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.