Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

The loveliness of Iowa seems somehow sadly gray The glory that was Chicago now makes me ill I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Carbondale I'd love to go down south and teach in Brazil I haven't been blogging that much because over the past month I have been dedicating most of my professional life to the leaders of several Binational Centers in Brazil. This opportunity came to me through a grant I worked on with partners at Global Ties, World Chicago, and CIVIC (Council for International Visitors to Iowa Cities). Purpose & Goals The purpose of this program is to support a faculty exchange program for supervisors, coordinators, and teachers from the Brazilian Binational Centers. These participants have been chosen to make a lasting impact on the Brazilian ESL education system. Our program specifically focuses on English as a Second Language (ESL) and English Language Learner (ELL) programs. By the end of our program, participants will understan...

When I left my previous position as curriculum coordinator, the curriculum revision process was incomplete. One of my roles as coordinator was to make sure the IEP's teaching practices were aligned with research. Most of this research was a literature review of ELT textbooks within the past decade and scholarly articles within the last five years. We successfully completed the whole revision process for reading and half of the process for speaking and listening, which means I was able to conduct a literature review of those three skill areas. Unfortunately, the committee dissolved before we could get to the writing literature. Thus I left the position feeling out-of-date with my understanding of L2 writing pedagogy. Fortunately, I am a contributor to ELT Research Bites , which is a collaborative blog that provides bite-sized portions of scholarly articles on English language teaching, and writing is the language skill that is covered most. I thought reviewing ELT Research Bites...

I've been inspired by Clare Maas' blog post , which was inspired by Dr. John Field's TEASIG/CRELLA talks, to share my shock at the listening curriculum of an intensive English program where I previously worked. To be fair, this listening curriculum was designed twenty years prior and my job was to lead faculty efforts to revise it. Unfortunately, the program went through financial difficulties and leadership changes, resulting in the "non-renewal" of most of the curriculum committee members. Upper-Level (EAP) Listening (B2-C1) Listening was relatively equally integrated with speaking and reading skills in one course set apart from another course that focused much more on writing. This was the case for the two highest levels for students who intended to matriculate into the university as undergraduates. The highest level was not dependent on any one coursebook, so all of the listening material had to be collected by the instructors. When I was the curriculum ...

My career has taken me to the uncomfortable and sometimes exciting spot in English language teaching or education in general: middle management, a term I dislike. As an advocate of teachers, I find my direction and passion by supporting teachers, helping them make their jobs more meaningful. Unfortunately, I have had to work with supervisors that didn't understand or share this vision. I'm not sure if they saw me as someone to "manage" teachers, but it often felt like it. If you don't know what middle management jobs are, and there are a lot of them, they go by many different names. Match any of the words in the left column with the words in the right column to create a job title that can describe the same job. It seems that most of these job descriptions do not include research, which I believe is essential in developing curriculum and professional learning. It also seems obvious to me that a background in pedagogical research (and for ELT, research in ap...

I have been interested in a multiliteracies approach to English language learning and teaching for almost a decade now. I've been blogging about it since 2010 and I gave a presentation on this for two conferences in Iowa. I decided to put this interest aside so I could complete my dissertation on another topic and search for jobs. Now that a few years have passed, I'd like to share how my interest has changed. The foundation of my interest is best represented by the Prezi I made (below) for my 2010 MIDTESOL Conference presentation: My primary reference was Stuart Selber's 2004 book Multiliteracies for a Digital Age , published by Southern Illinois University Press. While working for the Kirkwood Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (KCELT), I found some similarities between my highlighted concepts from Selber's book and the Framework for 21st Century Learning, which you can view at http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework . The third category (Infor...

Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/18162314289 What is an Open Educator? According to a recently published article from the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL): An Open Educator chooses to use open approaches, when possible and appropriate, with the aim to remove all unnecessary barriers to learning. He/she works through an open online identity and relies on online social networking to enrich and implement his/her work, understanding that collaboration bears a responsibility towards the work of others. Does this sound attractive for English language teachers? It seems to some who offer courses through or with YouTube. But what does it mean "to remove all unnecessary barriers to learning?" Working for free? Not necessarily. If you read the article, it seems you'd be working on a sliding scale depending on the socioeconomic status of the learners, but this sliding scale is a sliding slope. Ho...

I've been in the field of education (teaching & learning) since I was a preschooler at the age of four. For most of this time, I have been a student. It's only been in the last 18 years that I've been in the role of a teacher and 4 years that I've been in an administrative role that supports teachers. So I've seen teachers in many contexts from different perspectives, and my favorite teachers have been and still are English and foreign language teachers (social studies teachers come a close second). It seemed such a fun job when I was a student, and for the most part it turned out to be a fun job as a teacher. However, the pay is quite modest and even low for foreign language teachers who can get a full-time gig. I know why I and my friend-teachers do it, but why do others do it? I have my assumptions, so I read Why We Work to confirm my assumptions and to learn something new. I didn't expect the author to describe my line of work that much, but he did...

I am fascinated by science and the future, and that's what got me reading Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence . by Jerry Kaplan (Yale University Press, 2015). On page 151, I came across the paragraph above, and the first sentence is written in a way to confirm the fears of many teachers, especially technophobic teachers. In the second sentence, Kaplan casually connects the terrifying notion of being replaced with the flipped classroom. Instructional designers and administrators now prefer to call this flipped learning, which has become an industry of its own. See https://flippedlearning.org/ . Flipped Learning  Yes, please visit https://flippedlearning.org/ ! As of this writing (web designers love to redesign the sites every 6 months or so), "academic subjects" is at the center of the main menu. Guess what is the first academic subject listed? English/ELA. For old school English language teachers, ELA refers to En...

One of the more influential TESOL Quarterly articles I have read over the past decade was Karen E. Johnson's "The Sociocultural Turn and Its Challenges for Second Language Teacher Education." It helped guide me during the early stages of my doctoral dissertation. I'm revisiting now because it relates to my current position, and I wanted to see if Dr. Johnson's concerns are still valid ten years later. Theory/Practice Versus Praxis From my perspective, the theory-practice dichotomy is still quite prevalent in teacher education. I have entered discussions with our faculty on what should stand at the core of our ESL curriculum, which I perceive as research in applied linguistics or informal research in teaching and learning. I see this more as a applied linguistics-education dichotomy as research is on both ends, but education is more steeped in practice. Johnson recommends praxis as a solution to this dichotomy because it "is more suitable for the prepara...

In my current job, I am helping our program design an academic bridge program for conditionally admitted undergraduates students to the university's mechanical and civil engineering programs. I am just in the early stages of designing, conducting a needs analysis with the department heads and reviewing literature on engineering English, which is a branch of English for Specific Purposes.  After conducting a brief literature review on articles published since 2012 on English language programs for engineers, a few major patterns arose. Image from http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2012/05/engineering-bridge.html Needs Analysis Some papers (Kim, 2013; Mohamed, et al. 2014; Paci, 2013; Porcaro, 2013) recommended conducting a needs analysis before designing the curriculum. This is common sense for those like me coming from a background in instructional design.  Porcaro (2013) provided the most details regarding how to proceed with a needs analysis for this purpose,...