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.