What Works for Adult ESL Students

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A discussion was held in March and April, 2007 on the National Institute for Literacy Special Topics Discussion List http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/specialtopics with co-authors of the sudy What Works for Adult ESL Students?, Dr. Larry Condelli and Dr. Heide Spruck Wrigley. The discussion is archived below. For the National Institute for Literacy archive of this discussion go to http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/specialtopics/2007/000265.html

David Rosen
djrosen1@comcast.net
Sat Mar 31 23:04:35 EDT 2007

Dear Colleague,

I am very pleased to announce a special discussion on "What Works for Adult ESL Students" with the principal authors of the study, Heide Spruck Wrigley and Larry Condelli. The discussion will begin April 9th and continue through April 15th. Below you will find brief biographies of the authors, and (links to) some short and longer pieces about the research. This is one of the major studies of adult ESL/ESOL in our field, and a wonderful opportunity to discuss the study and its findings with the authors. I hope you will take time before the discussion to read the study and to formulate your questions for the authors. You may send your questions beginning now although they will be held until April 9th when the discussion begins.

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Biographies of the Guest Researchers

Dr. Heide Spruck Wrigley is Senior Researcher for Language, Literacy and Learning with LiteracyWork Associates, a small independent firm conducting research and professional development work in the United States and in Canada. She has been key in every federally funded national research study on adult ESL and acted as the subject matter expert in the What Works for Adult ESL Students study. She has written a number of books and articles related to adult ESL Literacy, including “Bringing Literacy to Life” a handbook for practitioners, “Communicating in the Real World”, a textbook on workplace ESL, and most recently the “Language of Opportunity” a report for the Center on Law and Social Policy; and “Capturing What Counts” a chapter in “Adult Biliteracy: Socio-cultural and Programmatic Responses” (Erlbaum 2007).

Dr. Wrigley currently is a non-resident fellow with the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. where she focuses on immigrant integration and policy issues related to adult ESL, employment and family literacy. She has served on a number of advisory boards and expert panels, including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy, and (currently) the National Institute for Literacy and the National Center for Educational Statistics.

In an effort to make research accessible to practitioners, Dr. Wrigley is involved in a number of professional development efforts across the U.S. These include a four year ongoing staff development effort in Socorro, Texas to help teachers integrate family literacy, EL Civics, and technology. She also heads up several professional development Institutes (including a virtual course) for both new teachers and master teachers throughout Texas, focused on teaching English as a Second Language to adults. She has delivered numerous talks and key notes at conferences both within the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Wrigley holds a PhD in Education with a focus on Language, Literacy, and Learning and an MA in Applied Linguistics.

Dr. Larry Condelli is a managing director of the Adult Education and Literacy Program in the Education and Human Development Division at the American Institutes for Research. His work includes research on adult ESL students, accountability, and conducting professional development and technical assistance for adult educators. He recently directed the What Works Study for Adult ESL Literacy Students, the first large-scale empirical study of the effectiveness of instructional practices for adult ESL students, and is currently directing a study of the impact of explicit literacy instruction on low-literate adult ESOL learners for the U.S. Department of Education. He is also the project director for the National Reporting System and was instrumental in developing this national accountability system for federally funded adult education and literacy program. Dr. Condelli's other projects include development of a performance-based reading assessment for low-literate adults for the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, funded by the National Center for Educational Statistics. He is a staff development and data consultant for the states of Alabama, California, Georgia and Utah and provides training and technical assistance to adult education staff in several states. Dr. Condelli holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California.

Readings to prepare for the Discussion

Below are links to readings (1 and 2) and attached documents (3 and 4) that will help you to prepare for the discussion. (Note, some people may not be able to open 3 and 4. If you have difficulty, and would like me to email these to you, let me know. ( djrosen1 at comcast.net )

1. A short NCSALL Focus on Basics article on What Works for Adult ESL Students http://www.ncsall.net/?id=189

2. Instruction, Language and Literacy: What Works Study for Adult ESL Literacy Students http://lotos.library.uu.nl/publish/articles/000176/bookpart.pdf

3. A long, but not too theoretical paper on the What Works ESL study presented in England

4. A paper on the What Works for Adult ESL Students study presented in Tilburg, Netherlands

I look forward to your joining this discussion.

David J. Rosen
National Institute for Literacy Special Topics List Moderator
djrosen1@comcast.net

cheryl gentry
c-gentry@cox.net
Sun Apr 1 23:01:19 EDT 2007

I teach GED at CRC...a prison in Norco, Calif. I have many students who grew up speaking Spanish in the home and have difficulty with English grammar. Are there any special tricks?

Cameron Eileen
cameroneileen@yahoo.com
Fri Apr 6 02:40:01 EDT 2007

1. In the article "National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy: A Conversation With FOB... What Works for Adult ESL Students," it states that ESL students are better able to learn and understand English when the teacher or instructor of ESL is bilingual, in which case, the instructor can speak the students' native language or languages in order to clarify the students' understanding to further construct meaning. This statement is also made in the article "Real World Research: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Research for Adult ESL." However, if a teacher or instructor is not bilingual, and they want to improve ESL students' written proficiency levels, should the instructor who is fluent only in English be encouraged to permit his or her ESL students to first write an essay or paragraph, depending upon the written assignment, within the student's own native language and then work closely with the student to translate that writing into English? Is this a recommended form of instruction? For one thing, allowing ESL students to write within their native languages helps the instructor familiarize themselves with languages that may be foreign to them. This can also help the student translate and interpret their own native language and correspond their thoughts and ideas within a contextualized English language. This can permit ESL students to demonstrate writing that displays clearer contextualized meanings. It also allows ESL students to demonstrate a complexity of thoughts and ideas as well as express critical, analytical thinking skills within written English, especially those ESL students who struggle with written English in terms of writing incoherent sentences or clauses, or students who write mere phrases or simple sentences with incorrect word choice and improper use of grammar. The article, "Real World Research," states "English learners who, for example, have good higher order reading strategies in their own language cannot call on those strategies to help them understand English texts until their understanding of English vocabulary and syntax are good enough to understand basic sentences and expressions." Can this same principle be applied to ESL students' written English?

2. The article "Real World Research: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Research for Adult ESL" briefly refers to the codings of a running record. A running record that is incorporated in the teaching of standard American English and literacy within elementary schools in this country is used in a way that teachers can determine a student's reading abilities and potentialities through close observation of a student's reading processes. Before a running record can be implemented, the teacher or instructor first must decipher the probable reading level of a particular student. For instance, the teacher must select a book that the student will easily be able to read along with selecting two other books that may be more challenging to this same student. Students must read 50 words within each of the three books. To correspond the running record in accordance with the student's reading, the teacher must listen closely and observe, paying strict attention to the student's substitution or replacement of words, repetition of words, omission of words, pronunciation and/or mispronunciation of words, and number of self-corrections the student makes during their reading. Once the student is finished reading 50 words within all three selected books, the teacher must add up all of the student's errors. The book in which the student made no less than five errors is selected for appropriate reading in terms of a substantiated reading level since it presents more of a challenge. However, a book in which a student makes more than five errors is considered too difficult for the student to read or comprehend. I brought this up because in a standard English or literacy class in grades K-12, a student can be placed within a specific reading level or group and is given reading material in accordance with that particular reading or grade level, as it pertains to a balanced literacy model in adherence with the curricular standards of a running record. Students are given reading material that is slightly more challenging in order to assist these students in mastering the English language. Once students have mastered the English language and have acquired appropriate English reading skills, they will be able to read books that are several reading or grade levels above their current reading performance level. Can a running record such as the one I have previousy described be applied within an adult literacy program for ESL students? Instead of using grocery store fliers, electricity bills, and immigration documents, can literature be incorporated in an adult literacy program for ESL students?

3. In the research study discussed in the article "Instruction, Language, and Literacy: What Works Study for Adult ESL Literacy Students, the BEST Oral Interview was incorporated in measuring listening comprehension, communication, and fluency. In the footnote of that same research study, it states that the BEST Oral Interview also includes measures of pronunciation and a reading and writing score which were not used in the study. I would actually like to know more about those measures of pronunciation, reading, and writing, and how they are assessed in determining a student's perfomance level. Recently, I completed a training session for both print-based and the computer-adaptive BEST PLUS software program which measures the same items that were measured in the research study 1)listening comprehension, 2) language complexity or fluency, and 3) communication. When I completed the training session in BEST PLUS there was no mention of scoring for pronunciation, reading, or writing. Also, I wanted to know if these measurements had been included in your research study, would it have any effect on the students' performance levels quantitatively? Also would it have any statistical significance whatsoever in this particular research study if these variables had been taken into consideration when the BEST Oral Interview was administered?

David J. Rosen
djrosen@comcast.net
Mon Apr 9 01:52:03 EDT 2007

Good day colleagues,

I would like to welcome Dr. Heide Spruck Wrigley and Dr. Larry Condelli, authors of the "What Works for Adult ESL Students" study. They will be our guests this week as we learn about and discuss this important study. We have received a few questions already, and I will post them today. I hope that you will send your questions and comments today, and throughout the week, and that we will have a good discussion about the study.

I would like to begin by asking Heide and Larry to describe the major findings of the study and to put the study in context of research on adult ESL/ESOL and especially literacy. Why is this an important study for adult ESL/ESOL and perhaps for the wider fields of ESL/ESOL and literacy education?

Everyone: to contribute a question or comment, or to add to the discussion, please e-mail your message to specialtopics@nifl.gov.

Thanks.

David J. Rosen Special Topics Discussion Moderator djrosen@comcast.net

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 9 08:07:26 EDT 2007

Good morning all

This promises to be an exciting discussion and I look forward to talking with you about the study in general and responding to the issues you have raised. So thanks for those of you who have already posted questions and we look forward to more.

I'm in D.C. at the moment at a meeting on adult ESL literacy with NIFL, the National Institute for Literacy and will be responding to David's invitation and to your questions this evening.

See you soon on-line

Heide

kolgin@glendale.edu
Mon Apr 9 09:51:55 EDT 2007

From "What Works" you noted that it was a surprise to see that "a judicious use of L1" had a positive influence. Can you expound on the difference between "judicious use" and bilingualism?

Kirk Olgin

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 9 20:51:57 EDT 2007

Hi, all

And thank you for the questions you posted so far

You'll be reading a quick overview on the study soon (Larry just came back from Mexico) and I'll be responding to some of the topics raised in your postings. I'll take one issue at a time.

I will try to write about one topic at a time, in order to make it easier to find and read about a particular area of interest. And if you do ask a question (or more), please indicate the topic in the subject line to help keep us organized.

First up, native language use in the classroom

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 9 21:28:16 EDT 2007

We had two questions so far on our finding that use of the native language in the ESL classroom, one asking for a clarification of the differenced between judicious use of the native language and bilingualism and another on the practice of having students compose an essay in Spanish and then translating the work into English (more on that in the next post)

Judicious use of the native language - an explanation: The study only focused on adult ESL literacy classes. We did not include classes in which teachers used a bilingual model where two languages are used purposefully (such as a preview/review model where the teacher introduces a topic in the native language, spends the rest of the time in English, and then reviews what has been learned once again in the native language and allows for a period of questions and answers in the native language to make sure students understand the content or point of a lesson). Also not included in the study where classes where some topic areas (U.S. history and government, for example) where taught in the native language while English communication skills where taught using, well, English

We did not include these types of classes because the bilingual model, consciously designed and applied as such) is not a common model in adult ESL (it is in bilingual education. And no programs that met the study requirements were found that consciously and systematically used a bilingual model as defined in the literature on bilingual education.

We would have liked to include programs that include a native language literacy component, that is programs that teach non-literate students to read and write in a language they understand (i.e., the native language - also referred to as L1) instead of teaching literacy in a language students are still struggling with (English - or L2 the term used for the target language). We did find a few programs that used this model but funding decisions made their inclusion not possible.

We also did not include programs in which teachers translated directions, vocabulary and content almost constantly, the minute a single student looked a bit confused, giving students little opportunity to grapple with English or stay in English for a significant amount of time and in the process depriving students of the opportunity to build confidence and competence in understanding and using English. We don't see constant translation as a model that is pedagogically sound, given the need of students to learn to communicate in English and to learn to engage and process print in English.

What we found was that many of the bilingual ESL teachers adapted their teaching to the needs of the students and used L1 in support of ESL learning and teaching. Using their own judgment (rather than a specific model), they used any number of bilingual strategies which included providing a quick translation of a task when directions (in a book for example), proved to be more complex than the task itself or giving an explanation of a language pattern that confused students. Strategies also included saying a word in Spanish when students were stuck or using Spanish to clarify when a student had a question.

Are there other ways to take advantage of L1 in the classroom? Absolutely, and we can talk about those.

Are teachers who don't speak the language of their students condemning their students to failure? Absolutely not. There are any number of strategies that teachers can use when their students are stuck or confused, and a number of ways in which they can take advantage of L1 in the L2 classroom.

But this is a discussion for another day..

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 9 22:34:07 EDT 2007

Although the study did not address issues of having students write in L1 and then translate, here are a couple of thoughts (mine only)

Translation has long been used in other countries to build language skills. Since the advent of the communicative approach to language teaching it has become out of favor. Translation workshops where students take work that they have created or other texts written in L1 and then render them in English can be an excellent way to build language awareness and put language skills to use. Promising are approaches that engage students in translating brochures or other texts for a real audience, such as offering to translate a menu for a restaurant or a brochure for a local business. "Backward translations" are a must in these cases.

Workshops focused on translation are most appropriate for intermediate levels on up where students have the English skills necessary to translate more complex concepts and sophisticated language.

I'm reluctant to endorse having students write in the native language and then translate in beginning literacy classes - at that level, students tend to think that there is a one to one relationship between L1 words, phrases and structures and their L2 equivalents, and the translations tend to be both awkward and highly ungrammatical. In addition, we don't want students to overly rely on translation but move them toward thinking in the target language.

You do, however, make a very good point in terms of helping students to organize their ideas and think about what they want to say before asking them to write in English. This can be done in a number of ways. Here are some tips for teachers:

1. Introduce writing by using oral language first. Help students to compose the text orally, whether it is a story, a description, or a process. Make sure students have the language they need.

2. Connect oral language with writing through models such as the Language Experience Approach where the connections are obvious since students talk, read and write together as a group

3. Model what you want students to do in writing by giving an oral example (if you do it in writing, your students tend to copy what you said)

4. Dictate a few sentences that model what you want students to write that way they get practice in putting pen to paper without having to compose something from scratch (some may still copy but that's also writing practice and they may not be ready to write on their own)

5. Allow students to think about and talk about their ideas in L1 or L2 before you ask them to write. - that process activates background knowledge and facilitates the composing process. In the beginning levels, let students know what they will be writing about over the next few days - that's not cheating, that's giving your students a fighting chance

6. Invite students to draw a picture as a starting point, again giving them a chance to compose a story mentally before engaging in combat with vocabulary, grammar and spelling. Students can create a snapshot of a scene, create a strip story a la Chalk Talks, or draw an item, for example.

It's late - back to the study tomorrow

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 9 22:01:50 EDT 2007

Hi, Camaron Eileen (I wasn't sure on the name - please tell us more)

Thanks, so much for your thoughtful reading of the reports and your insightful comments. We'll take one question at a time in order to keep reading manageable for the busy readers out there.

We did see positive effects on both oral language and literacy in classrooms where teachers used the native language occasionally to clarify or explain. In these classes students also occasionally used L1 in pair or group work to help each other understand a tasks or to get the point across.

We did not see instances where the teacher invited students to write in the native language and then translate what they had written in English so the study is silent on this approach. Here, however are my own thoughts on this approach.

1. Teaching students to learn to read and write in the native language is a promising approach for a number of reasons:

It is easier to understand sound/symbol relationships in a known language than in a new language.
Meta-cognitive strategies, such as asking questions about language or explaining what one can and cannot do with language and identifying where one's difficulties lie are difficult to apply in a new language.
We know that strong literacy skills in L1 transfer to L2 literacy (but not immediately or directly, some mediation is still necessary)
You only learn to read once - and once you have "broken the code" , that is your mind has understood that there is a relationship between oral language and print (sound/symbol correspondences).
Once you have developed phonemic awareness and once you have learned to decode in L1, you don't have to learn it again when you move to another language (you do have to learn how the new language works, but the hard work of understanding the nature and function of print has been done.)

For the most part (and for funding reasons) in our field, native language literacy classes are taught in parallel with ESL classes focused on communication skills, though it is rare to find beginning ESL classes that are solely or even primarily focused on developing English speaking and listening skills and where the teacher does not rely on print (e.g., writing on the board; using a textbook or hand-outs with written text)

More on translation in a bit

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 9 22:34:07 EDT 2007

Although the study did not address issues of having students write in L1 and then translate, here are a couple of thoughts (mine only)

Workshops focused on translation are most appropriate for intermediate levels on up where students have the English skills necessary to translate more complex concepts and sophisticated language.

1. Introduce writing by using oral language first. Help students to compose the text orally, whether it is a story, a description, or a process. Make sure students have the language they need.

2. Connect oral language with writing through models such as the Language Experience Approach where the connections are obvious since students talk, read and write together as a group

3. Model what you want students to do in writing by giving an oral example (if you do it in writing, your students tend to copy what you said)

It's late - back to the study tomorrow

Heide

David J. Rosen
djrosen@comcast.net
Tue Apr 10 02:40:24 EDT 2007

Hello Heide,

Thanks for your replies to the questions posed so far. I hope we will have lots more questions from subscribers to this discussion, including follow-up questions and comments. I have a bunch of questions that you'll find below, mostly my own, but also some that people have sent me to post. I have organized the questions by article rather than by topic area, but please feel free to address them in any order that makes sense to you and over the course of the week if you like. They are addressed to both you and Larry.

Here are the questions:

1. From your perspectives, what are the most important and interesting findings of the study?

2. In the Real World Research article, you write "Indeed, scientific research combined with professional wisdom is the definition of "evidence-based research" put forth by the research branch of the U.S. Department of Education.[1] <#_ftn1> Does the U.S. Department of Education have a definition of "professional wisdom" specifically, "professional wisdom in adult literacy education"? Do you have a definition that _you_ prefer?

3. In the Real World Research article you write "we found that the teachers in our study we[re] not trained in teaching literacy. They were mostly using the materials and methods that they would normally use in regular ESL classes aimed at more literate students." From your experience is this typical of adult ESL/ESOL practice in the U.S., and if so, what needs to be done about it?

4. Do you know of ESL/ESOL studies (completed or planned) which (will) look at how students acquire literacy (or language) learning from experiences outside of class?

5. In the Real World Research article, you wrote "It is worth noting that we found only two studies [ of the 17 studies of literacy interventions] that used adult ESL students ....Thus, the effects of literacy interventions on literacy and language development among adult ESL learners lacks a research base ...." Are you aware of any other efforts that are planned to address this lack of research on ESL literacy?

6. In the Real World Research article, you wrote "Given that adult immigrants and refugees come to classes to learn the skills needed in the community and at work, and given that only a few hours of classes are offered in a week, an approach that connects classroom learning with the community and encourages language and literacy use outside of school shows a great deal of promise." You have given some examples in the article. Can you review those here and give additional examples of how ESL/ESOL teachers could connect classroom learning with the community to use language and literacy outside of school?

7. In the Real World Research article, you wrote "Video, or multimedia containing video, shows particular promise for language instruction, since language and content are presented in a variety of modalities (visual, auditory, text based) that reinforce each other. As such, they offer an immediate context for language learning that is not print dependent and allows for varied inputs in terms of language variation (regional accents and foreign dialects), as well as variation in the speed of discourse, thus allowing for increases in listening comprehension and understanding of the pronunciation of American English. In addition, skill and drill software" Could you elaborate? Can you give us some examples of effective and creative uses of video or multimedia used for language and literacy learning?

8. In the Real World Research article, you wrote "Since distance learning is often problematic for non-traditional learners with low levels of skills and little experience with technology, a model that integrates multimedia with classroom teaching might have greater success than distance learning models, at least for students at the very beginning levels of English proficiency. Such a model could also include language learning tasks designed to help students learn on their own from TV, video, and film, thereby possibly increasing both language skills and language awareness. We find this an option worth considering." Are you - or is anyone - aware of work being done to help students learn on their own from TV, video and film?

9. In the Real World Research article, you wrote "The results of studies that look at the relationship between strategy-based teaching and reading comprehension look promising, as do the studies that have examined the effects of extended reading on general reading skills and vocabulary acquisition in particular. This latter approach has been successful with both L1 and L2 readers (Day and Bamford, 1998; Pilgreen and Krashen, 1993). However, both approaches assume at least an intermediate level of English proficiency." Can you elaborate on the relationship between strategy-based teaching and reading comprehension? What is strategy-based teaching?

10. In the Real World Research article, you wrote "Case studies of individual programs that use technology creatively and show high rates of success in terms of student outcomes can help provide explanations as to why technology might be worth considering in research and practice. The Socorro Family Literacy Program near El Paso on the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, has adopted a model that asks learners to work in teams and create projects with technologies such as PowerPoint or video.[2] <#_ftn2> Each year the students are part of a showcase where they present their finished projects to an English speaking audience consisting of other students, parents, school administrators and community members such as social workers and officials from the Workforce Board. Investigations into the effect of innovative approaches to technology integration can offer insights into what it takes to engage learners and help us see the difference in learning that occurs when adult literacy is used for real world purposes beyond the classroom. " Can you tell us more about the Socorro Family Literacy Program model?

11. A key recommendation laid out in the Real World Research article is this: "A direct literacy teaching intervention we envision would target skills and strategies found to be effective in the teaching of reading and writing, such as creating phonemic awareness, developing fluency or automaticity, modeling comprehension strategies, increasing vocabulary, and fostering writing skills.The point of such an intervention would not be to change teaching to a phonics based approach (and make ESL teachers "phonicators") but to find ways to integrate the teaching of basic literacy skills into an ESL curriculum so that non-literate or low literate students get a chance to develop the skills that they have not had the chance to attain in their first language. An intervention study of this sort would then allow us to see whether an overt focus on underlying skills associated with reading and writing will facilitate the literacy acquisition process." The questions is, can this be done now within existing, limited intensity ESL/ESOL programs, or do you think this requires expanding the hours of instruction?

12. You have proposed testing this hypothesis: "An instructional program that combines native language literacy and the teaching of oral communication skills in English will increase both the literacy and language skills of adults who are not literate in their native language. Use of the native language as part of ESL instruction is likely to aid students in the cognitive processing of new information and might result in greater gains in literacy as well." This appears to be bucking the trend of eliminating bilingual education. Has this been a politically controversial part of your study?

13. In the Tilberg presentation, you write "Class Variables. The only class variable related to growth in basic reading skills was the length of the scheduled hours per week of class meeting time. Students in classes with longer scheduled hours showed less growth than students in classes with fewer scheduled hours. Other things being equal, including students' attendance and persistence, the longer the class's weekly scheduled meeting hours, the slower the rate of students' learning in basic reading skills." However, later you write "The scheduled length of class in hours per week was also related to positive growth in reading comprehension. Students in class with more scheduled hours per week had more growth in reading comprehension". Could you comment on the meaning of these two findings? What exactly does "longer scheduled hours" mean, and given that it is positively related to growth in basic reading skills, but negatively related to reading comprehension, how should this variable be treated in the design of ESL/ESOL class schedules?

14. In the Tilberg presentation, you write "We also looked at whether teacher background and training had an effect on adult ESL literacy student learning. We found that no teacher variables were related to any of the student outcome measures used in the study. However, the 38 teachers in the study were relatively homogeneous. They were generally new, inexperienced teachers and although well credentialed, had little training or professional development in teaching adult ESL or ESL literacy. " Can you tell us why there was not a more hetereogeneous sample of teachers, and what differences you think that that might have made in the study?

[1] Whitehurst, G. (2002). Evidence-Based Education. U.S. Department of Education.

[2] For a fuller description see Wrigley, H. S. (forthcoming). Research in Action: Teachers, Projects and High End Technologies, Texas Center for the Advancement of Adult Literacy and Learning.

David J. Rosen
Special Topics Discussion Moderator
djrosen@comcast.net

Condelli, Larry
LCondelli@air.org
Tue Apr 10 12:20:37 EDT 2007

Eileen,

Heide has already responded to some of your more substantive questions but here's just a quick reply to your question #3 regarding the pronunciation and writing scores on the BEST that we did not use in the study.

We used the old BEST (not BEST Plus which was not yet developed) in the study. On that older test, the scorer can rate students pronunciation and writing, the latter based on how well the student completed identifying information (name, etc.) on the test booklet. BEST Plus does not have such measures. Because pronunciation was not a focus of the study and it is difficult to train raters to score it reliably, we simply did not score it. Because we already had a more comprehensive reading and writing test, we did not score those aspects of the BEST Plus either.

Elsa Auerbach
Elsa.Auerbach@umb.edu
Tue Apr 10 08:46:21 EDT 2007

A little anecdotal evidence here: I remember Paulo Freire once telling a story about his daughter's teaching (I'm not totally sure I'm getting this right). She found that if students are allowed to write in their first language first (to develop their ideas, to figure out what they think, to write their way towards understanding) and THEN write in the second language (without translating, but having already explored their ideas), their L2 writing was much richer and more developed than texts written Œcold¹ in their L2. This implies NOT translating, but using L1 almost as a way in to L2 writing.

Elsa

bodman@ucc.edu
Tue Apr 10 11:41:33 EDT 2007

How significant was your final finding--the use of the native language in the classroom? What can substitute if the class is not homogeneous?

Jean Bodman
bodman@ucc.edu

Condelli, Larry
LCondelli@air.org
Tue Apr 10 12:48:15 EDT 2007

Hi,

David has posed several intriguing questions and has generously given us the option of responding to them in the order we wish.

I will take him up on this and answer the last two on the relationship between scheduled hours (#13) and reading and the effect of teacher characteristics on student learning (#14).

We used several measures of student persistence and instructional "intensity" (defined various ways and explained in the complete final report of the study) in our analysis to examine the effects of these measures on instruction. Scheduled hours was simply how many hours per week the class was scheduled to meet, which ranged from 4 to 20 hours among our classes. For measures of reading basic skills, the longer the scheduled time the less learning. This is a counter intuitive finding and difficult to explain because we don't have data to explain it. We speculate in the report that this may be due to repetitiveness -- the class going over and over the same basic reading skills. Perhaps the students in these classes were bored or already new the concepts being taught so more of the same did not help them. However, this is my speculation, as we did not have the data to examine this.

The other finding of longer scheduled hours relating to improvements in reading comprehension is more what we might expect but we again don't have the data to explain it. My guess is the longer classes may have had more challenging or a broader range of materials and instruction in reading comprehension that helped students.

Regarding the impact of teachers on student outcomes, as noted in the report we could not study this because teachers were too much alike -- there was not enough variation in their training, experience and background for us to compare them (in addition we didn't really have enough teachers to do the complex quantitative analysis we used). There was not a more homogeneous sample because we selected the class to be in the study, not the teacher. We simply don't know if teachers with the characteristics we found are typical of ESL literacy teachers in general or if this was an anomaly of our classes. We might have found (and what we were hoping to find) is whether training in literacy and/or experience teaching adult ESL literacy students would have a positive effect on student acquisition of literacy and language.

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Tue Apr 10 19:50:29 EDT 2007

Hi, Elsa

That makes total sense to me - to explore different ways of telling the story (orally, in L1, through pictures) before committing oneself to writing. I think, as a rule, we give way too little time to preparation when we ask students to write. Most of us tend to write much richer pieces when we have been given a chance to think things through, talk with others about it, and have a good idea of what a final product might look like.

As ESL teachers we often see writing preparation and sharing models as stifling students' creativity, but it is really difficult to be creative in a language you don't yet understand. If we don't show students what we mean by vivid language and voice and, how will they develop the kind of writing that engages a reader? We cannot wait, I think, until we get to a GED class to talk about the power of writing and how to create powerful writing. Why not start early on with simple poetry, rather than with those deadly little formulaic paragraphs we often see.

One time I saw a very short piece written by a student that used the basic structure of "my name is... I am from..." but at the end of her paragraph, she wrote "that's all!" and that little phrase allowed her to come through as a person who could have fun with writing.

More on grammar and study findings in the morning. Keep your questions and comments coming

Heide

Pedro Contreras
paconni@yahoo.com
Tue Apr 10 22:25:49 EDT 2007

Cheryl:

We at American Hispanic School, deliver the ADULT HIGH SCHOOL COMPLETION, a non-public, instructional, bilingual program.

70% of our students understand only Spanish: SO, we print all the curriculum with 1 paragraph in Spanish and next paragraph in English. They are free to read at classroom in their preferred language.

The Independent study assignment must be handwritten in both languages.

They enjoy the mistakes, make fun correcting each other, but UNDERSTAND AND BECOME FAMILIAR WITH THEIR GAIN IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE.

We apply EFF standards:

1. Read with understanding: highlight the subjects, and the verbs. Mainly, must explain, what the subject said or did.

2. Practice the lecture in public, with the respect from their peers, but don't fear to mistake: they fix it.

3. They also learn to use math. permanently. Calculators are permitted.

At the end, they have not learned the second language at all: but understand and have an academic foundation.

Finally: teacher mission is not to teach: is to help them to understand, learn in any language ( spanglish probably- . Teacher kindly correct them and allow them to make as many new assignments as necessary.

We love so much, to be "professors".

Best regards

Professor Contreras
Email:director@ahs-diploma.com

From: Ellen Berg <iceberg900@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 09:58:34 -0400
Subject: [SpecialTopics 276] Re: giving students a chance to think about writing and play with language

Heidi - I'm a volunteer that teaches GED in a correctional setting - I get the students starting to write from the very start (right at the intake). I am not a trained professional in this field but seem to have success with getting the students to write. I get ones who "hate it" or "I can't do it" from the onset but enjoy it, and succeed at writing a somewhat interesting paragraph, at the end. I mostly emplore them to write about themselves using a particular issue. I spend a lot of time talking with them, provoking thought about different issues, how the issue might apply to them or their family or their friends. Once I get them comfortable in the talking stage, I then have them start to put the words to paper and show them simple things to do to improve on what it is they are trying to say. I could go on and on but I think you catch the drift. With a student from Africa who did not understand American culture, and especially black American culture, we had to spend a lot of time explaining idioms, euphemisms & colloquialisms.

I guess my main point is, it seems that I have to do a lot of work on the verbal end before they master the writing part. Once they start putting their thoughts on paper then we slowly start to work on structure (I even have to work on pennmanship for what is the point of writing if no one can read it). The important thing for me is to keep feeding back what it is that they have written and seeing if I am interpreting according to what they meant to say and keeping working forward from this point. In my experience, teaching them structure from the onset does not seem to work. It seems to be a relationship thing but mostly verbalizing everything seems key to their engagement and participation.

By the way - I usually participate in your forums from a distance (reading only to pick up thoughts, ideas and tips). I actually don't feel qualified to participate at the level that all of you participate. I hope my thoughts have made a difference.

Ellen Berg
Customized Business Services, LLC
POB 214
Washington VA 22747-0214
540-827-4498 (INet Phone)

Hartel, Joanne
jhartel@CambridgeMA.GOV
Wed Apr 11 14:48:40 EDT 2007

I work at a a community-based adult education program. We run two levels of ESL literacy classes, one for beginning speakers who may not be literate in their native languages or in English (although some in this level can read and write in a non-Roman alphabet.) The other literacy class is for students who know the alphabet and can read very simple text. Both classes work with written material that is controlled for useful, every day vocabulary, length of sentences, and grammar. In both levels, it is typical for students to be better at reading than at writing. We use a combination of a structured approach, including phonics, and more traditional ESL approaches that include listening and speaking activities. The students come from many different countries, including Haiti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Nepal, and some Central American countries. I have two questions:

1. I don't know of any standardized reading assessments for low level ESOL students. I think the Woodcock-Johnson Basic Reading Skills Tests were developed for native speakers of English. Was the comprehension subtest controlled for vocabulary that would be unfamiliar to someone who is a beginning speaker? In my experience teaching ESL literacy, ESOL students do not do well with nonsense words because they can't relate or get any meaning from them. Also it is difficult for the test administrator to judge correct pronunciation of words and separate out issues due to second language interference.

2. I've always had difficulty using authentic materials with beginning literacy students. Can you suggest ways to use them without simplifying them so much that they don't resemble the real thing?

Thanks for all of your work. I think this will be very useful to the field.

Condelli, Larry
LCondelli@air.org
Wed Apr 11 15:11:34 EDT 2007

Hi Joanne,

I can answer #1, I'll leave it to Heide to answer #2.

Yes, it is true that the Woodcock was designed for native speakers. As you know, there really are very few reading tests for low-literate ESOL students and we picked Woodcock after a comprehensive review and pilot test of several reading assessments. It's advantage was that it goes to quite a low level and assesses the reading sub-skills that are important to assess at the literacy level. In the end, it worked better than we expected. The problem students had was with the synonym-antonym subtest (they had no idea what we were asking them to do). Most actually did fairly well on the nonsense words, especially Spanish speakers from Mexico who had a couple of years of schooling -- and we did find differential effects on this subtest.

Janet Isserlis
Janet_Isserlis@brown.edu
Wed Apr 11 18:00:16 EDT 2007

hi, Ellen

Thanks for this -I think everyone has pieces to contribute here. I work with a young woman in prison as well – and we do a lot of writing around topics that she chooses.

I know that Heide has a number of great ideas about writing prompts. A slightly different set of work around teaching in prisons can also be found in an online issue of Focus on Basics, if you've not already seen it http://www.ncsall.net/index.php?id=52

thanks, too, to Heide and Larry and all for the discussion so far.

Janet Isserlis

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Wed Apr 11 20:13:46 EDT 2007

Hi, Ellen - thanks so much for jumping in and offering your insights and experience with your students. It's a great contribution to the discussion and really highlights the relationship between thinking about ideas, writing, and culture. It is always amazing to me how much cultural knowledge is required to understand basic communication, read simple texts or comprehend what is going in the news (the Imus story being a case in point).

I've been using the following sentence as an example of embedded cultural knowledge "She decided she would rather stay home alone than participate in her family's Thanksgiving" My guess is that someone who grew up in the United States has a much more nuanced interpretation of that sentence (in terms of the backstory) than someone who is new to the U.S. I talked with a young woman from Moldova yesterday with a PhD from Princeton who was trying to sort out the phrase "I'm not just whistling Dixie" (she knew the Dixie chicks but that didn't help much).

Culture (ours, "theirs") really is integral part of language learning and literacy development. It also shapes our social identities, and we get thrown off balance as we cross cultural borders and need to navigate between systems. It is surprising how little attention we pay to culture in professional development (beyond activities around holidays and multi-cultural potlucks). Unpacking the euphemisms and colloquialism that students encounter, while at the same time touching on issues of racism and stereotyping is really quite a challenge.

In terms of the study, we actually saw very few instances of teachers dealing with cultural issues in the classes we observed. Most likely, because these were beginning level ESL students and it's difficult to "discuss" cultural issues when you don't yet have much English.

I wonder how some of the other practitioners out there are making cultural concepts accessible to students or teach toward cross-cultural competence, particularly at the lower levels.

By the way, one reason I like the special topics is that it is a "sheltered discussion" where participants don't have to worry about being attacked or having their views dismissed (at least I hope that's right). So I'd like to invite others who may be a bit reluctant to share their experiences as well.

Oh, and very interesting point, Ellen, about introducing structure after students have started to write, rather than before

Soon more

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Wed Apr 11 23:41:16 EDT 2007

Hi, Cheryl

I'm sorry it took me awhile to get to the grammar question. I just got back from D.C. and am off to Austin in the morning, but here it goes.

First of all, it is indeed very difficult to help students write with expression and help them develop their language skills so that they are able to write sentences that are grammatical. It is quite a challenge, especially once students are able to communicate quite well orally and aren't particularly keen on working on their grammar skills.

Complicating the enterprise is the fact that at this level the difficulties that students have may differ from learner to learner so anything you teach to the entire class will probably bore some students (since it's not their problem) and frustrate others (cause they are not ready - given where they are in their language development - to absorb whatever rules you are presenting). So any time there is a presentation to the entire class on grammar at this level you may only have a few students who are with you. (Cheryl, correct me if I'm wrong in your case, since I am speaking in general terms and obviously don't know your students).

One thing that doesn't work very well, is to have students write their paragraphs on the board and have everyone else point out the grammar mistakes. Students generally are not particularly engaged in what other students have written, particularly if asked to focus on form. And again, some students may be able to detect errors and correct them (and what are they learning?) while others are nowhere near ready and the explanations make no sense to them - again, if some of you have had great success with this strategy, let us know.

Ok, here then are some strategies that you might try:

1. There is a hypothesis in second language acquisition that emphasize the notion of "noticing" and holds that students won't be able to acquire accurate linguistic forms and structures, unless they first notice them, that is unless they pay attention to their own language and the language of others and say to themselves "oh, that's how it's said (or not said); this is how you write it; this is what people do" And once student pay attention to these forms, it becomes easier for them to use correct forms or edit their own writing. So one suggestion I would make to build in your students a curiosity about language, an eagerness (well, may-be not eagerness, but an interest) in seeing how language works. This notion is also known as "language awareness" and it goes a long way in helping students pay attention to how the language they use in expressing their ideas is similar or different from the way other people say or write things. a. One way to help students build language awareness and look at their own language output is to ask students to circle the kinds of phrases or words that appear in their writing that they are not sure about. Sometimes students a way to self-correct, but you can also work with them to find better ways of expressing their ideas (sometimes that means fixing up the grammar and other times that means rephrasing a sentence and using a different structure altogether, one that the student is more familiar and comfortable with). After you help students use fix-up strategies, you can then ask them to pay attention in their reading to see if they can identify the structure in question in other people's writing.

b. Another way is to have students read their writings into a tape recorder and then listen to it again to see if it sounds right. I first saw this technique used when I was up in Vancouver at the Invergarry Learning Centre where Janet Isserlis taught for awhile. It was amazing to see how students would read their essays and then self-correct as they noticed that the language they used was awkward or ungrammatical. The tape recorder acted as a tool for editing and revision that was fun for students to use (many students I've known just hate rewriting - in their mind it was hard enough to put pen to paper and get their thoughts in writing, they don't want to prolong the agony). So the tape recorder adds a new dimension (students can just take turns using the machine as they finish their writings).

Of course, building language awareness and helping students self-monitor their writing is only one strategy to help students gain greater accuracy in their writing. And self-monitoring is not a great deal of help if students don't have much experience with the standard ways of writing. So you may want to see if there are some common areas of difficulties that your students share (subject-verb agreement; passive constructions; irregular past verbs) and then teach mini-lessons that zero in on those areas. While some students respond well to rules because they are good at deductive thinking, others do much better when you present patterns of language and then draw their attention to the commonalities within these patterns - so that you help your students abstract the grammar rules from the sentences they see - helping them to get to the aha! moment. This approach is also known as "discovery grammar".

If particular grammar forms are new to students and they need to know them because there are no simpler work-arounds, they will need some guided practice in using these forms in different ways so that they become internalized. I would then include these structures in a grammar editing check-list that students can use when they look over their own writing - once again, building language awareness in the process.

Another insight that might help you: Just correcting students each time you see a mistake in their writing and giving them a quick explanation generally doesn't work unless the student made a careless mistake. This sort of "drive-by" grammar lesson usually doesn't stick. It is much better, generally, to set some time aside, either with an individual student or with the group and ask the student(s) to focus on a linguistic form when they are not in the middle of writing or reading their writing to others.

Finally - and you will notice a theme here - a lesson that I learned as an adult second language learner: Quite a few of the mistakes that I made in writing English disappeared when I spent more time thinking about and discussing what it is I wanted to say and write.

Quite often, at the intermediate levels, the language that learners use is muddled and the sentences awkward or ungrammatical, because the thinking is still fuzzy. Once a writer is clear on what it is exactly (s)he wants to say, it is easier to construct sentences that are clear and concise.

I used this model of talking things through to discover what it is you want to write with my students when I taught Developmental Writing and for many students it did make a quite a difference.

Others did need some structured lessons on the grammar they had missed along the way.

So no silver bullet here (ha! another cultural reference to mess with the uninitiated).

Good night all!

Heide

Lynne Weintraub
lynneweintraub@hotmail.com
Thu Apr 12 07:36:35 EDT 2007

Heide--the GED grammar question reminds me of a related question I've had on my mind for a long time. Over the years, I have run into a number of students who seem to be "fossilized" in their language development. They get to a certain point, and then they just don't seem to make any progress anymore in terms of pronunciation, structure, or even expanding their vocabulary. Has any research been done on this problem? Do you have any ideas on how to break through? I'd like to offer some hope (and strategies) to their tutors, but so far I haven't found any that are genuinely successful.

Lynne Weintraub

Nicole Graves
cnaamh@rcn.com
Thu Apr 12 16:05:05 EDT 2007

Lynne,

Language awareness works for fossilization too. If you stop the student and focus on one point and explain the differences or similarities, on the spot, chances are the problem will go away. When the student is ready to become aware and you make the student aware, it always works. One at a time.

Nicole B. Graves

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Thu Apr 12 19:26:31 EDT 2007

Hi, Joanne and others

As many of you know by now, one of the major findings of the What Works Study was that a set of instructional strategies we clustered under the heading of "Bringing in the Outside" made a significant difference in learner outcomes.

This finding is consistent with other research (Sticht, Purcell-Gates) that points to the importance of keeping adult language and literacy connected to the language and literacy tasks that students encounter in their daily lives (in the community; at work; in training).

It is indeed difficult to find authentic materials that are accessible to first level learners, especially if you are looking for "connected text" (written pieces that use paragraphs as part of prose literacy). Examples of document literacy, particularly environmental print, are much easier to find and they provide a great many opportunities to develop sight words, read for meaning, skim and scan for specific information, compare and contrast various texts and develop critical literacy (do we really think that this medicine will flush out fat and make us slim and thin?)-

Here is a listing that provides a great starting point (more on connected text later)

1. Authentic real life products that students can identify and talk about (what is it? Where do you find it? What is it for? Do you like it?) - these can include cans of food from the store, soft drink cans, fast food bags or wrappers; toothpaste tubes, aspirin bottles. Students can work in groups to discuss and categories or fill in charts - it's a great starting point for low level learners. If you want to see how these materials can be used as part of an assessment, go to www.clese.org <http://www.clese.org/> and click on "Reading Demonstration" and you'll see me work with Bessima, a woman from Bosnia who is a refugee who had never had the opportunity to go to school.

If you work with learners who don't have much experience with reading and writing in their own language, real materials (products, not just pictures) make a lot of sense as a starting point.

You then can move on to using print that students often see and are probably interested in and that contains lots of picture support.

2. Grocery flyers, Sunday paper inserts, Home Depot ads and catalogues (tools, gear; department store)

3. Then you may want to move to environmental print that has some pictures (just because it's not as intimidating as print alone) Ads are great (you can have students design their own); TV schedules; magazine articles ("How to" are sometimes accessible but you may want to just start with the headings and pictures); brochures

4. Next comes environmental print that does not have visual support but still reflects every day tasks. These might include: Lottery tickets; Penny Saver type ads; simple medicine labels, simple maps; utility bills; yard sale announcements; street signs; signs in and around the airport, etc;

Basic reading development tends to move through the following stages

from recognition of common products and labels as a whole (how else would anyone manage to shop)
to being able to recognize a word when the product name appears clearly in a photograph with the logo prominent
to being able to read the word in question on a piece of paper when visual support is not there (e.g., if Coca Cola or Crest is written on a drawing of a can and toothpaste
to being able to manipulate words (which word says "coca" which word says "cola"),
to being able to manipulate the string of letters the word represents (if we take out the "c" in cola - what word is left?)
to being able to decode simple words (Cola and Lola; Mac and pack)

You can then, of course, use the products you've worked with, and categorize them into sound patterns so that you don't have to do decontextualized phonics work, but can keep going back to real words that students recognize as you introduce new words that follow the same pattern. The beauty here is that you can use real products that the students know about and use at home (they can copy the labels at home and bring them in and do various forms of Word Sorts). We don't see these types of activities in textbooks, since publishers, for good reason, don't use real products.

By the way, even when doing phonics and decoding work with low level learners, I would still continue with recognitions and comprehension work around real things (including newspaper headlines or magazine articles on common topics), since comprehension is where the rubber hits the road in reading.

More on connected text later - and I apologize Joanne if your learners are at much higher levels of proficiency than what is indicated here

All the best

Soon more

Moira.Taylor@mail.cuny.edu
Fri Apr 13 10:22:43 EDT 2007

Hi all -

I've been reading all week, and now how some time to respond. I hope the following is useful.

First of all, I totally agree awareness is a critical element for working on fossilization issues.

And then, just to put another work into the mix, I was just reading a chapter (Chapter 9) in Ilona Leki's book "Understanding ESL Writers." She writes about an interlanguage (an unstable language developed during the language learning process). The student is on his/her way to developing the correct L2 form by receiving input, but this student stresses and ignores rules based on input. For example, s/he may have learned about 3 person "S" and then overgeneralize the rule to modal forms (She cans...) Eventually, s/he will stop as s/he practices more.

I'm simplifying, but what Leki says at the end of all this is: "Normally, as language learners continue recieving input from the target language, their interlanguage reshapes itself in increasing conformity to the L2. For reasons not completly understoond, however, certain interlanguage forms become fixed, or folssilized, and no amount of input seems to be able to induce a re-analysis of the fossilized form to put it more in line with the L2...Fossilized interlanguage forms are particularly difficult to alter, possibly because the learner is for whaterver reason unmotivated to identify completely with the target discours community."

She has more to say about what to do (this particular chapter is about correcting sentence level errors - what, how, why). Worth a read I think.

Moira Taylor

Moira Taylor
CUNY Adult Literacy Program
101 West 31st St., Room 704
New York, NY 10001
Tel: 212 652 2883
Fax: 646 344 7329
www.literacy.cuny.edu

Julie McKinney
julie_mcKinney@worlded.org
Fri Apr 13 10:51:41 EDT 2007

Lynne and others,

I want to suggest an excellent article about ESOL learners who seem "fossilized" in their learning development. It is from an issue of Focus on Basics dedicated to ESOL research.

"Taking a Closer Look at Struggling ESOL Learners" by Robin Lovien Schwarz is about ESOL learners who seem "stuck", and how we can find the real reasons for their struggles and find ways to get them back on track.

You can find this article at http://www.ncsall.net/index.php?id=994

Last year we had a discussion about this on the Focus on Basics list with Robin, and it is definitely worth looking at if you are exploring this issue. You can find it on the FOB Discussion list archives at the following link:

http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/focusonbasics/2006/date.html

Scroll down and find the discussion from February 15-22. You do not have to be subsceribed to read it.

You can find all other Focus on basics articles at http://www.ncsall.net/index.php?id=31

All the best,

Julie

Julie McKinney
Discussion List Moderator
World Education/NCSALL
jmckinney@worlded.org

Elsa Auerbach
Elsa.Auerbach@umb.edu
Fri Apr 13 19:24:03 EDT 2007

A word of caution: when using authentic materials, it's important to be sure they're authentic for the learners, not just for the teachers. So, for example, if students shop at local Chinese grocers, a flyer from a food chain may not be authentic. If you like, McDonald's, your students might not. It's also important to consider the message you send as a teacher: are you using mainly consumer products to teach literacy? Does that send a message of preparing students to become good consumers. An alternative is to ask students themselves to bring in materials that they would like to understand. Alternatively, they can take pictures of signs (with throw away cameras) of signs or symbols that are confusing to them. They can bring in mail that they get that's difficult to understand and teachers can teach genre conventions (where do you find the amount you have to pay on a bill? Where do you find the due date?).

Elsa

A Tom
abtom@mindspring.com
Sat Apr 14 08:42:44 EDT 2007

I have two thoughts about authentic text: One is using them authentically, unlike one instructor who suggested using a pizza box as authentic text and then having the students find all the words with the letter P in them. So, for example, a supermarket flier can be used to work with quantities (69 cents a pound vs 69 cents each) and for price comparison in a unit on food. The other is that I don't have a problem modifying an original text for lower level students. For example, I've made a lease and a doctor's office form for high beginners which are similar to but not as long or as complex as the ones I used as models. By modifying it I can be sure that I include the most important information without leaving my students totally baffled. Abbie Tom

abtom@mindspring.com
Abbie Tom
Chapel Hill, NC

Kathleen Reynolds
kathleen@reynoldsthomas.org
Sat Apr 14 22:53:54 EDT 2007

Hi all

I'm new to this list--I teach Level 1 ESL at a community center in Chicago--classes include many students with low levels of literacy/little education in native countries. I wanted to share a few thoughts on using authentic materials in the low level ESL class:

I often find it useful to modify the task rather than modifying an authentic text.... so, for example, if we are looking at an apartment lease, instead of re-writing the lease myself, I would have them read (scan?) for specific information, not read line-by-line. I find that when I modify things, I tend to oversimplify them..... which is not to say that I never do it, of course!
Elsa's comments on what is authentic to me (teacher) vs. what is authentic to my students definitely rings true for me. I always ask students to bring in examples of things they need to read in English, but finally (with some clearer explanations, a lucky good lesson, and good old bribery(candy)) I am managing to get more things. Lots of children's homework (that was the example lesson) and also lots of "junk" mail... which has turned out to be quite important to students.
Having sudents bring things in is necessary and vital, especially for the "bringing the outside in" element of "what works." But I am realizing that they are not sufficient to create the "rich" "exploration of a variety of texts" that Drs. Wrigley and Condelli talk about. For things like... poems, short news articles, personal stories.... I need to find them. When I as a teacher am struggling to do a good job of teaching life skills in an authentic and student-centered way, to go beyond that, to enrich that, to teach a very full range of metacognitive and other reading skills (especially things like phonics that I don't know that much about) sounds like a huge challenge (but definitely an exciting one!)

Really enjoying this discussion.

Thanks!

Kathleen

David J. Rosen
djrosen@comcast.net
Sat Apr 14 23:21:28 EDT 2007

Special Topics Discussion Colleagues,

This has been an enjoyable discussion, and I want to thank our guests, Heide Spruck Wrigley and Larry Condelli, for joining us this week and helping us to better understand the What Works for Adult ESL Students study. I will leave the discussion open for a few more days in case others want to add comments, but Heide and Larry may not be able to continue to join in, or answer every reply. Our agreement was that their participation would only continue through today. Of course, they are welcome to continue if they wish.

I have a comment on the study and the discussion. The study has impressed me with what we know as a result of this research but, like a good appetizer, it has whetted my appetite for more adult ESL/ESOL research. There are so many questions that yet need to be answered.

David J. Rosen
Special Topics Discussion List Moderator
djrosen@comcast.net

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Sun Apr 15 10:05:48 EDT 2007

Hello, all

I still have a number of answers and comments that I would to post. What had looked like a more or less "open time" when we first agreed to this discussion turned into a week chock full of commitment and travel. I'll now be a few days in the office and can field additional answers plus pick up those we haven't responded to. I'm wrapping up my time in Austin and flying back to NM this afternoon. More from there

So stick with us for a few days if you have the time and are interested.

Be well, all thanks for putting you questions out there so far (and thanks also to all the wonderful lurkers out there who are reading the list and have commented privately

Heide

Isserlis, Janet
Janet_Isserlis@brown.edu
Sun Apr 15 10:45:16 EDT 2007

Kathleen's observation:

- Having sudents bring things in is necessary and vital, especially for the "bringing the outside in" element of "what works." But I am realizing that they are not sufficient to create the "rich" "exploration of a variety of texts" that Drs. Wrigley and Condelli talk about. For things like... poems, short news articles, personal stories.... I need to find them. When I as a teacher am struggling to do a good job of teaching life skills in an authentic and student-centered way, to go beyond that, to enrich that, to teach a very full range of metacognitive and other reading skills (especially things like phonics that I don't know that much about) sounds like a huge challenge (but definitely an exciting one!)

makes me think, too, of the work many of us do with Language Experience writing - where we/learners encode their spoken words into written form, as part of a process of helping new readers 'see' their words, and as part of a process of generating and using meaningful texts. The next step[s] have to do with building bridges from those texts to other materials, relevant to learners but also generated from beyond the classroom, in order to help readers broaden their abilities to take on all kinds of texts.

Heide's hands-on work, particularly, has been helpful to many practitioners in broadening our practice and the kinds of texts and other materials we use with learners.

Janet Isserlis

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Sun Apr 15 14:36:40 EDT 2007

Thanks for all the contributions around "authentic materials" -

Thanks, Elsa Auerbach also for participating in this discussion and challenging some of the ideas put forward. It makes this a more exciting and worthwhile discussion as we grapple with what to teach to whom and how and what difference it might make. I am hoping that the rest of you will feel free to disagree or pose alternative views - and, as you have done, offer your own ideas.

Here are my two cents Coca Cola, doing literacy work around the print materials that students bring to class, and the value of strategy-based teaching:

I take Elsa's point about making sure that the materials we use as a start are both known to the students and meaningful to them - and I had a sinking feeling that the minute I mention Coca Cola and McDonald's, the issue of teaching toward consumerism might come up. It is indeed an issue to consider. A couple of thoughts on that one, before we move on to connected text:

1. One reason we chose Coke and Micky D. in our assessment materials because they are ubiquitous - if a student does NOT recognize the logos, it does tell us something about their level of print awareness. In our study, there was only one group, a group of elderly Hmong refugees who did not recognize the Coca Cola can (whether by color, logo or script and good for them). The knowledge that highly popular consumer items are unfamiliar to our students indeed tells us that we need to start at a different point.

2. Yep, if you use authentic materials to find out if students can read and negotiate familiar print, you indeed have to find out what print is familiar to them and asking students to bring in examples is, of course, a great idea.

Much is to be learned from what students read or want to read in L1 as well as in English and what kind of print materials baffle them. Print in other language also offers opportunities for authentic communication as students explain to the non-bilingual teacher or to students who don't share the same language: What is it? What does it do (what's it's function)? And what do some of the key words mean. Having students teach other students and a the teacher a few words is a good way to connect groups to each other and build community.
I know several teachers who model vocabulary learning, by having the students teach them a few high frequency words a day from their language. They write down the words on big flashcards, and in the back, draw a picture or paste a photo of the word and write the English equivalent underneath. They then show the students how they study the words (look at the back, study the clue, predict the word and then turn it over). A word you know goes into one pile - the ones who still have trouble with goes in another. They then encourage the students to do the same, with a few select words that are key to what's being studied or that students really want to know and remember. And together they set a few minutes aside to study the words. The students then work in pairs to check each other, using the flash cards as tools - they count the words they know and put them on a chart and keep working with the ones they don't know and keep adding to them (it's ok to just give up on some words because they are not all that important to you anymore and you figure you'll never learn them and that has to be ok). The class then checks the teacher on her new vocabulary. The trick is for the teacher to take on enough of a challenge so the task is genuinely difficult .. The class then continues with a number of other vocabulary learning strategies - and each gets modeled and practiced - again, a lot of the words come from words that students are curious about but there should also be words that the teacher selects because they have high value in terms of facilitating reading comprehension for the topics they class has selected -
if you are working with speakers of Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole), there is a high value in making students aware of cognates as a strategy for building skills in "word study"- but that's a topic for another day

3. As for the concern that we may be emphasizing consumerism by focusing on brand news, flyers, catalogues, and ads, here are my thoughts:

We are bombarded with consumer messages all day long and so are most of our students. Why not take advantage of what's out there and use it as an apportunity not just for reading, but for discussion. There is great value in "problematizing" consumer messages - in taking that Coke can and saying, what is it? What does it do? Who drinks it in your family (a lot of the grandkids). Why is this the one product we know? Where do you see it? Is it good for you? Why or why not? What else do people here drink? What do you drink? When you were little - what did you drink? You can move the direction into a critical analysis of marketing (who benefits?), of health and nutrition, and of alternative ways of eating. It can also lead to parenting issues (how do you say "no" to your children)

4. A quick thought on having students bring in materials and discussing them in class. Many times, I see teachers just do a quick explanation and rephrasing of what those print artifacts are and what they mean, and quite a few opportunities for language learning gets lost because the discussions tend to be hit and miss and students tend to be interested in their own piece but not necessarily in what others bring in.

I like what some of you have suggested, asking students to bring in example of print that they find interesting and that baffles them and then collecting these pieces (copy, and, if necessary, black out names, and number each piece). After students to their sorting, it may be worthwhile to take one type of text with several examples and study it further.
I think it is worthwhile to introduce reading strategies specific to different kinds of print (labels, announcements, bills, ads), so that students can see how to approach, navigate and make sense of the different genres.
If you have enough examples for small groups, you can ask the group to sort and categorize, filling out a chart (a literacy activity in itself) that has them seek and record evidence such as what is it? What is it's function, who sent it and why? who is it for? And, is it current (date)? Is it urgent? Should I do something (is action required?). Is there small print? Why?
Most importantly, perhaps are the questions: What is the central message here? And What happens if I ignore it (USCIS letters; IRS letters etc; letters from a court)

Through activities of this sort, we can teach students that different kinds of environmental print are laid out differently and that there are often indicators that give us a worthwhile clue although we may not yet have the English skills to understand all the language in the text. Just having the confidence and the competence necessary to approach a new text can move students down the road to what is called "strategic competence" (knowing what to do when your English is still not good enough to understand it all or explain what you mean).

Here's hoping you are all having a terrific weekend

Heide

Condelli, Larry
LCondelli@air.org
Sun Apr 15 14:48:00 EDT 2007

Hi David,

Thank you the the opportunity to discuss the study. I (and if I may speak for her) and Heide will be happy to answer additional questions, either posted here or emailed directly to us.

Regarding your comment on more research, I with colleagues from AIR and Dr. John Strucker, are just now beginning a new study of reading in instruction for adult ESL literacy students. Perhaps someday (a few years from now) we will be discussing that! But there really is a need for more research of all types in adult ESL in general.

All the best,

Larry Condelli

Nicole Graves
cnaamh@rcn.com
Sun Apr 15 15:11:32 EDT 2007

Hi all,

Recently, once again, two examples of interlanguage development and fossilization jumped at me.

The first one from a high level student who has been here 15 years: the person consistently used "privaty" for privacy. You can see that having seen the word private on doors at work, at the gym, at school, etc. she made up the new word "privaty" applying whatever assumptions she was working with at the time. I might have corrected her by repeating the correct form many times but I understood what she wanted to communicate. My way of correcting her did not work. It was not enough. Because there was no breakdown in communication, there was no need to alter the utterance. This week, I stopped and pointed out the mistake directly. I also mentioned that other people might be confused and possibly would not understand. We talked about the two words. It was a five minutes direct instruction language awareness lesson. She self-corrected after that for a short time. She no longer uses the wrong word.

The second one is from a man who has been here more than 6 years but just entered a high intermediate class. He had a smattering of English when he first arrived and got a job immediately. He continued to develop his oral English skills over the years but had no time to attend classes until now. When I interviewed him, he said he worked in a factory that had 3 shifts [shiftes]. In two months [monses], he would change his shift [shifte]. That would allow him to come to class. I asked him how he would write shift and month. He replied: shifte and monte. You can see how he had applied a plural rule he got somewhere to use these words in the plural. Another quick mini-lesson: no final "e" in either of these words. After a final voiceless consonant sound, the plural marker "s" is also voiceless. He also learned to self-correct with prompting from the teacher at first and no longer makes the mistake. I do not think that he has internalized the rule but he has corrected 2 words that appeared "fossilized".

Nicole B. Graves

David J. Rosen
djrosen@comcast.net
Sun Apr 15 20:22:48 EDT 2007

Colleagues,

Heide and Larry have graciously agreed to continue the discussion for a few days, so if you have questions or comments you have not yet posted, please post them now. I'll extend the discussion through this week.

David

David J. Rosen
Special Topics Discussion Moderator

robinschwarz1@aol.com
Mon Apr 16 11:13:06 EDT 2007

Hi all -- I am starting through unread messages from a while ago, so maybe this has already been discussed, but the use of first language for creative writing is seen as a perfectly viable method in TESOL-- I believe TESOL Matters, a quarterly publication from TESOL had a wonderful article a couple of years ago about having students write something in first language and then having them work on getting that into English.The instructor writing the article noted what a big change in attitude and connection occurred as students were finally able to express themselves.

In addition, Evangeline Stefanakis, who used to be at Harvard and is now, I think, at City College of NY, has done extensive work with portfolios with ESL learners suspected of having learning difficulties. She has shown repeatedly that it is the lack of language skill ((vocabulary) and writing skill in English that impedes writing, and often comprehension of course. As part of the portfolios, Stefanakis has students write if possible in their first language to demonstrate that it is not a learning difficulty blocking writing. She also then has students work on getting their writing into English by learning what they need to do that. Her workshops on this topic are very moving as she demonstrates that ESOL learners have so much to say but cannot yet say it in English. She has a book about this approach, but I cannot lay hands on it to give the exact title--sorry.

Robin Lovrien Schwarz

robinschwarz1@aol.com
Mon Apr 16 11:22:48 EDT 2007

What Ellen is doing here is developing the CALPS I talk about all the time. I noted that CALPS require many years to become strong enough for learners to do work as native speakers do, which is what writing pretty much requires. And I would like to point out again that cultural differences in the way text is organized and accessed are quite significant. WE should never assume that readers and writers from other cultures understand our way of doing things automatically--nor accept that it is the right way to write. I think I referred to a book called "Listening to the World," Cultural Issues in Academic Writing (Helen Fox), in which the author explored the phenomenon of college foreign students who cdo assignments the way they think they should be done and pay no attention to their American college professors' assignment formats etc. Culture is a pretty powerful influence!!

(This book was written over a decade ago but reviewed in the Spring 2006 issue of Progress, the newsletter from the Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center www.valrc.org)

Robin Lovrien Schwarz

Barbara Tondre
btondre@earthlink.net
Mon Apr 16 11:33:11 EDT 2007

Hello from Texas! I have been following the discussion. It's always good to hear from Heide and Larry as well as fellow practitioners from beyond...

Janet touched upon something that is so fundamental to this discussion, and that is the basic preparation of ESL instructors. Here in Texas, we have been fortunate to have Heide work closely with us for a number of years in an effort to build a foundation of knowledge among our very part time AE instructors.

Unfortunately, because of the overwhelming demand, AE often finds it necessary to make ESL instruction assignments to those who are still struggling to get a firm grasp on adult learning theory and the principles of second language learning. In my work with Texas LEARNS and its response to a legislative mandate that AE provide work-related ESL instruction, I am constantly reminded that our efforts rest on a rather shaky foundation.

Preparing program administrators and instructional staff to respond to the work-related needs of adult English language learners - and to maintain a balance between language learning and workforce skills development - is quite a challenge. So I have to ask: are there efforts out there that require (or strongly encourage) administrators to guide their instructors through a series of PD activities that help them incrementally develop expertise vs. merely fulfill the annual PD requirement? The Texas Teacher Credential project is a model for this kind of professional development, but it seems we need a multi-faceted tactical approach to move forward.

Just wondering out loud...

Barbara Tondre-El Zorkani

Texas LEARNS

robinschwarz1@aol.com
Mon Apr 16 12:22:24 EDT 2007

Heide and I are so often on the very same page on these issues! I too, see very little attention paid to cultural issues in ESOL classrooms and I would like to say that while yes, it is hard to DISCUSS cultural issues with beginning learners, it behooves the teachers to be enough aware of cultural issues related their particular population of learners not to make some gross assumptions about them and their behaviors.

My favorite examples of teachers being unaware of cultural issues, which I have no doubt talked about before here or on the English Language Learners' list, are two comments: one from a teacher who said in annoyance " I don't know why it is so hard for [the students] to adjust to the US. WE don't HAVE a culture." and the other two from a tutor and a teacher who said similar things about students and homework: "These students just don't seem to care about learning. They do not engage in learning behaviors." and the other who said, " These students do not do homework. They are just not independent learners."

These remarks tell me how unaware adult ESOL teachers are of cultural differences-- OURS and theirs. The students who are seen as "not independent learners" or not engaging in student behaviors are usually those who come from educational traditions where memorizing is the norm--the teacher tells them what to memorize and they do. If their teacher here does not give them something to memorize, they do not consider that they have any homework as they understand it. And if you asked them they would say they do not think their teacher is very good either, as a another quote from a 20 year old GED student from Africa sort of sums that up: " You GED teachers are so stupid! You do not even know what you want us to learn. In my country the teacher tells us exactly what to learn and we learn it and then we have a test on that. Here, you tell us to go study something but we do not know which part and then the test is on some part you did not tell us to learn. "

Another cultural gap, especially in writing, is that students from such traditions ( where memorizing is the mode and the teacher is the expert) have no experience with our analytical and question-asking approach to learning, nor do they have experience with giving opinions. When my college ESL students were asked what would happen in their country if they gave an opinion they first laughed and then were shocked. They said they would be thrown out of school if they gave their opinions, and why would they, since the teacher knew all there was to know.

In fact, question asking is very much a Euro-centric approach to knowing. I am reminded of a professor at Lesley who has worked among the Navajo for years. During a doctoral program discussion on interdisciplinary inquiry, this professor quietly noted that not every culture knows by asking questions. He pointed out that the Navajo are not a question-asking culture. They accumulate knowledge in other ways. This is true for other cultures besides the Navajo, but is something we Americans tend to bulldoze right over as we ask questions to our learners.

When you consider how much we train students in our system to have opinions and ask questions, and how much cultural behaviors and culturally grounded beliefs govern an adult, no wonder there is so much confusion in the writing--and other aspects of ESOL classes.

Robin Lovrien Schwarz

robinschwarz1@aol.com
Mon Apr 16 12:39:38 EDT 2007

Thank you Heide for the great explanation of why correction does not always help and for pointing out the need for language awareness. This is a topic I address often from two perspectives. The first is that of the non-literate learner-- who has little understanding of the structure of language and for whom grammar is a mystery. I have observed very low level ESOL classes of non- or preliterate learners where teachers were attempting to explain grammar or mistakes by using grammar and the learners were completely mystified.

One teacher with whom I was discussing this problem recently expressed frustration because the structure she was trying to explain in English exists in Spanish and the learner in question just couldn't seem to get that. But the teacher herself finally had the insight that since that learner had almost no education in Spanish either, just the fact of translating the structure or referring to it in the native language doesn't mean the learner will understand it. (and then of course for many teachers there is the issue that learners with unwritten languages will not have any access to the notions of grammar nor the words for it in their language---they do not exist. )

The second perspective is of auditory attention to grammar-- a teacher recently gave me an example of a learner who had "fossilized" grammar and never had subject verb agreement in the simple present tense ( He say, she talk, etc. ) One day recently the teacher automatically corrected this student when she said "he look" and the student was stunned. She asked, " What did you just say? Did you say LOOKS???" and the teacher said yes, The student asked, " Do you mean you have always been saying LOOKS with a final /s/ and I never heard it??" And the teacher said, of course, YES!

This is a small illustration of the need to bring many adult learners' attention to the auditory details they do not know they should hear. Since we know that literacy skills and language skills transfer at the level at which they are developed in first language, if a learner does not know HOW verbs agree in his or her own language or how plurals are made or how present past and future are indicated, why would that learner be listening for how it is in English. My research tells me that accurate auditory input is required for the brain to build up a store of sounds, words, strings of words ( such as idioms) and grammar strings--but if the auditory input is not accurate, the stored up information is not accurate. Hence we need to help learners pay attention auditorily to details they are not hearing.

But, as Heide points out, this will only be useful if the learner is at the language learning stage where she or he can make sense of it. Language acquisition stages are yet another piece of the picture which is not well known in adult ESOL.

Robin Lovrien Schwarz

robinschwarz1@aol.com
Mon Apr 16 12:44:47 EDT 2007

And as I just pointed out in a longer post, these learners often lack auditory awareness of what they are supposed to hear--and they usually have great difficulty with phoneme discrimination in English. I find that intensive training in minimal pair discrimination, among other things, helps with fossilization a great deal.

Robin Lovrien Schwarz

robinschwarz1@aol.com
Mon Apr 16 13:19:28 EDT 2007

This second example reminds me of a wonderful ESOL teacher in the Washington, DC area of 40 years' experience who always says that ESOL learners always have a reason for what they do-- it is NOT random. But their reasons are not always the right reason. Our job is to help them replace their reason with the right reason. Bravo Nicole! Asking the learner WHY he said or wrote what he did was a great direct route to that issue.

And the first example is a great illustration of what I see as the need to bring auditory attention to the learner of what it is they need to hear and then say-- as noted in a longer posting just earlier this morning.

Robin Lovrien Schwarz

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 16 17:40:24 EDT 2007

Hi, Nicole and others who have written on issues of fossilization, interlanguage (and implicitly error correction), and building language awareness through the explicit teaching of mini-lessons. We appreciate both your examples and your insights

I wanted to make sure that we don't leave new teachers or those who come to adult ESL from other fields in the dust, so I wanted to stop for a minute and add a few definitions:

Interlanguage: All second language learners make language errors. Errors are part of language learning. We make "mistakes" as we try to create the target language (L2) in our minds. The language we produce in the early stages of proficiency is only an approximation of the target language, the language we are trying to learn. Since you cannot memorize a new language, mistakes must happen. The language that learners use on their way to proficiency is often referred to as "interlanguage." As students learn and acquire more language through various forms of input (noticing; practicing; studying, using the language in various contexts), they make fewer language errors and get closer to full proficiency. So a student's interlanguage is changing all the time, based on the "input" they receive (what they hear and read), and the "output" they are asked to produce (speaking, communicating with others; presenting). There is some evidence that "corrective feedback" judiciously applied (more on that later) can help students notice the errors they make, correct them, and move forward, self monitoring and self-correcting down the road.

As several others pointed out, creating mini-lessons around some of the sticky points (where students keep making the same mistake over and over) can be really helpful, if students are indeed ready in their language development to understand and integrate new knowledge about language into their existing knowledge (schema). You can try to explain how present perfect or how hypotheticals work in the beginning ESL class (if I had had the money, I would have bought the car), but your students will not be ready to take in sophisticated structures of this sort. So you will hear "I be here 5 years" or "I am here 5 years" or "I have 5 years here" but probably not, "I've been here for five years" - so whatever your Level 1 students say when you ask them "how long have you been in the United States," that's interlanguage.

Fossilization. At any time in the learning process a student may become stuck in some level of interlanguage and may make the same mistakes over and over again - and language development does not seem to move forward. That's called fossilization. I've know older students who seem to have decided that their language skills are close enough and they aren't all that interested in improving their grammar. Those may be the students that Lynn (Weintraub was talking about). In many cases, the strategies we mentioned do get learners moving forward, in others, the learners seem so focused on communication that little noticing of form takes place. Perhaps asking learners straight out:

Do you want to improve your English? If so, which part of English? (vocabulary, comprehension, pronunciation, grammar). We can then ask students to identify language they are not sure about (from an audio tape of their story or a written piece). Or as Nicole explains below, we can keep trying to isolate a pattern and offer insights.

Corrective feedback: This much we know: If corrective feedback (input focused on errors, such as "recasting" has to have any effect, it must be selective, judiciously applied and offered at optimal times (NOT, when the student is trying to tell us something important - correcting at that point can be really insulting and most likely make no difference).

Language learning is extraordinarily complex and so is language teaching - knowing what to correct, when, why and how (and when to leave things alone) may be one of the most critical skills new teachers need to learn.

Examples, anyone?

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 16 18:44:33 EDT 2007

Hello all

And thanks, Janet for pointing out that for a lot of teachers it can be a significant burden collecting authentic texts, working with "stuff" that students bring to class, and yeah-right-who's-got-the-time modifying existing texts.

The "Language Experience Approach" makes a great deal of sense for beginning learners who are "emergent" readers and writers. It is based on the assumption that it is much easier to read something that is based on a common experience with language generated by students than it is to read something that is disconnected from their life experience.

How does LEA work?

1. Create a common experience for students - a field trip works and so does a hands-on activity that has a point to it, a how-to perhaps. News accounts that everyone has heard about - especially if they are a few days old and have been on TV in different languages work also. The point is to have a common point of reference on a topic that engages students ("how to iron a shirt" would leave me cold, for example). Years ago I saw the teachers at REEP demonstrate how to make instant pudding and they later had a pudding tasting, identifying their favorite flavors - the students were fascinated by the whole process. Butterscotch lost, by the way, no surprise there.

Here then is how Language Experience might work as part of a How-to process:

2. Demonstration: Introduce tools and materials to the students. Demonstrate the steps either by yourself or have students follow along (making a paper airplane in preparation for a contest, say).

3. Ask students to recreate the steps orally that they just observed. If you can, create a story board on the board or a flip chart that reminds students of the steps- simple drawings are fine.

4. Work with the class to write down the steps on the board - asking guiding questions, such as - what should the title be? What is a good first sentence? We have steps, right? What is step number 1? As individual students generate the language, check with the class - what do you think? Should we write this? Yes, no? Any changes?

5. After you have created the story with the class, read the story to the class and then with the class - asking students again if they like the sentences and the story. You can use joint reading (with the class; echo reading - you read a sentence, students repeat it; shared reading - students take turns reading a step).

The point of a Language Experience Lesson is to use the language that students generate since that is the language that they know and can say orally. In the conventional model, ONLY the students make corrections in the text and the teacher leaves it alone, errors and all (and no, students won't pick up an error that they saw once on a blackboard and it becomes fossilized).

It makes sense to have the text on newsprint so it can be reviewed and used again. But I also know teachers who type the Language Experience text up at home and print it for students to read the next day in class.

As part of that process, many teachers end up making tiny changes in the language to get it a little closer to standard English (they don't usually touch vocabulary, just sentence structure. Purists, however frown on meddling with students' language.

As for me, I would leave the language alone when writing it down in class and then perhaps make tiny changes as I print it up - mostly for clarity so that students still have a text to work with in class that represents their language -

By the way, Susan Gaer - whose site on home remedies is an excellent example of student generated connected text - told me one time that they first time her refugee students had written their stories of how they escaped, she had fixed them up before she printed them as a collection of student accounts of their lives. She now feels that in straightening out the students' grammar, she had destroyed much of what was powerful in the students' language - the language they used and the errors they made represented who they were as people and as learners on a journey. The basic sentences she created in standard English did not capture the spirit of the stories the same way that their writing had done.

Lessons learned .....

Heide

Lynne Weintraub
lynneweintraub@hotmail.com
Tue Apr 17 12:14:01 EDT 2007

Heide: What I often hear from tutors is that they can get the student to produce a troublesome sound/sentence correctly (or identify errors) when the focus of a lesson is on that one particular aspect of language, but that it does not carry through in spontaneous production. Any thoughts?

Lynne Weintraub

janeaddeo@comcast.net
Tue Apr 17 14:19:04 EDT 2007

Robin,

Thank you so much for your enlightening comments regarding "auditory attention and auditory input."

If possible, could you please share citations on these topics from your research. Is it research that you conducted?

Thanks again for your comments.

Jane

robinschwarz1@aol.com
Tue Apr 17 22:47:21 EDT 2007

Lynn -- I will jump in with my version of this -- I hope Heide has her version. I get asked this question an awful lot. I know from brain research that the brain creates neural pathways when anything is learned. The longer the behavior is used, the bigger the neural pathway. When we help learners produce a new sound or combination of sounds, we are asking them to create a new pathway -- we want that one to replace the old one, but at first -- and maybe always -- the old is like an interstate and the new one like a cow path -- the old one will be used in unconscious situations because it is so well established.

It is said about spelling that one must spell a word correctly one more time than one has spelled it incorrectly in life -- which means the same thing -- the new pathway has to become dominant over the old one for the new behavior to be used more than the old one -- in adult language learners' brains, this means an awful lot of practice!!

As I have said before here, one practice I advocate heavily is use of minimal pair drills to help the learner's brain focus on the critical sounds it needs to build that new pathway. I was challenged on this recently by people in ESOL who say that minimal pairs do not help adult learners at all and are a waste of time because their brains cannot learn to hear these differences any more . However, I did a reality check on that with a colleague who is a speech pathologist. She scoffed at this idea--in speech pathology, minimal pairs are used not only as a screening test, but are used vigorously by therapists to help patients of all ages who need clearer auditory input to be able to produce speech more clearly. This is exactly why I have used them for years with ANY learner or group of learners I work with. It helps so much with the problem you identify.

I do a lot of training around minimal pairs and teachers always report that students are EAGER for the practice and often ask to have practice on sounds they KNOW they have difficulty hearing and producing.

Robin Lovrien Schwarz

robinschwarz1@aol.com
Tue Apr 17 23:29:05 EDT 2007

Jane -- I am traveling again and do not have names and titles at hand -- but as I just noted in another posting , much of my information on this comes from speech pathology and from neuroscience. Also, I do a lot of reading of international researchers on dyslexia in many languages. ( Ellis from Wales, Lytenning from Finland, Baddely and Gathercole from England among, Hu, Chong and others doing work on Chinese). Many of these have examined the role of something called phonological memory and its role in language acquisition. ( this is a very short term memory for speech sounds) . This research has indicated that when the phonological memory is weak oral/aural skills in languaeg will be weak. I hypothesized that therefore if PM is impacted by poor auditory discrimination ( what Marilyn Jager Adams, researcher in reading, calls speech discrimination) PM will be poor and therefore language acquisition will be poor. Thus if we strengthen speech discrimination by helping learners focus on key sounds they have normal difficulty hearing because adult brains do not process sound as young brains do, we should see better learning all around.

I did a sort of pilot study in Texas last year on phonological skills of adult ESOL learners (available at the website of TCALL a clearing house at Texas A & M) and found that no matter the education level, language background, or length of exposure to English as adult learners, the learners could not repeat sentences of 4 or 5 words or longer completely accurately--something any native speaker can do readily up to 18 or 20 words. This reinforced my belief that these learners do not hear sounds very accurately and therefore are not sure what the actual words and word boundaries are in a stream of speech. I did extensive minimal pair training with my ESL college students in DC a decade ago and they reported themselves that their comprehension of spoken English soared--certainly I saw remarkable improvement in their spelling and grammar as they were able to discriminate sounds that constitute grammar in speech.

As my earlier post says, my colleague the speech pathologist is unimpressed with my ideas because they are so basic to speech pathology that she is shocked ESL is not aware of the value of minimal pair drill and the reasons that it is important to do this kind of auditory training.

Robin

janeaddeo@comcast.net
Wed Apr 18 12:34:06 EDT 2007

Robin,

Thanks for your reply. Perhaps, we as ESL / ESOL teachers need to be more cognizant of the research conducted in the fields of reading and speech pathology that impacts second language acquisition (SLA). Could you recommend specific journals in these fields?

Thanks again for your excellent postings.

Jane

janeaddeo@comcast.net
Wed Apr 18 12:42:52 EDT 2007

Robin,

Thanks for your reply. Perhaps, we as ESL / ESOL teachers need to be more cognizant of the research conducted in the fields of reading and speech pathology that impacts second language acquisition. Could you recommend pertinent journals in these fields?

Your comments on minimal pairs are right on target.

Again, thanks for your informative postings.

Jane

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Thu Apr 19 12:29:45 EDT 2007

Hello, everyone

I apologize for being so slow in responding. I picked up a vicious flu bug on the road which laid me low for a couple of days but am now as good as new (well, almost). Larry is up to his eyeballs in a discussion around the National Reporting System on the assessment list serve.

Here's my plan:

I'll review the questions we have not dealt with from last week and this week and will post of few comments to pull things together and give the rest of you a chance to respond tomorrow.

So thanks to all who jumped in there to post questions and ideas and also to those of you who have taken the time to read the posts (a number of people have written to me off-line).

All the best and I'll write more soon

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Thu Apr 19 16:55:01 EDT 2007

Hi, all again

Man, it is quite a challenge to find key points reading backwards through all the posts finding comments and issues that I still wanted to address. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to thank contributors personally each time, but I'm sure we all appreciate hearing about examples from the field and the other resources that were mentioned. I'm hoping that as the discussion gets archived, it may be a bit easier for folks to find things.

Here are a few left-over strands of discussion that I thought we might tackle today and tomorrow:

1. Assessment of students ability to negotiate connected text through variations of a strategy similar to conducting a Running Record

2. A quick note on contrastive analysis and cognate awareness

3. How do we build foundation skills in PD and allow teachers to be experts in a particular area, such as workplace literacy or workforce education

4. A quick note on Lynn's question about students being able to use language correctly when there's practice in a point but then not in spontaneous speech.

I'll take those on by one but not necessarily in that order. By the way, if you have posted a burning question (or just a lukewarm one) that I missed, please let me know. I think we answered the question, but perhaps only implicitly, on the strategies that you as a teacher might use if you are not bilingual and/or you have class where languages are mixed.

Stay tuned

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Thu Apr 19 18:04:37 EDT 2007

Connected Texts:

Kathleen and others have mentioned the difficulties of finding authentic texts that use connected prose for beginning level learners to read, and Eileen asked about the use of an assessment strategy known as a Running Record (see the details below for how this works). Eileen also mentioned "graded readers".

Here are my thoughts:

1. I don't know of any research that looks at "graded readers" as a way of moving low literate adult language learners into literacy, but Penguin books has a series of novels that have been rewritten at different levels. There is a debate on whether close enough to authentic (that is modified) counts as long as it reflects what students may encounter in their daily lives. So that's fine for informational text particularly in cases where the information is important enough for students to know and when they get a chance to grapple with content, source, purpose etc. I'm not so sure about modifying novels or God forbid - poetry since quite often it kills the spirit of the piece. So I'm all for teachers writing a few short pieces about some issue of interest to their students and then sharing it with other teachers who then add another piece at a slightly higher level so that you can have a program-wide reader (this could be done as part of PD). In terms of commercial materials, many of the adult ESL students seem to love the True Stories series although most are still too difficult for beginning ESL.

Starting points for beginning students are approaches we've discussed - Telling stories orally with the students and using photographs from all over the world (I love Material World) and personal pictures. We've mentioned using instructional strategies such as Language Experience, Chalk Talks, and other forms of story boarding where the connection between oral language and written language are clear and connected text is the end result, rather than the beginning of doing print-based literacy work with students.

Assessment of students' ability to read and make sense of connected text:

As other researchers have found (and most teachers know), adult beginning ESL students have highly uneven reading profiles so it is difficult to place them into a particular book that is just right for their reading level.

Students often have interests, background knowledge and real life experience related to particular topics that allow them to obtain meaning from stories and other texts that are significantly above the level they test at. A large vocabulary in particular can do much to propel a student forward when it comes to making sense of print. Students with this sort of "pragmatic competence" may still be missing some foundation skills (and could benefit from activities that focus on building those), but they should have the opportunity to encounter texts on "hot topics" (defined by them) and get a chance to work together to sort things out (graphic organizers and other learning aids can be helpful here).
It's often difficult to determine what the nature of the reading challenges are that beginning students face.
For some it may mean not having a strong foundation in L1 reading that might transfer and the mistakes they make are not so much errors related to reading English, as errors related to basic print processing (in any language)
Others may have L1 reading skills but their knowledge and experience with English is not strong enough to decode English or their difficulties with pronunciation may get in the way or reading text aloud correctly
Still others may not have the vocabulary needed to recognize and read words fluently
And for some English word structure and syntax remain a mystery although they have developed the kind of decoding skills that allows them to read aloud without making too many mistakes.

What then should we do?

It's important to have a sense of what the student can do with print in the native language - self report of what they read, inviting the student to read a L1 short passage aloud and using years of education in the home country as a proxy are all good starting points.
Here's a variation of a Running Record that has been helpful in my work - it's a way to develop a Reading Profile for each student or a way to use selected students to gain a better sense of what they can do and where they stumble.
Select a story or text that you KNOW students are familiar with because you have talked about it in class and the vocabulary has been introduced.
Select a second story written at the same level but using a text that is not as familiar
Have the class do some group or independent work while you spend a few minutes with an individual student
Invite the student to read with you (choral or echo reading) and pay attention to fluency (decoding, expression, speed). Pay attention and make notes on where the student tends to stumble (basic vowel sounds; longer words etc) and try to determine to what extent the errors are decoding errors and to what extent they are pronunciation errors (a Spanish speaking student saying "espays" for "space" is a pronunciation error; a student saying "espah-se" for space is a decoding error.
Invite students to mark 3 important words they know in the text and 3 words they are not sure about (they may think they should know these words). Mark the words on your sheet and discuss them with the student.
Ask the students a couple of comprehension question, making sure the student understands that the answer can be found in the text. Reread a short section around the answer with the student, ask the question again and see if the student picks up the answer.
Invite the student to ask a question that can be answered by the text (students should have practiced this perhaps as part of the strategies associated with "question generating" and "question answering" - (Robin made some very good points about the culture of question asking that we have in the States)
Use the opportunity to ask the student some open-ended questions about what's hard and easy around reading English, what the student likes to read and reads at home in L1; what kinds of things (s)he is interested in reading about (having some examples on the table is good) etc. It's important to keep the focus on reading since this is a Reading Profile you are trying to develop.

I have a rubric that I use for the different categories but again that takes a bit of work to develop. Again, it seems to me that teachers might work together as part of their professional development create such an assessment that can be shared. They can then use this information to see what students need and where they are stuck. Some may indeed be at a level where they cannot hear the distinctions in sounds and could benefit from some individual work in sound discrimination while the difficulties of others may have to do with vocabulary or with trying to figure out how English sentences are structured.

In the end, the adult ESL teacher still has to teach an entire class focusing on those skills that help move students forward in their understanding of language and texts. Taking a bit of time to spend with individual students who are stuck seems worthwhile to me, but assessing each student in a large class seems unrealistic. In the end, the task of adult ESL teachers is quite different from that of clinicians and speech pathologists whose job it is to work with clients one on one.

Which doesn't mean we can't learn from each other. And special thanks to Robin for providing such rich details on the topic.

Soon more

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Fri Apr 20 00:15:00 EDT 2007

Hi, all

First a definition for those new to linguistics: Minimal pairs: two words that are distinguished in meaning by only one sound

Ship and sheep are minimal pairs.

Bear and pear and ruse and lose or minimal pairs (forget spelling, it's the sound that counts), but choose and juice are not (they have more than one difference - not that I can hear it - see story below)

Normally, native speakers don't have difficulties hearing the differences and thinking of those words as denoting different concepts. And, if you come from a language that uses the same sound to differentiate meaning, you shouldn't have much of a problem.

The difficulties come in when your language doesn't have some of the same sounds as English (or at least the sounds don't indicate a difference in meaning). It's very difficult to hear differences that your language does not have. For example, Chinese does not have long vowels so many Chinese speakers new to English will have a hard time hearing the difference between "hit" and "heat" and most likely will have difficulties producing the sounds. I have a Chinese friend whose Mom could not say "sheets" to save her life and kept using the short vowel sound, much to the embarrassment of her children.

As Robin suggests below, the use of isolated minimal pairs in language teaching has been out of fashion for awhile and remains controversial, while the need to help students understand and use the sounds of the target language remains, of course. There is now much more of an emphasis on teaching students to use multiple clues to make meaning, paying attention to both context and sound. For example, a teacher might ask: If someone says, "Do you have a pin - what's the situation? If someone says "do you have a pen?" what is the situation?"

The focus now is on teaching students to attend to sounds while at the same time demonstrating that real life context can help to make the meaning clear even if the student cannot distinguish between two sounds. In terms of production, it makes sense to teach students "work arounds." For example, my friend's mom learned to say "where are the towels?" when asking for help in a department store, figuring the sheets had to be close by. That's what we mean by "strategic competence" figuring out what to do when your language skills are still "under development."

So here is my personal nightmare with decontextualized minimal pairs. When I first started university in California (after having attended 2 years of adult ESL classes), minimal pairs were all the rage, and a group of graduate students had created a test, specifically designed to trip up members of different language groups. Predictably the test focused on l/r differences for Japanese and Chinese speakers, and Spanish speakers had to hear the difference between "I could really go for this version" and "I could really go for this virgin" (I kid you not; it was way before we got PC). My downfall? Not hearing the difference between "he makes his money raising horses" and "he makes his money racing horses". They could have asked me 100 times and or offered me 1000 dollars, and I could not have heard the difference (my dialect of German does not have a voiced "s" at all and even in high German there is no difference in meaning between the voiced and unvoiced "s" sound).

For what it's worth

Heide

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Fri Apr 20 00:37:25 EDT 2007

Hi, Barbara and others

Good questions about PD and how to help teachers acquire the foundation skills needed in teaching adult learners new to English. (I think understanding how second language acquisition works and understanding second language reading and literacy are good starting points). And introducing teachers to tasks and texts that serve multiple purposes and allow for deeper understanding of language and life seems a good way to go ("less teaching and more learning" was the title that Susan Gaer gave to one of her articles on project-based learning and was kind enough to let me use for some of my work)

Unfortunately, I don't know what various states are doing in PD around adult ESL though I very much like the model of the ongoing staff development through Academies and Institutes that the Texas GREAT Centers are adopting. The limitations of the conference model that focuses on the one shot workshop has certainly been demonstrated through research.

Jodi Crandall (on the list but in Korea at the moment) is working on a project that examines the various PD models that states in the U.S. use, and she should have more information in a few months.

In terms of PD that focuses on the development of language skills in the context of work or on the integration of jobs skills on the one hand and language and literacy skills on the other, I keep hearing renewed interest in these models from foundations, government agencies, and other institutions. Various new reports have been published or are under development. To what extent this interest is translating into workshops or seminars for teachers is difficult to say and too early to tell, perhaps.

But some of the rest of you might know more, and it would be great to hear what is happening in other countries in that respect. Australia or New Zealand, perhaps? Ireland?

Heide

kolgin@glendale.edu
Fri Apr 20 01:22:25 EDT 2007

Heide,

I hope you are feeling better. I have always wondered how much "creaming" were you able to detect in the classrooms in "What Works". Is this common in most literacy classes? I brought this subject up at a conference and was surprised at how wide spread "creaming" is. The consensus seems to be that putting preliterate or nonliterates with non Roman literates or non alphabetic literates together begs for "creaming". What are your thoughts?

Kirk Olgin
Glendale College

JoAnn (Jodi) Crandall
crandall@umbc.edu
Fri Apr 20 03:45:09 EDT 2007

Dear Heide and others,

I'm on my way to Korea, but am at the airport in Tokyo (Narita) where they have wireless so I'll briefly respond here.

In a study of promising practices in adult ESOL at five community colleges, we did discuss a number of professional development practices, ranging from those for new instructors to those for very experienced instructors.

The final report (and a much shorter executive summary) is available to download at www.caalusa.org. Look for the study, Passing the Torch, on the left side of the homepage.

Some of the interesting models included peer coaching and mentoring, reflective teaching, setting up a certificate program, as well as a variety of uses of program websites and resource centers.

Jodi

Susan Reid
sreid@workbase.org.nz
Sat Apr 21 20:39:31 EDT 2007

Hi Heide

At the end of your post you talk about PD options for those who want to integrate literacy numeracy and language skill development into vocational or workforce or other forms of training.

Australia has a long history of intergrated literacy training ( started in the mid 90s) and it has over the last few years been picked up in the UK under the title 'embedded literacy' mainly as a method to increase reach and scale.

In New Zealand this has for some years been recognition that low levels of literacy numeracy and language skills are not going to attended to just by specialist literacy practitioners. So last year a new qualification was developed for tutors ( in NZ this is not used just for volunteers as it is in the US) who are delivering vocational courses or industry training courses or workplace training programmes ( not literacy but focussed on specific workplace skills). http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/nqfdocs/quals/doc/1253.doc The main part of the qualifcation is what we call a unit standard ( competency standard) called 21204 . http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/nqfdocs/units/doc/21204.doc

The critical aspect of integrated literacy is the concurrent development of the two sets of skills together. The literacy skills that are to be developed are defined by the context of the vocational course and are therefore confined by that context. There needs to be sufficient teaching time and acts of teaching so that literacy can be integrated into the other course.

There are a number of models for delivering integrated literacy - one is team teaching where there are two tutors in the room - the literacy teacher and the vocational teacher. This is a resource hungry model and often depends on additional funding which may not be sustainable.

Unit Standard 21204 is based on another model - that vocational teachers themselves can be trained to develop their learners' literacy skills to a certain level. Teachers are not expected to develop the skills of someone who is at a very low level - people with low level skills need a specialist literacy tutor but we believe that vocational tutors can make a difference to learners' literacy skills.

At Workbase we have started to deliver this National Certificate this year. I am currently working with a group of teachers who train students who are acquiring skills and qualifications in dairy farming. The literacy skills of the students of these vocational teachers range from those who can easily cope with the literacy demands of the job and their vocational course to students who are really struggling. These vocational teachers are finding that a lot of actiivities they are currently using in their teaching can easily be used to teach and develop literacy skills - in some cases it is just a question of making it all explicit.

In the UK they have tended to focus on the team teaching model. They have also invested millions of pounds in developing really excellent 'embedded learning materials' for awhole range of occupations see

http://www.dfes.gov.uk/readwriteplus/embeddedlearning/cfbtgeneralinfo.cfm

You are right too that NALA in Ireland has done some really good work on integrated literacy - they developed a really useful guide about the systems and processes needed to set up an integrated programme http://www.nala.ie/publications/listing/20020628161601.html

with NALA's permission we adapted their guidelines for the NZ context ( particularly the pre employment context) http://www.workbase.org.nz/Document.aspx?Doc=Integratingliteracyintoothercourses.pdf

If people are interested we have what we believe is the largest collection of international online resources about integrated/embedded literacy on the New Zealand Literacy Portal www.nzliteracyportal.org.nz just type integrated or embedded into the search function - otherwise you can just type in 21204

if there is something else you know about that isn't on the portal please let use know

Kind regards,
Susan Reid
Manager Learning and Development
Workbase the New Zealand Centre for Workforce Lireracy Development
www.workbase.org.nz

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Sun Apr 22 14:33:50 EDT 2007

Hello Barbara and everyone

I had a couple of questions off-line about efforts to revive workplace literacy, to link adult ESL and job skills training and to contextualize language learning using task an contexts common to various job clusters (health, advanced manufacturing, sales and service). Barbara can certainly talk more about the Texas Initiative.

There's quite a bit of interest these days in studies that speak to the issues of work and language education. Although we did not look at workplace literacy or integrated approaches in the What Works study, there are strong indicators from other studies that models that link job skills training with language and literacy development have stronger outcomes (in terms of retention and transition, job placement and earnings), than other approaches.

If you'd like to know more, here are a couple of links to a report that I did with Julie Strawn and others for the Center for Law and Social Policy.

Full Report:

http://www.clasp.org/publications/LEP_report.pdf

Policy Brief:

http://www.clasp.org/publications/LEP_brief.pdf

Other papers are currently being commissioned that address models for linking adult ESL with employment, including a paper for NIFL on issues in preparing immigrants interested in careers in Allied Health (Crandall, Wrigley and Goldberg) and a report commissioned by Public Private Ventures on promising approaches to help immigrants with limited proficiency in English move into jobs that pay a living wage and can sustain a family.

For those of you interested in studies that examine these issues, resources are available: The Migration Policy Institute's Center on Immigrant Integration Policy has a number of papers and reports listed on their site:

http://www.migrationinformation.org/integration/

Should employment and training be the only goals of adult ESL? Certainly not!

But since millions of people are here in the U.S. to make a living and need language, literacy, and job skills for employment that helps them move out of poverty, it's worth thinking about models and approaches that are likely to make a difference.

More on these topics from an international perspective - I just got a long and thoughtful note from Susan Reid in New Zealand who knows of such things.

Cheers

Heide

aneaddeo@comcast.net
Sun Apr 22 15:37:48 EDT 2007

Heide,

Thank you for your informative postings and excellent links. Be assured that your time and efforts are very much appreciated.

Jane

David J. Rosen
djrosen@comcast.net
Sun Apr 22 22:00:31 EDT 2007

Colleagues,

I want to thank Heide Spruck Wrigley, Larry Condelli, and everyone who contributed to the rich discussion of the What Works for Adult ESL Students study. This discussion is now over. In the next few days I will archive it on the ALE Wiki and post an announcement here when it is available.

In the upcoming weeks we will have discussions on:

Community Literacy
Numeracy
Defining Professional Wisdom
Research on the GED

and possibly other topics. You are welcome to stay subscribed for those discussions. However, if you wish to unsubscribe, you may do so by going to:

http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/specialtopics#unsub

If you have comments about this or other special topics discussions, or suggestions, please send them to me at djrosen at comcast.net

David J. Rosen
Special Topics Discussion Moderator
djrosen@comcast.net

missy slaathaug
missythird@gmail.com
Sun Apr 22 22:42:21 EDT 2007

Ellen, I taught reading/writing in SD Women's prison for about a year, and I can really relate to your comments - they make a lot of sense, and I wish I had read this email before I started my teaching. I also had students who started out from the outset claiming that they "hated to read" and "do we have to read in this class?" For me to get them motivated to write or read, it seemed to be all about creating an atmosphere of trust, so that they dared to take risks, and also somehow responding to their questions and conversations so that their curiosity was validated. They needed to talk a lot before they started having anything to say, so to speak.

(sorry if my comments are off topic!)

Missy Slaathaug
Pierre

Hartel, Joanne
jhartel@CambridgeMA.GOV
Mon Apr 23 09:21:31 EDT 2007

Thank you very much. I'm happy to know that we actually do use some of the materials you describe in our classes. We should do more. The reading development stages and the video were especially helpful.

Barbara Tondre
btondre@earthlink.net
Mon Apr 23 17:32:11 EDT 2007

Anyone interested in learning more about the Texas initiative may contact me at btondre@earthlink.net. Also, the study we did in preparing to respond to the legislation requiring AE in Texas to address industry-related instructional needs can be found at http://www-tcall.tamu.edu by clicking on Workforce Partnerships and then scrolling down to Charting A Course.

Barbara Tondre

Wrigley, Heide
heide@literacywork.com
Mon Apr 23 18:22:01 EDT 2007

Wow. Susan!

I'm sorry it took me a bit to respond (but I did post your note - which somehow didn't show up on its own)

Thanks so much for taking the time to lay things out and describe what's going on in places other than the U.S. - and the links are invaluable. I've already forwarded this page to a number of people beyond the list who are dealing with workplace literacy, and perhaps it will get Paul Jurmo energized as well.

I very much appreciate your contribution and I'm sure others do as well

Heide

David J. Rosen
djrosen@comcast.net
Fri Apr 27 09:34:54 EDT 2007

Dear colleagues,

A couple of posts reached the Special Topics discussion list after the What Works ESL Study discussion was closed, so they were not posted. The moderator of the The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List, Lynda Terrill, has agreed that our discussion could continue on that list. Heide Wrigley has agreed to join that discussion list. To subscribe to that discussion, please go to http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/Englishlanguage

I will post a message here in a few days when the Archived discussion is available on the Adult Literacy Education Wiki. It is available now in the National Institute Discussion List Archives at http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/specialtopics/2007/date.html

Sincerely,

David J. Rosen
Special Topics Discussion Moderator djrosen@comcast.net

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