Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

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,...

I am interested in teacher agency the extent to which English language teachers seek out professional development on their own.  After nearly a year as curriculum coordinator at an intensive English program (IEP) at a regional public university, I have informally observed my faculty colleagues' approaches to professional development as a prelude for a more formal study I may initiate in the following year.  This blog synthesizes my observations with Dr. Jackie Gerstein's blog User Generated Education, specifically her post on self-directed professional development at https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/teacher-agency-self-directed-professional-development/ Acknowledging Differences Dr. Gerstein's blog seems to be mainly aimed towards K-12 educators of all disciplines, whereas my interest is specifically focused on English language teachers (ELTs) but broadly focused on ELTs in many contexts, including public and private K-12 schools.  For this b...

An experienced teacher should be able to know their strengths and weaknesses.  Although I don't enjoy teaching grammar, I'm not bad at it.  However, I know that enjoying teaching a subject can make you a more effective teacher because your enthusiasm can positively affect students' engagement. I've been effective at teaching verb tenses this term, but then I noticed that the curriculum called for about an hour of class time to review articles.  I have never had great success teaching articles, perhaps because there's no instant reward to this.  It takes students a long time to master articles (if you don't believe in fossilization ), and the more time spent on explaining articles and their usage, the less effective I become as a teacher.  Because students have already learned articles in a previous class, I found no risk of flipping this one class and do some informal action research. Before Watching the Videos After wrapping up the previous unit, I tol...

Last month, my attention was brought to an article recently published in TESOL's IEP Interest Section Newsletter, " Navigating Curricular Change in a Postmethod Program: Negotiating Roles and Expectations " by Erin O'Reilly, who works upstate from me at the University of Illinois. Their IEP has undergone a similar process of curricular change as we are experiencing at Southern Illinois University. The need for curricular change became clear for accreditation purposes. Both of our programs needed to align student learning outcomes (SLOs) across levels and skills. The biggest difference between our programs is that they had experienced teachers with administrative oversight of one skill area whereas we had experienced teachers with administrative oversight of two to four levels. In this sense, Illinois may have had an easier process to align skills across levels whereas we had a clearer understanding of SLOs representing the three major tiers of levels.  For both o...

If there's one thing I find difficult to do as a teacher, it is taking student praise.  This is example of a humblebrag , a newer word in the English lexicon. The truth is that I was raised in a household where praise was restrained and mainly reserved for achievements that clearly exceeded expectations. Actually, I find it more difficult to give praise than to receive praise because of this upbringing. It took me a few years to praise students who adequately met my expectations. Student Praise Last term, I had a very rewarding experience teaching English to a relatively small but dedicated group of students. This combination of class size and student motivation helped me meet the linguistic, academic, and cultural needs of each student more effectively than in most other classes. Most of the students preferred this extra attention to their needs and skills, but there was one that didn't want me to get to know his learning and studying strategies too well.  I had tw...

Last month, we (the Center for English as a Second Language) hosted the Shawnee Hills IEP Camp at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.  I blogged about how we were able to organize and host it in a previous post .  As mentioned in that post, we followed the EdCamp model and shared our professional learning with IEP faculty and staff from the University of Southern Indiana and from Southeast Missouri State University.  Our program (CESL) was also hosting English language teachers from Panama, who also attended the Camp.   Starting early at 8am in the morning, we had a very good turnout with around 65 of the registered 70 participants showing up.  Above is a picture of some of the earlier attendees mingling over our sponsored and catered breakfast from yummy Cristaudo's Bakery of Carbondale.  They have always been a dependable and popular caterer at CESL events. Pictured above is a couple of our faculty members with our Panamanian visiti...

I was inspired to write this post because of the complications with my program's current practices with using online videos to help students develop their listening skills and to assess their listening skills. I've had conversations with my current and previous classes, which range from the intermediate-mid range of English language proficiency (as a whole, not just listening) to the lower advanced range. I initiated these conversations as a result from my first class at the program (our highest level for students intending to enroll in undergraduate courses), in which the majority of students complained about how difficult and inappropriate the online videos were compared to their expectations and academic needs. In my current and previous classes, I performed a low-stakes informal (not controlled well) experiment with their full knowledge that this was an experiment.  I compared my students' reactions to videos from TED Ed to videos from the Sci Show You Tube channel....