Flying from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to New Orleans in March involved time-traveling forward by one season, from the dregs of winter to summery sunlight. The gumbo, the Cajun music, the views of the mighty Mississippi, and the French Quarter all made for a memorable immersion experience. The TESOL convention in New Orleans re-created the diversity of languages and cultures that we teachers of English language learners appreciate and even revel in. But alongside this diversity, there exist unifying forces of views and methods that are more powerful than the differences in our instructional settings often suggest. What I saw and heard in the plenaries and sessions at our convention convinced me of that fact all over again.

A good example was the application in several sessions of concepts of Systemic Functional Grammar, identified most closely with Halliday and his associates in Australia. In their plenary address, “Modeling and Mentoring Teaching and Mentoring in Home through School,” Martin and Matthiessen spoke of teaching as a staged, goal-oriented, social process of genre development turning experience into discourse. What does that mean? Beverly Derewianka demonstrated it in her talk about a unit using the mode continuum to teach biology. Her middle-school learners move from one end of the mode continuum―familiar conversational English in an exploratory task―to the denser and more specific language required for academic tasks; from water animals to aquatic life in a freshwater pond.

Thinking about the mode continuum―the gradations of genre and style, and the linguistic features that characterize them―is relevant for all levels and types of instruction. Ellen Rosenfield’s presentation entitled “Teaching International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) to Use Lexical Bundles” revealed an approach quite similar to Derewianka’s. However, her students need to move from the dense academic discourse of textbook English they are familiar with to the interactive and informal modes that their students expect in classroom communication. The concept of the mode continuum works in both directions.

Attending to the linguistic features of various genres is relevant to ITA seminars and other academic settings as well as to general English education for adults. One of my ESL Specialist students included in her lesson plan a practice dialog to elicit passive verbs. When reminded of Halliday’s theory, she immediately understood that the passive constructions in an informal conversation would be inappropriate, whereas in the context of her model text, an instructional brochure for tourists, they were OK.

Whether we are teaching children or adults, in schools or informal programs, it matters how we think of the language we are teaching, who the teachers and learners are as users of that language, and how we can help turn experience into discourse. As president of the Three Rivers TESOL affiliate this year, I hope to draw together our various groups of members more closely in the realization that all are in pursuit of the same goal: finding the best ways to support our students as they become users of English and members of global English-speaking communities. We are looking forward to our fall conference, where Dr. G. Richard Tucker will deliver the keynote speech on the topic “A Rationale for Developing Additive Bilingualism in Our Students.” It is my hope that we can recognize how much English language learners of all ages and backgrounds have in common, and the responsibilities that we share as their teachers. The conference is to be held on November 5 at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.