Palomar College EAP 2008

This year, our college is repeating the huge success of EAP (i.e. Palomar College Early Acceptance Program) that we started last year. High school graduates who have been assessed come to our San Marcos campus during three successive Saturdays in June for an orientation, tour, opportunity to talk to college representatives and, most importantly, priority register for their fall 2008 classes!

Our department is once again an active participant in this important annual event. Under the leadership of Anne Stadler and Jose Luis Ramirez, all of our office staff members from San Marcos and Escondido conduct our ESL-specific orientation, advisement, registration, and tours.

This year, our dept. also participates in the Department Fair as part of the Saturday events. Carol Lowther volunteered to man our ESL table on the first EAP Saturday, June 7.

Counseling Dean Lynda Halttunen, whose idea it was to start the EAP at Palomar, took and published photos to mark the events. To see the photos of the EAP Day on June 14, click here.

This year's EAP continues next Saturday, June 21.

Unfilled Full-time Position Reopens

The college reopened our unfilled full-time position on Friday. Here's the bulk of this latest position announcement:

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Teaching assignments may include day, evening, and/or weekend classes at the San Marcos campus and/or off-campus locations as part of contract responsibilities. Teaching assignments may also include distance education classes. The initial assignment is to teach English as a Second Language fifteen to twenty hours weekly, ten hours of which will be scheduled in the evenings at the Palomar College Fallbrook Site. Remaining hours will be scheduled in the day at the San Marcos campus and/or off-campus locations. Three additional hours weekly will be spent coordinating personnel, student-related activities, and curriculum at the Fallbrook Site. Participate fully in departmental activities and college governance and hold regular office hours.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

1. Must meet one of the qualifications listed under a) through c)*:

a) Master’s degree in TESL, TESOL, applied linguistics with a TESL emphasis, linguistics with a TESL emphasis, English with a TESL emphasis, or education with a TESL emphasis.

b) Bachelor’s degree in TESL, TESOL, English with a TESL certificate, linguistics with a TESL certificate, applied linguistics with a TESL certificate, or any foreign language with a TESL certificate and Master’s degree in linguistics, applied linguistics, English, composition, bilingual/bicultural studies, reading, speech, or any foreign language.

c) A combination of education and experience that is at least the equivalent of either qualification a) or b) above. Candidates who do not possess the specific minimum qualifications as stated above, which includes degrees that have not been awarded at the time of application, are required to complete the Equivalency Qualifications Form that is included with the standard application.

2. Sensitivity to and understanding of the diverse academic, socioeconomic, cultural, disability, and ethnic backgrounds in a community college.

*Note: Only coursework completed at, and degrees awarded by, accredited institutions recognized by the U.S. Department of Education will be considered as satisfying the Minimum Qualifications. Candidates who have earned degrees from foreign institutions are required to submit both official translations and evaluations of their transcripts that have been prepared by a certified U. S. credential review service in order for the application to be considered. Visit http://www.naces.org/ for a list of commonly-used credential review services.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

1. Three years’ experience teaching different levels and skills of ESL (including academic reading and writing) at an accredited post-secondary institution within the previous five years.
2. Competence in English sufficient to serve as a suitable linguistic model.
3. Second language competence.
4. Experience working with immigrant population, especially Spanish-speaking adult learners.
5. Experience using computer technology in an instructional setting.
6. Experience working effectively and professionally with colleagues in a collaborative, collegial environment.
7. Evidence of a strong commitment to remain current in ESL and its instructional program.
8. Leadership experience in an educational setting, such as student assessment and placement and curriculum development.
9. Commitment to a student learning-centered college.

SALARY AND BENEFITS:

1. Starting Salary Range: $52,114.69 – $81,530.99 annually. An annual stipend of $1,274.18 shall be paid to any faculty member who has an earned Doctorate.
2. Academic training and teaching experience will form the basis for salary computation as determined by placement on the regular salary schedule of the College. Degrees are recognized on the salary schedule only when they have been awarded by an accredited institution. For a salary estimate, visit www.palomar.edu/hr/salaryinfo and use the links for full-time faculty. Please note that a maximum of step 8 at the appropriate salary grade will be awarded to new faculty.
3. Fully-paid employee benefits for full time employees include medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents; and life, disability, and long-term care insurance. Estimated value of these employer-paid benefits is approximately $18,900 annually. All full-time, tenure-track faculty are enrolled in STRS (State Teachers Retirement System).

For the full position announcement including the application procedure, click here.

Read "Three Cups of Tea"

No wonder this book is the current selection of the "One Book One San Diego" community reading campaign. This guy, Greg Mortenson, whom the book is about, is someone so special that no person on the globe should be ignorant of his work. He ranks right up there with Mother Teresa. Too bad Mr. Bush didn't know him before he sank us into the war. Even Republican Congresswoman Mary Bono has said, "Greg Mortenson represents the best of America. He's my hero. And after you read Three Cups of Tea, he'll be your hero, too."

Read one of the most recent book reviews here. But better yet, my dear colleagues, if you haven't already done so, please get a copy of Three Cups of Tea because you have to read it. I mean it.

By the way, Greg Mortenson will appear on a book tour at SDSU later this year.

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.