Join Give Sign In
Experience at TESOL 2023 by Jennifer Slinkard
I had a wonderful time at TESOL in Portland this year! I attended so many good sessions, but one that stands out to me was the first one I went to: Building Antiracism and Linguistic Justice in the Cross-cultural Composition Classroom, with Madeline Crozier and Tanita Saenkhum from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. The session was a report on how they had included the "Toward Antiracist First-Year Composition Goals" Statement into their cross-cultural first year composition courses. They first elicited definitions of anti-racist pedagogy from the attendees and encouraged us to discuss them in groups. Then, they presented a framework to include in our own anti-racist curriculum development. Some questions they encourage us to consider were: 1) Where do your rhetorical concepts come from (e.g., are they only Western)? and How is time for languaging accounted for in the classroom (e.g., do you include the extra time it takes for students using English as an additional language in your estimation of student work hours)? They recommended Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 4 as a text to draw from. The essays included in this text are Creative Commons licensed and include essays on linguistic diversity, grading criteria, racial literacy, and more. They also recommended that teachers adopt a habit of reflective self-assessment, so that we are regularly checking in with ourselves through the lens of antiracist pedagogy. During the session, I asked a question on how to adopt their ideas into a cross-cultural classroom that was still predominantly white. At my past institution in Arizona, I felt more comfortable making linguistic diversity the topic of my first-year composition classroom, but since moving to Eastern Oregon, I've wondered if it was the best for my mostly-white, rural students. They pointed me to Amy Walker's YouTube channel, which has fun videos on different accents. These videos might be used to talk with students about the stigma associated with specific kinds of speech. It was just one wonderful session of many, and I am so grateful to ORTESOL for providing funding for me to attend the conference.
SOMETHING I LEARNED AT 2023 TESOL by Vivianna Maracel
The experience of attending Dr. Sammy Ramsey’s Opening Keynote address on Tuesday, March 21 opened my mind in a way that made me see and appreciate diversity in a whole new way. Dr. Ramsey is an entomologist (he really likes insects, especially bees) and shared his history with bees in his opening address. Honestly, I was sitting there listening and thinking, “What do bees have to do with my classrooms?” His presentation was listed as dealing with various aspects of diversity. Dr. Ramsey spoke about bees, his life, the interconnectedness of all organisms on Earth, justice, equity, inclusion, and diversity. He was a POWERFUL speaker. At the end of his address, I knew what I must do to create diversity in my classroom. I learned to…
Appreciate (DO NOT BE AFRAID OF) the differences and diversity of the students in my classroom.
Offer opportunities to my students to show their different learning styles, personalities, and understanding of the content being taught.
Encourage students to share their opinions and ideas about better ways to see, understand, and learn the curriculum in my classroom.
I unreservedly recommend watching Dr. Ramsey’s Keynote address. It is a truly inspiring story and a moment on the path of creating truly enlightened classrooms.
TESOL 2023 Report
by Brandon Kurtz
Academic Manager, Pacific International Academy, Portland, Oregon
I was pleased to be able to attend the 2023 TESOL Convention in Portland recently thanks to the location and ORTESOL’s James Nattinger Travel Grant. Knowing that teachers are always looking for practical tips and tricks, I would like to share some of what I learned regarding pronunciation approaches. In Laura Holland’s well-attended “Embrace Teaching Pronunciation: Practical Daily Tips that Work” workshop, Ms. Holland tackled the importance of teaching pronunciation and some of the challenges instructors face in doing so. Pronunciation may be pushed aside by an overcrowded curriculum, and a lot of teachers are not confident in their ability to instruct students on pronunciation. Regarding the latter point, many ESL instructors are nonnative speakers of English, and a lot of educational resources are designed with native speakers in mind. Ms. Holland cautioned the audience against taking a colonial view of pronunciation and acknowledged that there are a variety of regionally and culturally appropriate World Englishes in use around the globe. That being said, she pointed out that any language user needs to be comprehensible to be effective, so explicitly practicing pronunciation is a valuable use of classroom time. One technique for practicing pronunciation and intonation with multisyllabic words and sentences is called “backchaining.” This approach involves leading students in enunciating words or sentences by syllable or word, respectively, starting with the end of the utterance. For example, for the word “multiplication,” the teacher would have students repeat after her, with special attention on which syllables are stressed and unstressed:
“tion”
“cation”
“plication”
“tiplication”
“multiplication”
One of the main benefits of this practice is that students stop focusing on the meaning of the word/sentence and are able to focus on the sounds. Materials for this technique can be found in the textbook, in authentic materials, or whatever students need help with at the moment. Backchaining can be used effectively to draw students’ attention to important pronunciation features in sentences, such as rising intonation at the end of a tag question: “They’re both doctors, aren’t they?” Working backward, and making sure to maintain the correct intonation throughout, the teacher can help students focus on making sure that they are communicating accurately.
Similarly, backchaining can be used to practice yes/no questions, listing, final -ed sounds, and more. I used the approach for the first time with some students recently, and I found it to be a fun and effective way to practice intonation. Thank you, Ms. Holland, for sharing your expertise!
TESOL 2023 Experience by Lara Ravitch
I had a wonderful time moderating the Intersection for the K12 IS and the Supporting Students with Disabilities IS. First, Amy Noggle & Patricia Rice Doran gave an overview of disability in the US educational context. They particularly stressed the four goals of disability policy (Equality of opportunity, full participation, self determination, and economic self-sufficiency) and the importance of involving families. Liz Piñon then spoke about Translanguaging as a strategy for supporting students with disabilities in language learning contexts. While Translanguaging can benefit all students, Piñon noted that students with disabilities are particularly likely to benefit from the scaffolding and clarity that it provides. She gave great, concrete examples of how to increase translanguaging, such as listening corners with materials in all languages, a multilingual cognate wall, targeted use of translators, and giving students the opportunity to translanguage in pair or independent work. Finally, Crystal Cho Jones shared a number of strategies for supporting neurodivergent students, including dimming lights, moderating sound, providing flexibility, using assistive technology and not forcing students to make eye contact. For those who'd like to learn more, the Padlet form the presentation is here:
https://kapiolani.padlet.org/caroline_torres1/inclusion-and-dis-ability-in-global-pre-k-12-english-languag-h3kpllnku37183vo
TESOL 2023 Experience by Nataliia Brown
TESOL 2023 conference was the first TESOL conference I ever attended. As a current TESOL graduate student, I was very excited to spend a day at a Graduate Student Research Forum. I wanted to meet other graduate students, learn about their research interests, teaching methodologies and, possibly, find ideas for my own thesis. I focused on presenters that talked about teaching techniques, bilingualism and translanguaging, as those are the main areas I am interested in.
Aram Ahmed, a doctoral student from University of Massachusetts in Boston, presented his research about teachers’ perception of teacher talk in the classroom. He analyzed the data collected from interviews with teachers, who provided their views on the reasons and purposes for teacher talk. The main conclusions of this presentation were the following: the common use for teacher talk for the teachers from the study was to provide clarifications, feedback and instruction to students; high percentage of teacher talk versus student talk in the classroom is not always a negative factor in the learning process, in the lower-level classrooms teacher talk can be necessary to provide additional explanation on the learning material.
Another presentation I really enjoyed was done by Woongsik Choi from Purdue University. He talked about translanguaging practices in the high school English as a New Language (ENL) classroom. He studied one classroom for several weeks by observing the lessons, conducting interviews and collecting learning material samples. The classroom from his research had a shared language besides English. Most of the people in the class, including a teacher, spoke and understood Spanish, but not all students did. In their interactions, students and the teacher switched between English and Spanish regularly. Some of those Spanish exchanges were interpreted into English while others were not, therefore excluding from classroom communication students who did not speak Spanish. The presenter concluded that translanguaging can be a valuable resource in language learning, but more attention needs to be given to all languages in the classroom.
Overall, The Graduate Student Research Forum at TESOL 2023 was a fantastic way for me to connect with other TESOL graduate students and learn about their research topics. I was especially excited to hear about the translanguaging practices in the classrooms, their challenges and potential solutions, as I include translanguaging into my teaching methodology as well and planning on my thesis being related to this subject.
2023 TESOL Experience by Françoise Howard
The TESOL conference was a delight! I wished I were able to be in several sessions at once! On Wednesday I went from session to session with no break from 9 am to 5:15 pm! One of the sessions I attended was titled "When Worlds Meet: Learner Engagement Online and In Class" by Maggie Sokolik. I will focus on the takeaways regarding student engagement in the physical classroom. Maggie brought up some ideas that I had never thought of before attending her session. I hope my fellow colleagues in ORTESOL will find this useful.
The worst nightmare of an instructor is to have a classroom full of students who are disengaged and bored to tears. There are barriers to student engagement that instructors cannot control. The student could be preoccupied with personal problems, local policy or events that directly influence them, or global policy or events in their home countries.
There are also controllable barriers to student engagement such as: irrelevant and boring assignments, impersonal classroom style, rigid class format, teacher-centered approaches, inflexibility to student concerns or needs.
As an instructor, you might be doing all the right things, but students still lose interest. Could something else be going on?
The presenter observed in-person classes and took notes of the layout of the classroom, who was talking, and where they were seated in the classroom. She observed the distribution of “classroom talk” between teacher and students in a 20-minute window of time. She noted the geographic location of those who were talking. Some students were hidden behind a post in the classroom or behind another student. She also observed that most people have a dominant eye that corresponds to their dominant hand. So if an instructor is right-handed (like most of the population), they are more likely to have a dominant right eye. This would lead to more engagement with students seated in the left side of the classroom. This is due to the fact that we can use our eyes to strategically cue another’s attention. This typically happens in a subconscious way in the classroom.
The take-aways is for instructors to consider how their teaching space may be affecting classroom engagement. Are there hiding areas in the physical space where teaching is taking place? Also, instructors need to be self-aware and think about how their patterns of gestures and eye contact can be used to engage students. They should be open to being observed or recorded teaching to watch for actions that might be privileging one part of the room over another.
As instructors, we might be looking into complicated solutions to student engagement while the solutions literally lie under our own eyes. The layout of our classroom as well as our physical inclination to gaze to the left side of the room could be hidden factors that affect the students' engagement with teaching.
Have you worked with students who are English Language Learners? Have you worked as a Teacher of the Visually Impaired or English as a Second Language Teacher between 2020 and today? Then we want to hear from you!
We’re recruiting participants for a research study titled to better understand how prepared teachers feel to work with students with visual impairments (blind or low vision) who are also English language learners.
For teachers who have worked with students with visual impairments who are also English language learners, we also want to learn about your experience collaborating with your student’s Teacher of the Visually Impaired (TVI) or English as a Second Language Teacher as well as what instructional methodologies, approaches, and informal strategies you have used with students.
If interested, please complete this brief screener which will take less than 5 minutes: https://redcap.link/56423lzp
After reviewing your screener responses, we’ll send you a link to complete the full survey. The full survey may take as little as 10 minutes or upwards of 45-90 minutes to complete depending on how much you choose to share with us.
At the end of the survey participants can enter a raffle to be randomly selected for one of ten $25 gift cards to Amazon or Target.
Please consider forwarding this survey opportunity with colleagues who may be eligible to participate. We are excited to learn about your experiences!
Questions? Email Gabrielle Gosnell (gabrielle.r.gosnell@Vanderbilt.Edu ) or Dr. Rachel Schles at rachel.schles@vanderbilt.edu
Sincerely,
2023 Regular Session | More Information
Requires Higher Education Coordinating Commission to conduct study to determine best method for making public higher education affordable for Oregonians. Directs commission to submit findings to interim committees of Legislative Assembly related to higher education not later than September 15, 2024.] Appropriates moneys to Higher Education Coordinating Commission for purpose of carrying out Oregon's Open Educational Resources (OER) Program. Declares emergency, effective July 1, 2023.
Open Oregon Educational Resources and Oregon Student Association have created a support letter template.
Link to the support letter template
Our current funding level from the state is $669,200 per biennium. Based on the recommendation of the Joint Task Force On Student Success for Underrepresented Students in Higher Education Affordability Workgroup, and the House Higher Education Committee, we are advocating for an increase of $4,530,800. This would bring our ongoing program budget up to $5,200,000 per biennium.
With the ongoing funding increase, Open Oregon Educational Resources will be able to…
Expand the open application OER grant program at ~$10 in student savings per $1 spent
Expand professional development for faculty to adopt OER at up to ~$35 in student savings per $1 spent
Increase personnel to support additional high-quality, equity-focused OER development and translation
Expand outreach on impact reporting and statewide coordination
If passed, this bill will appropriate the funding increase to the Open Oregon Educational Resources program for the 2023-25 biennium. The bill will have to go through a series of steps and there will be opportunities to testify throughout this process:
The bill started in the House Higher Education Committee.
It is now in the Joint Ways & Means Committee.
We are asking for it to be assigned to the Joint Ways & Means Committee’s Education Subcommittee for consideration in the state’s overall budget.
It will pass both chambers of Oregon’s Legislative Assembly.
It will go to Governor Kotek’s desk to be signed into law.
2023 Legislative Session One-Sheet for Open Oregon Educational Resources
One-Sheet about Open Oregon Educational Resources Programming
Making the Case for Open Education
Small Dollar Amounts Are Significant
Find Your Legislators
Dear Fellow TESOLers,
The budget process is in full swing in the 118th Congress and we have opportunity to build support for the funding of multilingual learners of English (MLE) in our public education system.
The President has called for a 34% increase to ESEA Title III funding, but to ensure that funding keeps pace not only with inflation but also the numbers of learners, the budget amount needs to reach $2 Billion.
As part of this process, the House of Representatives is reviewing appropriations and we have support from Representatives Garcia, Craig, Espaillat, and Grijalva in the form of a Dear Colleague sign-on letter (see attached).
Please encourage your Representative to sign-on and support our MLEs! Time is of the essence as the sign-on letter is open only through close of business 21 March 2023!
To send a letter to your representative, visit our Advocacy Action Center now by clicking the link below.
TESOL Advocacy Action Center
We look forward to seeing many of you Portland next week and hope to see you at the Advocacy and Colleague sessions (see here).
Jeff Hutcheson Director, Advocacy & Public Policy jhutcheson@tesol.org
Submitted by Nanci Leiton
February 4, 2023
This review was originally written on May 11, 2022, to determine applicability of the curriculum in a specific context. It has been updated to reflect the reviewer’s opinion after adoption and implementation.
BurlingtonEnglish posits itself as a “standards-based, fully blended curriculum” serving as an “online digital solution for adult language learners.” Intended for use as a tool for in-person learning with digital components to support online learning and practice, BurlingtonEnglish (BE) offers extensive multimodal student learning activities and comprehensive instructor support.
With the inevitable integration of AI in the language learning process, this review supports BE as a useful resource for a range of ESOL courses. This review is my opinion after using the program to supplement an Integrated Education and Training (IET) course at Portland Community College.
The BE components that have supported my course outcomes are primarily the English Language and Career Readiness materials. Those most relevant to my initial review included:
General English - Burlington Core (6 levels, Basics - Advanced)Example: Scope & Sequence for High Beginner
Career Exploration and Soft Skills (3 levels, Beginners - Advanced)
Grammar (3 levels, Beginners - Advanced)
Digital Literacy (List of topics)
In my mixed-level course, I have used material ranging across 3 Burlington Core levels, and this has worked well with my students at PCC ESOL Levels 4-7, or English Language Proficiency levels (ELPS) 2-4. The ability to assign similar topics at different levels to meet each student where they were was also a plus. I’ve used the Burlington Core component extensively and augmented those modules with grammar and topical vocabulary.
Additional components that became part of the course and that demonstrate the extent of options available in BE span 2 sets of word lists in the English for Specific Careers modules and CASAS test prep:
Prepare for CASAS With an enormous database of test items, students can take dozens of practice tests without repeating questions. Using BE to prepare students for the exam environment, especially if they are unfamiliar with digital test-taking when they walk into the computer lab on Test Day, helps to lower performance barriers like test anxiety.
The Welders Wordlist and Factory/Plant Workers Wordlist, specifically the categories Safety (nouns and PPE) and Tasks (action verbs) became student favorites. I’ve included an example with the accompanying Vietnamese translation here.
BurlingtonEnglish offers further resources that this reviewer has not yet had the opportunity to use in class, but that look useful in a typical ESL pathway:
Readers (high beginner to high intermediate), ranging from Ghandi and Tutankhamen to Frankenstein and Last of the Mohicans. Note: Peers at other institutions who use BE readers have mentioned them as key resources in their classes.
English in America (Civics) Internet Safety, Housing, Diversity, Becoming a Citizen, Emergencies and Banking are just a sampling of the topics available in 3 levels.
Messaging This feature allows more direct communication between teacher and student, and student and material. Other instructors report using the messaging feature successfully, but I have been using my school’s LMS to post learning activities and link students directly to assigned BE lessons & practice.
BE offers both in-class lessons and assigned or self-directed student lessons.
In-Class lessons are project-able, interactive lessons intended to be led by an instructor. Teachers can easily toggle between in-class and student lessons to demonstrate homework or self-guided practice. Whole group review activities and games keep students engaged and prepare them for independent practice.
The topics are relevant to adult learners, with level-appropriate grammar points and engaging activities (see the In-Class lesson above about Small Talk at work). Note the range from overview to skills practice to review activity.
Support elements for instructors include a Course & Lesson Planner, In-Class Lessons, Worksheets and a Progress checker. This Progress checker informs both formative and summative assessments. This chart shows progress for one of my students in Module 4: Money Matters. It denotes time spent (total and in/out of class), best scores, and individual completion rate:
Multi-modal student lessons are presented as sequential modules that can be assigned by the instructor and repeated by students as desired. Tutorials are available for additional guidance. Among the support are Student Lessons, Vocabulary Practice, a Portfolio and Progress tracker (students see their own progress like the progress tracker Money Matters above). Much like the satisfaction achieved when closing rings on a fitness tracker, this progress has been enthusiastically pointed out when my students complete their “rings”.
This tool collects data from every speaking activity and “learns” a student’s pronunciation. With this information, the student can focus on improving their common errors through practice delivered by semi-customized instruction. Popular among students, this tool allows for self-correction in an otherwise labor-intensive area of feedback. See this example for the pronunciation of “h”:
Wordlists are designed for self-directed practice, but students often need guidance to get started. The wordlists can be sorted to focus on various aspects of the target content, which, in my Welding IET, concerned safety, equipment, scientific terms and measurements, techniques and process, weld features, and so on. For each word, students can listen, see model sentences and practice pronunciation. Wordlists can be personalized so that students can revisit key or problematic vocabulary (circled in red below).
Here is a sample of how students might engage with the vocabulary. Review activities include pronunciation, spelling, listening, speaking, matching, and more. At any point, students can click on the Pronunciation Course icon (circled in red) to practice specific sounds. (phone screen on L; desktop on R):
Accessibility options are easy to find and use on every page.
BE correlates with Oregon Adult College and Career Readiness Standards (OACCRS) and Oregon Adult English Language Proficiency Standards (OAELPS) ensuring WIOA success.
Instructions can be translated into student’s L1, established at registration, with a single key tap
Translations are available in 63 languages.
Graphics and lessons are mobile-friendly and technology and learning are integrated seamlessly.
Support and training for instructors is readily available and provided by friendly, helpful trainers.
Instructors/students can access the Pronunciation Course at any point in the program.
Tutorials are located on the app.
Site navigation is not intuitive; however, with instruction and prompting, it is easily learned for those with minimal tech skills (learners who are familiar with navigation on their own phones, for example).
The speaking exercises require a headset with a mic for best results with the pronunciation trainer. For my IET, these were supplied to the students. Another option might be to use BE in your school’s language lab.
Students who are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with technology will face greater challenges than those who are not. That said, each lesson offers a number of printable handouts, and each module ends with a downloadable assessment. I found that offering a paper worksheet yo accompany each in-class lesson eased tech anxiety for some students.
My students used BE on both their phones and assigned Chromebooks. Early in the course, we spent some class time downloading the BE app and practicing navigation on these devices. After that, students functioned mostly autonomously. Instructors at other levels and institutions report using a more hands-on approach, which has been equally successful.
During my initial review, I recommended using the BurlingtonEnglish curriculum with ESOL courses at my institution, and, after using BE for several months, I firmly support BE as a learning resource for ELL adults at multiple levels. Real-world topics and naturally integrated skills with a range of engaging and easy-to-use interactive activities make it popular among students as well. Learners were highly motivated to use the app on their phones; they reported working on assigned tasks during their lunch breaks and in waiting rooms as well as during planned study times both in and out of the classroom. The flexibility BE offers as a cell-friendly platform serves our students well as we move forward in the digital age.
I’d like to express appreciation to my ESOL and IET peers at Chemeketa Community College, Rogue Community College, and Blue Mountain Community College for their reflections and comments on using BE in their courses. Some of these instructors have already used BE for years, and their comments encouraged me to expand my use of the program in my own courses.
Funding for the BurlingtonEnglish curriculum at Portland Community College has been provided by the State of Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) and Community College and Workforce Development.
In sum, the more I use BurlingtonEnglish, the more I like it. If you would like an expansion on any part of this review, feel free to contact me or respond on this platform. To request a demo account or learn more about BurlingtonEnglish, contact BE’s representative listed below or visit www.burlingtonenglish.com.
Reviewer
Nanci Leiton, MA TESOL
ESOL Instructor, Portland Community College
nleiton@pcc.edu
BurlingtonEnglish in Oregon
Daphne Lagios
Teacher Trainer
daphne.l@burlingtonenglish.com
Members
Log In | View Profile
Forgot Password
View Privacy Policy
Contact
Mailing Address: PO Box 12322, Portland, OR 97212
Email: info@ortesol.org
Follow Us
