Tutors as Teacher: Assisting ESL/EFL Students in the Writing Center

by thonus

General stuff: contrastive rhetoric, conflicting agendas. Its main benefits is that separates ideas about teaching ESL into 3 categories: Focus on form (contrastive rhetoric), focus on the writer (first negotiate meaning then the client self-corrects grammar; good references here), and focus on the reader (writing for academic community).

Working with ESL Writers

ch 9

NNS don't just come to get their grammar checked, they don't need more basics, you should work on higher-order concerns below later-level concerns, you should have a rulebook handy, and you can teach anything.

Bilingual Education

by Nessa Wolfson

1988

Many Americans do not speak English as a mother tongue. We have always been a pluralistic society. Bilingual education is a political issue.

Bilingual education was widespread in America until World War I, when English-only became a nationalistic policy point.

In 1963 middle-class Cuban refugees flooded Dade COunty, Florida. Their teachers taught them in Spanish. At Coral Way school, 50% Anglo and 50% Cuban, half the instruction was in each language. Both groups came out bilingual and biliterate. At this time the civil rights movement made being ethnic a point of pride and contributed to the political pressure to educate bilingual children fairly.

The federal govt passed laws intended to help bilingual children receive the schooling they needed. Unfortunately, the laws are vague.

There are different ideas as to what should constitute bilingual education:

1. Submersion. They should be taught only in English. They'll catch on, as "millions" of people did in the early years of teh twentieth century.
2. ESL. Instruction in English as a Second Language, although Lau v. Nichols found that ESL by itself could not be considered adequate. "Pull-out" classes stigmatize students.
3. Immersion. Early grades: target language. As fluency in English increases, instruction in mother tongue introduced. First was St. Lambert experiment in Canada: parents voluntarily pt their English-speaking children in French immersion program. Very successful. Unfortunately, doesn't work in America very well.
   
4. Transitional Bilingual Education. Instruction in the mother tongue during early years, with gradual increase of instruction in English. The hope is to "mainstream" ESL students by high school. The problem is that it's hard to find teachers who can teach in the native language of EVERY minority group. Also, some groups, like the Hmong, have no background in formal schooling.
   
5. Maintenance Bilingual Education. Purpose of bilingual education is to maintain ethnic identity, language and culture. Often inspires fear and anger in conservative people who fear minority succession.
   

While opponents of bilingual education are quite vocal, the majority of Americans support bilingual education. Opponents are usually older people.

The AIR report found that bilingual education did not change students' scores in language and math. There are numerous problems with methodology, however. Test scores themselves are not a measure of whether bilingual education lessened drop-out rates or helped students get jobs after schooling. It measures academic ability and not interpersonal language skills.

TESOL will always play an important part in bilingual education.

processing measures of cognitive-linguistic interactions for children with language impairment and reading disabilities

by windsor and kohnert
in brain, behavior, and learning

cognitive-linguistic processing emphasizes that lang. is part of a broader cognitive system and that processing proficiency is a better measure of capability than performance measures.

"Language performance measures are heavily experience-dependent"

the authors found tasks that seperated bilingual kids from normal readers from RD kids.

Rapid Automatic Naming tasks "tap into a common cognitive skills setthat underlies performance across languages."

these tasks de-emphasize experience.

contrastive rhetoric studies in applied linguistics

ulla connor

"Three approaches concerning tranfer have dominated: contrastive analysis; error analysis; and its later development, an analysis of the transitional system called 'interlanguage'."

"Non-Anglo-American English as in international language encourages tolerance for nonnative norms of English."

"English readers expect and require landmarks of coherence and unity as they read. The writer needs to provide transitional statements. In Japanese, on the other hand, trasnsitions may be lacking. The reader is expected to piece sections together to make a coherent text."

"In addition to emphasizing the personal growth and integration inherent in such self-evaluation, social constructionist theory in L1 composition has allied itself with an anti-authoritarian ideology."

"...critical pedagogy...has not been embraced by ESL teachers and researchers..."

developing awareness of crosscultural pragmatics: the case of american/german sociable interaction

catherine evans davies

"...this article draws teachers' attention to three interrelated aspects of conversational style which are important in initial crosscultural encounters between Americans and Germans."

criticizes the natural approach

"The argument is made that language teachers should give pragmatic competence/awareness the highest priority in the classroom, form the beginning of language study."

3 points:

1. "we need to organize teaching around speech activities as discourse rather than around isolated speech acts."
2. "we need to develop in learners the ability to looks for patterns, through discourse analysis and a certain critical distance, rather than 'facts' or 'rules' about language and culture."
3. "we need to present cultural themes (e.g., the public versus the private self: what is the boundary betwen an acceptable and unacceptable degree of self-disclosure in small talk?) as opportunities to explore diversity within the home and target cultures."

"Too often we also find an avoidance of cultural generalizations."

"...compared to German strategies, American conversationalist style (in particular with reference to the experience of university students engaged in crosscultural conversations) 'is weighted toward deference strategies' (Byrnes 1986)...Such a conversational style in fact allows the individualism which Americans favor ideologically, in that respect for the individuality of others protects one's own by maintaining reciprocal respect."

Byrned characterizes "conversational style among German univeristy students not in terms of solidarity or deference politeness strategies, but rather as placing greater emphasis on the 'information-conveying function of language, as compared with the social bonding function' (1986). She suggests further that this emphasis leads naturally to more dircet strategies."

Example in which a roommate stains another roommate's blouse. "Germans were much more willing to pass judgment on the violators, exercising a more overt social control function than English speakers."

"An alternative explanation might be that Germans have more of a sense of homogeneity with a shared set of norms which they can enforce, whereas Americans are more aware of their heterogeneity."

"...among Americans the average 'social distance' between different individuals seems to be smaller than among Germans, but only in regard to the peripheral regions."

(1) SMALL TALK
"The existence of the expression 'small talk' in English suggests that it is a cultural category; in contrast, German simply describes the practice as ...(unconstrained, unrestricted, easy interaction).

"Germans seemed to have obligatory opening and closing rituals for public encounters, with nothing in between; whereas Americans seemed to have more flexible (and sometimes optional) openings and closings, with the focus on the sociable interaction in the middle."

"It is easy to envision the difficulties of an Americna trying to develop small talk along American cultural lines."

"Germans in the US often misunderstand small talk to be the initiation of a 'close friendship' and can feel set up for a disappointment."

(2) JOKING
"...for Germans, joking is private behavior, whereas for Americans it is public as well as private...English speakers (and Austrian German speakers) have a more creative and lighthearted attitude and less prescriptive approach to language than Germans do."

"Germans tend to judge Americans negatively on the basis of what was seen to be their excessive joking; they were assumed to be 'frivolous' and 'not serious enough.'"

"human beings are not cultural robots."

Noun Phrases in Chinese and English: A study of English structural problems encountered by CHinese ESL students in Hong Kong

alice y.w. chan

"This paper attempts to find the sources of the problems and proposes a system of teaching priorities for the benefit of teachers and students."

"In terms of usage, Chinese pronouns are used more sparingly than their English counterparts--they are normally omitted if their referents are contextually clear."

ze5 bun2 syu1
this CLASSIFIER book

tung4 hok6 mun4
student plural

"While plural nouns (whith plural determiners when necessary( in English are obligatorily used to mark plurality...the Chinese plural marker mun4 is not used across the board."

"Like English, Chinese nouns also have the common case...and the genitive case...but neither Chinese nouns nor CHinese pronouns are distinguished by the subjective or objective case--the same form is used no matter whether the pronoun is the subject or object of a sentence."

Chan got confused between written and spoken.
"...the Chinese third person singular pronouns are also distinguished in gennder, i.e., taa1 (he), taa1(she)."

"Determiners introduce noun phrases."

"CHinese has no articles equivalent to the ENglish articles."

jat1 go 3 jan 4
one CLASSIFIER person
(a person)

dik1=possessive
ngo5 dik1 ji1 fuk6
I GEN clothes
(my clothes)

"Though the inclusion of a possessive dterminer does not make the imperatives ungrammatical, it tends to destroy the favorite style of terseness typical of the CHinese language.

baa2 (nei5 dik1( daai6 ji1 tyut3 haa6
BA (you GEN) big coat take off
(Take off your coat.)

"Classifiers in Chinese are important because in many cases the absence of a classifier, such as the direct translations from corresponding English noun phrases, would result in ungrammatical structures."

"Unlike ENglish, CHinese does not have post-modifiers."

Table 1 has ungrammatical ENglish sentences.

Topic-comment structure: "*My father he alays get my mother's money."

Resumptive pronouns: "*She is the teacher that she taught me grammar last year."

Missing relatives: "*You are the first person come to Hong Kong."
"*There is only one people look after my whole life."
"*One obvious smptom can be detected is insomnia."

Missing verbs: "The reduced relative clause in ENglish"
"*I have a large family which including grandmother, grandfather...."
"*After enjoying our delicious food which cooked by my mum, we wnt to school together."
"*The negative consequence that brought by its growth was...."

Missing subjects: "Chinese pronouns are used much more sparingly than their English counterparts...Chinese learners tend to produce English sentences with the subjects missing..."
"*I think my most important person in my life is not one, is my family."

English faux amis for francophones learning english

robert sheen
http://www.volterre-fr.com/sheen.html
retrieved January 19, 2009
Volterre-Fr, English and French Language Resources

There are "tens of hundreds" of faux amis. Venn diagrams can be useful in teaching francophones about faux amis. Absolute faux amis are represented by two circles which do not overlap; partial faux amis can be represented by a smaller circle inside a larger one, or by overlapping circles.