My Own Private Saturnalia

As I sit and recover from a most productive fall semester (and not a bad Christmas haul, I don't mind adding), I find myself making plans and adjustments for the upcoming spring semester. This is in clear violation of one of the rules I had set for myself when I began teaching college – The week between Christmas and New Years was to be completely free of business; the week was to be for me and me alone. In hindsight, I'm actually glad I've chosen to break this rule.

I had originally gotten the idea for this week off when I did some research into the Roman holiday of Saturnalia – a week at the end of the end of the year which was reserved for wild parties, overturning of social norms, and general raucousness. During this Roman festival, masters served servants, courthouses were closed, and Roman youth were immune to arrest for minor crimes such as vandalism or being a public nuisance. While I have no plans for any such debauchery this New Year's Eve, it should come as no surprise that I found the “no work gets done this week” aspect of it particularly appealing -- so appealing, in fact, that I freely admit that it was probably more of my own tradition than the holiday's.

I discovered Saturnalia quite by accident, as I, for my own curiosity, did some research into Christmas. I found that one of the reasons that The Catholic Church chose December 25 to celebrate Christmas was to change the general mood of the time away from generalized debauchery and towards more... spiritual thoughts.This got me thinking about holidays across cultures. How much do we as teachers know about the holidays and traditions in our multicultural classrooms? I know of many teachers who encourage their classes to participate or reenact certain holiday traditions (which, due to the religious nature of some of them, occasionally causes them to run afoul of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution), but rather than merely celebrate them, do we give our students opportunities to explore them? I'm not just referring to American holidays and traditions, but to their own – how often do we give students the chance to explain not only what they do, but why they do it?

I've seen (and given) plenty of holiday-themed assignments in which the history of certain traditions and customs associated with a holiday are researched and explained – such assignments are interesting and insightful to the students, who often don't know the history behind the traditions (which happens to be something of a hobby of mine). But what I've noticed is that these assignments are almost universally geared towards researching the traditions of the dominant (that is to say, our own) culture. Over the course of the last couple of semesters, however, I've learned about many ways that my students have incorporated their own traditions into mainstream holidays. This shouldn't come as any kind of surprise – most countries and cultures have traditions for various holidays, such as birthdays, New Years celebrations, and the Christmas season (whether they actually celebrate Christmas or not), but the actual traditions vary from culture to culture. We who have been raised in Western/American culture sometimes take our traditions for granted, and don't always know why we celebrate the way we do. I've therefore become curious as to whether students from other cultures have done so with their own traditions.

Of course, all educators should be mindful of the customs and traditions that are important parts of their students' backgrounds, but what I plan to do in the coming semester (my New Year's resolution, as it were), is to have the students themselves be the source of the important information: why? We should always strive to encourage higher-level thinking in our students, and what better place to begin than with those things which are intimately familiar with, yet at the same time, might not know much about?

An additional benefit is that it gives students the chance to showcase their own cultures in front of a diverse class – not only do they get to teach others about their own rich history, but they get to reaffirm it for themselves. Holidays traditions exist, I believe, as all traditions do, to give us a vital connection with our past, and to serve as reminders that we are not alone; we are part of something greater and more enduring than ourselves. Our students, no matter where they are from, should be afforded every opportunity to both remember and express that truth.

Merry Christmas!

No post this week -- just a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone!

Blast from the Past

A review of McClosky, M. & Stack, L. (1996). Voices in Literature. Bronze level. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. 200pp., 5 units.

As part of my studies in English and ESL, I often come across various textbooks which I'm called upon to review. While I do have some I can recommend, I occasionally find it useful to look at the opposite end of the spectrum, and explore some of the “don'ts” of ESL instruction. I recall this review I found for what turned out to be a real doozy of an ESL text.

In defense of this book, I will point out that its date of publication was 1996 – which goes a long way to show how far the field of ESL education has come. I have no idea whether or not this text is still in use anywhere in the country, but if it is, I urge teachers to remove it form their ESL curricula and move it over to history – for indeed, its greatest use now is as a relic of a past time.

This book appears to be for a grammar/middle school level, best suited for students at WIDA level 3, Developing. It comes with an audio cassette but no online component – hardly surprising considering how old the book is.

Some of the topics and themes may be a bit much for students at this grade and proficiency level, including The Diary of Anne Frank or an essay on WWII Navajo code talkers, but the book provides a fair amount of pre- and -post-reading exercises to help students put the content into a meaningful perspective. There's very little explicit language/vocabulary instruction in the book, which seems to make great assumptions about students' prior knowledge. Without explicit language instruction, it's difficult to say how exactly it would be integrated into content instruction, which is what the book focuses on. As many of the questions are either open-ended or focus on group work, there's not much objective material here to aid in evaluation or assessment.

The book, being a language through literature book, emphasizes reading and writing skills. Language functions are simple, including describing a scene or giving recitations of facts. There is actually very little guided language instruction in the book, with only minimal vocabulary introduced and no grammar exercises at all. Content instruction seems to overshadow language instruction at every step, sometimes at the expense of language. For example, after the essay about WWII Navajo code talkers, students are encouraged to write their own codes – an exercise which seems to me counterproductive to teaching standard English.

The book's exercises are few, seemingly random, and focus more on content than on any specific language skills. The exercises tend heavily to involve pair or group work, which provides students to practice language in hands-on settings – practice what, however, is something of a mystery because the book offers little to no guidance in language instruction. Students are expected to answer comprehension questions after each story, as well as other exercises such as filling in knowledge charts or adding captions to illustrations. The variety of exercises (too much variety; it seems too random) at least insures that some students' learning styles will fare better than others. The random range of exercise types, as well as the emphasis on group work, at least serve to differentiate instruction, as less-proficient students can seek aid form their more-proficient peers.

The book is well illustrated, relying primarily on hand-drawn illustrations with the occasional photograph of a scene or author. There is enough imagery and realia to promote understanding of the stories and essays in question, but as the book is somewhat dated, so are the images – the clothing and props shown in the pictures seems a bit out of date. There are, at least, enough representations of different cultures – from Hispanic to Asian to Latin American – that ESL students are likely to identify with.

I was very disappointed in this book – in fact, I repeatedly found myself checking the introduction and contents to insure that it was, in fact, an ESL textbook, and not a mainstream book that I had picked up in error. It is the oldest book I've reviewed, and its numerous shortcomings illustrate just how far ESL education has come in 15 years. This book needs much more explicit language goals, and needs to incorporate them into the content of the stories it presents. Simply having the students emulate activities in the book – for example, having them describe their own family after a story with a family theme – is not enough, and accomplishes little in ESL education. The exercises are a confusing mishmash with very little logic or organization behind them. I'd be hard pressed to even recommend this book for a mainstream literature class, let alone for the unique needs of an ESL student body. It's simply too far behind the times to be of much value.

Observation of an ESL class

A little over a year ago, I had the opportunity to sit in and observe an ESL class, and discuss my observations. The following is a copy of my report.

College life is stressful enough in one language, let alone in two. Academia has a language all its own that a student must learn in order to succeed – a daunting prospect if the student is already in the process of learning English. Fortunately, ESL programs exist across the country at every academic level, from kindergarten all the way to higher education. Recently, I had the opportunity to observe an ESL class at a local university.

This university's ESL program services approximately 250 students each semester. The majority of these students (about 45% total) are Hispanic, coming from areas of the Caribbean, Central and South America. The second largest group is Middle Eastern, mostly from Egypt. The Indian subcontinent is also well represented in the ESL program. According to a representative of the ESL program, many of these students have already earned degrees or nearly so in colleges in their home countries, and come to this university to continue their education.

The ESL program at this university is a part-time program which runs alongside the college's English curriculum. It need not be taken for credit, although about three-quarters of the students in the program are matriculated. The rest take the courses as part of their own continuing education. While the program contains ten courses in total, only two – ESL 101 and ESL 102 – are necessary to fulfill the University's ESL requirement. The other courses are either electives for those who wish to continue their ESL education, or prerequisites recommended based on the entrance examination.

The entrance examination is in three parts: a standardized grammar test, a written composition, and an oral interview. Exiting the program is a matter of completing ESL 102: English Composition II – ESL. It was this class that I observed on Thursday, April 8, taught by “Dr. Carson.”

The ESL class I observed contained 15 students, approximately 60% female, of varying backgrounds: Hispanic, Arabic, and African American. The mood was congenial for the most part, but as the class went on (the class was three hours long), I could hear the complaints and grumbles of students getting restless. But on the whole, the students were attentive, cooperative, and eager to learn.

Because this class was the final class in the ESL program, most of the students I observed were quite proficient and nearly fluent in English – I estimate they were about levels 4-5 on the WIDA scale of proficiency. From the chatter among themselves and their banter with Dr. Carson, it sounded to me like their conversational English skills were at near-native levels. My earlier interview with Dr. Carson seemed to indicate that the focus of the class would be the students' academic language. My observation of the actual class supported this.

During my pre-observation interview with Professor Carson, he explained to me his personal theory of language learning. According to his theory, academic language has two components: syntax (grammar), and preformulated structures. The words of any language can be combined in literally an infinite number of ways, however, certain combinations, or preformulations, usually representing idiomatic expressions, turn up more often and are, according to Dr. Carson, not given enough attention by language teachers.

Some examples of preformulations particular to academic language are phrases such as “_________ has to do with _________,” “There is a sense of _________ in _________,” or “If it hadn't been for _________, _________ would have _________.” Dr. Carson believes in teaching his students a series of structures like these from the first day of class, so that they may become familiar with them and use them in their own academic essays, plugging them in where needed , like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He referred to is as, “learning English from the inside out.”

I will admit at this point that I had some reservations about his theory at this point, probably because learning “from the inside out,” sounds too much like learning “from the bottom up.” While this approach was popular in the earlier days of language teaching, various ESL philosophies have long since come to the conclusion that language cannot be learned in pieces – it is best learned holistically (Richard-Amato, 2010). On the surface, this part of Dr. Carson's theory seems to be a step backwards in language teaching, but I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a man who has quite literally written the book (several books, from the look of his office) on the topic.

One of Dr. Carson's other classroom practices that we discussed during the pre-observation interview was how he had his students keep “metacognitive journals” in which they would write about some aspect of language or grammar usage that they had recently studied or learned. A sample topic might be the importance of organizing your ideas before an essay, or what makes a good introduction. The idea was to get the students into the habit of examining not only what a given rule was, but why that rule existed. Forcing the students to examine and understand the why of a given rule or good study habit reinforced the lesson in the students' minds. I found that to be a very useful practice and plan to incorporate it into my own future classes – ESL or not.

Dr. Carson's emphasis on metacognition, as well as a combination of grammar and useful academic language production led me to assume that he was practicing a cognitive-code approach, as explained by Patricia Richard-Amato: “Cognitive code refers to any attempt to rely consciously on a syllabus based on grammar but at the same time allows for the practice and use of language in meaningful ways” (Righard-Amato, 2001). By comparing Dr. Carson's ideas with our own readings and discussions, I was even able to narrow down which of the linguistic theorists studied in class most closely matched Dr. Carson's approach: Lev Vygotsky.

“Vygotsky and Piaget were both constructionists, meaning that they believed that knowledge itself is structured and developed from within the individual through active learning” (Richard-Amato, 2010). Certainly, Dr. Carson's emphasis on the structure of learning, and encouraging his students to introspectively examine that structure through metacognitive journaling, would put him somewhere in the area of the Cognitives – either Vygotsky or Piaget. But what puts Dr. Carson firmly in the Vygotsky camp is their agreement on the role of society in cognitive development, as well as their work in scaffolding. Through Vygotsky, Wells stressed the notion of “scaffolding” language, bringing each learner up from the level they are at towards the next step in their cognitive development. (Richard-Amato, 2010) I could see how practice with Dr. Carson's preformulations – unfamiliar at first, but eventually becoming a habit – would lead students forward in their academics. Dr. Carson's preformulations are a type of instructional scaffolding that Echevarria, Vogt, and Short identified as one of three types that can be used. Preformulations can be used to enhance student learning like a graphic organizer Echevarria et al used as an example of instructional scaffolding (2008).

Vygotsky, like Dr. Carson, believed that society determined a person's stages of development. During my discussion with Dr. Carson, he noted that there were two types of ESL students in his classes – those who came directly from a foreign country, and those raised in America by non-English speaking parents. His opinion was that students in the latter group – native-born but still not English natives, had a more difficult time learning English than those who came from a fully-developed, yet foreign, cultural experience. As he explained, those students coming from a hybrid foreign-American culture don't have as solid a foundation as those who were already established in their homeland.

As most language arts teachers know, the language experience starts with “me,” and gradually moves outward towards “family,” “friends,” peers,” and so forth. But my opinion is that a person's culture is such an integral part of a person's identity that if it is not well defined, then neither is a person's sense of self. How can language begin with “me” when there is some question as to who “me” even is? These were just a few of the heady issues I had in front of me as I prepared to observe Dr. Carson at work.

The first thing I noticed about the layout of the classroom was how unremarkable it was. While group work is practically a mantra in ESL education, I was surprised to see the students seated in rows similar to any mainstream class. Students never separated into groups and had absolutely no interaction with anyone except Dr. Carson himself. I surmise that because this class is the final step before the students are mainstreamed, and that, as previously mentioned, their conversational English is already nearly fluent, Dr. Carson's goal was to operate the class as closely to a mainstream English class as possible, so that the students could easily adjust next semester.

While I see the value of Dr. Carson's approach, I have to disagree with its execution. Students, even advanced ESL students, should be given opportunities to interact and produce language. “Organizing students into smaller groups for instructional purposes provides a context that whole-group, teacher-dominated instruction doesn't offer” (Echevarria et al., 2008). And ESL or not, three hours is a long time to listen to one man. Experience has taught me that some sort of group activity is needed to break the monotony and dispel some of the restless grumbling I began to hear during the second hour.

After Dr. Carson listed his objectives for the day on the board, the class began with a quiz on the short story that the students were to have read for that day. This was a regular feature of the class which Dr. Carson had described (to the students as well as to myself) as a “Yellow Dog” quiz. As he put it, “If a story has a yellow dog in it, and I ask a question about a black dog, then I'll know who read and who didn't.” My initial impression was that this quiz, consisting of ten true-or-false questions, was merely a formality to insure that the students had actually done the reading. But I did notice that Dr. Carson had added something extra: not only did the students have to answer true or false, they had to write a short explanation of their answer. I found this to be useful not only to gauge the students' grasp of the content, but to compel them to produce language, even on something as mundane as a “Yellow Dog” quiz.

With the quiz completed and the answers reviewed and discussed, Dr. Carson moved on to the main part of the day's activity: a group reading and discussion of the short story in question. Dr. Carson invited students – sometimes volunteers, but often chosen by him – to read from the short story, while he would occasionally interrupt to draw attention to a vocabulary word or figure of speech, and ask the class if they knew what it was or what it meant. When the story mentioned hemlock, he would stop the reading and ask the students if they understood what hemlock was. The a student answered that it was a poisonous plant, he was satisfied with that answer and then proceeded to ask why it was mentioned. Did the students understand that hemlock was being used here as a symbol for something? Could they recognize what that symbol was for?

As the reading of the story continued from beginning to end, Dr. Carson's discussion of symbols and metaphors led into the most important part of the class discussion: the theme of the story. Could the students identify major themes in the story? Yes, they could, and they did. Could they relate the theme of this story to those of stories read earlier in the semester? Yes they could, and they did. It was in this activity where I saw students operating on multiple levels of thinking, as categorized by Benjamin Bloom (Bastos, 2003). Students were interpreting similarities between this story and previous ones, analyzing the story in question, realizing that there was an important theme to be found, synthesizing a theme from the actions depicted in the story, and evaluating the quality of the theme's presentation, both on its own merits and compared to previous stories. The whole time they were developing cognitive skills, they were producing the necessary language to express their ideas through dialogues with Dr. Carson.

But it was here that I noticed Dr. Carson falling into a common mistake: When a student was struggling for the right words to express his idea, Dr. Carson attempted to help the student by completing their idea for them. In and of itself, I saw this as counterproductive for language development, because the student is no longer producing language, the teacher is. Worse, occasionally Dr. Carson would continue his extension of the student's idea far beyond completing a sentence. Dr. Carson would finish what he assumed a student's idea was, or perhaps what he wanted it to be, and used it to direct the class discussion from that point, without ever asking the student if that was the idea he or she was trying to get across.

Dr. Carson was no longer just assisting the students with language, but actually feeding them content – perhaps not the content the student was originally trying to express. A student attempting to express one idea only to have it misinterpreted into something completely different might be discouraged from participating if it becomes a habit. I do not believe that Dr. Carson was doing this deliberately, but only as a result of his enthusiasm for the class discussion. Nevertheless, it is a habit that Dr. Carson should look to avoid. Help the students express their ideas, but make sure it really is their ideas being expressed.

Following the discussion of the story, the class took a 20 minute break, which Dr. Carson used to hand back papers and give students individual comments on their work. Not wanting to cross the line between observation and eavesdropping, I excused myself and took advantage of the opportunity to stretch my legs. When class resumed, Dr. Carson had a new exercise for the class, the purpose of which wasn't entirely clear: A “Character Profile Generator.”

As near as I could tell, the students were expected to compose an original short story at some point in the future – possibly the end of the semester. The character profile generator, as the name suggests, was a device which assisted students in creating random characters for their stories. Students would fill in a series of blanks with random letters or numbers, and then consult a series of charts to see what effect their choice had on their character. For example, if a student selected letter “E” for the second blank, then their character was between the ages of 20 to 25 years old. If the student selected number “5” for the tenth blank, then the character came from a large family, and so forth.

The potential for speech production were very limited in this activity, as students were expected to complete it on their own, and only occasionally raised their hands to ask for the definition of certain words, particularly ones involving personality types, for example, “pessimistic.” Furthermore, Dr. Carson never made it clear whether the characters created in this activity were required to be in the students' stories, or whether or not this was just a tool to be used should the students develop writer's block. My professional opinion is that an activity with the kind of depth and involvement as the character profile generator needs more explanation, particularly about its use, or else it just seems like so much filler. While I did like the activity in and of itself, and plan to use something similar in my future creative writing classes, it just seemed out of place in this ESL class.

Dr. Carson had two more activities scheduled for that day: exercises in preformulated structures and a discussion on finding a thesis for the students' research papers, but by that point, time had run out. Dr. Carson wished the class a good day and dismissed them. All told, I found Dr. Carson's class to be an enlightening and enjoyable experience, and was intrigued by just how much of it seemed, at first glance, to run against what I had come to expect from an ESL class. If I hadn't been specifically looking for the telltale signs of ESL teaching, I might have easily assumed it to be a mainstream English Composition class. Perhaps that was the whole point.

References

Bastos, G. (2003). Multiple Intelligences, Howard Gardner and New Methods in Teaching. Jersey City: Bastos Publications.

Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2008). Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The SIOP Model. Boston: Pearson.

Richard-Amato, P. (2010). Making it Happen: From Interactive to Participatory Language Teaching: Fourth Edition. White Plains: Pearson.

A General Teaching Philosophy.

The following is from an essay I wrote in March of 2010 in response to the question, "What is my ESL teaching philosophy?"

My experience has been almost exclusively on the high school level, grades 9-12. I enjoy this level because the students are just sophisticated enough to be able to recognize and appreciate literature on several levels. A freshman class reading Animal Farm doesn't just keep track of which animals do what, they can begin to recognize the story as an allegory for the Russian Revolution. That way they can see how seemingly “harmless” literature can hide serious social messages.

A senior class reading Oedipus Rex sees not only a play about a man solving a mystery, but can understand the moral lessons the story teaches, and in turn, can learn about the culture that learned from the play – a culture which has left its mark on our own.

This leads to the greatest advantage of teaching high school students – they're already familiar with their own culture, and will be able to recognize parallels between it and the cultures represented in the stories they read. My first law of literature has always been “There's no such thing as an original story; every idea comes from somewhere.” The stories we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to; it's all been done before. My ultimate goal as a teacher is to help my students realize that, and open their idea to worlds radically different yet strangely familiar to their own.

I would say that when it comes to teaching ESL students, or indeed, any student from a non-native background, the trickiest issues come not so much from the language difference, but from the cultural difference. Without a common cultural background, it's more difficult to find something for a class to use to build new information on, and every teacher should know how important it is to base new material on previous knowledge. Scaffolding is a crucial part of any educational process, regardless of the languages involved.

As a literature teacher, I often find myself illustrating story lines from classic works in terms of movies, music, and other aspects of pop culture which many students, as it turns out, haven't been exposed to – my Thanksgiving misadventure last week was a prime example of this.

While many of the historical myths of the US are quickly fading, pop culture remains as strong as ever. I once had a class discussion in an honors class comparing the story of King Arthur, the Star Wars saga, and the Harry Potter series. A student who hasn't grown up surrounded by American popular culture wouldn't make the connections. However, for better or for worse, there's little escape from American pop culture.

Rather than start assigning movies to my ESL students, one option find the aspects of their culture that they are familiar with, for them to make new connections with the literature in class. This could be an opportunity not only for me to learn more about my students, but for the ESL student to overcome anxiety by proudly demonstrating something of their own culture, which reinforces the (very true) belief that the culture they are coming from is every bit as important as the one they are entering.

How to use knowledge about the nature of language as a system to teach listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills – Probably the most important thing to remember about the system is that it is a system. Careful attention must be paid to all four of these skills, and they are best developed in a certain order: usually passive skills (listening and reading) must develop before productive skills (speaking and writing), and the oral skills will develop before the written ones. A teacher should structure their lessons so that all four of these skills are put to use, and that, over the course of the school year, the skills emphasized follow a pattern that allows them to master the language system in its proper order.

Students are going to spend a lot of time listening before gaining enough knowledge or confidence to produce – what linguists refer to as the “silent period.” The first step for ESL teachers is to tailor expectations accordingly, and not demand large amounts of produced language in the beginning. That will probably mean no major speeches or essays at first, instead giving the students time to absorb language via lectures and reading groups (preferably with English-speakers) to take in English until they feel ready to produce language.

One of the most useful lessons I've learned about language acquisition is the Critical Period Hypothesis, which states that a language learner only has a set window of time in order to learn a second language with native-like proficiency. By the time a student reaches high school, that window has most likely come and gone, but that doesn't mean that they can't learn. First and foremost, expectations of their language development need to be adjusted – if they're not going to speak like natives, they shouldn't be expected to – not according to any set schedule, and certainly not within the confines of a school year. Communication, not perfection, is the goal.

Second, language learners are going to learn a lot more from their peers than from the classroom, so with that in mind, make group and cooperative learning an important part of any teaching strategy. Language learners partnered with native speakers will have to communicate in order to complete their assignments, and in so doing, students will be developing their language skills by using them in relevant ways.

The goal of any ESL teacher is to integrate content with language, and in this area I believe that my particular subject matter will be of the most use. Literature is, after all, a medium of language in which a particular culture expresses its values and ideals. When I taught World Literature, I acquainted my students with the concept of the hero (the works of mythographer Joseph Campbell is especially useful). Every culture create heroes as role models that exemplify the values of the culture they came from.

“Who are these heroes?” I would ask the class, “and what do we learn about the culture they came from?” For example, ancient Greek heroes such as Odysseus, Perseus, and even Oedipus were famous for their intellect, which was highly valued by the society which created them. Medieval characters such as King Arthur and Dante the Pilgrim showed great religious faith, a hallmark of their period. “Who are the heroes of your culture? What makes them special?” This is an opportunity for students of every culture to showcase their heroes, from their native culture's history, literature, even mythology. And if the student isn't familiar enough with their own culture to know their heroes, it's an excellent chance for them to research and learn.

My teaching strategy was, at first, to unite the students under a common goal – to understand literature originating outside either of their cultures. But then I realized that too much of this approach would put ESL students at a disadvantage, since they would be faced with both a culture and a language barrier, while the English-speaking students would only face a different culture. Then it occurred to me to add literature (both classic an contemporary) from the the students' own culture into the canon.

For example, many World Literature texts include selections of Middle Eastern literature and poetry which often gets overlooked by teachers (In one of my previous schools, I was the only teacher who chose in include selections from The Arabian Nights in class). In a classroom with a large Middle Eastern population, ESL students, working in groups with English-speakers as much as possible, would add their knowledge of their own culture to class discussions as well as small group or student-paired projects and presentations.

The advantages are many: First, since the ESL student is learning about their own history and culture, they are far more likely to be eager and motivated to work. Second, they will be discussing their own culture with their English-speaking classmates, which not only gives the ESL students more exposure to English in academic as well as peer/social situations, but also motivates them to learn English so that they may better understand the great works of their own culture.

Hanging over all of this, as always, is the issue of WIDA and state curriculum standards, and the question of assessment. The answer to this question depends on what level of English proficiency my future students will be on. But in general, the important thing is going to be to determine that level as quickly as possible (assuming the students haven't been tested beforehand, and that data is available to me), and model one's own teaching style, from the nature of assignments to the way a teacher speaks in class, according to their level.

Using my own experience in Multicultural World Literature as an example, a level 2 student should be able to “summarize examples of story lines from native cultures using visuals or graphic organizers (e.g., outlines) in literature circles using L1 or L2” (http://www.wida.us/standards/6-12%20Standards%20web.pdf). I could arrange a lesson in which students created such a visual media (a flowchart, for example) that organized key points in a story's plot, summarizing each one according to which character caused it and why, showing clearly how each event led to the next one in the story. A small group or pair of students working on such a chart would demonstrate sufficient skills at a 2nd level in accordance with the WIDA standards.

A level 4 student on the same WIDA scale should be able to chart a character's development from the beginning of a story to the end. For this level, I would propose a similar assignment with a different focus: rather than follow the story line, the flowchart would follow the actions and events surrounding a single character, and make note of how each event changes the character, for better or worse (A character slowly learning an important moral, or another character's descent into evil/madness, for example).

The WIDA standards provide a guide for identifying what a student should be able to accomplish in order to advance both their language and content skills. A teacher's responsibility is to know the guide and implement it to the best of their ability.

Of course, in so doing, all language skills, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, must be integrated into lessons. The value of performance-based activities in the classroom cannot be understated – which is why I believe that drama teachers have the best potential to be great ESL teachers. Having a group of students read a section from a novel or short story and then, in groups, act out the scene in front of the class, has always proven to be very effective in developing students' abilities to read, comprehend, and then perform. And why stop at literature? Couldn't students just as easily “act out” scenes from history, or even scientific concepts? I once saw a group of students, wearing signs that read “T-cell” and “virus,” represent the immune system in front of the class.

When performing scenes from plays, I've found a variant which works well, and is enjoyable to do besides: In a dialogue, or similar scene with a small number of characters (I've used the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in the past, but if the students aren't ready for Shakespeare, any play will do), each character is assigned to two students who have prepared ahead of time: One student reads aloud from the text, giving the lines the necessary voice, emotion, etc., which the other “performs,” pantomiming the action of the scene in front of the class. In this way, one student reads and speaks, the other listens and acts. The lesson can either begin or end with a short essay or similar written assignment in which the student describes their character's action in the scene. In this way, opportunities for listening, speaking, reading, and writing have been combined in a single lesson. These are just a few possibilities to combine content and English instruction in a classroom.

In summation, we have to always remember that language does not exist in a vacuum, nor should it be studied strictly for its own sake -- language is both a product of and a tool to understand a particular culture, and students who wish to be truly bilingual must also strive to be bicultural -- learning their new culture while never losing sight of the importance of their own.

Thanksgiving -- Do We Know Why We Should Be Thankful?

 A funny thing happened as I was putting together my lesson plan for this week. Since Thanksgiving was around the corner, and the writing topic for the week was debate, I thought it would be both interesting and topical to use Thanksgiving as a topic for a sample debate.
It's not too difficult to find Thanksgiving subjects, and a little time on Google yielded paydirt: Nicki Heskin wrote about a pair of California elementary schools that stumbled into a Thanksgiving controversy when, due to a letter-writing campaign begun by a Native American mother, changed its traditional Thanksgiving celebration.
The celebration seemed harmless enough – the kindergarten students dress up in Pilgrim and Indian costumes, and recreate the traditional “First Thanksgiving.” However, when the mother of one of the students complained, compelling the school to alter (but not abandon) their celebration, she became the target of angry mail and phone calls.

Heskin discusses the ordeal in detail here: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art39029.asp


Now, I already knew enough of the history to know that the traditional “First Thanksgiving” is more good storytelling than history, but the author of this article decided to dig a little deeper, and get to some of the facts behind the myth. What she found surprised her, and what she decided was that schoolchildren (at least Kindergarten kids) shouldn't be taught to celebrate the myth, as she details in this article: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art30719.asp

It looked like I had enough material to make a good lesson – using these two articles as a guide, I could introduce students to the elements of argumentation and debate by having them present an argument either for or against ending “traditional” Thanksgiving celebrations, showing them how to use claims, reasons, and evidence to construct such an argument, how to prepare a rebuttal, and how to avoid logical fallacies.

What I got was silence.

It turned out that none of the students – not a single one – were aware of the history behind Thanksgiving – not the myth or the truth. They literally had no idea why the holiday was celebrated. If my class was entirely ESL students, I'd have accepted it as a case of them not being familiar with American culture. But the fact of it was that The majority of my class are native speakers, having come up in the US school system. And yet, the issue of Thanksgiving had never been brought up, to the point that these students – college level students – only knew that Thanksgiving was about family and eating turkey.

I've always been interested in historical myths and the truth behind them, and Thanksgiving is loaded with American mythology. Is this, I wondered, how our school system is dealing with the myth: by ignoring it entirely? In the effort to avoid controversy, have our schools avoided the history completely?

If so, I can't stress enough how detrimental this is not only to education, but to the cultural awareness of our students. Our students need to know about their history – its facts as well as its fables – so that they can better appreciate the nuances of their culture; this, I believe, is true of ESL students as well as native speakers. We all have a duty to be aware of the history and stories that have contributed to our past, so that we all can better understand the present. Hiding unpleasant truths behind comforting myths is not the answer, but neither is forgetting the history in the name of debunking the myth.

I can understand why such controversies should be kept away from Kindergarteners, but there's no excuse to keep them away from college students.

Sociolinguistics -- Class Struggles in Literature

It has long been established in the field of sociolinguistics that language has often been a tool to reinforce social standing, establish one's superiority over others of lower social standing, show respect (or lack thereof) to members of a higher perceived social status, or show solidarity among members of one's own social group. But while the field of sociolinguistics is relatively young, authors, playwrights, and media magnates have long since been aware of the connection between language varieties and perceived social status, and have deftly and deliberately used specific languages, dialects, and variations to achieve a variety of sociological effects within their works – many of which have long since broken out of the world of fiction and inspired, or at the very least, influenced, society. Sociolinguistic studies in have clearly and irrefutably marked a correlation between language use and social standing, but art has been imitating life long before even the first study.

Pearl (2006) explored the use of languages in various novels, focusing on fictional, constructed languages, which she dubbed “conlangs.” She says that authors have used conlangs “to give their stories depth and intellectually stimulating plot twists and to address mature themes.” The existence of and interactions within and among social classes would certain qualify as one of the mature themes which can be brought to light through the careful and deliberate use of language.

Wardhaugh (2010) posited that certain languages or varieties of languages are more powerful, and consequently, more valuable, than others. This perception extends to the people who use such language, as well as those situations and circumstances in which the “more powerful” language or variation is used, as opposed to the “lesser” one. Wardhaugh adds to this by stating, “we cannot escape such issues of power in considering language and social relationships.” It is through a small sampling of various uses in language in classical and popular fiction that we can see how literary artists, far from escaping such issues, have embraced them to add to the literary and social impact of their works.

One literary great who used language as a tool to achieve cultural change was Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). A Florentine poet during the Middle ages, Dante broke with the literary traditions of his time by writing his work, including his magnum opus, La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), not in Latin, the lingua franca for literary and scholarly works of the time, but in his own regional Italian dialect of the common people. Dante's deliberate choice of language, breaking with tradition, was part of his effort to spread the them of his Commedia to as broad an audience as possible. As Nostoro (2003) put it, “Dante was the first major poet in the Middle Ages to write on a serious topic in the “low” Italian language instead of Latin, which was the norm for writings on theology at the time. Dante’s main motive for writing ‘The Divine Comedy’ was to communicate that everyone needs spiritual renewal by God in order to be saved and spend eternity in heaven.”

So Dante, rather than appease the intellectual and theological elite (two classes which, during the medieval period, would've practically been one and the same), directs his greatest work towards the common folk, in their own language. The result of this is not only the most widely popular work of medieval literature, but the formation and standardization of the Italian language itself, as Nostoto explains: “Possibly Dante’s greatest contribution was his opposition to the popular belief that Latin was the only suitable language for literature. He advocated the use of Italian with spoken dialect, and his works are the basis for modern Italian.”

Glover (1997), also acknowledges Dante's contribution to modern Italian. saying that “at the beginning of the 14th century, Latin was the foremost language of literature; and it is the orderliness and comprehensibility of Latin that gives strength to the new literary language of Italian that Dante created almost single-handedly,” but continues the praise for Dante's invention and use of Italian, saying, “What is amazing about Dante's language is the fluency, the plainness, the simplicity – the sheer approachability – of his words. . .Try reading the opening of The Inferno in any parallel-text edition. Listen to the words on tape as you follow them with your eye. The Italian – both the vocabulary and the way in which the words are pronounced – seems invitingly close to the Italian of today. That could never be said of Chaucer and his English contemporaries.”

In other words, the popularity of Dante's work not only helped create standard Italian, but firmly established it as a literary language on equal social and intellectual footing with Latin itself. In his poetry, Dante consolidated the dialects into a standard language of the people and elevated it out of vulgar parlance into into a new level of respectability. The tradition of Latin being the language of the elite, however, was not about to go away any time soon, but neither were those men who chose to challenge it, such as the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who originally wrote his scientific publications in Latin, but switched to Italian as the importance of his discoveries, and thus, his desire to share them, grew. Says Adams (2000), “As Galileo's telescope continued to reveal more surprises--sunspots, for example, and the phases of Venus – he sought an ever-wider audience. Flouting tradition, he began writing in Italian so that his fellow citizens, who had not been educated in universities, could learn of the new science for themselves. `I want them to realize,' Galileo explained, `that just as nature has given to them, as well as philosophers, eyes with which to see her works, so she has also given them brains capable of penetrating and understanding them.'”

It is as though both Dante and Galileo realized that through acquiring knowledge, one can increase their social standing and power in society, and that the traditions in place at the time seemed designed to prevent this from occurring. So both men fought the tradition, and in so doing, chipped away at Latin's exalted status as the only language suitable for serious discussion.

Up until this time, while Latin enjoyed its status as the language of educated work, “spoken” languages, such as Dante's Tuscan dialect, were relegated to an inferior status. Indeed, Wardhaugh has this to say about vernaculars:

Linguists use the term vernacular to refer to the language a person grows up with and uses in everyday life in ordinary, commonplace, social interactions. We should note that this variety may meet with social disapproval from others who favor another variety, sometimes one heavily influenced by the written form of the language. Therefore, vernacular often has pejorative associations when used in public discourse.

In other words, vernacular language is often looked down upon in a society because the spoken form of a language is commonly seen as inferior to the written form. But what happens when the written form is the spoken form? What happens when a literary author, in putting the “inferior” vernacular to print, writes one of the greatest novels in American literature? The novelist is Mark Twain (1835-1910), and the novel is the American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Over a century after its first publication, Huckleberry Finn remains one of the most controversial, challenged, and banned books in America today. Sullivan (2001) sums up the controversy thus:

From the start, the book was greeted with an odd mixture of praise and hostility. Most complaints were about the language. Twain had taken the innovative step of writing entirely in the vernacular of his characters, but refined critics thought his words were far too vulgar and lewd. The Concord Public Library banned the book, declaring it "trash of the veriest sort" and full of language fit only for the slums.

Twain, in the name of accuracy, took great pains to recreate the vernacular of the era as authentically as he could, which in part led to the Concord Library's above claim of it containing “language fit only for the slums.” More than anything else, the word nigger is at the heart of the firestorm surrounding the book, the word itself appearing approximately two hundred times throughout the text, mostly spoken by Huck, who serves as both protagonist and narrator. Again,Twain, writing during America's Reconstruction period a novel which took place in the Antebellum South, sacrificed political correctness for authenticity, incurring the wrath of critics then and now.

While Huck's own language, as transcribed by Twain, is tricky, but readable with some effort: “I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks, though I ain't had no experience, and can't say for certain, but it looks so to me, anyway,” it's the language of Jim, the runaway slave who Huck agrees to smuggle to freedom, which is nearly incomprehensible: “Well, one night I creeps to de do', pooty late, en de do' warn't quite shet, en I hear ole missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans.”

While many critics have decried Twain's use of language as racist, using Jim's language to portray him as stupid or inferior, Twain's supporters, including Twain himself, insist that the text is a measure of the authenticity of the characters' speech. Every edition of Huckleberry Finn published includes an explanatory note written by Twain himself, which reads as follows:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap- hazard fashion, or by guess-work, but pains-takenly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

If we accept Twain's explanation, then we are also forced to realize that the notion of Jim being judged as somehow deficient because of his dialect is hardly limited to Antebellum society. Indeed, prejudices against African-American dialects persist to this day, as Wardhaugh acknowledges in his discussion of African American English (AAE): “Many educators regarded its various distinguishing characteristics as deficiencies: black children were deficient in language ability because their language did not have certain features of the standard, and the consequence of that deficiency was cognitive deficiency.” Wardhaugh explains this as the Deficit Hypothesis, and why he, and most sociolinguists, reject it, he cannot deny that its acceptance has led to an uphill struggle among poor blacks in our educational system: “AAE may not limit its users cognitively but it does limit them socially. . . This is the traditional attitude that educators have toward nonstandard dialects.” And so, the prejudice marches on.

In spite of this, the end result is that Mark Twain, through Huckleberry Finn and other works, gave vernacular speech, particularly black vernacular speech, unmistakable credibility in the literary community, and opened the doors for later writers to use vernacular language, including fictitious “conlangs” such as Nadsat, the Russian/Cockney English hybrid used by Alex, the narrator/protagonist of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, which Pearl claimed gave the novel more depth by “allowing the violent world of Alex and his droogs to unfold, literally, in their own words.” Wardhaugh remarks, “I have said that there may be a certain solidarity to be found in the use of AAE and also that Bernstein has argued that the characteristic language of the lower working class successfully perpetuates itself.” If we extend Wardhaugh's comment to include all vernacular speech, as opposed to just AAE (and there's no reason not to), then we could conclude that both Twain's and Burgess' use of a vernacular-speaking first-person narrator is an attempt to foster solidarity between protagonist and reader – by the end of the novel, they are both, quite literally, speaking the same language.

Fishkin (1996), acknowledged Twain's use of vernacular as a contribution to black literature by saying,

Slave narratives had rarely employed dialect, seeking to demonstrate instead, through well-crafted, standard-English prose, the ex-slave's claim to a place at the table of humanity. And most of Twain's black contemporaries (with one or two exceptions) had steered clear of using the vernacular in their work as well, preferring the measured tones of the educated middle class. It was certainly plausible that Twain had been an important influence on writers such as Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison.

Fishkin also noted that she had “found compelling evidence that black speakers had played a central role in the genesis not only of Twain's black characters but of his most famous white one: Huckleberry Finn.” In her 1993 book, Was Huck Black?, Fishkin claims that “compelling evidence indicates that the model for Huck Finn's speech was a black child instead of a white one and that this child sparked in Twain a sense of the possibilities of a vernacular narrator.” The idea of Huck not only speaking black, but also being black, was explored by novelist John Clinch in his 2007 novel Finn, a prequel featuring Huck's abusive father, “Pap” Finn, in which Clinch writes that Huck's mother was, in fact, a black woman.

Whether or not Huck was a mulatto child, it's certainly reasonable that Twain would use similarities in speech to form a bond between the story's two protagonists: Huck and Jim. As the homeless delinquent son of the town drunkard, Huck occupies one of the lowest places in Southern society, valuable only because of the large sum of money he discovered at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It is Jim's status as a slave, and a runaway slave at that, that makes him possibly the only person lower than Huck on the social scale. And yet Huck is not Jim's superior – not at first. One of the dominant themes in Huckleberry Finn is how Huck comes to realize that Jim is a human being worthy of the same consideration and respect as any other, and not a piece of property, as society claimed he was. And while the black vernacular as written by Twain is difficult for the reader to translate, Huck seems to understand Jim without any trouble. Many times throughout the novel, Huck and Jim find themselves alone on the raft, floating down the Mississippi River, discussing folksy topics such as local superstitions. It is this communication, more so than the journey itself, that I believe engenders solidarity between these two characters, as emphasized in their distinct but common dialects. It was the use of vernacular which, according to Fishkin, gave Huckleberry Finn the impetus to become the literary classic it is today:

Huckleberry Finn allowed a different kind of writing to happen: a clean, crisp, no- nonsense, earthy, vernacular kind of writing that jumped off the printed page with unprecedented immediacy and energy; it was a book that talked. I now realized that, despite the fact that they had been largely ignored by white critics for the last hundred years, African-American speakers, language, and rhetorical traditions had played a crucial role in making that novel what it was.

Wardhaugh makes extensive use of research by Labov, Trudgill, and Cheshire to demonstrate the connections between nonstandard language variants and social class. In every case, use of the “standard” dialect was more prevalent among upper classes... but only in formal circumstances. In more informal situations, where the need to maintain social standing was not as great, speakers lapsed into more nonstandard varieties. The conclusion is that those varieties of language which deviate from the “standard” are associated with the lower classes, and nominally shunned by the upper classes in public. Away from prying eyes, prejudices slowly disappear

McNally's (1995) article, “Language, History, and Class Struggle,” can offer a few insights as to the nature of the oppressed and exploited (as both Huck and Jim surely are), and the common theme McNally notes, the way “they invert the experience of exploitation. At the heart of exploitation, after all, is the sense of theft, that one has been robbed. Inverting that relationship, robbing the robber. . . is a constant theme of popular culture.” So it is in Huckleberry Finn, where the concept of Jim “escaping” is almost never verbalized. Instead, Huck often describes the scenario as his own work to “steal” Jim out of slavery. Of course, we as readers know that Jim really cannot be “stolen” against his will, and that his escape began even before he met up with Huck on Jackson's Island. But it is the act of theft – Huck stealing Jim, Jim stealing himself – and the terrible consequences which both characters face should they be caught which unites them against their oppressors, and it is the word “steal” that Huck continually uses which shows the degree to which the ruling class of Southern Society have manipulated the language.

By even suggesting that Jim can be “stolen,” the slave-owning society of the South has managed to pass along the idea that Jim, as a slave, is no more than a piece of property or chattel. This is exactly what McNally would expect in a world where “speech involves both meanings and themes. Themes have to do with the accents and emphases that members of specific social groups try to give words in order to transmit their experiences.” The Southern rules have managed to transmit their experience of slavery in the term “stolen” as opposed to “escaped,” and emphasize the theme of Jim as a piece of property, not a human being.

 Just as language can bring people together in real or seemingly real bonds of solidarity, even across social classes, it can also be manipulated to artificially drive them apart. While we have touched upon that theme in Huckleberry Finn, a far better example exists in George Orwell's (1903-1950) 1984. 1984 depicted a totalitarian state where the very thoughts of the people were subject to government control. To that end, citizens even suspected of harboring anti-government thoughts were vanished without a trace, children turned in their parents for muttering anti-government sentiments in their sleep, and, in an ultimate act of control, the language used by the people is rewritten into “Newspeak,” a bland English variety deliberately devoid of any means of creativity or expressing imagination.

Orwell wrote an appendix to 1984 where he explains, “the purpose of Newspeak is not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the government of Great Britain, where the novel takes place], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak [Standard English] forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

By controlling the language, The Party could manipulate the way its people thought, and keep the Proles (the lower class of Ingsoc society; approximately 85% of its population) from even conceptualizing revolution, much less carrying one out. Here we see another of McNally's examples of the dominant social group attaching the theme it wanted to specific language, for, as Orwell writes in his appendix: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used such statements as, 'the dog is free from lice,' or 'This field is free from weeds.' It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically free' or 'intellectually free,' since political or intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.” Thus we see the ultimate use of language as a tool of social control – by removing, or at least attempting to remove, the very concepts that would cause social upheaval or dissention among the classes, for how can anyone aspire to freedom if they cannot even verbalize it? A similar theme of language being used to control the masses can be found in Ayn Rand's Anthem, also about a dystopian futuristic society so focused on collectivism that it is reflected in the language itself, which forbids any reference to individuality: All characters refer to themselves in the first person plural, and the very utterance of the word “ego” is punishable by death.

The deft and deliberate use of language is every author's stock and trade, and they are well aware of the impact their words have on their readers. We have seen a small sampling of authors who were aware of the connection between language and social standing, both in the real world and the fictional worlds in their pages. Our own study of sociolinguistics is only beginning to officially quantify and classify the truths these great authors were aware of as they put pen to paper and transported us to worlds vastly different, yet eerily similar to our own.

Adams, N. (n.d). Profile: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. All Things Considered (NPR), Retrieved from Newspaper Source database.

Cook, V. (1999, Summer). Going Beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching.

TESOL Quarterly 33(2), 185-209.

Fishkin, S. (1996). Huck's black voice. Wilson Quarterly, 20(4), 81. Retrieved from Literary Reference Center database.

Fishkin, S. (1993) Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices. Retrieved from http://books.google.com

Glover, M. (1997, June 13). The Poet who Created a Language. New Statesman, p. 47. Retrieved from Literary Reference Center database.

McNally, D. (1995, July/August). Language, History, and Class Struggle. Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 47(3) 13-31. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database.

Nostoro, R. (2003). Dante Alighieri. Retrieved from http://www.hyperhistory.net/apwh/bios/b2dante.htm

Orwell, G. (1984). 1984. New York: Signet Classic.

Pearl, N., & Boozer, D. (2006). Speaking in Tongues: Literary Languages. Library Journal, 131(15), 101. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.

Sullivan, J. (2001, Nov. 4). The Literary Adventures of Huck Finn. The Sunday Age, p. 10. Retrieved from Newspaper Source Plus database.

Twain, M. (1994). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Dover

Wardhaugh, R. (2010). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Educational Technology -- or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Smartboard

 Early in my teaching career, I was on a Technology Committee which met once a month to discuss ways to integrate technology into our curriculum. At the time, our school was slightly behind the curve in terms of tech, so many of our meetings were discussions about what to bring in and how to get the faculty up to speed on it.

It was the first time I had heard of Smartboards, and while the sales pitch sounded very appealing, I was concerned that they may have been too much, too soon. After all, we had only recently gotten computers in every classroom (one desktop per teacher; mine broke about a month into the school year, with no word on if/when it was going to get fixed), and money was about as tight as it usually is for smaller schools. Whatever we got had to be something that was going to be put to good use.

I considered myself to be fairly technologically savvy, and I had something of a reputation for it around the school – chiefly because I was one of the few people who how to hook up a DVD player or operate the stage lights in the auditorium. I was concerned that the rest of the faculty would eschew the new tools and stand by what they had known and trusted so far. I've found that people who are not familiar with technology who are introduced to it suddenly have one of two reactions: either they are intimidated by it, or infatuated with it. My position at the time was that in order to keep the faculty from falling into one of these pitfalls, we as a school needed to recognize the difference between essential, useful tools, and distractions. I thought then that the Smartboard would be a distraction. I've since seen Smartboards become very useful and prominent classroom tools, but I stand by what I said at the time – Smartboards weren't what we needed at the time.

The day after the Smartboard meeting, I was preparing a lesson for my Freshman class to illustrate a theme from the novel we were reading at the time, The Catcher in the Rye. In addition to all my usual supplies: attendance log, folders, well-marked up copy of the book, and extra chalk (this was the only school I've known which hadn't switched to whiteboards and dry-erase markers), I had the props I needed (know as “realia” in education to sound less showbiz; to me they'll always be props) to illustrate my lesson: a wicker basket, a deck of playing cards, and a large ball of string.

Um... don't ask.

Could I have done my lesson as effectively with a Smartboard, or at least an overhead projector and a Powerpoint presentation? Most likely. Would I have done so had those resources been available to me? Probably not. I was comfortable doing what I was with the materials I was accustomed to, and was convinced (to the point where I wrote this on a syllabus once) “technology is a tool, but it cannot do the work for you. We should be every bit as comfortable working without technology as with it.” And while I stand by those words to this day, I've found it important that they not be used as an excuse to be intimidated by technology.

The truth was, I wasn't ready to come out of my comfort zone. I was content in doing things the way I had done them before, and resisted change. Unfortunately, that attitude caused me to miss a great deal of innovations which would've made my job a lot easier had I been more willing to embrace them.

As wired as I thought I was in my personal life, as an educator, I was feeling technophobic. I didn't want to take a chance on the new gadget which some committee had said was going to revolutionize teaching, redefine the classroom, or other such hype. I was convinced that they were all distractions, shiny baubles meant to distract teachers until the next bauble came along.

The irony is that while I soaked up new uses for technology in my personal life, I wasn't willing to put that into practice in the classroom. I suspect it was because while I was comfortable experimenting with new gadgets at home, where failure means nothing but an hour going through a user's manual, I didn't want to take the chances in the classroom, where I was afraid anything going wrong would reflect badly on me; hurting my students' education and worse, making me look foolish in front of them.

The thing to remember about the way technology works is that yesterday's “distraction” becomes today's useful tool which becomes tomorrow's necessity. Our students are currently exposed to a level of technology which even our former students didn't have available to them, to say nothing of educators. As that technology shapes every aspect of their lives, it is going to shape their education. As educators, we have an obligation to them to get ourselves, if not a step ahead of the curve, at least on it.

I had a great deal of catching up to do, and at times it felt less like “stepping” out of my comfort zone as taking a flying leap out of it – blindfolded. But it has paid off. My syllabi are online, my students are as likely to get an email from me from my phone as much as from my computer, and I keep track of grades and attendance records online even if the school doesn't have its own dedicated program. Most importantly, all of these tools can quickly become to any teacher who overcomes their shyness around computers and learns the ins and outs of them.

And these are just the basics – there's a great deal of material out there, and it's crucial for educators to constantly push themselves out of their comfort zones, and be aware enough of the tools and resources available to them to decide – based on experience, not the lack of it – what they can use in the classroom. And of course, prepare for the occasional malfunction. I still believe in working with or without technology, which is why my syllabi are online, but I still hand out hard copy. The school has a web-based grading system, but I still have a grade book. And where I used to keep extra chalk, I have a couple of spare dry-erase markers.

Because you never know.

Familiarity Breeds Content -- Part 5: Conclusions

Over the course of six weeks, four written assignments charted the students' progress throughout the use of the cubing technique. A series of in-class essays was also originally planned to be included, but had to be scrubbed because circumstances made it impossible to gather a steady stream of data. Therefore, the limited amount of quantitative data makes it difficult to draw any conclusions.

However, I did notice a few things: Carlos demonstrated steady improvement in both organizational and grammatical skills. Sarah's organizational skills remained consistent, and showed improvement when it came to homework, although her in-class essays (PT 1 and PT2) showed a sharp drop in grammatical skills. Carolina showed level organizational skills throughout the study, and a slight increase in grammar since PT1. Paula started off strongly in both categories, but quickly dropped off in grammar, and suffered her lowest scores towards the end of the study, in PT2.

Carlos showed himself to be a success story throughout the study. His first practice test (PT1) showed serious issues in both organizational skills and in grammar. His thesis was vague and poorly supported – while he was able to state an opinion that teachers should not be prohibited from virtually “friending” students on sites such as Facebook, the bulk of his essay discussed the usefulness of Facebook, without specifically applying it to teachers and students. He mentioned vague facts about the site, such as how it “had millions of members around the world,” but nothing specifically on topic.

His grammar and vocabulary skills were similarly weak. He tended to omit several words, particularly articles and some prepositions; I've noticed phrases such as “talk important things,” instead of “talk about important things.” He also had a severe problem writing in the past tense – most of his verbs were present tense, even when discussing the past incident discussed in the article.

Formal Essay #4 (FE4), the first essay since the cubing process was introduced, showed an improvement in organization. Discussing an embarrassing moment from his past, Carlos managed to relate the story in a clear and organized fashion, keeping a simple chronological order to move from one event to the next. His grammar also improved; although he was still chronically stuck in the present tense, he was omitting fewer words than before. He had, however, apparantly picked up a new habit which wasn't readily apparent in PT1 – using the wrong, but similar, occasionally homophonic, words, or incorrect forms of the right words: “pass” instead of past, “tiers” instead of tears, “field” instead of filled.

Formal Essay #5 (FE5) showed a major improvement in thesis and supporting facts. When asked about a hero of his, Carlos began with a rhetorical question, defined the term “hero,” offered his mother as an example, and proceeded to contrast her with figures such as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln: Those heroes were famous; his mother' heroism is unsung.

The same grammar mistakes appeared as before, but there was a marked decrease: Some of his sentence structures were more complex, with more advances constructions such as “it could be said. . .” which marked a departure from the simple present tense, although a few missed past tenses were still present. Only a few words were omitted, and there were fewer wrong forms of words than in PT1 or FE4 – “Been” instead of being; “went” instead of when. There were clear signs of progress.

Practice Test #2 (PT2), showed that not only had Carlos' skills improved, but that he was adept at putting them into practice under pressure. The introduction to his response to the test's question, “should we be criminalizing bullies?” gave a solid introduction and piqued the reader's attention, while using his own personal experience (calling himself a former bully) to defend his position that a bully is a coward, not a criminal. Most of his grammar mistakes were self-corrected, as indicated by the number of cross-outs on his paper, and the only signs of his former issues were rare enough to be common to any student (ELL or native-born) operating under pressure – I saw “principle” instead of principal, and “look” instead of looking. There were one or two sentences or phrases which were hard to decipher, but I saw the same kinds of issues in my native speaking students.

In class, Carlos became more and more talkative as the weeks went on, and even became something of a class clown for a brief period – I remember one week when I was trying to identify a journal page where the student had forgotten to include her name. Asking about it in class, I mention that the topic was giving birth, and Carlos jokingly raised his hand to take credit. His newfound sense of humor, and his mistakes in word forms, would seem to indicate an increasing confidence in his own abilities and desire to experiment, although his proficiencies haven't quite caught up with his desires.

From the beginning, Sarah showed organizational skills – she was well-prepared and organized for every class, and once showed me her notebook where she kept meticulous notes: everything I had put on the board was copied, and my lessons were summarized in English, with a few Spanish phrases scrawled here and there. This organization carried over to her written work, as she always had strong theses and wrote essays in which were logical and easy to follow. What I noticed, however, was that her grammar and vocabulary skills varied depending on her familiarity with the topic

Sarah's PT1 had a strong thesis, was well organized, and supported her point of view. Her grammar and vocabulary, while acceptable, was unremarkable. I didn't notice any particular patterns of errors worthy of note. Her FE4 was a well-told story concerning her first job, and aside from what I considered at the time to be a relatively weak introduction (I always encourage my students to grab a reader's attention in the opening paragraph, and present a strong and explicit thesis, was well formed. She seemed comfortable with complex words and transitions in English, I saw sentences begin with words such as “thus,” or “consequently,” which indicated to me a growing confidence in expressing more complex trains of thought. There were a few occasional omissions of words similar to what I saw in Carlos' papers, but nowhere to the same extent. I wonder if this is a common error for Spanish speaking students, as the campus does have a large Hispanic population, and I've noticed such errors of omission frequently. There were too few words missing to detect any pattern, “thanks God” instead of thanks to God, or omitting the word “job” in “...part time job at a dentists' office.” The errors I did spot seemed less due to any language difficulty and more due to simple carelessness.

Sarah's FE5 was nearly flawless. The thesis was stronger and more explicit, the story was told in a sensible pattern with supporting details, and while the grammar errors were only sporadic in FE4, here they were nearly nonexistent. I spotted only two word errors in the entire essay: “leason,” in place of lesson, and she used the word “get” when she needed “go.” Her essay, a description of Jhon Frank Pinchaos, a Columbian police officer kidnapped for over a year by guerillas, was on par with anything I'd expect from a native English student.

I was surprised, therefore, at the sharp drop in her grammar skills for PT2. As in PT1. Sarah had a clear thesis and was organized, but her grammar and vocabulary had fallen sharply compared to her formal essays. She didn't seem to know the word “bullies,” even though it was mentioned several times in the article to be read, and instead referred to them as “bully people.” There were also problems with her subject-verb agreement which hadn't appeared in her previous works: “...bullying have been a big problem,” or even problems with word order, such as “school has always a group of bully people.”

Sarah used personal experiences to support her ideas, so her sudden drop in quality cannot reasonably be attributed to lack of knowledge on the subject. It's far more possible that someone as organized as her was not comfortable with the time limits involved for PT1 or PT2, and that her previous exceptional results on the formal essays was due to extensive revision, which she did not see as an option within the 90 minute window. I have seen many students who choked under pressure, but I am not ready to attribute Sarah's performance to this, as the data are inconclusive.

Caroline's PT1 was average all around – her thesis was well expressed, although she didn't include quite enough information to support it. Her grammar and vocabulary were average, with no clear patterns of mistakes apparent at that point. When it came time for her FE4, her essay about her decision to come to America showed a similar organizational pattern – a strong thesis, but she tended to stray off topic when it came time to support it. She mentioned Castro as a cause for Cuba's woes, and while she mentioned them in detail, she didn't make the connection as to why he was responsible for them.

Her grammar skills showed an interesting anomaly – she had a tendency to use gerunds and gerund phrases when infinitives would be grammatically correct. Phrases such as “the right of taking all your belongings” and “having the opportunity of living both in Cuba and the United States” would've led me to wonder if this was particular to Spanish, although none of the other Spanish students showed this. For FE5, Caroline chose her grandfather as her hero, wrote a compelling introduction supported on several levels. Grammatically, Caroline did occasionally misuse a word – “waive” instead of wave – and and the most notable omissions I notice were the word “to” towards the end of the essay. At first, I wondered if this was a holdover from her infinitive confusion in FE4, but it was only “to” as a proposition which was omitted.

PT2 showed a strong introduction and thesis, and,with the exception of a confusing title: “Bullying: Facing a Suicide Monster,” was well organized and easy to follow. I didn't notice any of her previous issues with grammar and infinitives, and she showed strong vocabulary skills with no noticeable patterns in mistakes – in fact, not many mistakes at all.

In class, Caroline was quiet and reserved, preferring to sit near the back of the classroom. She answered questions when asked, but rarely volunteered anything unless specifically called on. Her reluctance doesn't seem to be related to her language skills; it's far more likely that she was simply shy.

Paula's case was unusual. After a PT1 with a strong thesis but riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes, she showed considerable improvement for her formal essays. I noticed that her FE4 gave her some prepositional troubles, particularly with her tendency to use “of” instead of “to,” in phrases such as “a way of cut expenses,” or “take the time of hire someone.” there were some of the same omissions I had seen earlier, but pronouns and articles seemed to get the worst of it – more than once she'd forget a “the” or “it.”

FE 5 showed improvement, but I noticed her “of/to” error was replaced by another, more familiar one: using gerunds in place of infinitives. I found it interesting that I had only noticed this pattern of mistakes in Caroline's work, but not in the others. Why this patten seems common in some Spanish speakers writing in English but not in others is a mystery.

Paula's PT2 was a puzzling disappointment, in that it was the exact opposite of her PT1 – her grammar and vocabulary skills had improved, but her essay was disorganized, with very little direction or structure. What she said, she said well, but she spoke so much about the subject of bullying without ever getting around to answering the question posed about criminalization.

In summary, the results, due to the small group of students involved, are inconclusive. The only thing consistent among the study participants (as well as the rest of the class) was a sharp drop in motivation as soon as the cubing techniques were discontinued, and the textbook used in a more traditional sense – but whether that was due to the effectiveness of cubing, or student distractions due to the impending end of the semester, cannot be determined.

It is my belief that the first step of the “cubing” study led to a positive change in the students, but more importantly, in my own method of teaching. After the timeline exercise, I made a concentrated effort to make the assignments, discussions, and exercises as relevant as possible for the students, and the students reacted enthusiastically. The portion of the cubing technique that was the original focus of the study – the six points of organization – quickly decreased to secondary importance, and later to near irrelevancy, as what was originally perceived as a minor part of the exercise – having the students use their own life experiences as a basis for their writing – came to be the driving force behind the students increased energy and enthusiasm for the course.

As previously discussed, Jacobs' cubing technique did lead to better organizational skills, but grammar and mechanical skills showed no noticable pattern of imrpovement. This differs with Jacobs' own results, although given the sporadic nature of the data collection process, all such results are inconclusive. It is possible, however, that Jacobs cubing technique may not be effective on recent immigrant students who have not yet had enough exposure to English in a non-academic setting to be able to accurately reflect the nuances of the language. While they had the confidence to try, they lacked the skill to succeed. “Kim,” the subject of the previous case study, had noted the importance of English culture and media in her own quest to learn English:

Even though you don't understand, just watch TV. . . It is beyond grammar and vocabulary. Beyond that there are special rhythms, waves, and the tone. So when you watch TV, you can learn, understand. So you speak more natural. (Bifuh-Ambe, 2009)

It may be that long term English learners' increased exposure to English in non-academic settings such as the media, increased their confidence and familiarity with English, even if comprehension was lacking.

My findings reflected Lee and Krashen's in several key areas. First, students engaged in more “voluntary” writing (that is to say, writing in which they, and not I, chose the topic) showed a significant improvement in organization and overall coherence. The students were far more comfortable and at ease telling their own stories than trying to re-tell or react to someone else's, and could automatically make connections with their own experiences, instead of trying to force a connection with the unfamiliar.

Lee and Krashen's other important finding, about the negative relationship between writing anxiety and performance, was also confirmed, but with an addendum. It is not just the students' anxiety which negatively affects a classroom environment, but a teacher's. Looking back on my own research notes, I've come to realize that in the early weeks of the class (the weeks predating the study), I had reacted to my own inexperience with perhaps an overanxious desire for the strictest organization. This year marks the first time I had ever taught on a college level, after nine years of high school teaching, and while I had taught writing and composition skills before as sections of my literature courses, this had been the first time I had taught an entire course dedicated to the topic. I believe my earlier style was too rigid and inflexible – I was determined to follow my syllabus (which was only a cursory rewrite of the sample syllabus which had been provided to me) at all costs, and to keep the students “on track” as much as possible, I had refuse to deviate from the textbook assignments and essays, believing them to be a sign of stability.

During the course of the study, I noticed that many of the classroom activities I engaged in were variations (some with very little variation to speak of) of topics and activities I had used as teaching aids during my high school days. No longer was I concerned with being my own ideal of a “professor,” I instead focused on making the subjects discussed as relevant as possible – for myself as well as for the students. Familiarity helped assuage my own anxiety, and I believe that this, in turn, helped the students overcome their own. The text was used sparingly, if at all, and only to supplement those topics which were of interest to the students. If a concept from the textbook was needed, I would paraphrase it and incorporate it into the week's activities – for example, methods of classification and division used during the mythology lecture earlier in the semester. It is a relaxed attitude from both students and faculty that appeared to be most conducive to learning.

There is much that would need to be done differently if this study were to be performed as originally designed. Although the two practice writing tests would appear to make ideal pre- and post-tests, the short period of time in between, combined with the limited number of class session, provide far too few opportunities to gather quantitative data. Such a study is far better being conducted throughout an entire semester, perhaps using the weeks before and after the practice tests to arrange an pattern. A better qualitative study could have been planned in advance, with specific students observed for certain criteria, and not formed on the fly in response to unforeseen circumstances which necessitated changes in the entire format of the study. Furthermore, as a qualitative or quantitative study, the research is best done in an actual ESL-based course, where the entire class can be used as study participants, as opposed to the current suboptimal scenario of a standard English class with only a small selection of eligible students, either recently mainstreamed, from other ESL courses, or with no previous ESL experience at all.

What began as one study quickly changed into a completely different type of research, and while this did result in unexpected potential findings, the unexpected change in both methodology and findings left nearly all of the original research questions unanswered. What has come from this experience are two potential avenues of future research – if the study could be completed as originally designed, or if what the study eventually became could be properly prepared from the beginning, either or both of these research projects could potentially yield conclusive results.

This is not to say that this experience has been a total loss – it has become clear that perhaps the single most important factor in encouraging enthusiasm and participation in oral and written work is the interest of the student, and the connection of subject matter to topics which fit the students' own knowledge and interests. In this, Language Arts teachers have a distinct advantage, as course curriculum is based on form, function, and organization or written work, and the instructor has a great deal of latitude in choosing actual topics for assignments.

Regardless of the subject matter, a teacher should endeavor to learn as much about their students' lives and interests as they can as soon as possible, and encourage them to make connections between their own knowledge and interests and the subject matter. Furthermore, a teacher should not be afraid to incorporate their own ideas and interests (within reason) into the content; an optimal learning environment exists when both students and teacher find the content relevant and motivating. Finally, no teacher should ever feel “locked in” to a certain curriculum, personal preference, or teaching style. An educator must be willing to adapt and improvise, remembering that the material must be adapted to the students, and not vice versa – this is often a given in matters concerning academic ability, but it can (and should) also be applied whenever possible based on students' backgrounds and interests.

These ideas are difficult to apply in a quantifiable manner – WIDA has very few rules or specific guidelines for post-secondary education. What is important to always remember is that our educators, particularly new ones, can integrate their own knowledge and familiarity with curriculum content, and are most effective when they do so. In addition, students must be made to realize that they have something worth contributing to their own education. They are not empty vessels which need to be filled up with core curriculum standards, and must never be treated or made to feel as such.