SLWIS Newsletter - October 2015 (Plain Text Version)
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REVIEWS A REVIEW OF TESOL RESOURCE CENTER'S WRITING RESOURCES
SLWIS members may not be familiar with the growing TESOL Resource Center, yet this searchable database provides a wide variety of information for writing teachers. It includes activities, lesson plans, assessment ideas, and teaching tips contributed by members as well as recordings of TESOL convention plenary and keynote sessions, general sessions, and virtual seminars. The member-contributed sections are all open access, but the TESOL materials require logging in with a TESOL user ID. Teachers can search the Resource Center for items with the keyword writing and find dozens of resources. Activities There are currently 30 activities that cover a wide range of resources, from brief recommendations of useful links to complete lesson plans. The more useful entries provide a description of activity procedures and include PDF files of handouts and reading texts. One example is Design Your TV Advert, by Denise Seok-Hoon Quan, intended for secondary and adult intermediate to advanced learners. The objective of the lesson is to practice persuasive writing with the adjectives and language structures used in TV or print advertising. Students watch advertisements to analyze the language use then complete a graphic organizer focused on adjectives and persuasive language. They then work in groups to create a new product and design an advertising campaign to promote it. The activity includes a sample graphic organizer worksheet to use while viewing the TV ads. Other activities are brief and intended to be used as fillers or warm-ups. One of these activities is Snowball Chatting, by Walton Burns, for secondary, adult, and university students at all levels. For this low-prep activity, the teacher needs to provide only blank paper for writing. Following a review of appropriate and inappropriate text chatting, students all write a question to initiate a conversation, and then they wad up their papers into a “snowball” and throw it randomly across the room. Each student then picks up a snowball, unfolds the paper, writes a brief response to the question, and then wads it back up and throws it elsewhere so the conversation can continue. Burns suggests that this activity continue for about 15 minutes to allow for an extended conversation. Lesson Plans This section includes 27 lesson plans that can be used in one or more full class sessions. Some lessons were written by Sarah Sahr forTESOL Connections (e.g., Creative Writing). This lesson for intermediate to advanced secondary or adult learners promotes creativity and descriptive writing around household items students bring from home. Beyond a few materials (e.g., paper bags, blank paper), this lesson involves little prep and allows students to present their own perspectives and personalities through their writing. Other lesson plans offer concrete approaches to specific writing tasks. For example, Iftikhar Haider’s lesson, How to Write Effective Email Requests in US University Settings, outlines a process for teaching intermediate-level university students to analyze email messages for formality and the relationship between the sender and the recipient, and then guides them in writing messages to professors in various contexts. Some of the lesson plans provided in this section, however, do not actually focus on writing but rather on other skills, using writing merely as a homework task following a reading or speaking lesson. Assessment Only two resources have the keyword writing in the Assessment section. One resource is essentially an advertisement for the website Grammarly (a grammar checking tool), and the other, Modals, Conditionals, and Passives, by Roger Drury, is a lesson plan that includes an article for students to read about the newspaper industry. The writing task (which Drury uses as an assessment) requires students to write a memo using a variety of modal and conditional forms. Teaching Tips Nine Teaching Tips are connected to writing. Some are brief reviews of apps or websites. One helpful writing-related set of links is Teaching Writing, by Noura AlSaud, which includes links to 10 websites that can be used in class or recommended to students for writing practice. Other tips explain a concept with examples or suggestions for teachers to try in class. These can be simple suggestions that teachers can personalize for their own classes, such as Suzanne Donsky’s Helping Students Use Academic Services, or detailed plans for lessons, such as Estela Ene’s You Know You Are a Good/Bad Writer If…, which introduces students to humor to release tension, build class camaraderie, and explore U.S. culture. Convention General Sessions and Virtual Seminars This section includes links to recordings of five sessions from the 2010 and 2011 annual conventions. Clicking on the links in the Resource Center leads you to either a recording of PowerPoint slideshows as streaming video or an audio recording if the slides were not provided. No handouts are provided. There are five virtual seminar recordings that address writing. Two seminars focus on grammar (i.e., modals and noun phrases) and one focuses on pronunciation. The remaining two are Dana Ferris’s presentation Providing Enlightened and Effective Corrective Feedback on Language Issues in Student Writing and Teaching Academic Reading and Writing in English, by Danielle Zawodny Wetzel and current SLWIS chair-elect Ryan Miller. Each 1-hour seminar recording begins playing as soon as you click on its link. To the left of the presentation are slides, handouts, and other materials from the presenter. I have found it helpful to print out the slides to facilitate taking notes while watching TESOL seminars. Virtual seminars offer the opportunity to learn from some of our field’s top speakers in the comfort of your home or office. Evaluation Overall, the Resource Center is an excellent starting point that should grow as more members contribute resources. Currently, there are limited writing resources, fewer with other writing-related keywords (such as genre or essay), and only one resource linked to the SLWIS, but what is there is useful. As simple HTML web pages, the Activity, Assessment, Lesson Plan, and Teaching Tips sections were easy to access and opened quickly. Downloadable resources were all in PDF format, so they could be opened in a browser window or PDF reader. I was unable to access the members-only resources using Firefox, however, but logging in on Chrome and Safari browsers allowed complete access to the recordings of the virtual seminars and conference sessions. The videos loaded relatively quickly depending on the number of slides and the platform used for streaming. TESOL members can contribute their own resources to the Resource Center by clicking on the Submit a Resource link above the search window on the Resource Center home page. After selecting the type of resource, a page opens in which you can type content. For example, the Teaching Tip form requires Title, Author, Resource Description, Audience and Language Proficiency, and Teaching Tip. The Activity form also requires Duration and Objectives, with optional Outcomes. The Lesson Plan form also offers space to describe differentiation or extension options. TESOL states that it cannot guarantee the accuracy or quality of materials submitted but recommends that all contributors abide by the following principles: To ensure quality, the resource will indicate the target audience as specifically as possible (proficiency, age, purpose, class size, learning/teaching context); use original work or cite our sources accurately; aim to be relevant to current issues and concerns in the field; consider the wide range of applicability of the materials; produce materials that are easy to use/read and free of errors; offer classroom-tested materials where applicable; and demonstrate high professional standards. It is important to remember that as free, publicly created online resources, these materials vary in quality and relevance. Some are well prepared and neatly designed so they can be downloaded and used as they are, but others are just ideas that teachers must adapt for their individual contexts or create supplemental materials. Teachers should use their professional judgment to evaluate each resource. No information is provided about the authors of the resources, and resources are not geared to students in particular countries or regions. Given the limited number of resources under the keyword writing (and even smaller number with other writing-related keywords), as members of the SLWIS we should make an effort to contribute some of our great ideas. Numerous websites offer tips and advice to ESL teachers, but the TESOL Resource Center provides a central location in which we can compile lesson plans and teaching tips to share with colleagues around the world. In addition, you can add a contribution to the Resource Center as a publication on your CV. Did you just share a teaching tip at your local affiliate conference? Have you written a clever lesson plan or developed a rubric for a writing assignment? If so, share it! Betsy Gilliland is a member of the Second Language Writing Interest Section steering committee and an assistant professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa. She teaches courses on second language writing, language teaching, and qualitative research and researches adolescent literacy and writing instruction in U.S. schools. |
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