A Few Items of Interest

1. UCSD will be hosting a book fair next Monday, 12/3, from 10 to noon. The coordinator there has opened up the event to “the locals.” See the flyer here. This might be a great opportunity to check out your textbooks for summer.
2. The English Language (EL) Fellow Program fosters mutual understanding between the people of the United States and those of other countries by sending talented, highly qualified U.S. educators in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) on ten-month fellowships to overseas academic institutions in all regions of the world. See details here.
3. If you or someone you know would like to teach English in China with a team of professionals for five months (or longer), there may just be an opportunity for you now. For more specific information about the China program and the application, please visit the "Other Opportunities" page of the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program website here. Just scroll down to the bottom for the China program.

Our Roots and Our Commitments

Our History

As early as 1967, our college offered English for foreign-born Spanish-speaking students one night a week at Pauma School, in Escondido at Central School and Escondido High, at Vista High, and at Fallbrook High. At Palomar College itself, a class for the foreign-born was offered for speakers of all languages one night a week. The present-day ESL Dept. has its origin in the Bilingual Education Dept. In the summer of 1969, Palomar College Bilingual Center was initiated as a community outreach program designed to meet the needs of 13 Spanish-speaking mothers enrolled in ESL. The mothers had requested an intensive summer course, meeting four hours daily, four days a week. Classes were offered without credit. The ESL classes, open to all adults, were continued in this design in 1968-70 and thereafter. Spanish as a Second Language (SSL) was added in 1970-71 for English-speaking parents whose children were in the elementary bilingual program, business and professional persons, retired persons, and other adults. The Bilingual Education Dept. was reorganized in the spring of 1984 with the Spanish courses for English speakers absorbed by the Foreign Language Dept. The Dept. voted to change its name from the Bilingual Education Dept. to English as a Second Language Dept. in February 1984, with the Governing Board approval in the spring of 1985. Regardless of what it has been called, our dept. has been an integral part of our college for 40 years!

Our Mission Statement

Our mission is to equip students whose second language is English with the language and cultural proficiencies required for the eventual fulfillment of personal, vocational, academic, and citizenship goals so that they may participate fully in American society. We provide ESL students with the ability to use English that is accurate and appropriate in a variety of academic and nonacademic settings. We also provide learning environments that foster low anxiety levels, thus enhancing the development of language fluency and self-esteem of the learners. By integrating language acquisition with relevant life experiences, we stress the importance of critical thinking, problem solving, and self-sufficiency.

Our Vision Statement

Our vision is that all English language learners have the skills to be successful in achieving their academic, vocational and personal goals.

Our Tag Line

creating paths for a better tomorrow

Contract Instructors' Team-Building Commitment

We acknowledge that diversity and dedication can create one harmonious sound; therefore, we are committed to doing the following:

1. Trusting that we are all doing our best and working towards the same goal of student success, even though our approaches may be different.
2. Making others feel valued and important by treating them with respect and by letting them know that we care about them.
3. Dealing with issues that we have with others on an individual basis and in a constructive way.
4. Giving and accepting advice and criticism professionally and being willing to compromise when necessary.
5. Helping others to do their best by giving them the benefit of the doubt and making no assumptions.

Hiring Adjunct Faculty

Definition of an Opening

1. A new class that is being added to any program.
2. An opening does not occur until there are fewer instructors than classes offered in any given program.

Announcing an Opening

When there is an opening in his or her program, the program coordinator announces it by emailing all instructors, the chair, the ADA, and office staff. In fairness to all instructors, there should be no switching between programs coordinated by different people without an official announcement.

Hiring Current Adjunct

The coordinator selects an adjunct instructor who would be the most suitable for the program. However, according to the union contract, adjunct faculty who meet professional standards of performance and demonstrate a continuing commitment to the educational programs of Palomar College shall receive preferential consideration for continuing part-time assignments. Our dept. has established a preferential consideration list for each of its three disciplines (ESL, Adult Basic Ed, and Citizenship). An adjunct faculty member is added to the list when he or she has earned:

1. six or more assignment credits (one accrued for each regular semester) in a discipline within the preceding six consecutive academic years
2. a rating of "high professional performance" or "standard professional performance" on two consecutive peer evaluations (conducted once every three years).

Here are the pertinent articles in the contract:

20.10.2.1 All faculty members on the preferential consideration list for a given discipline shall have equal standing. For the purpose of assignment and scheduling, no part-time faculty member shall receive preferential consideration over a full-time faculty member.

20.10.2.2 A faculty member on the preferential consideration list shall be offered an assignment in that discipline before that assignment is offered to any person not on that list.

20.10.2.3 When two or more faculty members on the preferential consideration list are qualified for an assignment, the Department Chair/Director or Dean may select the faculty member who will be offered that assignment. This selection shall not be subject to the grievance process.

After the program coordinator makes the selection, he or she

• emails the adjunct's current coordinator to inform him or her that the adjunct will be changing to a different program
• emails the chair, the ADA, office staff, and contract instructors to tell them who is going to be changing programs, whom the person is replacing, and what level the person is going to be teaching
• email the ADA if a classroom key is needed
• provides a program orientation and copies of the books that will be used.

Hiring New Adjunct

If no current faculty members respond to the opening announcement by the specified deadline, the program coordinator looks through the new adjunct applications on file or advertises the opening to the outside world via HR web page, CATESOL Job Bank, etc.

The coordinator contacts the most qualified applicant and sets up an interview. The coordinator asks the applicant to complete an application packet and to submit it along with copies of his or her transcript to the chair, who reviews the qualifications, determines if an equivalencies letter needs to be written, checks off minimum qualifications section, and signs it. The packet and other required documents are returned to the ADA for further processing, including with HR.

Our Mottos

I thought it would be both fun and revealing to share here the mottos or favorite quotes that some of my colleagues hold dear. Please feel free to add yours.

Shayla:

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere." (Eleanor Roosevelt, from a speech delivered to the U.N. in 1958)

Lee:

(translated: "Listen more, talk less, do more.")

Nimoli:

"The heart that gives....gathers."

Lynne:

"To teach is to touch lives forever." (Anonymous)

Marty:

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first and the lesson after." (Vernon Law)

Colleen:

"Accept that some days you're the pigeon and some days you're the statue."

Gary:

"Always look on the bright side of life." (from the movie Life of Brian) and

(Navy Motto from WW II that Gary carved on wood when he was a teenager.)

Welcome Back

As you heard from President Deegan in his email sent around on Friday afternoon, most of the college was going to re-open tomorrow. The final decision came earlier this afternoon confirming that starting tomorrow (10/29), all Palomar sites will resume operations except Ramona, which will re-open on Tuesday, and Fallbrook, which will re-open on Wednesday.

This has been a very difficult week for everyone in our district, and our department is no exception. Starley Dullien, who teaches in the night General ESL Program in San Marcos, lost her Ramona home to the devastating fires. Many of you had to evacuate. Many more have spent this weekend cleaning up the ash and soot.

The extent to which our ESL students were affected by the fires will become known once classes resume. Please keep in mind that Counseling Services, Health Services, and the Office of Student Affairs all have plans to provide for the needs of impacted students. As we go back to a heavy workload, Vice President of Instruction Berta Curon wants us to be flexible and sensitive and "create an environment that will be crucial to assisting and supporting all students through the end of the semester, but particularly those who have been displaced from their homes and have experienced loss."

As with any natural disaster, the wildfires this week truly brought out the best in all of us. I was heartened by the caring ways that each of you displayed during this emergency. Via emails and phone calls, colleagues inquired about each other's situations, provided updates, and offered help. Some, like Kevin Staff, who teaches in the night General ESL Program in San Marcos, even volunteered at various community centers for evacuated families and their children. Some kept their instruction going by receiving student papers and giving assignments through email and the Blackboard online course site.

Students cared about their ESL teachers, too. Many emailed their teachers to ask how they were doing. Joyce Rogers, who teaches in Fallbrook, accepted an offer from a former Vietnamese student to stay with her after the Great Fallbrook Evacuation. And Joyce had her like 10 years ago!

The union leadership on Tuesday and the college administration on Friday both responded positively to a legitimate concern of many adjunct colleagues: a possible loss of wages and salary. According to President Deegan's email this Friday, "We want to assure you that all District employees will be compensated for their assigned work schedule during the time in which the college and/or education center/sites is closed."

So, it is in this caring and supportive community spirit that I gladly welcome you back to work, albeit starting on various days depending on your work site. But remember that special arrangements will be made for leaves needed to recover from the fires. If you need such assistance, please let your coordinator or supervisor know. I am also available via email or at ext. 2273.

A Conference Report (depite the Fires)

This past weekend was a fun one (until the fires broke out, of course). Part of the fun was due to San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference that took place on a beautiful day and on the gorgeous campus of Southwestern College. In addition to running into old friends and making new ones, I really enjoyed the company of like-minded educators. I managed to make it to a few presentations and am excited to report the ideas I learned or relearned.

Keynote: Learning IN English: Content-Based Instruction

The plenary speaker was Professor Frank Noji of Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he spearheaded a content-based ESL curriculum revolving around a different theme for each semester, not unlike themes for Palomar College’s Campus Exploration. The innovation was born out of a need ten years ago to save the ESL Dept. because it would have been wiped out along with a forced disappearance of other college remedial courses. Frank argued that “ESL ≠ remedial” and created the content-based program to prove it. Over the years, Frank and his colleagues have been successful in shifting their model from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” The purpose of their syllabi is now aligned with those of mainstream courses, aiming for a rooted relevance. That is, they link the skills learned in the ESL classroom to the college courses the students will soon take. Instead of “finding the topic sentence” and other easy-to-assess comprehension questions, they now utilize writings, seminars, and poster sessions to gauge the comprehension of a topic at hand. Instead of spending much time explaining why a main idea is a main idea, they now require getting information from a text and using that to complete a task. The thematic input now drives the instruction of grammar and vocabulary, both of which are in turn practiced in writing tasks. Frank reported that the purposefulness in such integrated content-based instruction has enabled the students to converge on similar cultural literacy, reduce the noise in reading texts, and navigate reading more easily. Even though I wonder if the students won’t become bored by an extended theme throughout a long semester (for example, the historical perspective of food, the psychological perspective of food, the nutritional perspective of food, the culinary perspective of food, the cultural perspective of food, etc., etc.), I am nonetheless very impressed by Frank’s approach to the overriding goal of having ESL students become savvy language learners.

A few interesting facts in Frank’s ESL Dept.:

• about 700 students, 50% of whom are international students, 30% Gen 1.5 students, and 20% immigrants
• each faculty member takes 3 to 5 Gen 1.5 students under his/her wing to advise them
• reading as the central part of the ESL classroom

Learning English through WebQuest

Although I was familiar with WebQuest, I had not created one for my students. So I decided to check out this workshop provided by graduate student Yi-Chia Lin of Alliant International University. Sure enough, she reviewed the usual five basic sections of a WebQuest:

1. introduction
2. task
3. process
4. evaluation
5. conclusion

I learned about four websites one can go to create WebQuests:

1. QuestGarden (http://questgarden.com/, fee-based with 30-day free trial)
2. InstantWebQuestV2 (http://www.zunal.com/, free)
3. TeacherWeb (http://teacherweb.com/wq_home.html, free)
4. PHPWebQuest (http://eduforge.org/projects/phpwebquest/, free)

Writing Peer Evaluation with Google Documents

Also facilitated by Ms. Yi-Chia Lin, this workshop introduced the Google Documents online that can be used by writing teachers who don’t want to spend much time doing peer review in class. Here are the major steps:

1. open a free Google account at http://www.gmail.com/
2. go to “Documents” from within the Google account
3. click to upload students’ writing
4. click to share students’ writing
5. type students’ email addresses
6. type a message to students

Students will then receive the email from you with a link. As a peer reviewer, the student will click “Indent more” and type his or her answers in the box. You as the teacher can click “Insert” and choose “Comment” to comment on the peer reviewer’s comment.

Based on my limited hands-on experience during this workshop, I would suggest not assigning a group of larger than 5 members to review one paper, especially not having them access the paper at the same time. The way Google Documents handled the roomful of participants, it still looked like a Beta version.

TELL-IG

During lunch, I sat on the table that was supposed to the meeting place for the Technology Enhanced Language Learning Interest Group (TELL-IG) Rap Session. The prepared agenda was abandoned due to the noise level in the large dining hall. However, I did learn that TELI-IG now has a new website at http://www.tellig.org/, along with its listserv at http://lists.catesol.org/read/?forum=tell-ig and its discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/tell-ig.

Take Action! 20 Minute Problem Solving

Too often, we complain without taking any action. Four ESL teachers gave a poster presentation about a useful solution called “NAB IT,” an acronym of the following steps:

Name (put a name to the problem)
Analyze the problem (causes, effects)
Brainstorm solutions (no judging)
Identify two solutions to try &
Think them through (set a date to report back)

Once a week for 20 minutes, groups of five students can form problem-solving circles, where each member plays a distinct role: a problem poser, a leader, a timekeeper, a facilitator, and a record keeper.

Simple Strategies for Effective and Authentic Writing Assessments

Jan Forstrom of Continuing Education of San Diego CCD presented ways to give effective and authentic writing assessments to her adult ed students. To be effective, a writing task cannot be on just any topic and must be appropriate to the student level. To be authentic means that the writing task can be replicated outside of the classroom, not just one that asks to describe something in the classroom, for example. Effective writing assessments also need to be fair. For example, “Christmas around the World” is not free of bias, so it is not fair. In short, writing assessments need to be meaningful to the students so that they want to communicate. In addition, clear, exact directions must be given either orally or in writing. The most important step in creating writing assessments, however, is choosing measurable objectives to develop a rubric to determine how all of our students are to be graded. The rubric is what enables our ESL students to receive meaningful feedback. A rubric covers form, content, and language. For example, for form/mechanics, we can have—

For content, we might have the following:

• 90% correctly completed as instructed =12 points
• 80% 10 points
• 70% 8 points
• 60% 6 points
• 50% 4 points
• Less than 50% 0 points

For language, we may use something like this: Once we have a specific rubric developed to assess the form, content, and language for a particular paper, even the students can grade each other’s papers, knowing what circling a certain point means. Here is an example of a grading form for a two-paragraph essay:

There is always an amount of subjectivity associated with grading a written piece. But Jan suggested that when in doubt, teachers give the student the point; that way, we can help to build their confidence in writing.