What's Up at Joy of ESL?

There is a lot going on right now for me as a language instructor, perpetual student, blogger, webmaster, and creator / illustrator of learning materials! Since everything I'm doing right now leaves no time for a separate blog post, I thought I would simply write about what I'm up to. Would you like a peek under the hood?

The thing that gives me most pleasure is illustrating. When I first started making activity packs to complement literacy readers, I did not know how to easily create illustrations. My earliest attempts were simple black line drawings done in the free Paint application that came pre-loaded on my computer. I drew a scarf, hat, and boots using my finger on my laptop's trackpad.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I am using Google Drawing to create images such as this medical form and health card. I can't say enough good things about the online "Classy Graphics" course I took in Google Classroom with Tony Vincent. Without that class, I would not know how to use Google Drawing at all. Anyway, the image of a blank piece of paper on a clipboard was free for the taking on Pixabay.com. I send them a donation after every 20 or 30 images that I use.  I also found the caduceus on Pixabay and simply shrank it down to fit in the upper left corner of the piece of paper. The rest of the form was created using text boxes in Google Drawing.

The image of a health card was created almost entirely in Google Drawing. I imported only Maria's face, which I drew using a Wacom Intuos Draw graphic tablet and Artrage software in trace mode over a photo from the reader.

The walk-in clinic image started with a photo of an actual clinic in downtown Windsor that I believe my students are familiar with. I traced the sidewalk and greenery, made the canvas transparent, exported that as a PNG file, and imported it into Google Drawing in order to create the building, doors, and signs using shapes and text boxes.

For some images, I don't open Google Drawing at all, but just use the graphic tablet, such as was the case with this depiction of the nurse who calls Maria in from the waiting room. When I was originally given permission to create activity packs for the Bow Valley College readers, I was told I could not use their images. Yet one cannot follow best practices for the creation of materials and worksheets for literacy learners without images! So hopefully the number of images I replicate with modification falls within the scope of what in Canada we call 'fair dealing'.

So! Literacy teachers can look forward to my publishing this new activity pack before too long. It is my hope that you will notice the quality of my materials improving over time.

My own literacy learners are reaching the end of their five-month term with me. Many will be moving on to a mainstream CLB 1 or 1/2 class at the end of this month. I'm so proud that they can now tackle this level of reader and are asking for more challenging material all the time.

Second on my plate right now, aside from teaching itself, is keeping up with the research and latest developments in our ongoing effort to get the powers that be to listen to us, believe us, and respect us when we attempt to inform them of things that are wrong with (or are going wrong with the roll-out of) Portfolio Based Language Assessment experiment. Many problems are inherent, other problems are the result of certain employers' interpretation of the 'non-negotiables.' Either way, we still have a dire need for open, honest, mutually respectful and fruitful communication between front-line workers and the big fish at the top of the food chain. Since I was losing track of all the links, I decided to dedicate a page of my website to the curation of these resources, links to research, and so on. It is HERE. If you have suggestions for better wording or other links, you can comment below, email me, or message me on Twitter.

Thirdly and lastly, I am SO JAZZED that Tony Vincent, the one who taught me how to use Google Drawing, is offering a new course called Classy Videos in February. It's not too late to sign up. It's six weeks, but you do NOT have to be at your computer at a given time on a given day. You always have a week to watch the video and do the (optional) assignment.

All of this has me excited about the new year. How about you? Are you excited?

ESL Literacy Clients Deserve Better

Canadian ESL literacy instruction represents a tiny and often overlooked corner of the world of teaching English as a second or additional language. If you serve these clients, you know how difficult it can be to find appropriate resources and classroom materials of the same quality as what our colleagues teaching mainstream settlement English have at their fingertips.

When I was hired for the literacy class that I now teach, the materials I was expected to teach from consisted of a binder a colleague had put together on her own initiative. Had it not been for that, I would have had nothing but one shelf in a cabinet full of dusty, yellowed, outdated materials that fell far short of meeting what we know today as best practices for working with pre-literate and semi-literate ESL learners.

Slowly, by mining the internet every evening and weekend for many months, I began to curate a decent collection of resources on my computer. I found HandsOn!, Making it Real, and the treasure trove of materials and instructor handbooks at Bow Valley College Centre for Excellence in Immigrant and Intercultural Advancement.

But it wasn't enough.

I began creating my own activity packs to complement the wonderful Bow Valley College readers. I went shopping online, and my employer purchased some of the Talk of the Block sets, a few resources from Grassroots Press, and a few more books each fall at the publishers' expo at the TESL Ontario conference.

Yet even when I was turned loose in Toronto with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket and permission from my employer to beef up the ESL literacy section of our resource library, there wasn't much for me to buy. There still isn't. When I visit my local teacher supply store in hopes of finding an alphabet line for my classroom, I come away having settled for something that was designed with NS children in mind.  I don't want the S word to be star, which begins with a blend. I want a pure S followed by vowel sound. I don't want any of the images to be words my newcomers will not need in their vocabularies for another ten years; I want words that are relevant to their lives now. O is for octopus? How about O is for on / off with a picture of a light switch? Now that's English we can put to use immediately!

On my last post, Cintia Costa left a profound comment. Central to her teaching philosophy is Love. Yeah, big L Love. I also believe deeply in the value of Love. So much flows from Love: respect, growth, trust, community, a safe space.

Love, if you ask me, is in the details.

How can we claim to respect our ESL literacy clients if we do not pay attention to the details? I, for one, am not satisfied putting materials in front of them that are not designed for them. Would you use a magazine containing violent war pictures with a group of refugees just arrived from war-torn areas? Of course not. You would pre-screen what you use and would set aside the resources not appropriate for them. You respect them. You care about the experience they have in your classroom.

So why are we okay with an alphabet line that was made for little Canadian children? To be honest, it's probably because we have no choice. Materials designed for pre-literate and semi-literate ADULT newcomers to Canada are very hard to find. It's a tiny niche market, so what publishing company is going to bother developing these things?

The good news is that it's becoming easier all the time for you and me to stop waiting around for someone else to make these resources. I'm ready to make them myself. A is for apple, B is for baby, C is for a cup of coffee. D is not for dog, but might be for door or doctor.

I'll let you know when the set is ready for free download. ;)

How about you? Do you think we teachers of ESL literacy have to take it upon ourselves to create what we need?

What's Your Philosophy?

After my first seven-week session (full time) at CCLCS, the Standard I students had their TESL Canada certificates and all the practical tools under their belts that they would need to teach English at local "visa" schools or in places like Thailand, South Korea, and Costa Rica. After a seven-week break, I returned to Toronto for the remaining seven-week session that would--if I passed--make me an Ontario Certified English Language Teacher. We settled in to learn in more depth the history of the teaching of second languages, the various second language acquisition theories--from Krashen to Chomsky. We wrote research papers peppered with our newly gained lexis of the field: L1, L2, interference, comprehensible input, ZPD. We had heated classroom debates on whether the existence of certain words in a native language allowed the speakers to entertain the concept while NS of languages without the words were unable to think in the terms provided by the existence of the word itself.

I still remember how I answered an important essay question on an exam. The question dealt with which SLA theory or theories I found to have the most merit and how that might inform my classroom practice. I answered that I did not feel able to conclude with absolute certainty which theory was the "right" one, nor did I find them to be mutually exclusive. I found some merit in bits and pieces of many of them, and therefore I planned to take an eclectic approach to classroom practice.

And so I have.

I enjoy delving deeply into certain pedagogical works and authors more than others, but always like to make time during summer break and--to a lesser extent--throughout the school year for reading that (hopefully) makes me a better informed instructor.

How about you? Do you enjoy reading books whose target audience is comprised mainly of teachers of English as a second or additional language? If not, why not? Are you an auditory learner who prefers attending workshops or webinars and watching videos on YouTube? What other ways do you enjoy expanding your knowledge and improving your teaching skills and repertoire?

An ESL Literacy Teaching Habit

This past two weeks I have had no choice but to turn my classes over to supply teachers. The first day I was able to leave a detailed lesson plan for the literacy class, but then fevers swept over me, robbing me of my mental clarity. The best I could do, rushing to get my email typed before the next fever hit, was send a link to one of the Bow Valley College readers along with my corresponding activity pack. The supply teacher would have to write her own lesson plans, but at least she would have more worksheets than my students could possibly need in one week.

I inserted little 8-point font notes on some pages. "Teacher, Ss should be ready for this by Thursday," and so on. I mentioned that we usually practice a given story multiple times throughout the week, sometimes even reading it together in 15-minute increments two or three times on the same day.

A strange thing happened. One of the supply teachers reported to me that the students, on Thursday, were completely mystified by the Yes / No quiz. They were not able to do it. They didn't understand all the words in the questions.

Now it could just be that the material I had chosen was too high for the group. Three new students joined the class while I was away and one moved up. So it could have been that. In any case, it got me to thinking about how I teach ESL literacy. Is there anything that I do that comes so naturally to me that I might not even think to mention it to a newer teacher whom I'm mentoring? Since Beth Beardall has just posed a question on the TESL Ontario Blog about literacy teaching tips, I have decided to try to put into words a teaching habit that I think benefits my learners and helps them get to fluency and mastery of one story by week's end.

Before I get to the tip, let's get some basics out of the way.  When introducing a new story, I not only activate prior knowledge of the schema but pre-teach the terms that are new to the learners.  I use pictures, realia, and also try to personalize a new term on the spot. So if a new vocabulary item is the word son, we will go around the room asking one another, "Do you have a son?" We'll talk about how many sons and daughters we each have. If a new word is bill, we will talk about the various bills we pay. I don't start the story until most students are getting at least 65-75% accuracy when I ask, "What's a bill?" "What's a dentist?"

So now we're looking at a week that we will spend learning to read, for example, Mark Goes to the Dentist. We'll spend the week going back and forth between the whole and the parts. We'll do activities involving the meaning of the language, such as: dialogues and role plays, sentence unscramble, paragraph unscramble, peer surveys, T/F quiz, and my verbally quizzing them on meaning. We'll do other activities that focus on the parts of language, such as: spelling dictation, word shapes worksheet, categorizing by sound, hidden word, etc.  I will usually also find space in the week to assess a real-world task, such as filling out a form, role playing with the receptionist, and so forth.

Okay, so here's the tip.  Never waste an opportunity to reinforce either ability to read aloud (and pronounce), the ability to spell a new term, or the ability to show comprehension. Below are some examples of what I mean.

• If a student comes up to the board to write the answer on a worksheet where meaning was the focus, never let her sit down until she has read the sentence aloud.
• If you are the scribe calling on students for the answers as you write them in the spaces, don't settle just for the word. Have the student spell it to you as you write it in.
• If you are taking up a worksheet where the focus is not on meaning, just on the spelling or shape of the word, before you erase the board, go back over all words--this time asking the class to say the word and give the meaning.
• Never erase anything without having students read aloud/pronounce the words one last time. If they can say it, you erase it.
• If you've been using sentence strips or flashcards with partners, don't let them just put the items back into the envelopes or paperclips. Make a new activity out of that: "Everybody show me 'The drink is cold.' Put 'The drink is cold' back in the envelope."

In this way, day by day, students build up their abilities to read all the words aloud, read the sentences aloud, spell all the words, define all the words. And don't think that I put students on the spot for these performances. Mine is a low risk, safe classroom. All are free to pass and know they will be encouraged when they are ready. However, I don't let strong students take easy questions! Those are reserved for the less confident students. With a quick glance in their direction, I give them the chance to signal me when they feel ready.

When we play Sentence Unscramble, I do not tell them if I think the sentence is right or not before I hit SUBMIT for them. I ask the class, "Everybody, is that right?" Through peer coaching, they eventually get the syntax right. I keep a poker face. Make the students do the work.

I fashion the end-of-week Yes/No quiz in such a way that most are easy and just one is tricky. One question requires the student to not only understand the new language, but also to be able to use it in a novel context.

Mark has a drink. 

The drink is hot. 

Mark has a toothache.

Mark gets a filling.

The bill is $1,999.

Kelly is a dentist.*

The same notion of cycling through ability to read aloud / ability to spell / ability to understand meaning can come into play in a simple game of BINGO. My students make me play it till I'm sick of it, so I jazz it up by switching from calling the words to calling out the spelling to making them guess the word. "This is what Mark gets. He can't pay it all today." They say, "BILL!" I say, "Yes, how do you spell bill?" Or, at other times, "What does B-I-L-L spell?" Also having a student play the teacher in this game allows peers to correct poor pronunciation. 

So to summarize my ESL literacy teaching tip: there should be no moment when the teacher is writing something and students are just sitting there staring. When the teacher is writing, the students have a job. When the teacher is erasing, the students have a job. When a student is at the board, the other students have a job. Chances to reinforce the language are EVERYWHERE. And keep your formative assessment feelers up at all times. 

How about you? Have you left a comment for Beth on her blog post?

Welcome, Conference Attendees!

Hello!

If you're visiting my website and this blog for the first time because you received or picked up one of my cards at the TESL ON conference, welcome!

Just to catch you up, after a couple of years of blogging here with two or three loyal followers in across Canada and scant comments, I recently stumbled upon an area in dire need of reporting. That is the lack of a safe space for teachers implementing PBLA to give honest feedback, both laudatory and constructively critical, without fear of reprisal and without receiving a response that feels patronizing or dismissive.

During and right after the conference, I will be meeting with a couple of key individuals and sending some of your feedback up the chain to the funders. I hope this is just the start of a beautiful thing. I am a huge fan of democracy, transparency and accountability. After all, that's one of the biggest selling points of PBLA itself--increased transparency and accountability!

So watch this space. I am brainstorming day and night on the best way to proceed and see that the vacuum gets filled with a forum that is accessible, user-friendly, welcoming, affirming and effective in channeling up to the funders some questions and concerns that until now have been discouraged or silenced.

In solidarity,

Kelly - tweeting at @JoyOfESL

P.S. Excuse the occasional American spelling. I am an immigrant. ;)

How I Use the Literacy Activity Packs

I apologize.

I was rushing on October 2nd and didn't do a good job. Let me try again to describe how I build a week-long module. This time I will get much more into specifics regarding how I use the activity packs that I have been uploading to the LITERACY area of the website.

Staying within a Theme
Though I don't always spend an entire month on the same theme, I do think it is beneficial to the literacy learner to stay within a theme for more than one week. Why? I say this because with literacy learners, it takes a lot longer to activate the schema and prime the brain for the topic(s). Once you've warmed them up for one set of linguistic terms and cultural concepts, why would you want to burden their cognitive load unnecessarily by jumping from topic to topic? Why not settle in a while and allow them to become really comfortable as they layer more and more skills and a richer vocabulary within the same theme week by week? The lower the stress, the more room there is for fun, and I would argue that retention of the new language increases.

Starting with a Needs Assessment
Since settlement English programs are student-centred, you will have consulted with the learners via a needs assessment to determine how to prioritize the topics. I have found over time that some topics cannot be optional. One example is learning about our PBLA binders; another is learning personal information and calling 9-1-1.  I also weave lessons on phonics, decoding skills, and printing into the thematic modules without asking the learners if they want that.

Mapping Out the Modules
When planning a series of four interrelated modules within a month-long theme, I start with a couple of modules that are heavy on skill building and end with a module or two that take advantage of the learners' new abilities. Just as a lesson starts off with more scaffolding and more controlled activities, gradually reducing the need for 'training wheels,' so can a module or series of modules be constructed so that students are using language more independently by the end. They can also be reading about the topic at a higher literacy level or with more fluency by the end of a module or series of modules when you stay within a theme.

An Example of Layering Modules
Let's say the theme is housing and the house. My series of modules might look like this:
Week 1 - learn the names of the rooms and a few key furniture pieces for each room
Week 2 - learn to read a house-related story in Talk of the Block short vowel series, HOME volume
Week 3 - learn to read Perminder's Cleaning Day
Week 4 - learn to ask the landlord to address problems in the apartment

Key Resources
The resources I would use to execute the modules listed above could include: a picture dictionary; student-made reference materials from flyers and catalogs; HandsOn!; Talk of the Block, ESL Literacy Network's Readers and Read Aloud versions of the same readers; ESL activity kits from Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO); my own activity packs.

My Activity Packs
The resources I've listed above almost never come complete with sufficient activities to give the learners the number of linguistic affordances (opportunities to encounter the new language in a variety of contexts and ways) that I believe are necessary for long-term retention of the language. I have therefore developed the habit of creating my own set of activities that I use week after week. I simply change the vocabulary while keeping the activities pretty much the same. To see a sample, check out my activity pack for Deng Starts School.

One huge benefit to this habit of staying with a limited number of activities is that it vastly reduces cognitive load that otherwise would be devoted to instructions for the task. Students become so familiar with our routines that their entire cognitive load belongs to the linguistic and cultural content of the lesson. This level of confidence on the part of the learners means that when a new student joins the class, a peer will always jump in and show the new student the ropes.

An activity pack will typically start with easier controlled activities such as:

• Match the word to the picture
• Word Shapes worksheet
• Listen and fill in the (first, middle, last) letter
• How many times can you find the word?

It will include guided and more difficult but still relatively controlled activities, such as:

• Unscramble the sentence
• Gap fill with no word bank (answers are in the reader)
• Crossword with no word bank (some schematic knowledge, some verbatim from reader)

I try always to include a peer survey. This can be used as a free activity, giving students an opportunity to use new questions and answers related to the real-world task or it can be used to help activate the schema and prior knowledge at the beginning of the unit.

Finally, I include two activities to be used at the end of the week to solidify rapid recognition of our new lexis:

• Flyswatter game (I often don't include this as a document in the pack because teachers can simply print the words across the board)
• BINGO grid with word bank

Incorporating the Activities into Lesson Plans
At the beginning of the week I remind students of our needs assessment so that they recognize the module as being an answer to their expressed need. This helps give them confidence to communicate to me any desire to slow down, repeat, add new material.

As I place activities into lesson plans, starting with a hook, I try to be mindful of how the student will be feeling after one activity. To keep a fast PERCEIVED pace, which has nothing to do with actual pace, I strive to give them a change in activity about every 20 minutes. I endeavour to go back and forth between work that focuses on meaning (e.g. T/F quiz) and work that focuses on form (e.g. printing). I also try to break up periods of sitting and concentrating with bursts of movement and interaction.

Of course all the while we are building toward one or more real world tasks such as asking, "Excuse me, where's the sugar," understanding, "On aisle six, with baking," and responding, "Thank you."

A Snapshot
So a typical day might unfold like this:

12:30 - announcements

12:35 - review the alphabet and sounds

12:40 - review the prior day's learning (if it's Monday, ask each other about our weekends)

12:45 - hook - activate the schema, brainstorm, elicit prior knowledge

12:55 - introduce the new lexis, reader, etc.; students predict from pictures, pass around picture flashcards, etc.

1:05 - matching words to picture (project onto board)

1:15 - take up the worksheet by projecting it on the board, students come up and draw the lines

1:25 - work with word flashcards - one set per partnership; teacher says, "Show me X, show me Y..."

1:35 - categorizing activity - students group the picture or word flashcards in some way, such as by part of speech, by type of object, by sound, etc.

--BREAK--

2:00 - Introduce a short dialogue, such as "Do you like _____?" "Yes, I do / No, I don't." Give students a chance to practice it verbally many, many times in various ways. These exact phrases will appear on the upcoming peer survey.

• Repeat after T
• Teacher plays role of A, students take turns taking role of B
• Chain drill around the room
• Write the dialogue on the board. Read and speak.

2:20 - Project the peer survey form on the board, demonstrate. Make sure students remember how to say "How do you spell your name," and can spell their names. New students are allowed to cut corners (copy instead of speaking). Veteran students are strongly encouraged not to 'cheat.' Hand out the peer survey. Teacher always participates.

2:40 - Do a plenary activity with the results of the peer survey, such as forming 3rd person singular statements about others. Ali likes tomatoes. Jenna doesn't like tomatoes. (Note that you have now covered all forms of this grammar point: question, positive and negative answer, positive and negative statement in first and third person.)

2:50 - Written sentences summarizing our peer survey findings or start a puzzle. (Teacher is now free to start cleaning up the classroom.)

Extending with Online Games
There are times when I need a little ten-minute filler activity and the students need a change of pace. In that moment, I'll be so glad I loaded the week's words and sentences from their text into Spelling City. Our school pays about $74 CAD per year for up to 25 students at any given time to use the premium activities. If you only want spelling test and a few games, you can get a free account. Since I believe the Sentence Unscramble game has enormous value to the learners, I have the premium account.  In a given week, I might use Hang Mouse once, Sentence Unscramble once, and then link to the word list on the classroom blog so that the learners themselves can opt to practice our week's lexis using these same games and quizzes. 

The Week
I tend to stick to a rather predictable pattern through the week:

Monday - presentation, controlled activities, take pictures for LEA books

Tuesday - skill building, practice reading, paragraph unscramble in pairs, phonics

Wednesday - iPads, reading circles, gap fill, posters, practice reading

Thursday - comprehension quiz, peer survey, flyswatter game, role plays, assessments

Friday - learning logs, BINGO, computer lab

Conclusion
So those are some routines I follow in order to reduce the cognitive load on me and on the learners! When the students are highly familiar with an activity, they do not rely on me to spend my time and energy explaining and re-explaining, wrangling and redirecting them. This frees me up to help struggling students, tick boxes on rubrics, or prepare for the next activity.

What do you think?

Give Them Something to Touch

In ESL literacy instruction, it is so very important to make learning as physical as possible. ESL literacy classes tend to be comprised of at least three kinds of students who direly need learning to be made as hands-on as possible: refugees, whose recent trauma can make focusing on dry lessons impossible; learners with interrupted formal education, as they are unaccustomed to sitting for long periods at a desk; students with learning disabilities, especially ADD/ADHD, who may be desperate for any excuse to get up out of their seats.

I was reminded of this 'best practice' this week as I was passing by the new literacy classroom that is currently blooming in a former childcare space next door to my classroom. Every time I pass by the door, something different draws me into the space. First there was the welcome sign, then the tea kettle with a collection of herbal and black teas, next the little alcove with a carpet that has already been used by our newly arrived Syrians seeking a safe space to pray.

This week's eye candy was a collage of student work covering one wall. Maria had led the learners through a colour lesson involving leaves and fall colours. One thing she noticed about the lesson was that everyone was so calm afterward. Even the men got into carefully colouring around their leaves.

From role plays to realia, anything that allows them to manipulate objects, move, stretch, sing, drum or dance is going to help create an effective and enjoyable language learning experience for this very special clientele.

What's your favourite way of giving your learners a hands-on learning experience?

How Should I Organize My Free Literacy Materials?

With school starting back up and a new literacy teacher joining our team, I am feeling motivated to go through and edit / improve all the activity packs that I have created both for the ESL Literacy Network Readers and for the Talk of the Block short and long vowel series of books. I did have some of these activity kits housed on Bow Valley College's teacher showcase area, but they discontinued that feature in their transition from ESL Literacy Network to Centre of Excellence in Foundational Learning.

As I go through and ensure that my materials follow best practices for literacy materials and contain only images that can be freely shared without copyright infringement, I will be posting them on my website.

Here's my question for you.

Where / how should I organize these materials?  Is there a teaching resource website whose layout and organization you find especially user friendly? Do you find the current layout of my website www.kellymorrissey.com easy to navigate? If not, why not? What would you have me do differently?

I am currently planning to put the activity kits in their own section at the top or bottom of the existing thematic pages. These pages follow the settlement themes (housing, commercial services, banking and money, etc.)  Do you think this is a good plan?

Alternately, I suppose I could create separate page or pages containing ONLY literacy worksheets, links, ideas, etc.

Please let me know in the comments section below which plan appeals more to you as a user of my website.

Thank you so much!

Ramping Up for PBLA

Hello!

Not sure where you all are in the PBLA process, if at all, but at my school we are just getting the training and starting our pilot modules soon. I'm open to any and all tips, suggestions, links, commiseration, encouragement, etc. that you are willing to send my way as I start off with my two classes on this exciting journey!

In my morning class of eleven Chinese, three Iraqi and one Syrian senior (over 55), I am gently introducing the concepts of goal setting and reflection. This week will be our first time to write out our individual and group goals for the module. We want our goals to be SMART goals: SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE, ATTAINABLE, REALISTIC AND TIME-BOUND.

I'll let you know how it goes!

In my afternoon class, which is literacy (one Foundations learner and the rest Phase I), we have just done our needs assessment for the term via sticker voting.

learners have voted for our first four topics

For goal-setting, I am going to rely heavily on Svetlana Lupasco's resources that she was kind enough to post on her blog Teach2LearnESL. She blogged about goal-setting with literacy learners HERE, and offered up samples for free download HERE.

Many of the teachers at my centre seem to have the same challenge right now: finding really good resources to guide students through goal setting. The best I've found so far is in the PBLA Best Practices - Resources document.

How about you? For those of you further along in the PBLA journey, do you have tips for those of us just starting?

Martine's Rule Number One

Muffled inside my backpack, the ring of my cell phone was just barely audible as I walked from my parking spot to the building where I'd just been hired to teach for four hours a week--a lunch hour pronunciation class.

I grappled with the zipper pouch in the middle of the sidewalk and managed to answer before it went to voice mail. It could be one of my colleagues calling me to supply for them, I thought. Covering for absent teachers was another role for which I was hired at the same time. My third hat was that of teaching assistant, which was why I was headed into work hours before my class time.

"Hello?"

"Kelly?" A weak and raspy voice came through from the other end.

"Yes?"

"Can you cover for me today? I woke up with a migraine."

"Sure I can," I said, already starting to feel ill at ease with the notion of zero prep time. "What's the topic?"

"Oh, there's no particular topic. Do anything you want with them."

"Thanks a lot," I said, hoping my voice didn't betray any trace of sarcasm.

She had given me no advance notice nor had she prepared anything like the other instructors always did. There wasn't even a topic to inspire me. Fortunately, I had spent a recent weekend compiling a few emergency lesson ideas for just such a circumstance. I would try out "student-made tests."

Thank goodness I'm a nervous Nellie an early bird; I had time to grab a ruler and create a simple table-style graphic organizer and make twenty copies. (Grab the free template on my website.)

After introducing myself and explaining their teacher's absence, I polled the class to find out what grammar points they had been covering over the past week or two. As they all began to chime in, I scribbled quickly, capturing their answers on the board.

Next I asked them what topic they had covered. They told me they had just finished reading The Piano, a slender chapter book abridged for ESL learners. Great.

I explained that their task would be to think up six good questions to test their classmates on the material covered over the past week or two: three about grammar and three about the novel. I would come around, I said, to help them find any errors in their questions. I then would circle what I thought were the best four out of six, and they were to copy those onto the graphic organizer.

That took us to break time.

After break, we pulled half the chairs from outside the U of tables to the inside so that pairs were facing each other.

"Partner A has five minutes to ask partner B four questions. When you hear my beeper go off, it's time to switch roles: B then has five minutes to quiz A. Then I'll ring the bell and Bs will move clockwise while As stay put. Got it?"

They got it. With five pairs, this took exactly fifty minutes, leaving us ten minutes for a debriefing before the end of class. They were supposed to rank their classmates and report at the end who had done the best job answering each question. But during the plenary discussion, something serendipitous arose from this technique. The students all said they had come to understand the material so much better. Their classmates had elucidated formerly cryptic grammar points, helped them understand the book's plot twists, and had taught them new words or given them a fuller grasp of terms already touched on in class.

As the students filed out into the hall with smiles on their faces, still abuzz with the energy of the activity, I heard the voice of my TESL prof in my head. "RULE NUMBER ONE," she said so many times that it can never leave me, "Whenever possible, have the students do the work."

Yes, Martine. I think I see what you meant.

The next time Martine's rule echoed in my mind was when I was acting as teaching assistant, observing and helping the literacy teacher. The class was about to play BINGO. How many times had I toyed with the idea of using this game in class only to reject it as too time consuming for the teacher? After all, each BINGO card has to be different since you can't have every students shouting BINGO at the same time. But this teacher did something that had never occurred to me. He put the bank of twenty-four words at the bottom of the sheet and had the students COPY them one by one into the BINGO grid, reminding them not to copy them in order starting with the top left cell, but encouraging them to scatter the words around the grid in a random way. Not only did this save the teacher prep time, but these students got an opportunity to practice copying--a skill most of them were still developing. Value!

That was over five years ago.  Now I have two classes and continue to remind myself several times a week of Martine's Rule Number One. Today in literacy class, for example, I decided to start our food unit in a way I never have before. Instead of warming them up, activating prior knowledge, yada yada, and then presenting twelve food staple words of my choosing, I passed out grocery store flyers and had the students cut out five items they buy every week. From posters each team of two created, I then told them they had to decide on the twelve terms we would learn and practice with this week. Well, we ended up with a list almost identical to the one I usually give them, but I noticed that the level of engagement seemed much higher than usual. These are the words THEY chose, the ones THEY say they need when shopping.

So, how about you? How do you feel about Martine's Rule Number One? Do you embrace a similar philosophy in your teaching? If so, how? And if not, why not?

Getting Better (at Teaching Literacy)

I don't have the proper training to do this job, I thought.

Have you ever thought that about a job you were tasked with undertaking?

When I applied for the position of LINC Literacy Instructor, I wanted it more than I'd ever wanted a job before. I think I may have aced the interview based on my passion alone. Perhaps they believed me--as well they should have--when I said that the most important qualities they should be seeking in a candidate were patience and compassion.

You won't find anyone, I assured them, better suited to take good care of this--the most vulnerable group in our school. I will, I promised, create a safe space where every learner's potential is nurtured and coaxed along until it blossoms.

I got the job.

And then I said to myself, "What on earth do I do now?"

While I am grateful for the quality education I received at CCLCS in their intensive full-time program that allowed me to get TESL accredited and back into the workforce in just under five months, the module on teaching ESL Literacy was, if I remember correctly, one or two Saturdays. Many of my colleagues who did their work online through a university got a separate course dedicated to this very specialized corner of TESL.

What this means is that I've been teaching myself how to do this as I go along. I've attended webinars hosted by the ESL Literacy Network, sought out every literacy workshop available each fall in Toronto, and have scoured the web for pedagogical materials, devouring what little there is out there.

Recently I attended for the second time "Oral Language First and Flashcard Use," facilitated by Val Baggaley. What a great webinar. I am still not where I want to be, but have definitely started to shift more weight to the initial oral activities and have put more energy into creating big, beautiful, colour flash cards that I laminate.

Speaking of flash cards, once again the ESL Literacy Network came to my rescue with a showcase on making custom flashcards that I blogged about two weeks ago.

But the one tutorial that has had the biggest impact on my ESL Literacy teaching this term has been this YouTube video called "Creating Worksheets for ESL Literacy Learners."  Yes, I had viewed it before, but apparently I don't always GET everything I read or watch the first time around.

This viewing left me determined to change my worksheets. Why were learners in my class having trouble with visual tracking of items on a sheet? Because my rows are too close together. I've got too much happening on the same sheet. I don't have enough graphics to support text.

This week, having spent a week on learning the days of the week and another on months of the year, we were putting all our calendar skills together by learning a few Canadian holidays. The end activity would be for me to give everyone a Milk Calendar, on which we could cross out all the days on which school is closed. I was able to put my freshly gained knowledge into practice. Here is a new and improved worksheet.

Managing to control my usual urge to save paper, I added more white space between rows. Our next activity after a YES/NO quiz is always to correct the false statements. I usually cram that part at the bottom of the YES/NO quiz. This time I moved it to its own sheet of paper.  Yay.

The one area I most want to work on next is supplying learners with more visual supports on worksheets. More pictures. But gathering copyright-free images or creating them does take time, and I do have a life. It is spring, after all, and I can't spend every hour of every day preparing for classes. One must go birding! One must go foraging for morels!

I'll get there, though. This week we are going to learn ten prepositions. We will create our own visual aids by posing for photos standing next to each other, crawling under the table, sitting on the table (egad), and so forth. Once again I have the ESL Literacy Network to thank for this idea.

On another positive note, The Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks has recently published Canadian Language Benchmarks: ESL for ADult Literacy Learners (ALL). I've been reading through the first several chapters with coloured stickies and highlighter in hand. So far I am impressed and so very grateful. I'm starting to feel a little less like I'm all on my own out here doing my best to muddle through the land of ESL Literacy teaching.

How about you?