Hey, all.
I hope the beginning of your year is going well. Me? I’m on strike. So I’m cleaning out my inbox.
In case you need a little PD right now, I just got a tweet from Stanford directing me to this website. They have a lot of opportunities coming up focusing on English Learners. Enjoy!
–beth
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Jeff Alan Zwiers to keynote Language, Culture, and Identity Conference October 19, 2017, at the University of Southern Maine
PORTLAND – The Multicultural and Multilingual Center of Portland Public Schools announces its fourth regional conference, Language, Culture, and Identity, to be held on Thursday, October 19, 2017, at the University of Southern Maine, Portland. The conference is designed for ELL and other educators, administrators, service providers and individuals interested in the language acquisition, academic achievement, and socio-cultural and emotional well-being of English learners.
The full-day conference features keynote speaker Dr. Jeff Alan Zwiers, a highly sought after presenter and consultant to school districts throughout the United States regarding development of academic language and literacy across the K-12 subject areas. Following the keynote, there will be concurrent workshop sessions on the topics of language, culture, and identity. The afternoon will feature a double session with Dr. Maria Brisk of the Lynch School of Education, Boston College. The language sessions will build on the theme of academic language in the content areas. ELL teachers, classroom teachers, and service providers of English learners can follow a strand or mix and match according to interest. Continental breakfast and lunch buffet are included. Parking is convenient and free.
For more information, visit http://mlc.portlandschools.org
Please see the message below from the conference organizers. It would be great if some of you wanted to create a networking session at TESOL 2018!
Have an idea for a hot-topic dialogue for the annual convention but missed the proposal deadline?
Want to explore an important development in your area of TESOL with others?
Interested in a space in the convention center to have an informal discussion or a planning meeting for ongoing projects?
Consider scheduling a networking session for TESOL 2018.
Sign up on the online form.
Round One Deadline:
30 August 2017 (Session will appear in the print program.)
Round Two Deadline:
01 February 2018 (Session will appear on a special program flyer and in the online app.)
Networking sessions for the convention in Chicago will be held in the Exhibition Hall. The space will include approximately 20 round tables, each able to accommodate 8-10 people. There will be wifi, and easel-pad-marker sets will be available for planning and brainstorming purposes. The space can be used for planning for 2018-2019 projects; for open sessions on pressing issues and broad, engaging topics that may not have adequate coverage in the program; and more. All are invited to schedule a session, so please share this opportunity with others in your TESOL group that may be interested in participating.
There will be a second call in January for networking session requests, and there will also be open slots for crowd-sourcing. But — if you schedule a session by 30 August, your networking session will appear in both the printed and online program.
If you have any questions or any difficulty accessing the form, please contact Margi Wald at tesolnetworking@gmail.com.
Reading, Writing & Refugees: New/upcoming books for kids & teens about Muslim refugees https://t.co/dlUzsdJfbn @nytimes #ELL #ELLchat #WNDB pic.twitter.com/u0D1J0RbH7
— Colorín Colorado (@ColorinColorado) August 25, 2017
Welcome back to a new school year!
We are getting excited about our conference in Burlington, VT, this year. And we hope you are too. Please take a few minutes to register.
Early bird registration ends Sept. 30. We will have all the details up in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, check out our conference speaker, Judy O’Loughlin.
Amirah Leigh Mahdy alm15@hampshire.edu
Hampshire College TESOL Certificate Course
One activity that I could attempt to do with my ESL students is to provide a funny scenario where a student has plagiarized their paper but he/she/they don’t know how to fix it. The scenario can go like this:
This is Mikayla.
Mikayla just received her research paper about the Civil War from her teacher. It said in big, fat, red letters, “REWRITE THIS PAPER IMMEDIATELY.
PLAGERISM!” Mikayla did not understand what plagiarism meant so she looked it up on Google. Then she realized that there were dire consequences if she does not fix her paper. But she doesn’t know what to do? Can you help her?
This scenario can be modified but I will provide the same scenario for all of the ESL students and they will work in pairs on how to solve it. The students will have to figure out by peer reviewing “Mikayla’s plagiarism” by having a copy of her research paper. One element they will have to look at is the works cited page and see if the citations were correctly formatted. Another element is the ESL students will have to look at it to see if the quotes were cited correctly. Also, another element is correctly the paraphrasing ideas from her sources. I will have the books that “Mikayla” cited so that the students can create citations and paraphrases that are correct for the paper. They will have a quick guide on hand on how to cite correctly for MLA or APA format (depending on the ESL student’s level of English). After revising, the students will have gained skills on how to cite correctly especially for future papers they have to write for other subjects. As an ending activity, “Mikayla” will be put in an “epilogue situation” where another student plagiarizes her work and this can become a reflective activity for the ESL students to think about how they would feel if someone plagiarized their work.
References
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Snow, M. A. (2014). Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (4th Ed). Boston, Mass.: National Geographic Learning.
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From our mailbox:
Stanford’s Understanding Language will be offering three free online professional development 
courses in the fall to impact instructional practice, programs, and policy to create more meaningful learning experiences for language learners. There are two strands available for participants – one focused on instruction and the other on leadership.
To learn more, visit ell.stanford.edu/courses. If you have any questions, you can contact the course manager, Hsiaolin Hsieh (hsiaolin@stanford.edu). Please share with your colleagues and professional learning communities.
We will be hosting an informational webinar on August 22nd at 11am PDT. Additional information about these courses will be provided long with an opportunity to ask questions regarding content and facilitation.
In addition, our experience shows that the most successful online course completion rates are achieved when participants collaborate in face-to-face settings between the online sessions, such as in organized professional learning communities or during after-school meetings led by district coaches. We will be hosting an additional webinar on August 23rd at 11am PDT (that’s 2 p.m. EDT) that will share ways that districts can configure hybrid professional development approaches to increase participation and completion rates.
RSVP HERE
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Annie Camey Kuo, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
Understanding Language
Stanford Graduate School of Education
ph: 626.755.1726
ell.stanford.edu
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Have an idea for a hot-topic dialogue for the annual convention but missed the proposal deadline?
Want to explore an important development in your area of TESOL with others?
Interested in a space in the convention center to have an informal discussion or a planning meeting for ongoing projects?
Consider scheduling a networking session for TESOL 2018.
Sign up on the online form.
Round One Deadline:
30 August 2017 (Session will appear in the print program.)
Round Two Deadline:
01 February 2018 (Session will appear on a special program flyer and in the online app.)
Networking sessions for the convention in Chicago will be held in the Exhibition Hall. The space will include approximately 20 round tables, each able to accommodate 8-10 people. There will be wifi, and easel-pad-marker sets will be available for planning and brainstorming purposes. The space can be used for planning for 2018-2019 projects; for open sessions on pressing issues and broad, engaging topics that may not have adequate coverage in the program; and more. All are invited to schedule a session, so please share this opportunity with others in your TESOL group that may be interested in participating.
There will be a second call in January for networking session requests, and there will also be open slots for crowd-sourcing. But — If you schedule a session by 30 August, your networking session will appear in both the printed and online program.
If you have any questions or any difficulty accessing the form, please contact Margi Wald at tesolnetworking@gmail.com.
Adeline Grant Skovronek ags16@hampshire.edu
Hampshire College TESOL Certificate Course
I do not believe that the ideal English teacher has to be a native English speaker. In fact, I would imagine that a person who has gone through the struggle of learning English is better equipped with a general understanding of how to learn English and the challenges that arise for students during the process. Before enrolling in a TESOL certificate course, I had never taken the time to deeply consider the idea of World Englishes and the complications they might impose when choosing how exactly to teach ESL/EFL. In broad terms, I think that as long as the teacher has enough command of the language to present it without grammatical error and is him/herself intelligible to other English speakers (whether English was their L1 or L2), then he/she is perfectly qualified in regards to language ability. I am also of the opinion that the accent or specific variation of English spoken by the English teacher should be considered in comparison to the type of English used where he/she is teaching. At this point in my understanding of World Englishes, it would not surprise me if an American who spoke quickly and with a thick southern accent were, in some instances, unintelligible to learners/speakers of English in the expanding circle. I would expect the same if I, as a learner of High German, attempted to have a decent discussion with someone who spoke Swiss German. In outer circle countries where English has developed its own dialect (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Snow, 2014), perhaps teachers who are considered fluent in that particular variant of English would be better suited to teach because they would have a natural understanding of the rules and grammar used in that particular region.
References
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Snow, M. A. (eds.). (2014). Teaching English as a second or foreign language (4th ed.). National Geographic Learning.
