And the theme of this carnival will be vocabulary development using my favorite part of speech…VERBS! — cause that’s what’s happening. This is my first time doing a blog carnival. I’ve been trying to up my game by using this handy dandy list of verbs on our state tests. Now, I’m not a big “test prep” fan, but I do love vocabulary development, and there are some really great words that take you out of the boring “write” and “learn” and into the more interesting, “paraphrase”, and “infer”. So I’ll be using words from this list to describe the really great posts that have been sent to me. Drum roll please…

Karenne Sylvester relates an excellent, and brief example of teaching idiom in Business English Idioms – The ball’s in your court appearing at How-to-learn-English. She even manages to include variants for auditory, visual, physical (kinesthetic) learners. Not content with this, she includes an “encore” with this post, The Business of Twitter – an English for Special Purposes Lesson residing at Kalinago English where her business students discussed business plans for twitter to develop their language skills. Brilliant!

Mathew Needleman shares some home-truths about making movies in How to Get Started Making Class Movies delivered at Creating Lifelong Learners.  It can be tedious getting to the final product. After seeing some of Mathew’s students’ work, you’d probably agree it’s worth it. The bad news? Another of Mathew’s home-truths, making movies is like playing Carnegie Hall, you need to practice. Not content with cinematic creativity, Mathew Needleman deconstructs and reconstructs Comprehension Strategies Posters V.3 on Creating Lifelong Learners, taking boring old clip-art and making it pop visually (and make more sense). Even if you aren’t stuck with Open Court for reading, these are great.

Drew analyzes How to Make a Good Impression in the IELTS Speaking Test ~ English Trainer carried on the English Trainer blog, with some really frank, and easy to follow advice that students may not be aware of, but need to know, to put their “best foot forward”.

Darren Elliott explains what he does in teacher development – Assessing Speaking contributed at teacher development blog. He does a great job of analyzing some of what he does (formal speeches) in contrast with the type of oral communication they are likely to encounter. He then asks for folks to share how they assess speaking, so do Darren a favor, and keep the conversation going by sharing what you do.

Edu-tainer relates how he introduced Role-playing Games in the classroom #1 on Edu-tainment Canada to teach two otherwise surly Korean teenagers English. He definitely wins the wise use of minimal materials prize for that hat-trick.

Myscha Theriault explores Spelling Activities: Twenty-Seven Ways to Practice in Style at Myscha Theriault in a post that will help you take spelling activities from the boring, “write the word 10 times” to something meaningful and engaging.

Ann S. Michaelsen creates a full unit on Teaching Hamlet putting in an appearance at Teaching English using web 2.0. It looks short and sweet, but it’s packed with meaty details in the links. Take a bite!

Larry Ferlazzo takes a look at chatbots, online applications using artificial intelligence that students can use to practice conversational English with. He analyzes and lists the best of them at The Best Online “Chatbots” For Practicing English | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… shared at Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…. The skivvy? Most are only good for fun and not suitable for replacing human-to-human conversational practice, except the last one. Nice job making sure folks read the whole article Larry!

In a post aimed at EFL students, One Language provides suggestions for Literary Choices for Students of English as a Second Language published at the Learn English blog. The article has a nice helpful and encouraging tone as it leads student through some of the entry-level choices to English literature.

AtlTeacher relates a project from Mr. Mayo (a recent “Totally Wired Teacher” winner) in Performance Assessment: Creating Films shared at Awesome Resources for Curious Teachers. The project had a small group of students in an after school group, creating stop-motion films to show what they had learned.

Seth Dickens shows how to connect classes in difference countries by pairing students up with Skype Calls for e-Twinning in L2 showing at DigitaLang. The post does a good job going through the overall setup and preperation. Another helpful part was the analysis of both what went well, and what he would have done differently.

Nik Peachey describes an activity for improving English pronounciation in Poems for Pronunciation putting an appearance in at Nik’s Daily English Activities. This is Nik’s blog aimed at EFL/ESL students. He goes through the steps for getting a poem, and recording it to practice pronounciation complete with screenshots (helpful for students and teachers alike). The activity has potential for oral fluency practice with middle grade ELD students. Hat tip Nik!

Michelle Klepper sees an application for a white elephant gift of 20 Questions for both struggling readers, and language learners in 20 Questions. What’s really nice is that she provides some activity plans for how to implement this tool to maximize the learning. Not content with that gem, she then outlines how she had students create Amazon Book Review 1st Post as part of doing book reviews. I like how she focuses not just on the thinking, but the actual steps and how long it took. And the final entry in Michelle’s triology chronicles implementing Language Arts Stations in an eighth grade class with a large number of ELLs and SPED (special education) students. Once again, very thorough in describing the setup, the implementation, and what worked, or didn’t. All of her posts appear at Ellclassroom.

There is thinking outside the box about how to teach English, then there is David Deubelbeiss’ brilliant, but not to be taken literally, The 7 Sensational Sins of Great English Language Teachers appearing at EFL Classroom 2.0 – Teacher Talk. Resist not the temptation to sin, and be a better teacher for it.

Mary Ann Zehr recounts how Seattle Plans Overhaul of ELL Programs–With Stimulus Funds reported at Learning the Language. This is a really interesting use of stimulus funds, and is news worth learning more about. Keep sharing Mary Ann!

Deven Black asks, “What were they thinking?” in Vice Versa showing at Education On The Plate about the scary and foolish things that can happen when Special Education meets ESL students. I used the post as a springboard for my own experience with ESL students not getting special education services when they probably should in Stupid ESL and Special Ed Tricks.

BUT, there is still time to add your submissions to the next edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival is coming up on May 31st, so don’t delay, get those submissions now before you miss your chance!

We are looking for posts related to the teaching or learning of English, including examples of student work. Need an example? Check out the latest edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival, which was hosted by Nik Peachey.

Photo Credit: Dead End Black and White on flickr.

It started with a “tweet” from Deven Black, where he lamented about a student placement. I convinced him to blog about it for the upcoming ESL/EFL/ELL Carnival. Here’s the story in Vice Versa « Education On The Plate:

When she arrived from Ecuador two years ago, Juanita, who barely spoke ten words of English, was placed in a special education class. Today she is a sixth grader who speaks English well but she is still in a special education class. Her teacher and I are wondering why.

Juanita is a real person, though that is not her real name. She is charming, funny, friendly and hard working. Aside from the remnants of her accent she seems like any number of other girls in our inner city middle school. Juanita smiles easily, tells a good joke and occasionally gets a little cranky. Her classwork and grades are not spectacular, but they are not terrible either. They are on the level of a middling general education student.

A month after he came to the US with his parents Robert was enrolled in kindergarten in a multi-ethnic, mixed income suburban district. This district has a policy that all students born outside the US must be placed in ELL classes, no exceptions.

Blanket policies are rarely a good idea, even if that policy would have helped Juanita. Here’s why.
Robert was born in South Africa to British parents. English is not only his native language, it is his only language. He speaks it with better enunciation and grammar than the school aid who insisted she had to enroll him in the ELL class.

I wanted him to share because I’ve had the opposite situation come up where students who are ELLs are not tested for Special Education services because we want to give them time, but what happens when you wait too long, which I shared in a comment at Education – Change.org: Arne Duncan to 8-Year-Old Woodrow Wilson: “No College for You”:

Clay, I’m usually with you on this, but I’m sorry, when my students end up coming out of second and third grade not reading, they’re screwed. We have a sixth grader like this, cannot read, and is working on decoding at age 12. He should have been identified LONG ago for services. He may go to college one day, but it’ll be a minor miracle if he does.

What’s all that other stuff about where I’m disagreeing with Clay? Well, actually when you get down to it, I wasn’t. Clay was discussing how Arne Duncan had said there was no chance for a kid who can’t read at 8 years old going to college, to which Clay pointed out President Woodrow Wilson (and a President of Princeton) did not learn to read until he was 12 years old. But, at the heart of Clay’s post (and the really good comments there) and what Deven says clearly is that you really can’t use the same yard stick to measure all kids and blanket policies that do NOT treat our kids as individuals will fail them in the end.

My proposal would be that you use what data you have (which will include both summative testing, and observation) to help these kids, but ask questions, and try to get quality data (not like testing a student new to the country in English as happened to Juanita). I have found EL students muddling along through school at the two lowest proficiency levels (we have five in California with the top two being passing) on state testing. Sometimes the adults in charge take a look at the kid and just say, well that’s because he is learning English, just give him time. While it is true that not all kids learn at the same speed, sometimes that is a sign that more is needed and it doesn’t take much to figure out if you have a problem that needs to be addressed.

Sitting on our school’s student study team (the team tasked with looking at individual students who are struggling), the test scores can tell us a bit, but it’s the questions we ask each other about the individual child that tell us more. If an ELL child has low test scores, the next thing to look at is to look at their CELDT scores (a test of English acquisition that all California students take to see how they are progressing). If they start out behind on the standards test, they could be progressing in knowledge, but it won’t show because they are still behind grade level. The CELDT tells us some more about how they are doing on things like listening and speaking in English. The test stays the same for a 2-3 years, so a flatline score is a sign that something is not going right. Ask yourself, are they getting English Language services that are addressing their specific deficit, or are they learning something they have already mastered.

But, it’s the subtle questions that can really point to a problem. California’s default model for ELLs is to put them in a Sheltered English program. Parents are asked once a year what how they would like their children to be educated, in a bilingual or sheltered program. Most opt for sheltered. This means that we are not doing assessment in the child’s home language if they’ve been in the country for more than a year or so. One of the most important questions to ask a parent when we have a student who is not progressing both in academic testing and in English acquisition is  are they maintaining or losing their knowledge of their home language. If they aren’t learning English, and they are losing their home language, they are, overall, losing language. This is not a good thing. Do the kids have signs of attention problems like a wandering focus? Do they have an inability to retain information after it is taught to them? Is this true in BOTH English and their home language? If you are answering yes to these questions, they could have a processing disorder, and should be tested. If they are in primary, and they have few home language skills along with below age-level English, that can be a sign of a language disorder (like PDD-NOS or Austism Spectrum Disorder). ASD is really hard to spot in Language Learners, but it happens.

I think all these cases teach us the danger of making assumptions where we either ignore data, over-rely on data, or look at the wrong data, instead of looking at the total picture, and the total child.

_{Photo Credit: Can you take a photo of my hands too! from eviemaedavid’s photostream on Flickr.}
I know, I know, I’ve been an awful blogger! My feed has grown to almost 400 unread articles (yikes), I haven’t commented on a blog in a month, and my last post was at least a fortnight past. Like many of you, I’ve had a serious addiction to political news, but I’ve also had some interesting things happening “in real life”. One of them may end up shifting my focus from my online community to my school-based peers. Seemingly before I could have predicted it, a small revolution has taken place on my campus. We have a bunch of “carry-over” funds from federal bilingual money that have to be spent. The principal pitched it to be spent getting an “extra” upper grade teacher so that class size could be lowered (from ~30-33 to 27 or so). With no prompting from me, the upper grade teachers who had the most to gain from this decided that the money would be better spent on getting technology for every teacher in every classroom, instead of just having it in my lab. I’m very pleased with this change, but it’s meant that I’ve had to shift my focus from you all, to my school site and peers.

What will we be getting? A teacher laptop for all classroom and resource teachers, along with digital projectors, and document cameras.

Why does this help with English Language Development? While this is far from one-laptop per child, I think it’s a necessary first step. We have teachers with broken VCRs and no DVD player. The district has sprung for Discovery Streaming, but for most teachers, the only way to show it is if I burn a dvd for them, or they have the kids huddle around a computer monitor. We have Inspiration/Kidspiration (another district-wide purchase), but teachers can only hand out paper copies, and can’t do class “webs” for thinking and sharing ideas. Since the classrooms have 1-6 outdated desktop systems, the computer is something that kids go an do by themselves in small groups (which is good), but there is no opportunity for teachers to share online images, and sound files to illustrate concepts (don’t know what a galaxy is? here’s a pic from NASA kids).

I also think that giving teacher a laptops of their own will be a big game changer. The flexibility of laptops cannot be underestimated, it gave me the ability to experiment and use technology in ways I never dreamed of. It will give them the ability to use computers for their lecturing in a way that will make it more visual and engaging. Since based on my observations (dropping in classes, etc.) they seem to give students independent work time, and not just play sage on the stage, I don’t think this will let them continue with outmoded practices, but instead make the amount of lecture time they engage in really count. Many have already used technology, like tvators (all of these are currently “dead”), to supplement their lectures (locating supporting images) and having that available on the fly is something they value. This tells me they already have some good instincts about how to use technology to improve instruction.

The next part is what I’m really excited about. Another order with digital recorders, cameras, and camcorders for each class should be next. This will let them document, and share student learning that is authentic. They can photograph illustrations, demonstrate concepts, show their oral listening and speaking skills, and it can all be saved to review their progress.

What would I like to see them do with it? How about using Inspiration to talk about stories they read, and record book talks they have about it too? How about demonstrating concepts, and narrating what they come up with, then sharing it with the class? How about showing videos as an into or building background? What about sentence lifting on the projector with color-coding of different elements? Why not show images and visuals of ideas and concepts that are being taught?

Will all my dreams come true? Probably not, but it’s a step forward, but scary because now I have to talk tech with the folks I work with, and make it work for them.

Well, given our flight time, and drive into Palm Springs from Ontario Airport, we arrived as things had already started. Steve Hargadon, the show host, announced I was going to be doing a 5 minute demo within 5 minutes of me walking through the door, lol…

I did a five minute demo/discussion on Diigo, but since I didn’t have a computer ready to go running through the door, so it was mostly talk, but folks asked some good questions and were engaged.

edubloggercon » Palm Springs 2008 Agenda

This is the agenda page for Edubloggerconwest 08 which I “highlighted” in Diigo as part of my demonstration.

edubloggercon » SocialBookmarking is my stuff for a presentation on Diigo. Since I had to move to the second venue, down the hall, only a few participants followed, in addition, I had been testing a new USB Webcam with mic the night before, and it had taken over my audio system in one of those nasty ways that did not let me play audio from a YouTube video on Diigo. I show examples of what I did with it, and those who saw it, got a great feeling for the possibilities. I also showed off some capabilities to others more informally.

I participated in and took notes on the next session:

edubloggercon » ProjectBasedLearning

which included Sylvia Martinez (Generation Yes) and Jane Krauss (recently published “Reinventing Project Based Learning”) There is a blog post here from Gail:

» Technology and Project-based Learning BlogWalker

Over lunch, I discovered two other folks there who were experts in areas related to my next presentation on Language Development

Bruce Gale is a clinical psychologist who works on social skills with ADHD/ADD/ASD/ODD children, and is using animation is fascinating ways with his L.U.N.C.H. School Year Program.

A coworker of my friend Jose Rodriguez, John Rivera works in LAUSD on doing trainings on Universal Design in teaching. He shared how he is trying to transform teaching so that differentiation is not added after a lesson is planned, but is built in as a lesson is being developed. He shared these resources:

CAST: Center for Applied Special Technology

Tools & Activities: Teaching Every Student

And, Gail has some of the UStream sessions on her blog, thanks Gail!

» Streaming from Edubloggercon BlogWalker

On a more frivolous note, I share I’ll have an aria with that Angel Hair pasta…
about our dinner at Cafe Italia.