I recently read in Zamel (1987)
Requiring students to formulate their ideas beforehand, to elaborate on them by using some prescribed rhetorical framework and to submit these written products for grading purposes seems to ignore everything we have learned about the (writing) process. p.269
I'm all for letting students discuss an issue and connect to it before writing the essay, but when it's time to write, the thesis should come first. At least it always did for me. So the question becomes how to teach academic essay writing, specifically the 5 paragraph essay which got me through college. I don't think the thesis needs to be a straight jacket; it could be changed, but when I was in college I rarely if ever changed my thesis once I'd thought one up; it was just extra work.
I guess we do some reading and look at the form of the essay. Choose and discuss a topic, brainstorm, come up with an argument and three supports, turn them into a thesis, and write the essay. I hope that's not what Zamel meant when she talked about articulating ideas beforehand, elaborating within a framework, and getting graded. If what I did goes against everything we know about the writing process, than I know nothing about writing. Bad news for a writing major! And it doesn't reflect too well on the school that graduated me with honors...
So the next assignment for my masters involves reading about teaching reading and writing and designing two reading/writing lessons.
Starting from the premise that as teachers we have to prepare students for real life, I'm wondering exactly how to interpret all the research that says pre-reading activities enhance comprehension. Of course they do, by activating schemata (background knowledge).
In real life, though, don't students have to activate schemata as they read? When I read, I don't spend 10 minutes predicting what I'm about to read...
Richards (writing about listening) said that pre-listening activities are part of teaching listening and that without them you're closer to testing listening. Should I take his word for it and assume that's also the case with reading? Good teaching = pre-reading activities?
This doesn't make intuitive sense to me. I would think that it's better to help students activate schemata while they read rather than before they read.
One aspect of this that does appeal is that Penny Ur (also writing about listening) said that students learn by accomplishing tasks rather than failing them. Pre-task activities that activate background knowledge certainly make students more likely to succeed (my only complaint is that it doesn't do so naturally). I suppose the key is take these pre-tasks and help students apply the schemata activation skills in real-life reading situations where (for example) they don't have ten minutes to brainstorm about a topic before reading.
I recently read an article on TEFL that was better written than most rants about my chosen profession but equally short sighted:
So while teaching English is fine if you want to spend a year abroad, and great for meeting pretty foreign girls, considered as a career that might offer some degree of professional fulfilment, it fails on every count. No one with a scrap of ambition can possibly consider it. As the philosopher Alain de Botton says: "You become a TEFL teacher when your life has gone wrong."
From the point of view of career, social advances, financial gain, the last two-and-a-half years had been completely wasted. More that that, they had left him physically exhausted and mentally addled by all these stupid lessons, besieged by boredom and mediocrity . . . He had reached the end of his tether . . . What was a language teacher in the end? A nobody. A mere failed somebody else.
What strikes me about the article is the talk of hangovers and mediocirty. A mediocre TEFL teacher may have trouble making ends meet but since when are hangovers and mediocrity rewarded in any profession? And sure, I know an excellent TEFL teacher who sometimes struggled to make ends meet. Although an excellent teacher, he never rose to the top of his profession. He now works in Korea (where salaries are higher than in many other EFL countries) and makes enough money, but when I suggest that he apply for a position at a university he says it's not his style.
Yet here I am, working in a university, 15 hours a week, pursuing my masters, making speeches, working on ESL go - free English as a second language learning and teaching, and planning my career (and what to do over the next 5 weeks or so while I'm on vacation).
EFL is a highly competitive field, with far more bad jobs than good ones, but the good ones do exist. I can't agree that it's a deadend profession.
For the full article: http://education.telegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2004/01/17/teftefl17.xml
Principles and Practices of Online Teaching Certificate Program is a course offered by TESOL and an especially good deal for people teaching EFL in poor countries. While someone in America or Japan (or one of the other countries listed as high income) pays $175/course, people in other countries pay $75/course. The courses look interesting too, like teaching speaking online.
Thanks to the budding online university systems rising up around the world, getting yourself an accredited online degree is easier now than it ever has been, and many now accept online college degrees to be as relevant as a "normal" degree.
There was another interesting discussion recently on the TESL-L email list about the use of translation in an English language classroom. As usual there was one person who said using students' native language (L1) is inexcusable.
A few people have countered his arguments, including me. I said that while learning Korean I wanted to tell servers that I was a vegetarian and learn the Korean I needed to order vegetarian food. As a true beginner, if my teacher hadn't allowed some English and some translation, I still wouldn't be ordering my own food. I concluded that I was glad my teacher had put my needs before the needs of a teaching style.
In response I got a private off-list e-mail about how I shouldn't have admitted that I have no imagination and that the correct thing to do would have been to carry around pictures of cows, circled and with lines drawn through them.
To me it's not about imagination, it's about self-expression. I'd rather express myself through Korean (which I can do thanks to the translation of a few key sentences by my teacher), than pictures. I got what I wanted. Why does he care if my success was achieved through translation?
By the way, I'm not saying that L1 should be common in EFL classrooms; it almost never occurs in mine because it doesn't lead to fluency. I'm just saying that we should consider what students need and want before we dismiss it.
There are some sites which can not be contacted:
www.eslpartyland.com - the e-mail given, karin@eslpartyland.com hasn't worked for over a month now. According to the home page, it hasn't been updated since 2001!
www.eslmag.com - info@eslmag hasn't worked for over a month now
The web links on www.eslcafe.com aren't up to date. At the 2003 KOTESOL conference Dave himself said "Don't use my links; it's a mess". So why keep it online?
Very annoying.
Children's Storybooks Online Talking eBooks looks like an excellent resource for teaching children. Their description (their words; I haven't personally used any of their products):
Every individual word is clickable to hear in our eBooks! Engaging stories, colorful illustrations, full narration to hold a child's (or adult's) attention while helping them to read and pronounce English. Short stories for beginning readers and longer stories (thousands of clickable words) for intermediate readers. Only $2.50-$3.50. Instantly downloadable.
My director recently asked how I felt about having students given oral exams by a teacher they weren't used to. For example my students would be assessed by some other teacher and I'd assess his/her students. I said that would be fine. The important thing is that all students in a class are assessed by the same criteria and person since each class is curved.
By curved, I mean each class can have x number of As, x number of Bs, etc. which is really bad as a student might end up with an A in one class but the same student might have received a C in another class. It all depends on how well the other students do.
I don't like it because it's like saying that only some students can be good and some have to be bad. That's not motivating where I come from...