ELL Carnival for December 2009

November15

The next edition of the ELL/EFL/ELD Carnival will be…right here! Any blog posts, including examples of student work, that are related to teaching or learning English are welcome. You can contribute a post by using this easy submission form.

The last edition of the Carnival hosted by Jennifer Duarte and Michelle Klepper is  here, and as always it’s chalk full of useful information for working with English Learners.

Future hosts will include Shelly Terrell at Teacher Reboot Camp: Challenging Ourselves to Engage Our Students on February 1st and Karenne Sylvester at Kalinago English: Teaching Speaking Using Technology on April 1st.

You can see all the previous twelve  editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival here.

posted under fun, resources | No Comments »

Curriculum and Instruction 489

November2

Thanks for letting me chat with your class tonight. Lots of great questions. I’m sorry I was under the weather and unable to stay long. If you have further questions, please send me a comment below. Also, it would be a great help is you share with me resources or approaches that have or have not worked for you in trying to build an online PLN (Personal Learning Network).  Since I do professional development for my district and conference presentations, this will help me offer good advice to my audience. Below are some of the resources for online networks that I mentioned, and some new ones:

Moving Forward list of education blogs

Support Blogging list

Twitter for Teachers list

Plurk for Teachers (Plurk is like twitter, a 140 character microblog, but the comments are “threaded”)

Classrom 2.0 Social Network (this one is really big, so pick a group to join)

Ed Tech Talk You can listen to podcasts on ed tech topics, and if you listen life, chat with others about the show (I forgot to mention, I have show here called It’s Elementary).

Edutopia groups BIG miss not mentioning this one. I moderate a forum on classroom management here, but there are others on project-based learning, etc. It’s more about pedagogy and less about technology.

Instructify is part of LEARN-NC out of UNC-Chapel Hill and is a great resource blog. I used to work for them as a free-lancer.

Have you no shame?

June7

I love getting and reading the Sacramento Bee, and love being able to read it online. The comments however are a real mix of the bitter and the sweet. I hate how the limited space in the print version constricts representations of different points of view. If that is the problem in the print paper, the online version is like a polar opposite. To be frank, it’s embarrassing. Many commenters think nothing of making racist comments, ad hominum attacks, or weaving entire backgrounds for stories that have little to do with reality.

A recent Sacramento News and Review (our independent weekly) had this to say:

“If you are someone who leaves comments below news stories on the Sac Bee’s web site, chances are your politics are reactionary and inhumane and your heart flinty and cold.
Under a story about a child who drowned in the river, you might write, ‘Kids drown all the time. Why is this news? And Rodriguez? Was the kid even here legally?

Like a piece in the Onion it is funny and sad, because you could literally find comments that read almost exactly like that in the comments section in any given week. It’s like all the happiness and joy has been sucked out of the comments section. Instead of the milk of human kindness, they’ve reverted to the poison of reptilian bitterness.

My husband follows transportation articles as part of his job, and shares the story about a woman who was forced off the road by a driver enraged truck driver who felt she had taken too long in a drive-through line where he had been stuck behind her. The commenters all came up with reasons why this must have occurred: texting, using a cell phone, putting on makeup, including elaborate descriptions of what she was doing. All of this with no facts to back up any of their suppositions, but it obviously filled their preconceptions.

The comments on recent story on burn victims from the daycare fire in Mexico coming up to Shriners International Hospital here in Sacramento was the most recent example of this combination of ignorance and meanness. Commenters were angry that we were taking care of non-Americans showing their ignorance that other commenters were fortunately quick to address; services are not paid for by taxpayers by the international efforts of Shriners and the hospital is part of a network which includes a hospital in Mexico. The response? One commenter vowed not to contribute any longer to Shriners because he only wanted to help American kids. Local columnist, Marcos Breton, has weighed in on the ugly nativism that paints all folks from South of the U.S. who have a Spanish speaking ancestor as illegal (and squares off on the reality of “illegals” as well).

My maternal grandfather was a proud Shriner for years who collected his own spare change and stood in front of grocery stores raising money. It was to help sick children. Period. I could resort to terms like, ignorant, racist, etc. but the one that really fits is small. We Americans like to think of ourselves as generous people, and we are, those comments were not from that America.

There is another more general concern that I have about the online comments. I teach in Sac City in an elementary, but one of my colleagues is Larry Ferlazzo, who teaches at Luther Burbank. We both have large immigrant populations from Mexico and SE Asia. Our problem is that we rely on using links to stories to help teach our students about their culture and how it intersects with mainstream society, which can expose them to the comments section.

A few months ago Larry pointed out a story on traditional conflict resolution methods in the Hmong community in light of the recent murder that had it’s roots in an extra-marital affair. The comments were the usually blend of sanctimony and bigoted opinions that have marked the online comments.

I wondered, what will students make of this? Most of the commenters probably don’t consider the students important enough to worry about it, but they should. Proposition 13 passed around the time I was 13 years old. In the flurry of threatened closures of libraries and other services Howard Jarvis opined that it didn’t matter if libraries closed because none of these ignorant kids read anyway. That was my political crucible and I have never and will never find anything that Howard Jarvis or his taxpayers association has to say to be credible.

I have to think that some of Larry’s students might be coming to the same conclusion about folks in the Bee comment section that I once came to about Howard Jarvis and his ilk. I once was 13 and powerless, but now I am 44, vote in every election in an electorate where my views are shared by a majority. Someday many of Larry’s and my students may be too, demographics is on their side. Meanwhile, those commenters will still be trolls.

Photo Credit: Dirty Troll Revue on Flickr

ESL/EFL/ELL Carnival is Here! (so come on down)

June1

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.

ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival is coming here (yes HERE)

May1

The deadline for submissions to the next edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival is May 31st (my birthday, btw), and it will be hosted by…me! You can contribute a post by using this submission form.

What are we looking for? Posts related to the teaching or learning of English, including examples of student work, are welcome.

Need an example? Check out the latest edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival, which was hosted by Nik Peachey.

All the previous editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival can be found here.

« Older EntriesNewer Entries »
rssrss
rssrss

Links of Interest


License

Creative Commons License
All of Ms. Mercer's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.


Skip to toolbar