The CATESOL Journal

This mixed-method study addressed the “foreign TA problem,” reconceptualizing it as the communication gap, an issue created by multiple parties—including bias originating from undergraduates. Experimental sessions measured undergraduates’ comprehension of 2 brief lessonstaught by an international professor. Between lessons, participants completed 1 of 3 short modules: a bias-stimulation module, a control module, or a linguistic-training module (which confronted both accent misunderstanding and accent bias). While training did not affect comprehension, questionnaire responses revealed a positive effect of training on sociolinguistic attitudes. Follow-up discussion sessions explored undergraduates’ experiences with international faculty and responses to the communication gap. Several important themes emerged from these discussions, including effects on academic plans, negative cognitive effects, and a model of undergraduates’ socialization into accent bias. The article concludes with recommendations specifically geared toward TESOL professionals’ ongoing efforts to close the communication gap, including a greater recognition of undergraduates’ role in perpetuating the gap.

This narrative research study involving 13 Hmong college women reveals some of the challenges that multilingual students may face in the American educational system. Using stories told by the participants about their language- and literacydevelopment experiences, the author identifies commonalities in those experiences. The similarities in their stories suggest that linguistically diverse students may often be inadvertently subjected to marginalizing experiences in their interactions with both educators and classmates. The author offers 3 positive suggestions for addressing critical issues in the US educational system: establishing and equipping the teacher as an agent for social change, promoting critical multiculturalism in the classroom, and legitimizing and giving voice to the minority experience.

This interpretive study explores the writing and writing experiences of 2 bilingual, Mexican, immigrant undergraduates at a US university. Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester’s (2003) continua model of biliteracy situates writing interactions to understand how students explore and draw on their bilingual and bicultural resources as they develop academic writing in English in the university. Data include questionnaires, literacy history interview-conversations, text-based conversations, student writing, course syllabi, and assignment sheets. Biliteracy dialogues demonstrate how students approached writing. The 1st student, Diego, focused on negotiating what he perceived as appropriate to include in his writing, while the 2nd student, Nicolas, connected to academic reading and writing through previous educational experiences. The findings illustrate the writers’ bilingual and bicultural resources, suggesting that biliteracy dialogues have potential to facilitate bilingual writers in developing more confidence in academic writing. The findings have implications for tutoring, conferencing, and other 1-on-1 work with bilingual students.

This article discusses how the ESL program at an ethnically/linguistically diverse community college (between San Diego and the Mexican border) moved from a general, grammar-based ESL curriculum to a content-based instruction (CBI) curriculum. The move was designed to better prepare 1st- and 2nd-generation immigrant students for freshman composition and mainstream content classes. The article describes the author’s challenges and successes in implementing this new curriculum in her classrooms, particularly with beginning-level immigrant ESL students. The author provides a close look at 6 portfolios by students with whom that author worked for 3 semesters. The chapter ends with reflections on how this experience can help other instructors whose programs and classes undergo major curricular changes.

Mastering techniques of self- and peer revision is a valuable tool for all writers, especially US-educated Generation 1.5 students, whose near fluency enables them to dialogue successfully about their writing. Using action research, 2 academic writing instructors systematically trained students to more responsibly and effectively revise their academic essays. Fostering student buy-in to the editing process, sequencing rubrics over a series of essays, and establishing a productive role for the teacher during peer revision were all features of this process.

To succeed academically, students must learn how to develop critical response to texts (both written texts and visual texts). Asynchronous forums provide an ideal setting for developing these response practices. This article illustrates how the author created scaffolded online forum discussions to support students in their academic literacy development. These discussions took place in a high-intermediate community college ESL class that included early- and late-arriving immigrant students, US-educated multilingual writers who have graduated from US high schools, and international students. The article concludes with a list of issues that teachers should consider when attempting to use online forum discussions in their specific contexts.

Many teacher-development models posit teacher learning as a linear process in which teachers build skills and knowledge while progressing through different stages of expertise. Although this model is attractive for many reasons and often does seem to shed light on some of the aspects of teacher development, this author’s own experience largely does not conform to this linear trajectory. In this article, the author describes changes in several aspects of her practice during the course of her 1st year as an ESL teacher at an Intensive English Program (IEP). She situates developments of specific skills, attitudes, and beliefs about teaching within her continually shifting understanding of the interplay between theory and practice.

The relationship between structural linguists and applied linguists is notoriously uncomfortable; each tends to view the others’ focus and methods with suspicion. Despite this uneasy relationship many TESOL-focused master’s programs are housed in Linguistics Departments. This article reflects on my experience in 1 such department and makes suggestions for how the 2 halves of the department could be integrated to the advantage of each group. Formal linguistic theory has the potential to very usefully inform classroom practice, while the language classroom is an ideal location to investigate the mechanisms of second language acquisition and add to the body of knowledge on how language acquisition functions. Specific ways in which formal linguistic theory can be applied in the ESL classroom are discussed.

This article discusses my (recursive) process of theory building and the relationship between research, teaching, and theory development for graduate students. It shows how graduate students can reshape their conceptual frameworks not only through course work, but also through researching classes they teach. Specifically, while analyzing the intersection of modality, evidence, and argument in my students’ writing, I began to adopt Bakhtinian (1981) theory of dialogic voicing and appropriation as a framework through which to approach writing development. I examine the influences of curriculum, policy, citation, and plagiarism on student writing and conclude with discussing the changes in my teaching practices.

The processes by which unprepared freshmen are able to develop their academic literacy are overlooked by those in the academy. The author will describe a case study of the development of a student’s academic literacy in the 1st 3 semesters of college. The information for this project was obtained through interviews with the student and her teacher, observation of her ESL classes, and analysis of her writing. The author will provide 4 major findings of her success studies as well as important implications for students and teachers in the TESOL field.

The number of nonnative English speakers and Generation 1.5 students enrolled in mainstream English classes continues to grow, especially in community colleges in California and other western states. Yet most English teachers with degrees in Literature, Creative Writing, or even Composition have not been trained in TOESL and often feel underprepared to work with these students and the specific language and grammar problems they bring into the classroom. A recent study focused on the overall preparedness level of new community college Composition instructors provided some interesting data in this regard, illuminating the unique challenge community college teachers face in the increasingly multicultural and multilingual reality of today’s mainstream English classes, which are most often not designed with ESL students in mind.

TESOL theory is intended to inform teacher practice, but studying what teachers actually do in a given teaching context can sometimes lead to better theory. This report illustrates an area in which practice informed theory in the context of 1-on1 writing conferences for prematriculated ESL writers. This report describes the creation and implementation of a writing conference program for 250 prematriculated students at an Intensive English Program (IEP) with language proficiencies ranging from high-beginning to low-advanced. The theory-driven philosophy of conferencing encouraged teachers to meet 1-on-1 with their writing students 5 times during a semester to provide holistic, nondirective, level-appropriate feedback on student writing and to de-emphasize grammar instruction in these interactions. While teachers largely followed this philosophical direction, they also made modifications that were not entirely expected. Specifically, teacher practice deviated from conferencing philosophy in terms of the purposes of conferences, the role of grammar feedback, and the use of reflective practices to shape classroom instruction. Confronting these unexpected areas of teacher practice to learn from them rather than remove them allowed the writing conference program to thrive. It also pointed to areas where the writing conference philosophy, and its theoretical underpinnings, could be reevaluated to become more descriptive and inclusive of actual practice. This report also provides insights other theorists and practitioners may find valuable in establishing their own writing conference programs.

To better prepare themselves for authentic teaching situations, pre- and in-service teachers should become familiarized with the application of curriculum-development theory in their training programs. The authors will detail how they have become more prepared to face the challenges of course development by outlining their own experience designing a curriculum for an English for Art Purposes course for a leading art school. Being inexperienced teachers themselves and outsiders to curriculum design, the authors outline and share what they learned about creating materials, tasks, and assessment instruments that not only addressed the specific needs and interests of the students, which differ from those of other academic disciplines, but also fulfilled the educational objectives of the art institution itself. Involving preservice teachers in curriculum design will help them to internalize second language teaching theory and have a deeper connection to their own curricula. The authors believe that it is through this curriculum-development process that teachers can experience professional growth and empowerment.

This paper addresses the ideal of citizenship in the US and how particular meanings of history, culture, and language are encoded in government policy and practice. The US government (Citizenship and Immigration Services) presents citizenship as a commitment to shared knowledge and values, and it requires applicants to possess competence in “ordinary English language.” However, a critical discourse analysis of the naturalization test material reveals a de facto policy of higher English proficiency than is claimed. Furthermore, the history and civics requirement of the citizenship test demands memorization of only certain historical facts deemed important. Citizenship policy analysis is paralleled by a localized ethnographic study of an adult ESL/citizenship class, where the instructor’s teaching perspectives and pedagogy reveal how a different set of citizenship meanings is understood and transmitted to the students than is officially promoted. The paper concludes by offering suggestions for citizenship curricular reform.

As the world is becoming increasingly flat (Ang, Van Dyne, Koh, Templer, & Chandrasekar, 2007; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Friedman, 2005), the classroom has become a mirror that often reflects this phenomenon at a microcosmic level. As such, teacher-preparation programs are continuing to emphasize the importance of understanding and valuing student cultures to inform teaching practice. This study sought to examine how 10 in-service teachers in the San Diego area understand the role of culture in their daily work with their culturally and linguistically diverse students using the cultural intelligence framework (Earley & Ang, 2003). While the cultural intelligence framework provided some insight into how teachers understood certain aspects of culture in relation to their students, it also brought to light the complexity of defining and assessing cultural competence. In fact, teachers challenged the elevated emphasis on culture in the literature, and instead, highlighted additional competencies of value to them in this work.

Recent research on how TESOL professionals educate nonnative English-speaking students in MA programs indicates a general conviction that native-speaking and nonnative-speaking MA students should be treated equally during their studies in MA programs. Absent from this discussion and much of the literature on thistopic, however, are the voices of the studentsthemselves, which raisesthe question of how well self-reports from TESOL professionals match the perceptions of the students in those MA programs. The current study aims to address this issue. On a survey of current and former students in MA TESOL programs across California, data suggest generally shared perceptions between TESOL professionals and students on the question of whether nonnative English-speaking and native English-speaking students are treated equally during their studies; however, several important differences exist. This paper examines these differences and discusses the mismatches between MA students’ perceptions of how nonnative English-speaking students are treated and those of their instructors.

Using integrative grammar- and vocabulary-related activities, the high school English language development (ELD) teacher in this qualitative case study engaged her students by involving them in their own education. Drawing on research addressing student engagement (Kelley, Lesaux, Kieffer, & Faller, 2010; Norton & Toohey, 2001; Ryan, 2008), I coded 25 hours of field notes for instances of engaged and noncompliant behavior during integrative activities over 6 months during the 2009-2010 school year. The focal teacher employed a mixed-methods approach, and I observed that engagement was high during activities that had students creatively manipulating new grammatical forms and vocabulary words in a variety of ways. My findings suggest that this teacher’s methods were generally successful in promoting the engagement of her high school ELD students.

Within the communicative approach, often the assumption has been that with the right exposure, students will simply “pick up” the vocabulary required for learning and using English, and thus there is no need to focus on or teach it. Yet, as many teachers can attest, this is frequently not the case, and there have been recent efforts to reemphasize vocabulary learning and teaching in both research and practice. This article surveys the literature on word lists for vocabulary teaching in English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL), especially for adults, briefly summarizing their potential for learners and teachers in learning and teaching English vocabulary. After discussing general and academic word lists, it introduces contributions from recent corpus research resulting in 2 lists of English formulaic expressions and 8 subject-specific English word lists, in fields varying from agriculture, business, and engineering to medicine and theology. Finally, it offers suggestions for their potential in vocabulary teaching.

This article proposes to incorporate Freirean philosophy with a technique used in academic (monolingual) English courses: the multigenre research paper. When applying this technique in the ESL classroom, it is crucial to also use global and international texts of various genres in order to support students’ cultural identities and also instill a sense of social justice. The theoretical framework is based upon Freire’s ideas, with an overview of how the theory is implemented using the multigenre research project format in an advanced-level ESL Reading class. Results indicated that this method syncs with theory and that this format motivated students to read widely, validated their sense of self, and encouraged both independent and collaborative work in and out of class.

The misuse of smartphones in class frequently exasperates teachers. Instead of seeing this mobile technology as a nuisance, teachers can use it to their advantage. Smartphones can maximize collaboration, improve assessment, expand routine vocabulary lessons, augment out-of-class activities, and add multimedia tools to lessons, all while using technology that is both familiar and enjoyable to the students. The article highlights 3 free cross-platform software applications (apps)— Socrative, Edmodo, and Blogger. Each app is rated according to the following features: appearance, daily setup, ease of use, educational benefits, quiz format and grading, registration, speed, teacher control, tips/help, and user options. Evaluations, sample lesson activities, and walk-throughs are also included to emphasize each app’s strengths.