles, for example, by type (noun or prepositional phrase, verb phrase, etc.) and context (classroom lectures, textbooks, etc.) and teach the frequent occurrences. For example, for the noun or prepositional type, the following 4-word-lexical bundles occur more than 40 times per million words in textbooks, thus constituting the academic language to be learned and taught:
• as a result of
• in the form of
• in the United States
• on the basis of
• the nature of the
• the size of the.

On the other hand, in classroom teaching, the following fillers occur frequently, which signal some ideal time for the note-taking students during the lecture:

• let us talk about
• take a look at
• we're going to have
• what I want to
• you don't want to
• you know I mean
• you know if you
• you look at the.
• teach natural opening/closing sequences and use of fillers based on a corpus. For example, in hurried campus cafeteria transactions, the server frequently does not say, "How may I help you?" Instead, he goes "Hi." And at the end, no one seems to be using "You're welcome" in response to a "Thank you," unlike in most ESL textbooks. Also, the "uh" and "um" fillers used by a customer frequently happen before some specifics or decisions. Thus, we should have our ESL students role play these utterances. Randi was quick in pointing out that Touchstone, a 4-level textbook series by Cambridge now teaches fillers among other language uses in natural contexts.
• take lines from a concordance of a word that represent corpus-based research findings, which are often the reverse of a textbook rule, and have students notice the grammar or usage first from the lines. An example given by Randi concerned the word "any" and came from this fine web article: http://iteslj.org/Articles/Krieger-Corpus.html. Another example concerned the verb "commit." It turned out that the "flavor" of the right collocates of the verb was different from what most of us would associate it with in the first place. It was also very interesting to see the different listings of the meanings of "commit" between a corpus-based dictionary such as a learner's dictionary by Longman or Cambridge and a non-corpus-based dictionary.
• provide a list of concordance instead of commenting with "Awkward" or writing "Word Choice" on a student paper.
• provide concordances to show the nuances between synonyms such as "little" (for animates) and "small" (for things on average).
• scan a textbook to build a corpus so that sentences with a group of related words can be easily accessed to design a worksheet. An example came from Paulo Quaglio, who had just presented at TESOL 08 in March. His worksheet showed six sentences with suasive verbs taken from his Economics Corpus. The task was for his students to fill in the blanks with the verbs in the suasive verb banks that he provided and then find linguistic features typical of persuasive writing in each of the sentences.

A list of useful resources and websites:

• MICASE - Michigan corpus of academic spoken English. This is a very rich free site with sound files of academic spoken language. There is also a free shareware program for transcription that can be downloaded.
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/teaching.htm: More than 10 lessons that are very nicely done and updated based on MICASE; ideal for advanced academic English classes
• VIEW.byu.edu - where VIEW means "variation in English words." This is a portal to many corpora that interface with an online search function. There is a link to a corpus of Time magazine that could be used in academic reading and writing classes. The registers here are very similar to the four in Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English.
• Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999). This tome is full of corpus-based research findings in four registers: newspapers (at about 8th grade level), conversation, fiction, and academic prose. According to this book, the twelve most frequent lexical verbs in spoken English including academic lectures are:
• say
• get
• go
• know
• think
• see
• make
• come
• take
• want
• give
• mean
Thus, we should start teaching these verbs to beginning students, even if these are irregular verbs.
• T2K SWAL - TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Language Monograph 25 as a .pdf file. This research report has a nice appendix with a wealth of useful information.
• Compleat Lexical Tutor. This site has a tool for students to paste in texts and see the types of words they are using. The goal is for them to use as many academic words as possible. A nice review of an earlier version of Compleat Lexical Tutor is here: http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESl-EJ/ej31/m2.html.

If two and a half days of attending the state conference had inspired me to synthesize a trend, then I would say that more and more of our colleagues seem to want to be in touch with a natural approach to teaching, an approach that is grounded in the realities of language learning, away from the dictates of an educationally uninformed government and a profit-driven corporate America. I sensed a collective expectation for a new federal administration that would be kinder and gentler to education. I thought it a great segue to transition from this year's conference theme of "Growing Democracy" to next year's "Whole Learner, Whole Teacher."

Feeling satisfied, I pulled my luggage through the front lobby of the Hyatt Hotel, stepped onto the high-noon day out front, and headed for the bus stop nearby to catch the $1.50 ride to the airport. What a good deal! Fifteen minutes later, I found myself at a table in the airport food court, enjoying some soup and grading student paragraphs that I hadn't been able to finish from previous nights. When both jobs were done, I strolled over into a gift shop and bought Shelley, my daughter, a nice black t-shirt with a sequined "Sacramento" across the chest. I knew that was the style she loved. I also knew that my students would benefit from the many ideas that I would bring home and try out in class. Suddenly, I wanted to go home very much. Luckily, my late-afternoon flight was only a short time away from boarding.

Angela came up to me in the gate area, to my happy surprise. A whole bunch of colleagues from San Diego CCD were on the same flight home. After she pre-boarded, Angela saved a seat for me in the pretty packed plane. With Angela as my seat mate, the 90-minute journey looked even shorter. We chatted about the just ended conference. We chatted about our families. We even chatted about our annual summer party. It was a pleasant trip, made even more so by a great, invigorating conference.

My CATESOL Conference Report, Part 3

After picking up a sandwich and ice tea at the Wolfgang Puck's Express food counter at the Convention Center, I hurried upstairs to join in the Community College Level Rap. The outgoing Community College Level Chair, Laura Walsh of City College of San Francisco, did a good job in moving the discussions along. The issues that concerned most attendees were:

1. The degree-applicable ESL courses. Mark Lieu, the statewide Academic Senate President and an ESL professor from Ohlone College, was on hand to explain the latest Title V language change that delinked ESL composition courses from English composition courses, thus making it possible for more ESL courses to be qualified as degree-applicable. I was glad that due to foresight and luck, the academic courses in our dept. have long enjoyed not only AA-degree applicability but also some CSU and UC transferability. With the new ruling, we can walk with our heads held high, so to speak, not worrying if the status of our academic courses would be questioned any more.
   
2. The ESL data newly included in the statewide ARCC (Accountability Reporting for Community Colleges). As was the case for many other ESL departments, our ESL improvement rate in the report looked very bad. Mark Lieu explained that we ought to look at how our raw data, including the course coding, got reported to the state because that was what the state depended on for the report.
   
3. The financial picture. CATESOL's legislative advocate Dr. Jeff Frost, who had been making the rounds from level rap to level rap, predicted a very bleak outlook for the state budget in the next two years. Some kind of tax hike may have to happen to tide California's education over this crisis.
   
4. The labor division between adult ed and community colleges. Jeff Frost said that there was no clear-cut legal stipulations as to who offers noncredit classes for adult learners in the community. The division had been local, by inter-district agreements and past practices.

What's up next in the same room was the Community College Level Workshop titled "Successful ESL Programs and Students." I saw Katheryn sitting on the front row in the audience from the previous session, so I moved up there to be next to her. The first panelist was Laura Walsh again. She explained the standard measures of student success. The short-term ones were:

1. course completion (or success) rate: completed with a grade of A, B, C, D (used to be counted as success in the CSU system), CR
2. course retention rate: completed with a grade of A, B, C. D, F, CR, NCR (This means all the students who stayed to the end of the semester. I couldn't help but think of the value of assigning FW at Palomar because if we insisted on giving an F to students who disappeared, our retained percentage would look bad. In other words, an FW given to a student meant that the student did not stay until the end.)
3. term or year persistence: registered and enrolled at census in the following term or year
4. number of units successfully completed
5. mean gpa.

She provided an example from her college to illustrate the above short-term measures.

Long-term success measures, on the other hand, were:

1. number of units completed (with 30 and 60 units benchmarks, the former indicating half way for transfer and the latter being the standard for transfer)
2. preparation for transfer: 60 units with transfer-level math and English completed, as opposed to just random courses taken
3. transfer to a four-year institution
4. transfer to another two-year institution, i.e. lateral transfer, which should still be counted as success for the student
5. degree or certificate completion (A research finding cited by Laura said students with degree goals went much further than those with personal goals, but some in the audience still questioned why reaching personal goals were not counted as a success measure)
6. subsequent degree from four-year institution or subsequent employment.

The second panelist was graduate student Yueh-ching Chang of California Community College Collaborative (C4), UC Riverside. Her slide show was titled "Transferring Promising Practices (TPP) in Community College--English as a Second Language Programs." One of the several challenges in community college ESL that she talked about was how to identify and then serve ESL students, many of whom shunned an ESL label. Another challenge was how to increase learning gains, which had these two main barriers:

1. instructional time
2. instructional methods (There's no support for instructors to devise meaningful contexts for students to really increase learning gains.)

Among the promising practices in community college ESL:

1. high intensity programs (up to 25 hours a week, with exit requirements) with managed enrollment (open only the first few days of the term in order to force student commitment)
2. extending learning beyond the classroom (i.e. authentic learning)
3. curricular integration with content courses (This reminded me of the plenary speaker at last fall's San Diego Regional, Professor Frank Noji of Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii, whose ESL colleagues created their syllabi aligned with those of mainstream courses, aiming for a rooted relevance. I blogged about this on Oct. 22, 07.)
4. recruiting and retaining high quality ESL faculty (A good faculty resource center could contribute to such faculty retention.)

Laura commented how Yueh-ching's promising practices in her research findings actually jived with the best practices cited in the statewide Basic Skills Initiative documents.

The just-retired ESL Dept. chair of City College of San Francisco, Sharon Seymour, took the floor next. Her slide show was entitled "Noncredit ESL Student Transition to Credit at CCSF." Sharon and her CCSF colleagues had been very active in partnering with the Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy (CAAL) to be at the center of special study projects on adult ESL, resulting in such monumental documents as Torchlights in ESL and Pathways and Outcomes.

It was interesting to note the program design for noncredit students at CCSF, which includes:

• a general ESL program that meets 10 hours a week and offers 10 levels from literacy to low advanced
• a focus ESL program that meets 5 hours a week and focuses on discrete skill areas
• an accelerated ESL program that covers two levels in one term and serves as a program enhancement for selected students.

Having shared the findings of a longitudinal study (98 to 06) done at CCSF, Sharon concluded with several suggestions to increase noncredit to credit transition:

• provide matriculation services by giving everyone a placement test, for example
• structure programs by shortening the term, for example, to maximize student advance
• try fast-tack programs
• target students most likely to succeed (I would like to know how exactly they did this.)

The last panelist to speak was Prof. Mark Roberge of San Francisco State University, who is best known for his work on Gen 1.5 issues. Mark's talk focused on "Making the Jump to Junior-year Composition." Mark first listed the challenges in preparing transfer students for upper-division English requirements:

1. Gate-keeping mechanisms: CSU's GWAR (graduation writing assessment requirement), for example
2. Articulation of curricula
3. Differences in standards and expectations
4. No real upper-division support at CSUs.

Mark then suggested some solutions for community college teachers:

1. Go beyond one-genre writing. Don't just require four "pro-con" essays. We need descriptive, summary writing, etc. One technique is to start with a topic and then decide what rhetorical pattern(s) to use in the essay. Although GWAR typically calls for writing of the "agree/disagree" type, in students' majors, they will do lots of tech-response kind of writing, such as synthesizing, summarizing, etc.
2. Analyze the task (i.e. decode writing assignments and essay prompts) and hidden expectations.
3. Prepare students to self-scaffold assignments. The writing process, time line, etc. for a term paper should be a portable skill set.
4. Prepare student for grammatical issues. It's important to figure out standards/expectations for both general population and ESL students. Ten errors per paper may be OK for an ESL instructor who views them as writing with an accent, but a content teacher may impose a 2-error-per-paper limitation.

Exiting the meeting room with Katheryn, she asked if I had attended a CATESOL-board-sponsored morning session on the community college Basic Skills Initiative and the ESL learner. Upon learning that I had not, she gave me a BSI newsletter and pointed out the upcoming BSI regional meetings in June and the statewide training conference in August.

After I thanked Katheryn and we said good-bye to each other, I headed back to Sheraton for the last one on my list of sessions to attend for the day.

My CATESOL Conference Report, Part 2

Next, I headed to a panel presentation with this featured topic: Can We Develop Statewide ESL Placement Tests for California Community Colleges? This topic interested me tremendously as I had been aware of an effort to do so as a result of frustrations felt by colleagues up and down the state over their inability to place students consistently across districts, to afford dependable commercial testing instruments, to count on commercial support, or to find that perfect test. Indeed, dozens of participants at the session facilitated by Kitty Moriwaki of City College of San Francisco, Mark Sanmuels of Southwestern College, and Angelia Jovanovic of Sacramento City College aired the same sentiments.

I learned that Kitty and Mark are co-chairs and Angelia is a member of the Test-Development Feasibility Task Force for the California Community College Assessment Association (CCCAA). (By the way, CCCAA has a website at CCCAA.net, where one can sign up to join its listserv.) The Task Force continues to evaluate the feasibility of the development of quality, minimal-cost placement assessment instruments written by CCC-faculty and/or purchased from independent sources and managed by the California Community Colleges. These tests are intended to be available, not mandatory, for use by any CCC in its placement processes in 3 to 4 years. The panelists therefore were very interested in seeking the input from everyone and distributed a survey of ESL subject matter experts for the audience to take home.

The panelists showed the following likely stages of the test development:

1. Stage 1: fixed-form tests, multi-level, quasi-adaptive, available in computerized and paper-pencil formats
2. Stage 2: local, "customized" placement tests based on individual ESL program test specifications, quasi-adaptive, available in computerized and paper-pencil formats
3. Stage 3: computer-adaptive placement test.

A show of hands gave an overwhelming approval to the efforts.

It was also very interesting to hear what other colleges are doing to run their placement tests. One of the questions that folks are grappling with is whether to give a choice between computerized tests and paper-pencil tests. The latter seems necessary for testing at remote sites where there is no easy computer access. Mt. San Antonio College, which serves 5,000 noncredit students alone, is the only college that has developed its own computer adaptive ESL placement tests approved by the Chancellor's Office. At the opposite end, Ventura College has adopted the method of self-placement where an ESL instructor and a Matriculation Specialist provide example work from various classes and let the new students take enough time to examine the samples, peg their current skills, and place themselves. The Ventura colleague assured everyone that their self-placement has worked wonders. I remember some time ago, there was going to be delegation from Ventura College visiting Palomar to specifically study how our COMPASS tests worked, but they called off the visit at the last minute. Hmmm...

In terms of paying faculty to work at the test, at some colleges, full-time faculty volunteer to work on their test and registration days and are paid an honorarium or at the lab rate. At Irvine Valley College, eligible adjunct faculty get paid one hour for 3 hours of grading writing samples and are paid with noncredit matriculation funds.

Katheryn, our just-retired former dean, was at this session, too. I was not surprised, knowing how deeply she cared about the best ways to serve ESL students. The participants were no less enthusiastic, either. So many questions and so much sharing went down the room that the session went way over time till about 5:30. It was time for me to call it a day and make sure I had a room at my hotel.

My Saturday conference attendance started in Sheraton ballrooms where the Saturday Plenary took place. Our very own Mary Negrete was among the five Rick Sullivan Awards recipients. She really deserved it, especially in light of her stunning organizational skills as a site co-chair for last year's statewide conference in San Diego. The other, equally good site co-chair from last year Bobbie Felix spotted me in the cavernous hall and ran over to keep me company. I was so grateful that I finally had a friend to make my occasional comments to while listening to the speeches. After a couple of other awards including a graduate student research award given by the University of Michigan Press to a Korean student, the plenary speaker was introduced as a prolific writer on all things SLA, that is, second language acquisition.

Claire Kramsch is Professor of German and Affiliate Professor of Education at UC Berkeley. In her speech, she used data collected by her doctoral student, a City College of San Francisco ESL teacher, to try to prove that the ability to function in a multilingual environment requires more than just communicative competence in English. The dialogues between a Yucateco Maya immigrant and his Vietnamese supplies provider and between the Mayan and a Chinese grocer were a mix of bits of multiple languages and power play, in my opinion. They were so amusing at times that I couldn't help but whisper to Bobbie that somebody ought to make a situational comedy movie out of them. Prof. Kramsch analyzed the transcripts as the audience roared with laughter from time to time.

She had a serious notion to propose, however. It is called "symbolic competence" that includes:

• awareness of subjectivity
• awareness of historicity
• performativity
• reframing.

True to her intellect, Prof. Kramsch asked us to approach language acquisition and language socialization from ecological perspectives, or a complexity theory with these tenets:

1. relativity of self and other
2. time scales
3. emergentism
4. unfinalizability
5. fractal.

Significance for the teaching of ESL? "Becoming teachers of meaning," she called on us, and she went on to define the meaning thus:

• meaning is relational
• meaning is mediated
• meaning is multi-scalar
• meaning is emergent
• meaning is historically contingent
• meaning is reflexive.

After the talk, I went over to the other side of the hall to say hi to my old friend Ken from my Long Beach days. He, his wife, and I chatted a bit about the plenary speech. We still wondered how a classroom teacher was supposed to teach symbolic competence. Wasn't what got described in that doctoral ethnographic study stuff that naturally occurred? However, even though what we just heard was not as practical as Ken's new textbook that teaches academic language patterns, I did appreciate the reminder from Prof. Kramsch to view our adult learners as intelligent whole persons and their language learning and language use as a multi-faceted, holistic complexity.

Time now was 10:30. Hungry for something practical and dear to my heart, I went across the street, through the Convention Center, and over to the Hyatt Hotel for a demonstration titled "Connecting Technology to the Curriculum." Geared toward adult ed teachers, the talk was nonetheless applicable to other teachers who used computers in the classroom. Two famed early adopters of CALL in Southern California, if not nationwide, Barry Bakin of LA Unified School District and Susan Gaer of Santa Ana College, shared their ideas. But Barry was the one presenting. He started out by sharing these somewhat overlapping tech-using principles and random examples that were supplied by Susan:

• Keep focused objectives (e.g. let students use Quia to make language games; use Audacity to record a self-introduction for your students but with verbs blanked out)
• Make activities real (e.g. a lesson on buying medicine using drugstore.com/)
• Use student experience (e.g. let students create PowerPoint presentations about their countries)
• Develop math and language skills (e.g. use Google Maps and Google Docs to come up with a price comparison, etc.)
• Use authentic information
• Engage students (e.g. Room Maker; SpellingCity.com)

Then, Barry showed how he pulled things (e.g. a family tree) out of a textbook to design a technology lesson as well as to justify the high cost of buying the book. Specifically, one can

• reinforce a vocabulary lesson found in the textbook using a technology lesson
• provide more practice in a competence such as reading and understanding graphs
• easily re-create a writing strategy suggest by a book exercise, using PowerPoint or Publisher
• develop activities using other technologies such as the OHP and Language Master card readers from exercises in the book in addition to a computer project
• supplement a reading text with an online quiz or mp3 files of the story being read aloud
• spice up a boring handout-based lesson by sending students to an authentic website
• use video clips for supplementing grammar or to predict what will happen next.

Select examples included:

• Students use PowerPoint slide or a Word document with clip art to make grammatical sentences in order to demonstrate their just-in-time learning.
• Students use Paint to draw or use clip art to demonstrate their understanding of comparatives, etc.
• Students read about superlatives in an authentic news report and then answer questions about what they have read via email or in a Word document sent to them as an attachment. The teacher replies to student emails just to acknowledge receipt but prints out a hard copy to mark.
• Students use Excel to make charts for a small research project and then give a PowerPoint presentation to an invited audience of students from an upper level class and an administrator.
• Students use PowerPoint or Publisher to cluster their ideas as a pre-writing activity.
• The teacher and/or groups of student record messages, directions, and instructions for filling out forms, etc. for group work.
• Students come to the front to use OHP to demonstrate something with manipulatives.
• Students use a public transit website to fill out online forms and then turn the information into a paragraph.
• After students do a reading from Everyday Heroes, for example, the teacher uses thestudyplace.org to create an online quiz and email the quiz link to the students.

Other resources I learned during this session:

• There is a very clean, free media player called VLC Media Player.
• Many useful handout are located under the heading of "Professional Development" at this website: http://esl.adultinstruction.org/.
• Susan Gaer's 44-page conference presentation handout is here at http://www.susangaer.com/catesol2008/.
• Barry's experiments with integrating technology are blogged here at http://www.tech4esl.blogspot.com/.

In a Q & A exchange, Barry said that schools exist to enable students to learn, not to make tech guys happy, for example. He also reminded the audience to ensure timely training of their techs for Vista, etc. I was very impressed by Barry's incisive wisdom, practical advice, and vast experience of connecting technology to curriculum. I came away from the session being reminded once again that teaching technology for the sake of technology is not sustainable. We've got to try harder to use technology as an integrated means in content teaching.