On May 5, I finally had the opportunity to lead a full session about Academic Reading Circles face to face to teachers, at the TESL Toronto Spring 2012 Conference (#toscon12) and it was exciting to start the ball rolling.I’m sure if you’re reading this you’re aware of my involvement with EAP and one [...]]]>

On May 5, I finally had the opportunity to lead a full session about Academic Reading Circles face to face to teachers, at the TESL Toronto Spring 2012 Conference (#toscon12) and it was exciting to start the ball rolling.I’m sure if you’re reading this you’re aware of my involvement with EAP and one particular project: the design of ARC, which develops on a practical level in my program at (New College) University of Toronto.

Its puzzle pieces (how the roles best fit skill aims, technology choices to use in conjunction, etc.) evolve as I talk about them with more and more teachers (my colleagues -> my blog posts -> VRT -> TOscon12 -> ?). It’s exciting.  If you were at this session, you can view the slides below.

Session slides

If you can’t see the embedded slides, please click here.

Handouts

This weekend brings everyone 5th Virtual Round Table Web Conference.   You should check it out.  There, I’ve discussed #EAPchat during its opening Symposium. On Sunday, I’ll be talking about using blogs for intensive and extensive reading practice and yep, Ghandi and the Occupy Wall [...]]]>

This weekend brings everyone 5th Virtual Round Table Web Conference.   You should check it out.  There, I’ve discussed #EAPchat during its opening Symposium. On Sunday, I’ll be talking about using blogs for intensive and extensive reading practice and yep, Ghandi and the Occupy Wall Street movement are part of it.

My colleagues and I at University of Toronto, New College, choose texts each week for the academic reading circles usually by copying the text from online articles, reformatting them into a Word document with space for notes.   They use this in-class and for homework. We also try to use or make readings available to students on thematically related topics. This was great until a few weeks ago when we thought about switching it up by using the script (and video) from a TED talk on ‘the 99′, a comic based on a group of superheroes representing aspects of the Q’oran.  Immediately we thought of putting this one together in blog format.  It is here, in case you’re curious.

This got me thinking.  Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Paper-based texts can be very limiting in certain ways:

Click this pic to visit the blog itself.

The presentation slides are here:

Open publication - Free publishing - More 4c

Click on my face to watch the whole recording.  You’ll feel you’re there; I swear. =)

 

On the first day, language learners go in, sit in a theatre-style tiered classroom altogether, unclear about what it will be like to study a content university course.  It’s their first time to do so.  They fear that they will understand little.  And they’re right. They expect that writing downthe slide points [...]]]>

On the first day, language learners go in, sit in a theatre-style tiered classroom altogether, unclear about what it will be like to study a content university course.  It’s their first time to do so.  They fear that they will understand little.  And they’re right. They expect that writing downthe slide points will be enough.  And they’re wrong.  Learning how to engage with the lecture content means survival.  How to do this is what we, as instructors, need to help learners figure out.

The ‘authentic’ listening experience

Understanding a university lecture well enough to take effective notes and preparing students to do so using academic English coursebook material are two completely different mistresses.  Despite good intentions, the latter has clearly cut

chunks focussing on one microskill at a time.    A live lecture is rarely organised in the prescribed manner (introduction through to conclusion) nor includes multiple examples of cues and signposts that are told to us should be there.  I recently asked a publisher rep if the lectures (in addition to the podcasts and news clips) on their new release were real or not, as it was a claim that the listening material was authentic.  Their response was that they aimed for an “authentic listening experience”, which was code for “no”. They are scripted, slowed down and clearly enunciated, with the white noise of student coughing, chatter or technology buzzing eliminated.

In fact, lecture content and environment varies from prof to prof, discipline to discipline, class to class.  Accompanying technology and its availability to students is a professor’s personal choice. Though practice material from a good number of coursebooks can be helpful for simplified, digestible, packaged lessons, the application of their points to real lectures needs to be practised if not before, continuously alongside the content-course itself.

Professors are teachers too

In my program, we are lucky enough to have interaction (and to a small extent, collaboration) with the History course professor ahead of time.  She willingly sends us thorough lecture notes a week ahead.  It’s helpful to pull lexis, organisation and content cues from to prepare students for what they should listen for.  We don’t go over the content specifically; we use it to equip students with more authentic (i.e. complex, academic and lengthy) context than what’s in a book.  If this communication is at all possible in your programs, I highly recommend opening that channel. Alternatively, go to the lectures and experience what students experience.  Use that in the next class. I do that too.

Video killed the lesson plan star

For two years I’ve scoured the Internet looking for authentic lectures.  At first, TED was the obvious leader.  Not only were videos on a variety of topics, interactive scripts were available.  Jackpot!  Many are under 20 minutes long–manageable for most EAP classes–use signposts and clear rhetoric. The downside? They’re largely informative (as opposed to argumentative or connection-driven), with content not so academically organised or lexical…and eventually upon seeing the opening TED splash screen repeatedly, students seek it out on their own, watching so many you can hardly continue using them in class without someone having seen something, not altogether lesson-destroying, but certainly annoying if you want everyone to start at the same point.

Some other sites still underused by teachers and students:

YouTube EDU (http://www.youtube.com/education?category=University) - There’s a wide variety of collated lecture series, both old and new, from various universities across disciplines like Engineering, Social Sciences, Math, Business, Education, Humanities, you name it.  Many of them are full length, over 60 minutes. Some include student interviews also.

BigThink (http://bigthink.com/) – a large quantity of white-background single speaker HD videos (not academic lectures but often on academic topics) that are often quite short and accompanied by a related text and links to outside related articles

Academic Earth (http://academicearth.org/) – Real lectures from top universities organised by subject, university, even professor.  Full courses, even.  Excellent stuff. (Thanks to Rona McIntyre for the reminder)

Open Culture (http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses) – I haven’t actually used anything from here myself, though it was recommended to me by Phil Wade.  It looks to have a wide variety of both audio and visual recordings.

What works for me, doesn’t work for you

Note-taking is obviously important.  What’s not so obvious is the way to take notes.  The bottom line is determining why one take notes. Traditionally, it’s helpful to remember content transmitted. But now, if lectures are recorded and made available to students? Surely it’s not.  If it were, video would be useful enough.  I believe it’s largely to

• recognise connections between various parts of content
• guide students to digest and manipulate information read in preparation in a new way
• distinguish what’s important and what’s incidental; and
• have key information easily available for later use.

So what is effective note-taking?  One thing it’s not: rewriting slide information. So often I see this along with a guarantee they’ve missed so much valuable content as a result.  I tell them, but they don’t believe me.  Next step: prove it.  From this handout, I ask students to copy down the slide information as I read the transcript. Then I give them a short quiz about the content.  Upon multiple failures, I show them the text below and demonstrate that the blue represents what’s on the slide.  Red is discourse.  And black is everything they missed.  Mind-blowing, really.

In an ideal setting, students would have an outline or copies of the slides beforehand. When we compare my, your and Iam Teacher’s note-taking strategies, they’ll be different.  What works for one does not work for another.  Exposing students to a variety of note-taking types is probably the best way to go about it.  Have students try all sorts out and decide on their own what works for them.  The problem is, they won’t know what works for them without repeated exposure and repeated tries.  Let this EAP program be the time for them to figure it out.  Some suggestions:

The Cornell method - a very table-oriented logic, with indexing and summarising on each page

Mindmapping – like a web all tangled up into bubbles going to and fro, it may make drawing connections between various content more obvious.  Though using a sketchbook might be best, one could always try out Mindmeister, an online mind mapping tool.

Colour coding – consistent use of abbreviations and symbols is valuable on its own as part of note-taking, but how about adding colour to show various types of content, context or connections made?

Make it and we will come

I’ve often wondered why no one has approached universities to see if they could make use of their archived recorded lectures across a variety of disciplines for coursebook material.  Maybe it’s because of copyright issues.  Maybe it’s because a lecture from mid-year, out of context, would make little sense to our learners without the benefit of previous lecture content. Maybe it’s that they just don’t want to.  In the end, I can go to YouTube or my own History lectures and create the material from them myself.  But for a change, I’d like to have EAP material for an authentic lecture just given to me.

I think this deserves a collaborative wiki, drop box, or Googledocs and our community of language instructors.  Let’s rectify this situation.  Let’s find lectures online, create EAP materials based on them and share in them in one place so we can all benefit.

Or maybe I’ll just write a book and make my millions.  Guess I should finally get in touch with theround. ;)

For further inspiration about EAP lecture listening and note-taking, take a look at the #EAPchat transcript from April 2.

A valid buzz surrounds the importance of teaching students to think critically when reading, looking at visual media or listening to arguments.  Many international 1st-year university students are products of a believe-what-you’re-told, there-is-a-right-answer educational system.  As a result, questioning does not come naturally. And so, I want to devote a couple posts to [...]]]>

A valid buzz surrounds the importance of teaching students to think critically when reading, looking at visual media or listening to arguments.  Many international 1st-year university students are products of a believe-what-you’re-told, there-is-a-right-answer educational system.  As a result, questioning does not come naturally. And so, I want to devote a couple posts to ways I try to instigate this new ability.

Idiom origins revealed.  Or not.

In an initial lesson, as my program is integrated with a 1st year History course, I suggest to students that they are going to write an informative paper on life during the 1500s.  I ask them to describe what they imagine life at the time to be like.  Not surprisingly, they mention the poverty, the dirt, the lack of technology, the kings and queens. With these preconceptions now in place, since the internet is the go-to for initial research on an unfamiliar topic, we Google “life in the 1500s”. What results at the top is this website, a section of which I refer to below.

As you read through, you see that these preconceptions are confirmed. For example:

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, — hence the saying “dirt poor.”

What’s clever is plausible ideas are reinforced by explanations and references to common idioms (my personal favourite is “saved by the bell” at the end of #11).  I ask students how they feel about the information they’ve learnt from this site, to which many are impressed with the recognised idioms and their apparent origins.  I ask them if they believe everything–mostly silence and sheepish glances at each other follow.  They know because I’ve asked the question, the answer should be no.  Why would the teacher give us wrong information? Why would someone lie about this information so that others would be misled? 

I introduce the idea of red flags: warning signs, in this case, that should ring a critical thinker’s alarm bells.  After taking a look at some of the ways to evaluate the reliability of a website (University of California, Berkeley) like motivation, authority, currency and type of site.

Eyes squint the so-called facts.
…….Eyebrows raise.
…………..Trust dissipates.
…………………Skepticism seeps in.

An (convincing) open letter to educators

Next up: an impassioned video blog about why university education is no longer valuable.

I leave it up to students to thinking about his message critically.  Beyond comprehension questions and some guided questions (on the handout below), I give few correct/incorrect clarifications.

Surviving Pandora’s box

This awakening to the idea that information needs to be evaluated before it can be trusted seems to leave a number of students unsettled.  This Pandora’s box opens up to questioning what they’ve always held true about their own countries and high school education.  But they recover and are better for it.  Their initiation into critical thought may be disconcerting at first, but over time and with practice, it proves to help students build more reliable arguments and make informed decisions.

Inspired by Shelly Terrell’s Goal 6: investigate and instigate, increasing student ability to ask questions without defining what those questions must be or what the answers absolutely are allows them to develop evaluative skills at their own pace. What delightful surprise comes is a critical eye demonstrated on not only what information they receive, but that that they produce.

A related post, A reflection on teaching critical thinking, can be read here.

The second #EAPchat took place on Twitter on Monday, March 5 revolving around the question: Is the Academic Word List (or other lists) relevant for EAP programs?   Mura Nava (@muranava) kindly summarised the chat here, with minor additions made by myself.

#EAPchat, Monday, 5 March
In attendance: @mkofab [...]]]>

The second #EAPchat took place on Twitter on Monday, March 5 revolving around the question: Is the Academic Word List (or other lists) relevant for EAP programs?   Mura Nava (@muranava) kindly summarised the chat here, with minor additions made by myself.

#EAPchat, Monday, 5 March
In attendance: @mkofab , @leoselivan, @seburnt , @muranava

Our discussion kicked off by @seburnt posting a link to an article: Hyland, K. and P. Tse, P. (2007) Is There an “Academic Vocabulary”?  (http://bit.ly/yzDRKxt) in which Hyland & Tse discuss the relevance of the Academic Word List with regards to EAP programs and relate their findings regarding its shortcomings with regards to discipline-specific contexts in terms of usage and collocation.

@mkofab asked for clarification of what the Academic Word list is and  @seburnt gave a link to its entry on Wiktionary (http://t.co/thQFtdMJ) while summarising that Basically it’s a list of words researched as frequently used in academic texts.

There was a consensus that words should be learned in context (such as in collocations) and not as isolated blocks. And so word lists could be useful for teachers to structure their material but not so useful to give to students though @seburnt noted I do think word lists do have value though. The AWL can help Ss recognize or notice common academically used words Editor note: I meant that such word lists at minimum give students a guide as to words to look for in their texts, regardless of how they are used.

The discussion then moved on to  talk about how to choose words for a list and various tools were linked to:

• AntConc  http://t.co/iKhOvNTD
• Compleat Lexical tutor http://t.co/A6Ccxs1S
• Just the Word http://t.co/pEb7W611
• COCA with http://t.co/LweXO892 interface
• Vocabgrabber  http://t.co/pBav33H2

Participants agreed that until such tools get easier to use, teachers will have to rely on their intuitions. And hence word lists have their uses for teachers.  @leoselivan added  I think applied linguists should be compiling lists of chunks not words.

Moving more into classroom resources, Garnet’s EAS: Vocabulary (along with its supplementary activity site  http://t.co/Uv39HHm2) and Pearson’s Focus on Vocabulary was cited as useful . A gap fill activities site for AWL (http://t.co/6jhnAmdv) was also linked to.  @leoselivan noted that this and several other AWL practice sites all relied on a lexical chunking knowledge.  @seburnt suggested that guessing meaning from context strategies also come into play.

Regarding structuring a lesson @leoselivan suggested a principled lexical syllabus is take AWL list & add at least 3-4 collocates 2 each item & slowly train Ss 2 do same.

Talk moved onto to ways to help students organise their lexis. Vocabulary profiles as written about here (http://t.co/MwjVttbF),  lexical notebooks as detailed in posts by @dalecoulter (Editor note: not directly linked in the chat) and bristol cards (Editor note: i.e. flash cards) were all mentioned. The point made was that students should organise vocabulary beyond the single word and beyond translation.

An Adam Simpson (@yearinthelifeof) post, “How I developed an academic vocabulary syllabus (part one)” (http://t.co/FulX7jli), was suggested as a good example of developing a vocabulary syllabus. In addition, another post, by Tyson Seburn, “Learning vocabulary: receptive or productive goal?” (http://t.co/s0L9g0FV) was mentioned as food for thought.

So how do you feel about the AWL in your EAP curricula?

Yes, I was supposed to present my three-minutes this morning at the #TeachMeet International, but because of technical difficulties in logging in, I decided to go back to bed instead of fooling around with it any longer. I promised to record my presentation on The Highlighter Role of Academic Reading Circles (ARC) in [...]]]>

Yes, I was supposed to present my three-minutes this morning at the #TeachMeet International, but because of technical difficulties in logging in, I decided to go back to bed instead of fooling around with it any longer. I promised to record my presentation on The Highlighter Role of Academic Reading Circles (ARC) in lieu.  Here we are (though I doubt I squished it into 3 minutes).

Other ARC posts:

• Academic Reading Circles (introduction)
• ARC in practicum
• The interactions of ARC

Collocations sites referred to:

• Compleat Lexical Tutor (see Concordances)
• Just the word
• Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students

What is this? Does your language intuition and cultural expectations meet in the path of understanding?  Without context, it can be a little challenging.  Imagine this all around you. It was this alien experience, like living in some alternate reality, where I had my first experience with language workout.  Korean.

Date: Monday, February 20, 2012
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 PM (Toronto) / [...]]]> For my 100th post,  it seems fitting then that it be about a new project, a new era in my social media and teaching experience: this is a summary of the very first #EAPchat held on Twitter.

Date: Monday, February 20, 2012
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 PM (Toronto) / 8:00 – 9:00PM (Istanbul)
Platform: Twitter
Moderated: Tyson Seburn (@seburnt) & Sharon Turner (@sharonzspace)
Main attendees:  Adam Simpson (@yearinthelifof), Carolyn Bergshoeff (@MellynEducation), David Mearns (@davidmearns), Olywn Alexander (@olwyna), Mura Nava (@muranava)

What are the most important (effective) study skills to teach?

Three particular subtopics developed over our hour together.

1) Time management in self-study
A large problem area here tends to be the fact that students have little experience with managing their own time in a university setting.  With parents and teachers doing so under strict rule for the majority of their scholastic lives, when given the freedom to do it themselves, many are unable and lack the skills required to make effective use of their time, missing deadlines, leaving work to the last minute or the opposite even, overwhelming preoccupation with study.  A balance between study vs social lives needs to be reinforced.

Suggestions that came up:

• Students enter not only due dates, but periodic reminders (e.g. when to start assignments) in Google Calendar
• Start a Facebook class group or Edmodo that includes info on important dates
• Advise students to set aside specific hours per day to do anything but study or vice versa, depending on the main problem
• Explain the rhythm of their studies at this level
• Have students bring their schedule and workload and work together to find the balance
• Create different study scenarios with varying factors (e.g. content work, assignments, personal matters, etc.) and have students work through together to figure out what works for them; talk it out as a group activity
• Work with tutorial leaders about the process of assignment work

2) Vocabulary self-study
We discussed both whether it was worthwhile to study vocabulary outside of class and how to do so most effectively.  One issue that was recurrent was that of students not focussing on more than memorisation of words, which leaves them with little ability to use them appropriately. This process ignores various aspects of learning vocabulary (e.g. multi-meaning, collocation, word grammar, word class and family, etc.).

Suggestions that arose:

•  Have a class discussion about whether memorisation works – try out a memorisation activity and vocabulary profile (like these)
• Garnet Educations’s English for academic study: vocabulary self-study text (Colin Campbell) – Its first five chapters introduces and practices the aspects of vocabulary often overlooked by students and teachers (see above); the second five chapters applies those concepts to working with the first five sublists of the Academic Word List; students need a self-study routine established first though.
• Practice aspects (e.g. collocation or sentence construction) with students to demonstrate what should be done during self-study too
• Have students focus on vocabulary when doing their own readings, but guessing meaning from context, organising by topic, noticing collocation, etc.
• Have students be teachers, where they create their own vocabulary activities for other students and teach the vocabulary to them
• Implement an IMRD (Intro to vocab to learn, Method they use to learn it, Results of what they learnt, Discussion of the process with the class) system
• Students record vocabulary profiles in a notebook

3) Encouraging autonomous work
One issue can also be that students aren’t entirely sure of what to do outside of class for their own learning beyond the homework that is assigned. There are various ways to encourage autonomous practice.

Suggestions for this:

• Chatinars – David’s work that has students watch a video on a particular topic and then conduct a Facebook group chat with each other about it when they are at home.  This isn’t monitored or used for accuracy, but encourages (with great success) student-engagement with L2 outside the classroom in a more authentically used environment
• Portfolios – Students identify what parts of that week’s lessons they feel the weakest at, why and write this down.  They find internet or other sources of activities that can help them practice this.  They list what they’ve done and bring/email it to the instructor to discuss one-on-one. Instructors give suggestions on weaknesses and where to go from there.  These autonomously chosen exercises are collected for part of the year’s grade and to show students how much they’ve worked.  Sometimes grades need to be the motivation.
• Student/assignment blogs – Have student groups create a blog where they work together to produce a writing assignment that normally they’d hand in on paper.  This format is more modern and gives students the opportunity to add in their own creativity while also practising the skills they’ve been using in class.
• Discussion boards – Peers can review each others’ writing.  Instructors can monitor through the threads created

So there you have it.  Hopefully I didn’t miss anything major.  A big thanks to all who joined in or lurked during our first iteration of #EAPchat.  A couple of tools that might come in handy next time it’s on Twitter:

1) Don’t forget to use the #EAPchat hashtage on your tweets or it goes astray from the collected conversation.  For this, you may consider using TweetChat, which opens an EAPchat room for you and automatically puts the hashtag on your tweets.
2) Check out the #EAPchat report on Hashtagtracking for really cool stats. (I’ve put some below for those who don’t have access to the beta version)
3) Like the #EAPchat Facebook page to keep up-to-date on topic polls, dates and platforms.  Next week, the entire chat will be held on the Facebook page (Monday, February 27 @ 1:00PM Toronto), not Twitter! ;)

Interesting stats for Week 1, #EAPchat

For full stats and tweets, click here.

A few months ago, I proposed an #EAPchat to fill the void left by the great parent chats, like #edchat and #eltchat.  Now, it’s about to begin!

Adam Simpson, Sharon Turner (Sabanci University, Istanbul) and I (University of Toronto) have worked in EAP programs extensively [...]]]>

A few months ago, I proposed an #EAPchat to fill the void left by the great parent chats, like #edchat and #eltchat.  Now, it’s about to begin!

Adam Simpson, Sharon Turner (Sabanci University, Istanbul) and I (University of Toronto) have worked in EAP programs extensively and are very passionate about this field of study.  After months of speculation and hope, we are now organised and ready to talk about topics and issues important to educators and administrators in programs connected to or preparing for higher education study through the #EAPchat hashtag!

A couple steps that will make this new chat start smoothly for us and for you, if you don’t mind:

 - Like the #EAPchat Facebook page. Initially this is where we all can post EAP-related links to articles and blog posts. Our first topic poll is there too. The actual chat will also move to it in our second week as we alternate between Twitter and Facebook for the first while.

 - Vote for the topic of week 1.  Go to the Facebook page and choose a topic or suggest your own.  We’ll start with the most popular topic and save the rest for future polls.

 - Write down this important info!  First chat on Twitter:  Monday, February 20 from 1:00PM – 2:00PM Toronto/New York (your time zone?).  Permanent info can be found here.

 - Spread the word.  Take the logo.  Embed on your blog.  Play around with it. Enjoy!

Hope to see you and your big brains on Monday!  I look forward to getting to know everyone more. If you can’t make it this time around, don’t worry.  We’ll collect a summary of sorts on the Facebook page.