Florida and the lack of opportunities for ESOL teachers and students

I recently wrote my last ever paper as a Master’s student on a topic that is very important to me professionally: the state of Florida’s policies towards English language learners in the public K-12 system. I could copy and paste my paper here, but I suspect that most of the people who bother to read my blog don’t come here for academic writing and education jargon. However, since this is a topic that I think is pretty important, I’ve decided to convert my academic paper into a more accessible blog post.

Something like 220 languages are spoken in the state of Florida. There are roughly 270,000 students in Florida’s public K-12 system that are considered English Language Learners (ELLs). That’s roughly 10% of the K-12 population. You would think that this would translate into a lot of available jobs for people like me: experienced, qualified ESL teachers. Sadly, that’s not the case. What is typically seen are ads for content-area teachers holding ‘appropriate ESOL certification.’ There’s little to no demand for ESL teachers in the K-12 system at all, just regular teachers with this ‘appropriate ESOL certification.’ Why is that? What does having ‘appropriate ESOL certification’ actually entail? And is this what is best for Florida’s students?

Prior to 1990, the way ELLs were treated in the public K-12 system varied substantially by district, as there was no state level legislation pertaining to how they should be treated. Some districts had really great programs, including bilingual education, sheltered content instruction (in which subject matter such as Math or Social Studies was taught to ELLs specifically by an ESOL professional), and pull-out programs (in which students were pulled out of mainstream classes during the day for one-on-one tutoring or tutoring among a group of their ELL peers). Other districts had nothing; students were simply tossed into mainstream classes with teachers who had no training in dealing with ELLs. A group of advocates filed a lawsuit against the State of Florida in the late 1980s, arguing that as legal residents of the state, ELLs were entitled to equal access to education, understandable instruction, and intensive English language instruction. They won their suit, and in 1990, the Florida Consent Decree was enacted. The Consent Decree mandated equal access, comprehensible instruction, and language instruction for ELLs, and required that the state’s K-12 teachers actually have some sort of training for working with ELLs. Elementary school teachers, as well as middle school and high school language arts teachers were required to have 300 hours of training for working with ELLs. Middle and high school math, science, and social studies teachers were required to have 60 hours of training, and all other instructors were required to have 18 hours. Sounds great, right? In theory, perhaps, but not so much in actual fact.

One of results of the Consent Decree was that the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) began pushing for mainstreaming of ELLs across the state. While it was left up to each district as to the specifics of how they would comply with the Consent Decree, there was a lot of pressure for districts to work towards mainstreaming of ELLs. (Mainstreaming – sometimes referred to as inclusion – is the practice of putting ELLs in regular classes with native speakers.) The pressure to increase mainstreaming actually led to many quality bilingual, sheltered, and pull-out programs being dismantled and replaced with mainstreaming. After all, if all teachers are now “qualified” to teach ELLs, this should be fine, right?

Well, just how “qualified” are they? Is receiving 300/60/18 hours of instruction in working with ELLs enough? And what kind of instruction is that, anyway? Since 1999, all university teacher training and certification programs in the state of Florida are required to provide their pre-service teachers with their needed hours of ESOL training. However, pretty much all of the universities did this not by adding 300 hours’ worth of required coursework for their students, but instead by creating an ‘ESOL Infused’ program. This means that topics pertaining to education of ELLs would be included in general Education courses; very few of those 300/60/18 hours would be earned in a class that actually focused in its entirety on teaching ELLs.

The university where I’ve just earned my MA in TESOL requires its undergraduate Education majors to take only two courses that are ESOL-specific. I just spent the past two semesters teaching one of those two courses, and let me tell you, my students – junior and senior Education majors – had no clue about teaching ELLs when the semester began. Even at the end of the semester, there are very few of my students whom I would recommend to work with ELLs, and yet most of them are now “qualified” to do so according to state regulations.

While writing my paper, I read a lot of articles, including a lot of published research on the views that teachers and program administrators had of both mainstreaming and of the required ESOL training. The majority of teachers and administrators did not approve of mainstreaming – with the biggest complaint being that mainstream teachers lacked the time and/or the skill to properly modify their lessons for their ELLs. The majority of teachers themselves also complained that they did not feel adequately prepared to work with their ELLs. One article I read referred to the results of the Consent Decree as the “the deprofessionalization of ESL teachers, rather than the specialization of mainstream teachers” – and sadly, that seems to be the case.

Oh, and the FCAT? That standardized test that one must pass in order to graduate from high school in the state of Florida? ELLs are given one year – ONE YEAR – to get their language skills up to par to pass the FCAT. Research in the field of second language acquisition shows that it typically takes 5-7 years to master a second language, yet ELLs are given just one to take a test that is often challenging to native speakers. Seriously?

As a professional teacher of English as a second or foreign language, I found my research into this subject disturbing to say the least. Certainly, at the moment, finding a job is a pressing issue for me. My goal is to teach ESL to adults, although there aren’t that many jobs available. I had (rather naïvely) assumed that if I could not find work with adults, the public school system would remain an option. As it is, while I have applied for several K-12 ESOL positions, none were in Florida. Straight-up ESOL teachers are pretty rare down here. Then I think about the fact that so many people sacrifice so much to come to the United States in order to give their children better opportunities. But are they really getting better opportunities? If they come to Florida, it doesn’t seem that they do.

Almost done!

Last Friday I took my comprehensive examination for my Master's degree, which was (as you might expect) a Big Freakin' Deal. Essentially, if you don't pass, you don't graduate. While I never thought that failing was a possibility, I was still pretty stressed out over it. Not to worry; I passed :-) I have not yet received my official score (one can fail, or one can receive a low pass, a pass, or a pass with distinction), but I have been unofficially told that everyone who took the exam last Friday received a passing score. Official scores should be out by the end of the week. Now that comps are over, my to do list has shrunk to an amazingly small size: finish writing a paper (it's almost done; all I have to write is my conclusion and then proofread the thing), teach one class, attend one class as a student, and administer a final exam to my students. And find a job. 

I thought job hunting was stressful back in February. Now that it's April, the stress level has increased exponentially. There still aren't many jobs in TESOL in the US, the positions are very competitive, and I am developing an ever increasing urge to punch the people who design some of these job application websites. (The last job I applied for required me to submit a US state, zip code, and telephone number for each of my former jobs... a bit of a challenge for those positions in South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. In order to get the website to accept my application, I had to enter false information... and then click a checkbox certifying that all of the information I had entered was accurate. Grrrr.) 

I'll be moving out of Orlando and back 'home' to Georgia at the beginning of May, where I will remain until I find a job. Moving is an expensive and annoying process, and I would have loved to move straight from Orlando to the location of my next job, but unless something appears in the next two and a half weeks, it seems that wherever I end up, I'll be getting there by way of Georgia. Whatever happens, though, the graduate school phase of my life is nearly over; time for a new chapter to begin!

TESOL 2014: My Experiences

Those of you who follow me on Facebook know that I’ve spent the last week in Portland, OR. For those of you who don’t, well, I’ve spent the last week in Portland. I left Orlando on Tuesday, immediately following my classes, and flew to Portland for the purpose of attending the TESOL 2014 international conference. I’ll blog a little later about my non-TESOL conference experiences in Portland; this post will be limited to my conference-specific experiences. I’ll post about the rest of my Portland adventures later.

I have mixed feelings about the conference. On the one hand, I saw a lot of really great presentations on topics that I found quite interesting. Additionally, I was able to meet up with some really fantastic people and have some really informative conversations. (Where else can you have an academic discussion about Konglish?) On the other hand, I came to the conference specifically for the job fair, and to be honest, I found the job fair disappointing. But more on that later.

Wednesday was a pretty slow day at the conference. I explored the convention center, and found myself a nice spot to sit and dig through the 200+ page schedule of events to plan which presentations I wanted to go see. I met a guy from Florida who had watched my presentation back in 2012 at the Central Florida TESOL conference on Low-Tech and No-Tech TESOL in places such as Kyrgyzstan – and who remembered me and the presentation. I had the aforementioned conversation about Konglish, with a fellow presenting a poster on ‘Semantic Shift in Blended Languages in Korea’ (yes, by ‘blended languages’ he meant Konglish), and I met a woman doing research on state policies towards English language learners (ELLs) in Alabama (which seem just about as f’d up as the state policies towards ELLs in Florida, but at least she had some solid research to prove its f’d-up-ness). This was followed by the welcome reception for first time attendees, which was rather pointless (they taught us how to use the 200+ page schedule that most of us had spent the day familiarizing ourselves with, yawn). I did, however, meet a woman seated at my table who administrates the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) in a north-Florida county. Sadly (for someone like me, looking for an ESOL position), her county only hires mainstream teachers with ESOL endorsements, not full time ESOL teachers.

Inside the Convention Center
Just outside the Convention Center: "Attention: Bell will ring without warning"
I never did hear it ring.

Convention Swag

After the welcome session, we had the keynote speech, given by Surin Pitsuwan. It was a fantastic speech. Pitsuwan isn’t an ESL/EFL/ESOL teacher; instead he’s the product of such education. He came from a working-class, rural family in Thailand, where he was taught English by Peace Corps volunteers as well as volunteers from Canada and the UK. This gave him the skills to apply for a study abroad program in the US. Since then, he’s done all sorts of things, including getting a PhD from Harvard, becoming a member of Parliament in Thailand, and becoming Secretary-General of ASEAN. His point of view was that those of us in this field are helping to spread a necessary skill, and that he wouldn’t have achieved anywhere near what he has without the help from the volunteers who came to his village when he was young. This made me feel really great about some of the life decisions I’ve made (working in Russia for a pittance, volunteering in rural Kyrgyzstan).

Surin Pitsuwan

Thursday was a big day. It was the day that I had one interview scheduled and when I planned to spend the afternoon cruising the job marketplace, distributing my resume willy-nilly. However, in the morning my goal was to attend several presentations. The first presentation I attended was on ‘English only’ policies at Intensive English Programs (IEPs) in the US. Ideally, I would like to find a job at an IEP, so this was something that was quite interesting to me. The ‘English only’ concept (students may not speak in their first language (L1) during class and are discouraged from using it while at the facility or on IEP events) is essentially standard IEP policy across the country. However, research has shown that allowing students to use their L1, especially for school-related purposes (i.e., explaining directions or a grammar rule to a classmate, or looking up definitions in a bilingual dictionary) is actually very helpful to students. This isn’t really surprising, especially since recent research in K-12 ESOL education has shown the importance of incorporating a student’s L1 into their English education. The sad thing is that despite the research, this policy remains in place – and both teachers and students actually support it, despite its various downsides.

The next presentation that I attended was on transitioning from teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL; involves teaching overseas) to teaching English as a Second Language (ESL; involves teaching in the US or other predominantly English-speaking country). While I am not making a direct transition (going as I did from overseas to grad school to the job search), I felt that this was still an applicable topic. While I didn’t get much information about the topic that I didn’t already know, I did learn that the job market in my field here in the US is much tougher than I had expected. I have applied to an absurd number of jobs in the southeastern United States. While I haven’t heard back from most of them, I did hear from two (on Tuesday as I was on my way to Portland) that they had selected someone else. I had been hoping that was an anomaly, but according to this panel, jobs are few and far between, and that’s to be expected. The presenters were all fellows with advanced degrees and 10+ years of EFL experience, and they had all had trouble finding jobs when they returned to the US. One had returned last June AND IS STILL UNEMPLOYED. This made me feel rather panicky.

Next, I had planned to attend a presentation on the use of movie trailers in the classroom, but by the time I got to the room in which that presentation was being given, it was so packed that I couldn’t even make it through the door. I opted instead for a presentation on Global Englishes (different types of English spoken around the world, from the types that are considered more prestigious like American and British English, to the types that are often stigmatized, such as Indian or East Asian English). Sadly, I missed the beginning of her presentation, but I arrived in time for an interesting anecdote about teaching the phrase ‘on the bus.’ She discussed experiences in India where one normally says ‘I am in the bus’ unless there is no room and one must actually climb on to the top of the bus, in which case one would say ‘I am on the bus.’ I loved this, mainly because I have had students struggle with the fact that in American English we say ‘I’m in the car’ but ‘I’m on the bus.’ I also had a couple of experiences in Russia and Kyrgyzstan where I told people I was ‘on the bus’ (literally translating word for word into Russian) and having them think I meant I was on top of the bus, as in Russian you use the preposition ‘in’).

After lunch, it was time to find myself a job. Or so I thought. I had decided to come to the TESOL 2014 conference specifically because I was told that its job fair was absolutely the best place to find jobs. Based on the explanations I had received, I envisioned an area of booths manned by potential employers where you could talk to representatives, decide if you were interested in working for them, and then arrange a time for an interview. Sadly, it was not like this at all. You could only meet with the employers if you had an interview scheduled with them, and there was no direct way of scheduling an interview. After checking in at the job fair, I was directed to a computer which gave me access to the TESOL website’s jobs section (which believe me, I am already intimately familiar with). I was told to submit my application to any employer marked as present at the convention, and that if any employer was interested in interviewing me, they would call me. Nearly all of the employers listed who were present at the convention were out of the Middle East. As I am looking for work in the US, my options were incredibly limited. Of the very few US-based employers on the website listed as present at the convention, there were only two that I was interested in working for – and I had already applied for positions with both. While one had already arranged to meet with me during the convention (it was the only interview that I ended up having), the other had never gotten back to me. I re-submitted my application, stating that I was in town for the conference and would love an opportunity to meet with them in person, but never heard anything back. At least I had the one interview that I had arranged in advance. (It went really well, but they also had a stack of resumes about an inch thick from all the other people they planned to interview that day.)

I was feeling a bit discouraged after leaving the job fair section, but since I knew there were a small handful of booths with recruiters for other positions (all overseas) in the Expo section of the convention, I decided to see what else I could find. I had some people from Saudi Arabia and Oman attempt to recruit me, but like I said, that’s just not on my list of places to go. I have mentioned before that I had applied for a competitive position that is overseas. They, too, had a booth, so I decided to ask them about their time-frame, as I hadn’t heard anything yet. On a positive note, they told me that they were running behind. Normally they start interviewing people in March, but this year (“due to the overwhelming number of applications”) they wouldn’t be able to start conducting interviews until April. Then I asked them about pets. Their website had said that they allowed pets, but strongly discouraged them. I wanted to ask about this in person. Well, you can bring your pets, but if you’re in a position in which you are told you must evacuate (they just evacuated their personnel from Ukraine), you MUST leave your pets behind. (The other option is refusing to evacuate, in which case your position will be terminated.) Sorry, I’m not leaving Mochi and Charlie behind; I guess I can rule that job off my list.

Friday had a whole slew of presentations on language education policy in the US. I find language policy (and specifically language education policy) incredibly interesting, so I decided to attend three of these presentations. The first couple weren’t overly exciting, as they essentially reiterated a lot that I already knew. The third, however, entitled ELLs and the Law, was fascinating. They delved quite deeply into the legal reasons why schools are required to provide special language education services to ELLs, and what comprises the bare minimum of services allowed. Comparing what I learned in that presentation to what I’ve learned in recent research on Florida’s language education policies, it seems that Florida is skirting that bare minimum line pretty damn closely.

After three presentations on language policy, I figured I needed a change of pace. I attended a presentation on professor and resident ESL students’ interactions in higher education. The presentation ended up focusing a lot on the views professors held of ELLs who were legal residents or US citizens versus ELLs who were international study-abroad students. It was interesting – and a bit disturbing – to see that the professors almost uniformly held much more negative views of their resident ELLs than they had of their international student ELLs. Sadly, she didn’t delve into if this was based on the actual performances of these students in the classroom, or if this was merely the professors’ preconceived biases towards these students. (I also found this interesting, because when I taught ESL in the US, my resident ELLs vastly outperformed my international students, most of whom seemed to just be in the US in order to party or go to Disney.)

The last presentation I attended was put on by Brooke – one of my former colleagues at the American Home in Russia, where I worked in 2005-2006! She and her classmate (both of them are PhD students at Penn State) presented on ESL students’ reactions to the use of Global Englishes (non-standard English) in their Freshman Composition class. They discussed their ESL students’ reactions to readings from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Despite the huge push for inclusion of Global Englishes in ESL/EFL curricula (at least in a top-down sense), they had quite a strong pushback from the students, who didn’t see reading such texts as beneficial and not academic. In some ways, the students had a point – learning to include aspects of their native language/dialect in their writing is great from a creative-writing standpoint, but isn’t something that would be beneficial in terms of learning to write a Political Science or Chemistry term paper. The most interesting thing I found was that while the ESL students who were exposed to this kind of writing resisted it and gave a lot of pushback, the mainstream classes (native and fluent speakers of English) accepted these stories with little to no pushback.

Brooke presents :-)

So there you go; that’s my round-up of my experiences at TESOL 2014. I’ll post my non-conference related Portland adventures in a day or two :-)

Job hunting is a stressful thing.

I am not yet unemployed; that won’t happen until I graduate in May. Even then, I’m lucky to have enough in savings (*cough* hoarded student loan money *cough*) that I can be unemployed for a few months if need be. Still, it’s stressful. I can easily imagine how much of a nightmare the process must be for someone who is currently unemployed and who has already drained his or her savings.

This is the first time I’ve gone job hunting in the US since 2002, and the process has become a lot more internet-based in the intervening twelve years. While there were some online application websites back in 2002, most of the jobs I applied for back then either required me to snail-mail hard-copies of my application materials, or asked me to email the relevant documents to the individual in charge of the hiring process. Nearly all of the jobs I’ve applied for in the intervening twelve years have been overseas EFL teaching jobs, and they, too, merely required that I email my resume, cover letter, and references’ contact information to their HR person. While there are a very small number of job openings (in my field, mind you) here in the US that do simply ask for documents to be emailed, most seem to rely on online job application submission websites. These things are responsible for a lot of the stress that I’ve been feeling lately.

Here are some of the thoughts I’ve had while dealing with these job-application websites:

• If I am able to submit my resume to the job application website, why must I then manually copy and paste every single section of my resume into teeny-tiny little boxes? Surely one or the other should suffice!
• I swear, half of these websites must have gone live a good ten years ago or so, and are desperately in need of an update to become more user-friendly.
• PLEASE enable a save-as-you-go feature. Nothing like using an application website that doesn’t allow you to save until you have spent several hours filling in all the little boxes… especially when, right before you hit submit, your cat jumps onto your laptop and closes the browser.
• Dear Job X: I see that you have been advertising the same positions over and over for MONTHS now. The reason why no one is applying is that your job application website is broken. After potential applicants spend several hours completing their application, the website tells them they can’t submit the application until they answer Question X. Except that they have indeed answered Question X. Even attempting to provide different answers to Question X or attempting to apply via different browsers does not solve this problem. I would contact you directly to inform you of this issue, but the only contact information you provided was this broken job application website.
• If you are advertising a position on a third-party job-search website that allows applicants to apply for positions directly through said website, but you do not want applicants to use this function, please make this clear sometime before the applicant completes the third-party site’s application submission process.
• If the instructions clearly state that letters of reference must be submitted directly from the reference himself/herself, why won’t the application website let me submit the application until I upload three letters of reference? You do realize that if I am uploading them, they are not coming directly from the reference, right?
• UPDATE: If your website doesn't recognize *.docx files, even when it specifies Microsoft Word files only, your website is in serious need of an update.

It’s not just the job-application websites that are stressing me out, although they’re a good portion of it. For one thing, there just are not that many full time jobs in my field. I don’t want to graduate with over $20,000 in student loan debt only to make $15,000 a year as an adjunct, but that might very well happen. When faced with the option of making so little as an adjunct or going back overseas, I definitely start considering the option of going overseas again. I’ve even been corresponding with a potential employer in Kazakhstan and looking at job ads at Korean universities… although notice how that wouldn’t help me to take some of mom’s dogs off her hands. Not to mention that I feel all kinds of stress when I think about the logistics of international travel with Charlie and Mochi. Arrrrgh. Lastly, very few places seem willing to get back to applicants. How much effort does it take to email a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ form letter? So far, I’ve gotten one. ONE. Does that mean the others are still considering me? Have they hired someone else? Have they thrown my application in the trash and are looking for someone better? I have no idea.

Sigh. There’s not really any point to this post; I just wanted to vent. 

3/4 Done!

My third semester in the MA TESOL program has just come to a close. I have just one more semester and I will have my MA and be done with school for a while.

This semester I taught my first university level classes: mainly juniors and seniors; mainly education majors; all native or fluent English speakers. I had worried that while I loved teaching EFL/ESL, I wouldn’t enjoy teaching future teachers about second language acquisition and how to teach ESOL students. I needn’t have worried; I loved it. I had a really great time with my classes, and I hope I have students next semester who are as fun to teach as these guys were. I should also have a much lighter workload next semester, as I won’t be making PowerPoints from scratch for every single lesson; I’ll just be tweaking the ones I made this semester.

My experiences teaching this semester have changed my outlook on the future a bit. I used to think, ‘Why bother getting a PhD? I don’t want to be a university professor.’ Except that now I kind of do. And I didn’t go the thesis track. It seems that everybody says, ‘Oh, if you want a PhD, you absolutely must write a thesis for your MA’ and maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. The thing is, I don’t want to get my PhD in TESOL. If I were to shoot for a PhD, it would be in Sociolinguistics – and it would be at a different school. I didn’t want to write a thesis for the MA because I came to this program wanting to learn more about how to become a better ESOL teacher, not to conduct research. Oddly enough, this semester I took a sociolinguistics course, and ended up getting really into my research on language policy in Kyrgyzstan – and I’m hoping to get my paper published. Here’s hoping that if I do apply for any PhD programs and I get dinged for not having written a thesis, a published article will suffice. You know, assuming it gets published. I guess we’ll see what the future brings. Were I to apply to a PhD program, it wouldn’t be for a year or so anyway.

I’m heading up to GA for the next three weeks. I’m actually going to be pretty busy designing a curriculum for a baseball-themed EFL program for a major league baseball team’s training center in the Caribbean. Which should be interesting, given my general lack of knowledge of baseball. I’m also taking a fairly large dog up to GA with me, in addition to Mochi and Charlie, as I’ll be pet-sitting her over the break. That’s going to make for an interesting car ride there and back, let me tell you. Sigh.

Lastly, vimeo seems to be letting me keep my Kyrgyzstan-is-Middle-Earth video online, so check it out:

Rocky Horror! Halloween! Grammar! The Inhumane Society!

It's been a busy couple of weeks around here, mainly because it was Halloween season - which, in my opinion, is the best time of the year. This year I was able to rock three different costumes, which made me incredibly happy. I do love a good opportunity to dress up.

On Friday, October 25th, a group of us went to go see the Rocky Horror Picture Show film and interactive performance put on by The Rich Weirdoes. 

Security made M. take off his "FBI" jacket, because "someone might think he was a real agent." Um, OK. The show itself was pretty fantastic though. I've seen RHPS put on in smaller venues, but this was definitely the largest and most interactive version I've ever been to.

Saturday one of my classmates threw a kickass Halloween party.

I went as a flapper.

Mr. Green and Miss Scarlet from Clue, if you were wondering.

And then of course, I taught class on Thursday dressed as a Dalek. As you do. I'd say about half of my students knew what I was immediately. The others were like, "What's a Dalek?"

ED-U-CATE!

Thursday I also finished up my fifth and final lesson to my students on teaching English grammar to EFL/ESL students. Yes, we spent five days on grammar. You want someone to talk for six and a half hours (thirteen if you consider that I teach two sections) on English grammar, I am apparently your girl. The PowerPoint by itself isn't quite as great. For one thing, SlideShare has mucked up my formatting, and you can't see my animations. Plus, as I've mentioned before, I do NOT write every word I say on my slides - I hate it when teachers do that. As a result, reading the slides won't give you as much information as sitting through my class would have. However, if you're an EFL/ESL teacher new to teaching grammar, it should give you some useful pointers.

And lastly, due to the combination of some really horrific animal-shelter related news that I read on Facebook and all these people posting about NaNoWriMo, I've become inspired to get back to work on The Inhumane Society. I started by editing the existing 140 pages - you can read the edited first part here - and by finally picking up where I left off. Once you're all caught up, you can read the latest installment of The Inhumane Society here.

Oh, and you know I'm still posting about my summer's adventures over at Cat Lady in Kyrgyzstan, right?

Things to share with my students (or not...)

I was watching the 2009 Star Trek last night, and the scene where Kirk meets Uhura for the first time is just so bloody brilliant from my point of view. I would love to share it with my students since it mentions so many of the things we've been discussing in class (albeit from the point of view of xenolinguistics, not plain old bound-to-earth linguistics), although Kirk's quip at the end makes it a little less than appropriate for class. As such, I'll share it with you guys instead (until youtube takes me down for copyright violations, anyway).

And in the category of things I will actually share with my classes, here's my next powerpoint. Kind of annoyed that SlideShare eliminated my Arabic script :-(

Mixed Feelings

Here’s some appropriate music to listen to while reading:

I love traveling. It’s what I do, and I will never stop doing it. That being said, I’ll be turning 35 in a few days, and I’m starting to think in terms of actually… not settling down, but more like establishing a permanent base here in the US. While I’m not a huge fan of the Orlando area, I do like Florida in general and there are a lot of TESOL opportunities here due to our high native Spanish speaking population. I also do not relish another couple of plane flights with animals. Flying with pets, while often a necessity in my life, is never a pleasant experience for me, and I suspect it’s far worse for them. I’d love to have my own place with a fenced in yard where Mochi could run, and maybe even play with a dog his size, and a house big enough that I wouldn’t have to have the litter box in my bedroom. Obviously, when I do this (and I will eventually), I will continue to take fun and ridiculous vacations to destinations that hardly anyone else would choose… but am I ready to stop living and working overseas long term? I don’t know. On the one hand, I’ve been browsing real estate listings in central and north Florida while hunting for potential future employers in those areas. (Of course, I don’t graduate until May 2014, and all of the job ads online now are for either immediate or January start dates, so it’s not like I’m applying for anything.) On the other hand, I’m still working on my application to the State Department’s English Language Fellow program and browsing overseas job listings. Some days I’m certain I want to move overseas again, other days I’m certain I want to stay here. I’m thinking it could go either way. Obviously it’s way too early for me to be worrying about this, as I won’t be submitting any job applications until next semester… and yet it seems that nowadays this is all I think about.

Language Learning, PowerPoints, and Teaching

This semester, I am teaching a course on second language acquisition, or the process by which we learn second languages. I was provided with a complete set of PowerPoint presentations which had been used by current and previous teachers of this course... but I'm kind of picky about my PowerPoints. To me, there are certain fonts which should never be used in a PowerPoint presentation. I'm not just talking about Comic Sans; in my opinion decorative fonts and any sort of serif font should never be used in professional presentations. Likewise, multiple colored fonts can be used for emphasis, but this should be done sparingly. ClipArt and WordArt need to go. Slides packed full of words need to be rare and limited to Really Important Things. Basically, the set of PowerPoints that I was given pretty much hit on everything that makes me shudder with regards to presentations. As such I'm re-doing them. They're based on the PowerPoints that I was given as well as on the text The Study of Language by George Yule. Here are the ones that I've used so far. Annoyingly, I haven't found any share-your-powerpoint website that lets me embed the files on my blog AND lets the animations work AND doesn't mess up my formatting here and there. Boo. I'm using SlideShare, as it seems to work the best for sharing on Blogger. If any of you know of a site that would work better, please let me know. Anyway, keep in mind that a good PowerPoint presentation should be used as the backdrop for your lecture - it shouldn't simply contain the text of your lecture. As such, a lot of the slides are just pictures, short video clips, or short phrases meant to stimulate discussion. Anyhow - enjoy!
After using this one in class, I learned that my students have no clue as to who Kirk Douglas is. I was finally able to get through to them by saying "You know Michael Douglas? The guy who's married to Catherine Zeta-Jones? Yeah, his father." Also, note to self: warn students before showing the video on brain surgery. I nearly had one guy puke. Not everyone has as tough of a stomach for such things as I have.

You can't discuss second language acquisition until you know a bit about first language acquisition. Also FYI, the last slide consists of discussion group questions. And a picture of me as a toddler.

Native vs. Non-Native English Speaking Teachers

Do you remember back in January when I asked anyone who had ever taught English in Asia to help me out by participating in a survey? Well, our proposal to present our research project at the 2013 Sunshine State TESOL was accepted... unfortunately, the conference is May 16-18 and I leave for Kyrgyzstan on May 9th. Ooops. The other two members of our group are actually presenting at the conference, and I'll be participating via youtube video. Haha. Since some of our survey's participants expressed interest in our results, here's my absurd youtube video and our results. The results of the survey were divided up between native speaking English teachers and non-native speaking teachers.

Question 1: What are the STRENGTHS of native-speaking English teachers?

Question 2: What are the WEAKNESSES of native-speaking English teachers?

Question 3: What are the STRENGTHS of non-native speaking English teachers?

Question 4: What are the WEAKNESSES of non-native speaking English teachers?

If You Must Choose, Choose Wisely

I teach three ESL classes in the mornings, Monday through Thursday at a private language school. Every day, when I’m teaching my second class of the day, this is what I think of:

Only I wasn’t the one who chose poorly, and neither were my students. The poor choice was made by the previous teacher, who also happens to be the person in charge of choosing textbooks at this joint.

Choosing a text for an ESL class is different from choosing one for your middle school or high school language arts class. You need to take into account the level of language of your students, their reasons for studying English, and whether or not the text will be useful to them in any way. It also doesn’t hurt to choose something that they might find interesting. You should also keep in mind that foreign language skill level does not in any way equate to US school system grade level. Just because you read a specific book in the eighth grade does not mean that intermediate level ESL students – whose level-appropriate grammar text has them learning how to form sentences using “used to” while learning vocabulary such as bicycle, summer camp, subway, and quiet – could gain anything from attempting to read this book. I’m all for challenging my students. I love the concept of i+1 – giving students content that is just a little above their current level – but there’s a difference between challenging your students and, well, torturing them.

The words that I listed above (bicycle, summer camp, subway, and quiet) all come from the grammar-text that my intermediate level students in my second class are using in their grammar class. It’s pretty spot on level-wise. It might not be i+1 (it’s a little more like “just i”), and it certainly isn’t interesting, but it contains incredibly useful vocabulary and useful grammar that will be, well, useful to new immigrants to the United States. I wish I taught from that text book.

Instead, I’m teaching Call of the Wild, by Jack London. Not an ESL version of Call of the Wild, but the original. Like I said, this was not my choice. And the chooser chose poorly. Putting aside the fact that this book is depressing as hell (seriously, it’s all about dogs suffering and dying slow, painful, graphic deaths in forty-below temperatures in the Alaskan wilderness), there are some major problems with this choice of text. 

Remember my short list of vocabulary words from my students’ level appropriate text? Well, compare those to primitive, fang, primordial, mastership, and toil. And I just picked those out of Call of the Wild’s table of contents. Every chapter is bursting at the seams with very advanced level English vocabulary, the kind that students studying for the GRE would study. These words are way out of the league of students who are learning how to say “I used to go to summer camp by bicycle.”

Additionally, not only are many of the words used in this book very advanced, but they’re also pretty archaic. I don’t know how many times I’ve said, “Now, this word is very, very old fashioned. We don’t normally say this nowadays. Nowadays, we would say ____________ instead.” I’ve had students ask, if no one uses these words, why are we studying them? And that, my friends, is my point. This book was written in 1903, and I’m sure the language was spot-on for its time… but this isn’t practical language to be teaching ESL students in 2013.

Call of the Wild would be useful for ESL students who are at an advanced level and who are interested in studying American literature. For recent immigrants – especially those at an intermediate level of English – this book is a waste of time. And I’m stuck with it until April 18th.

ESL Monkey's Paw (Passages 2)

This is an activity I whipped up for class a few weeks ago - and which I spent this morning modifying just a tad. It's designed to accompany chapters 3 and 4 of the ESL textbook, Passages 2. The grammar points that these chapters focus on include ~ing clauses (Ex: Hoping to find proof of life on Mars, NASA launched the Curiosity probe.), active-voice reporting clauses (Ex: Scientists claim (that) they have found proof of life on Mars.), and passive-voice reporting clauses (Ex: It is believed (that) life once existed on Mars.). The main topics of Chapter 4 are superstitions, beliefs, and legends. 

I adapted the short story, The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs to contain language that my students would be able to comprehend. I also changed the sum of cash featured in the story from £200 to $20,000, to make it both American (as my students are studying here in the US) as well as modern. Lastly, I made sure to include examples of the three grammar points mentioned above, as well as to use some of the vocabulary from the chapter. If you'd like to take a look at (or use) my version of the story, you can download it from here. (I have highlighted the grammar points in hot pink, and the relevant vocabulary words in yellow. Also, dropbox seems to have done something wonky to my formatting; I promise everything was properly formatted in my original!)

After reading through the story, I also showed my students a clip from The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror II, in which the Simpson family acquires their own magical monkey's paw. Unfortunately, it's not readily available for free online, but you can download the episode from Amazon for $1.99.

This lesson works really well! The students seem to enjoy it, and they get to review the grammar and vocabulary without realizing that they're doing a grammar/vocab review. Also, a big hat tip to my friend YH who first came up with the idea of using The Simpsons' version of The Monkey's Paw as an accompaniment to Passages. 

Valentine's Themed Songs with Phrasal Verbs

Today was Valentine's Day, and my class (adults, advanced level) were still supposed to be working on phrasal verbs. I decided to spice up the lesson by using some songs with which they were all familiar, and which contained the phrasal verbs get back, come true, fog up, run out, settle down, bend over, hold back, look into, turn up, open up, and stay away. The songs I used were Someone Like You by Adele, and I'm Yours by Jason Mraz. In addition to discussions of the phrasal verbs in these songs (including whether or not they were separable or inseparable), we got to discuss words and phrases like out of the blue, time flies, the time of our lives, bittersweet, bend over backwards for someone, aim to do something, and fate.

Jason Mraz's grammar is a particularly annoying and often incorrect combination of cutsey and trashy, but my group was smart enough that we were able to go through and actually correct Mraz's grammar. And now if someone says to them something along the lines of 'I done ate that' (instead of 'I've already eaten that'), they'll know what that person is talking about. 

They also learned 'ain't' from Adele. (Only one of them had heard 'ain't' before.) While I love correct grammar and certainly don't want to be teaching my students to speak incorrectly, my goal is for them to be able to understand and communicate with the average person on the street... and with so many native English speakers using 'ain't' or other incorrect grammar forms on a regular basis, I'd like to make sure my students can understand such things when they encounter them. 

Anyway, the class really enjoyed the lesson, and they were all happily singing along with the songs, so I'd say this one was a success. Below are the lyrics to the songs with the phrasal verbs removed, if you'd like to snag 'em for your classes. (BTW, I'm Yours says 'damn' several times, and talks about nibbling on someone's ear, so definitely keep in mind the age/culture of your students!)

Someone Like You by Adele

I heard that you're __________________
That you found a girl and you're married now.
I heard that your dreams __________________.
Guess she gave you things I didn't give to you.

Old friend, why are you so shy?
Ain't like you to __________________ or hide from the light.

I hate to __________________ out of the blue uninvited
But I couldn't __________________, I couldn't fight it.
I had hoped you'd see my face and that you'd be reminded
That for me it isn't over.

Never mind, I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you too
Don't forget me, I beg
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead,
Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead"

You know how the time flies
Only yesterday was the time of our lives
We were born and raised
In a summer haze
Bound by the surprise of our glory days

I hate to __________________ out of the blue uninvited
But I couldn't __________________, I couldn't fight it.
I'd hoped you'd see my face and that you'd be reminded
That for me it isn't over.

Never mind, I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you too
Don't forget me, I beg
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead."

Nothing compares
No worries or cares
Regrets and mistakes
They are memories made.
Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste?

Never mind, I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you
Don't forget me, I beg
I remember you said,
"Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead."

I’m Yours by Jason Mraz

Well you done done me and you bet I felt it

I tried to be chill but you're so hot that I melted

I fell right through the cracks 

Now I'm trying to __________________

Before the cool done __________________

I'll be giving it my bestest

And nothing's going to stop me but divine intervention

I reckon it's again my turn to win some or learn some

But I won't hesitate no more, no more

It cannot wait, I'm yours

Well __________________ your mind and see like me

__________________ your plans and damn you're free

__________________ your heart and you'll find love love love love

Listen to the music of the moment people dance and sing

We’re just one big family

And it's our God-forsaken right to be loved love loved love loved

So I won't hesitate no more, no more

It cannot wait I'm sure

There's no need to complicate 

Our time is short

This is our fate, I'm yours

Dooo, dooo, dooooo

Scooch on over closer dear

And I will nibble your ear

I've been spending way too long checking my tongue in the mirror

And __________________ backwards just to try to see it clearer

But my breath __________________ the glass

And so I drew a new face and I laughed

I guess what I'll be saying is there ain't no better reason

To rid yourself of vanity and just go with the seasons

It's what we aim to do

Our name is our virtue

But I won't hesitate no more, no more 

It cannot wait I'm yours

Well __________________ your mind and see like me

__________________ your plans and damn you're free

__________________ your heart and you'll find that the sky is yours

So please don't, please don't, please don't

There's no need to complicate

Cause our time is short

This oh this oh this is our fate, I'm yours!

Fun with Friends and Phrasal Verbs

I've started teaching a new class at the school where I teach part time. It's a class of adults, all advanced level, all students who are really only "studying" to keep their student visas. Even though I've only just started working with this group, I've heard them mention several time over the past few weeks that the school is a joke, and that as soon as they get their green cards, they'll be out of there. They're definitely jaded! 

I've only taught two classes to this advanced group so far - on the rather stultifying topic of phrasal verbs, with the equally stultifying Passages 2 textbook - but I've been trying to bring as much life to the topic as possible. Today, at the end of class, my students thanked me for a great lesson and said 'we actually learned something for once.' This says a lot about my place of employment. (It's a private language school.) 

Anyway,  in case you're curious about today's lesson, I modified one that I found here. Here's my version: After some boring Passages-based phrasal verb reviews, I reviewed the phrasal verbs wear in, hang on, run into, pick up, come over, drop off, and sit down - which I admit were easy for this group - and discussed whether each verb was separable or inseparable. Then we watched an excerpt from the Friends episode The One That Could Have Been Part 1, which featured the aforementioned phrasal verbs. The students in my class are definitely advanced enough to watch Friends without any problems. Then I gave them the script to the excerpt that we watched, with the phrasal verbs deleted:

Joey: Hey man, look sorry about that Archie thing. Do uh, do you need me to give you
some money?

Chandler: Hey, I may have no money, but I still have my pride.

Joey: Really?

Chandler: Ehh.

Monica: Maybe Joey doesn’t have to give you the money, TV stars have assistants right?

Joey: That’s an idea! Hey, if I hired an assistant, would-would you take money from her?

Monica: No Joey! Chandler could be your assistant! See, he could answer all of your fan mail and stuff!

Joey: That’s great! That would be great! Let’s do that!

Chandler: I could use the money; it could give me time to write.

Joey: Oh right great! Welcome aboard!

Chandler: Okay!

Joey: All right! Now hey, I need to use the bathroom. Since I don’t need any assistance in there, take a break!

Chandler: All right!

Phoebe: Hey!

Monica: Hey Phoebe! Guess what?

Phoebe: What?

Monica: Joey just hired Chandler to be his assistant!

Phoebe: Oh that’s so sweet! Oh! _________________! _________________! Go! No! No-no! I
said sell when it hits 50! 5-0, it’s a number! It comes after 4-9! No, it’s okay. It’s okay, you’re allowed one mistake. Just kidding, you are of course fired.

Ross: Hey Mon!

Monica: Hey!

Ross: Mon, look who I _________________!

Monica: Oh my God! Rachel!! You look terrific!

Rachel: Oh, so do you! Did you lose weight?

Monica: You are so sweet to notice! Yes, I lost three and a half pounds!

Ross: And, and uh, you-you remember my friend Chandler.

Chandler: Hey.

Rachel: Oh yeah.

Ross: And that’s Phoebe over there!

Phoebe: Hi!

Monica: Oh my God, _________________! _________________! How long as it been since we’ve seen each other?

Ross: 1987, the day after Christmas, at Sean McMahon’s party. I played you one of my songs, y’know Interplanetary Courtship Ritual.

Rachel: Oh yeah. Right. So now, are—do you, do you still do music?

Ross: Sometimes, you should come over sometime! I’ll play you one of my other…

Rachel: Oh my God! Joey Tribbiani from Days of Our Lives just walked in here!

Monica: Rach, he’s a friend of ours.

Rachel: You are friends with Dr. Drake Remoray?

Chandler: Oh, it’s kinda hard to be friends with Drake because of his busy schedule and the fact that he’s not real.

Ross: Hey, hey, or I could bring my keyboard here sometime…

Rachel: He’s _________________! He’s _________________!

Monica: Joey!

Joey: I know, here-here!!

Monica: Ohhh! No! This is my friend Rachel, we went to high school together.

Rachel: Hi!

Joey: Hi!

Rachel: Hi! I love you on that show! I watch you every day! I mean, when you took out your own kidney to save your ex-wife even though she tried to kill you…

Joey: Well, it’s always nice to meet the fans.

Rachel: Ah!

Joey: She’s not crazy is she?

Monica: No.

Joey: So uh, how you doin’?

***                

Phoebe: _________________. _________________ . _________________ ! Go! Who is this? Oh, okay. You’re gonna like working for me. What’s your name? What kinda name is Brindy? I’m… whatever… stop talking! Alright. From – from now on your name is Joan. You can pick your own last name.

Joey: Hey, there you are.

Chandler: Uh-oh, it’s my boss.

Joey: All right, here’s a list of things for you to do today. Man, this going to be so great! Thank you so much! All right, I got to go to work I’m delivering twins today, but only one of them is mine!

Chandler: _________________my dry cleaning. _________________my vitamins. Teach me how to spell vitamins. _________________my new jeans.

We watched the clip again, and the students filled in the blanks with the phrasal verbs. Then - since it's a class of six - the students took the script and acted it out. They really got into it and had a great time. Anyway, my students loved it so much that I thought I'd share this with you. The only problems with this activity are: I couldn't find this episode online for free anywhere (I actually bought it so that I could do this lesson). Also, you have to cut off the video right after Chandler says "new jeans" or else you get Monica telling him (and your students) that he is Joey's bitch. 

Anyway, if you've got an advanced class that's starting Passages 2, this makes a great supplement. Enjoy!