My grandfather explained to me why he loves chocolate so much. When he was a small boy in Japan, the American soldiers would give children chocolate. Last summer when I went home, I brought him American chocolate and he cried a little. I didn’t understand why he cried until I interviewed him and he told me about his childhood.

This excerpt was written by a student who completed an oral history project that is currently part of an advanced academic writing course in the English Language Transition (ELT) Program at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls (UWRF). For this project, students conduct two interviews: one face-to-face interview with a senior citizen here in the United States and one telephone or video call interview with a grandparent, older relative, or other older adult from students’ home countries. The ELT Program at UWRF has established relationships with two senior living centers in our community who are happy to meet with our students.

Students ask both interviewees questions about social, cultural, historical, political, or economic events they have lived through; technological changes they have experienced; and aspects of their personal lives, including their early childhood memories, marriages, and careers. Students then write summaries of these interviews, create timelines to compare interviewees’ lives and place them in their historical contexts, create presentations, and share their work in a group presentation setting. This project was designed to give students opportunities to engage in focused and meaningful conversation with older adults, develop the academic skill of conducting primary research, reach out to community members beyond campus, and creatively express their findings.

Because of the complex nature of the project, advanced planning and coordination among instructors are crucial. In this article, we describe the steps we have followed and illustrate how our project incorporates meaningful primary research into an advanced ESL writing course.

Phase One: Laying the Groundwork

Instructors have some behind-the-scenes logistical tasks to complete, some of which may need to be undertaken before introducing students to the project. They must do the following:

• Contact administrators at a senior citizen housing facility in the community to make arrangements to meet with their residents.

• Arrange for a demonstration of the chosen presentation software.

• Reserve a space for the presentations.
  
  

Phase Two: Orienting Students

In this phase, students begin thinking about older adults and learning about oral history. Instructors lead discussion and writing exercises and provide samples of oral history projects.

• Instructors lead students through guided discussions about how older adults are regarded and treated in their cultures. Following these discussions, students write about their experiences with and perceptions of older adults. The writing can be in the form of a story, a short essay, a poem, or a freewrite. The idea is to have the students capture their thoughts on paper after the discussions. The instructors read the writing pieces, but they do not mark or grade them.

• Instructors describe the project to students by showing sample projects from previous years and providing a list of due dates for the various steps in the project. New instructors can refer to various iterations of oral history projects accessible on the Internet to become oriented with the genre of oral histories. Depending on students’ proficiency levels and the amount of time allocated to this unit, the depth and length of the final product can be modified to fit the students’ needs.
  
  

Phase Three: Preparing for Interviews

In this phase, students develop their interview questions and practice interviewing.

• Students create a list of questions they would like ask their interviewees by drawing from the discussions and writing in phase one or by adapting them from sample questions provided by the instructors. For instance, both the Tell Me Your Stories website and the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History website have useful sample interview questions. Although the students will interview their non-English-speaking relatives in their first languages, instructors encourage the students to ask each interviewee similar questions.

• Instructors teach the necessary pragmalinguistic skills related to politely asking people to clarify, repeat, or slow down, providing students with a list of useful phrases and expressions for each situation (e.g., I’m sorry, Do you mind . . . , Could you please . . .).

• Students practice by interviewing their classmates; they should be encouraged to use open-ended rather than closed questions. These mock interviews can be useful for preparing appropriate follow-up questions (e.g., How did you feel about that/when . . . ?).
  
  

Phase Four: Conducting the Interview

In this phase, the instructors make final arrangements for transporting students to the senior housing centers and the students interview their person from their home countries.

• Students either interview the residents in a communal room or break into small groups to interview a resident or couple in their apartment. Students are encouraged to take notes in English, but allowing note-taking in their first language is a reasonable option.

• Instructors should ensure that students ask interviewees’ permission to record the interview. Our students have encountered few objections to using their phones to record the interview. In fact, students usually take photos with their interviewees and incorporate them into their final projects.

• Students are also responsible for interviewing the elderly person of their choice from their home countries at this stage in the project.
  
  

Phase Five: Summarizing, Synthesizing, and Preparing the Presentation

After the interviews are complete, students engage in the writing and research aspects of the project.

• Students write 500-word summaries of their interviews and submit them to the instructor for feedback and a grade. Considering the lexicon and grammar needed for writing an interview summary, the rubric that we use includes a separate category for transition words and phrases and cohesion. Summarizing an interview lends itself to the use of quotations and paraphrasing, which necessitates using indirect speech and reporting verbs.

• Students conduct additional library research so they can incorporate important political, social, cultural, and technological events into their timeline, thus situating the interviewees’ lives in a larger context.

• Students create a timeline of important events in their interviewees’ lives. In the past, instructors have had students create posters to present their work, but software such as Prezi allows for a more dynamic presentation. Students often incorporate pictures they take during the interviews or that their family has sent them as well as images found on the Internet.
  
  

Phase Six: Presenting the Oral History Project

In the final phase, students share their stories with their classmates and the campus community.

• On the day of the presentations, students set up their posters or laptops and stand next to them. Several students present simultaneously at presentation stations organized around the room.

• Attendees circulate at will to the various stations to listen to the presentations. This roving audience includes students' ESL classmates, TESOL graduate and undergraduate students, other faculty and staff, and invited guests.
  
  

Students’ final projects are evaluated on the quality of writing in the written summaries, the thoroughness of research, and the creativity and quality of the presentation. Prior to submitting final drafts of their projects, students engage in peer review and meet with their instructor for a one-on-one conference. The final project is worth 100 points and the rubric is broken down as follows: visual presentation (30 points), content (20 points), grammar (20 points), formatting (10 points), organization (10 points), vocabulary (5 points), and mechanics (5 points). We follow this same process approach to the other writing assignments in this class and see that most students develop into strong, skilled, and confident writers.

Final Reflections

Every semester we discover new ways to enhance the quality and improve the organization of the project. For example, we have learned that it is better to assign this project in the middle of the semester because students tend to be more creative and produce higher quality work if they are not working on other final projects or preparing to leave the country. We also need to allow for flexibility and look for learning opportunities if the students’ interviewees are not in a similar age range. Ideally, both interviewees are within about a decade of each other, but if they are not, instructors should have the students focus on relevant life events and identify themes or causes and effects in their timelines. Other possibilities would be to allow students to interview a family friend or a person living in the United States who is originally from the student’s home country.

Overall, we have found that the real value of doing this project goes beyond the content of this unit. This type of intergenerational and cross-cultural partnership certainly seems to be mutually beneficial for all those involved, which is evident in the positive and enthusiastic feedback we receive from the senior housing center administrators and the interviewees themselves. According to their feedback, our students have enjoyed the interaction that this project necessitates, and as conscious TESOL practitioners, we continue to strive to incorporate more integrative and authentic assignments into our writing classes.

Charles Lavin has been teaching ESL/EFL since 2006. He has taught English to children in Ecuador, teenagers in Chile, adults in Colombia, and military personnel in Saudi Arabia. He is currently an associate lecturer in the English Language Transition Program at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

Rhonda Petree has been teaching EFL/ESL since 1999, when she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan. She holds an MA in ESL from the University of Minnesota. She is the director of the English Language Transition Program at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

Sam Herrington is an associate lecturer in the English Language Transition Program at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He holds an MA in TESL and an MA in French, both from Bowling Green State University, and has been teaching ESL since 2002.