TESOLs
2016 Baltimore*
2015 Toronto*
2014 Portland
2013 Dallas*
2012 Philadelphia
2011 New Orleans*
2010 Boston*
2009 Denver*
2008 New York
2007 Seattle*
2006 Tampa Bay*
2005 San Antonio*
2004 Long Beach*
2003 Baltimore*
2002 Salt Lake City*
2001 Saint Louis*
2000 Vancouver*
1999 New York*
1998 Seattle
1997 Orlando*
1996 Chicago*
1995 Long Beach*
1994 Baltimore*
1993 Atlanta
1992 Vancouver
1991 New York
1990 San Francisco
1989 San Antonio
1988 Chicago*
1987 Miami Beach
1986 Anaheim
1985 New York
1984 Houston
OK so I'm not as consistent as I thought. 19 in 23 years; 20 in 30, and I missed quite a few. There are some I'm not sure about: have I been in New York only once? Or Seattle? Or Chicago? I may come back and star a few more of these.
TESOL had its 50th anniversary this year. There were mostly good feelings; anyone who is mad, doesn't come around anymore. A surprising number of my friends actually run the place. I myself am kind of a stringer, but, in the end, I'm proud to be associated with it.
More later.
Labels: personal, tesol
TESOL session report
Session Report:
Leverett, T. (2016, Apr.). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the ESL writer. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL International, Baltimore, MD, USA.
This appears on my weblog which is specifically about the topic; unfortunately, this weblog was not advertised in my handout. The handout will appear on Google docs soon, but I'm reorganizing my google docs, and I'm not sure how soon.
Labels: grammar, internet, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing
2015 report
OK, I'll be the first to admit it. I got one foot into retirement (I am now teaching 3/4 time, writing 1/4 time), and I realized how tired I was, after about thirty years of teaching. I still have lots of ideas. I do lots of things in my class. But a lot of times, I come home from teaching, and all I want to do is rest.
Part of the problem is that, having ten children, I never get that rest, whether I do extra ESL stuff or not. In fact, the ESL tends to be kind of a break from the children, an enjoyable, academic kind of break, like having conversations with interesting people I know, but I don't have time for it. I'm taking kids to their sports practices, or to the dentist, or getting groceries, etc. But another part of it is that I really
love writing, and I also
love music, and these are sides of me that went undeveloped for many years. So, when I apologize for failing a little at this end, just consider me as backing off a little. I can't possibly keep up the pace I kept for many years.
Nonetheless, here are some interesting things I've been doing in 2015.
First, I became almost entirely a writing teacher, so I had two advanced writing classes. My students are very high level graduate students who are trying to maintain and improve what they consider their weak point. The stronger ones take the class on their own, knowing that there's always a lot to learn. The weaker ones are pressured to take it by their departments, where they really don't want to teach graduate students writing, but just want them to crank out good useful dissertations and articles regularly. It's high-level; the students are bright. I had one do a blog on
gay marriage (their choice) and the other
campus carry (gun control, also their choice). We published everything we wrote, and it was good, and interesting. I helped teach them formatting things online, as well as the usual writing things - citation, reference, etc. I had the usual run-ins with plagiarism. I taught a lot of students a lot of things.
One of my graduate students became interested in the concordance movement, so I became reacquainted with it. The first step was learning more about it as a tool, how to use it, whether it really works. I am genuinely interested in the process of learning how students integrate tools into their writing process - how, why, how easily, etc. They are not especially forthcoming about the tools they use, being convinced, I guess, that so many of them are illegal. Nevertheless, as a class (both of them, really), we discussed opening up the concordance, seeing what it can do, applying the simplest of grammar problems to it, etc. It was interesting. My Graduate Assistant was fascinated. And, interestingly, even the students found one aspect of it interesting: they are stats people. They like to run the numbers. To be able to run the numbers on the words you use, that's an interesting concept. They are still shaking their heads.
We have a conference in the spring; there is some doubt about whether we'll do it this spring, with its main organizer gone now. Last spring, I was caught unprepared, and didn't even present. There are many things I could present, but I presented zip, I didn't even go. I believe I was out of town, but I don't even remember where; perhaps New Mexico. But I
did present at TESOL, the usual, and I could have presented on various subjects of interest, if I could keep from being drawn into the world of personal fiction publishing.
The first would be on cultural flexibility as a requirement of good language learning. I feel that the characteristic of cultural flexibility, being able to unhinge your self-image from its cultural trappings, is measurable, and crucial in the process. I'd like to define it better, and work toward writing about what I mean. I gave a presentation at our 2014 spring conference, and very easily could have given another. But I was interrupted, and, I'm sorry to say, I dropped the ball.
In the course of doing that one, I became interested in Order of Acquisition as a given construct in Language Learning. Actually, I'm more interested in proving that there
isn't one; it's part of my constructivist belief that each learner decides for himself/herself what order to acquire anything in, and each learner has his/her own idea of what is crucial, or what should go first. And, it would be possible to manipulate the system. For example, one could convince a learner to learn all the religious words first (salvation, heaven, savior, etc.) and skip the ones having to do with cooking, if that learner were proselytizing ten hours a day, and never cooking. One's viewpoint determines what one acquires, not an innate natural order. But I'd like to prove that, if I had time.
My TESOL presentation is basically about how grammar programs have messed with people's heads. That's putting it lightly. But something has come up that is tangentially related to this. The War on Passive is something we researched, and wrote a little about, and learned how to teach. In essence some departments, specifically social sciences, dislike the passive intensely; others, namely the hard sciences, still cling to it. There is a wide variety. Read about it on this blog. I could easily ride this one to another TESOL, but I haven't...why not?
Finally, there is the language-as-a-self-organizing-system project; this has been dormant for a while now, and is beginning to fossilize in its dormant phase. I have written voluminously about it. I haven't given up on it. It needs to be published before I give up altogether. Hello?
Meanwhile I help out at the office. My classes are full. I enjoy teaching, and I also teach American students these days; I like that too. Texas Tech is benevolent and enjoyable to me. I avoid politics. This year, due to wife's surgery, mother's near-death health experiences, and family issues, I avoided all office parties, poetry readings, etc. as well. I am in demand at the poetry reading, as people like haiku, and believe it or not, one
can write bilingual haiku that pulls on both language universes in seventeen short syllables; I am one who could do it as I've been literally immersed in poetry for months now. However as I said,
I was busy. Life is full here, the nights are beautiful, and there are lots of stars out, even in the city. And the mountains are even better; the 9000 feet woods beckon. I am, in the end, partially retired.
Labels: creative, krashen, personal, plagiarism, self-organized systems, tesol, ttu, weblogs, writing
Leverett, T. (2015). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the language learner. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL Convention, Toronto, Canada, March.
Here is the
Session Report.
I have to admit that the actual material for this presentation is now pretty much spread out. A lot of the new things I've written have been on the
For Better or Worse weblog. I have been unable to change the
original presentation page, which now holds FBOW 2013 and earlier, because servers now require encryption for any new pages or any uploading.
My goal is to compile information. I will update you here. I also want to put the presentation handout on Google docs and link to it here (this should happen soon), and expand what I've written a bit and do the same thing with it. Google docs will at least
hold it, and make it available.
Here is the Google docs link.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19p1eL1W0ZB8qEhJ9Jmv87bHtFLkHSLAinjcyxd5U9XE/edit?usp=sharing
Labels: grammar, internet, personal, tesol
TESOLs Past - the big picture
One reason I'm going to Toronto is that for years, as the TESOL Convention was in various cities, Baltimore, San Antonio, St. Louis, I would just tell everyone that I thought it should go to Toronto. Little did I know that it actually
was in Toronto, maybe in 1983, but that was well before my time, as I didn't really start attending them seriously until about 1994. From '94 on, though, I went to a string of about sixteen or seventeen of them, and really only missed a few from then to now.
I know that TESOL as an organization has an institutional memory of its very first international TESOL Convention, which was in the late sixties, in which a terrible airplane accident near Mexico City killed all the leaders of TESOL, most of whom were all on the same plane. There was no question for many of the following years that TESOL as an organization was still hesitant to have a Convention outside of the USA, but I think another big reason for avoiding Canada was simply the weather. The Convention is always in late March (sometimes early April) and draws people from all over the world, but especially from some of the warmer places. How many of these people will truly be prepared for Canada in late March? Of course, how many people are prepared for Canada in general, one could argue, and I tend to jump in here as a person who has always loved Canada, in all its forms, stormy, gray, snowy, windy, a little conservative, with its kilometers and grams and liters, and good youth hostels in the centers of its cities.
My first TESOL Convention, or the earliest one I remember best, was in Chicago in 1988, and I badly needed a job in the USA, having had a baby back in Korea. At one point I climbed in an elevator of a major hotel, perhaps the Palmer or the Sheraton, and Dick Gephardt and a few of his goons were in there. He was running for president of the US at the time, and all the candidates were in the fancy Chicago hotels on that day for some event; others who were probably in the building at that time were Dukakis, who eventually won, and Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, who lost that campaign but was probably the best of the candidates. The elevator closed around us and I could feel the tension as everyone read my name badge, which had a Korean university's name on it. Dick Gephardt almost had to restrain his goons to keep them from having two or three of them just pick me up and push me out of the elevator. I pressed a floor button so that the elevator would drop me well below their floor, and everyone was relieved when I simply got out of the elevator at the right moment. I still laugh about that time, because I still remember so clearly the stress resulting from the idea that every voter is still to be courted; a bad story about being roughed up in an elevator could cost a person hundreds of votes at that point and I'm sure he wanted to avoid that; at the same time, being a kind of south-side (St. Louis) kind of guy, maybe he had some other opinions too. on my trip, i will fly through Chicago in one direction, but through new york on the other. a friend of mine claims that Toronto '83 was his first, and that this gives him nostalgia. ah yes, me too.
I could go on and on about various conventions, or tell a little about what kind of things a Convention encompasses, but I won't. TESOL took applications to be a convention blogger (long-time attendee) and I almost took them up on it, but I didn't. The main reason is that I've become like the guys in my bluegrass band, thoroughly uncompromising, and not caring especially whether I please a professional audience. Why should I reach out to a wide, far-flung, professional, TESOL audience? I haven't published a single ESL book, so I have no special reason to attract such people to even this page, which is about the best of my professional writing these days. I'm going to this one to connect with many old and beloved friends, and to do my schtick in another country, which is always fun, and partly, because I need a break from warm and dry, relentlessly conservative Texas. Down here, Cruz is more liberal than most, but he was able to capture the center (by calling his opponent a
moderate), so....he edged his way into office, and actually shut down the government once. I'm not getting in an elevator with him; instead, I'm leaving the country. It's really for everyone's benefit.
Labels: personal, tesol
SIUC Linguistics Alumni Coordinator
I am asking for help with this job because I am semi-retired, I'm busy, and I don't know how many more TESOL Conventions I will be able to attend. I think it's extremely important, to SIUC, to its graduates, and to the future of Linguistics. I hope somebody will help.
There is a Facebook page which one keeps an eye on. I could be more aggressive about being sure each of its members is an actual graduate, but I consider it good enough to keep it free of spam and keep its messages related to the department. It does not specify that it is for alumni, but the current students have other active pages that they use more regularly, and this one is mostly for alumni.
Every year at the TESOL Convention, we try to have an SIUC gathering. Sometimes it is poorly planned, nonexistent, or poorly attended. SIUC Linguistics has a huge community, important in the TESOL world, and if those who attend the conference know about the gathering, and are able, they will usually drop by and say hello. Most are successful ESL/EFL professionals spread around the world. One year the President of TESOL was a Saluki and he stopped by. Many of our grads were at SIUC at a different time than I was (I was at SIUC 1994-2012) but I have come to meet some who were there before me, and some who have arrived since. Needless to say this would be true for any alumni coordinator. You would get to know them and learn what era they occupied.
To me, these grads are SIUC's greatest resource, yet SIUC barely knows about it. If the Alumni Office ever tried to reach me or find out who or where these folks were, I never knew about it. It could be that many of them have joined the Alumni Association separately and want to maintain relations with their specific department separately, but I tend to believe that, since there is a price to maintaining a relationship with the Alumni Office, they prefer to stick with the department itself.
Our shining moment came a couple of years back when the department was in danger of being extinguished entirely, and the Chair asked if alumni could simply report where they were, what they were doing, and how they were using their MA degree. I used the list of e-mail addresses that has been passed down to me, and simply asked everyone. The response was significant, and I forwarded it all to the Chair. People higher up got a sense of who our graduates were and what they were doing. To make a long story short, the department was saved (there were other reasons, too, I'm sure), and I felt vindicated.
I maintain that e-mail list, but I'd like to hand it over to someone. There's an unspoken rule: I use it only to tell about the convention reunion, in other words sparingly, and since it doesn't overpower anyone's inbox, people stay connected to us. We don't sell their e-mail addresses and they remain loyal Salukis.
Keep in mind one other thing. Folks who worked at Nakajo for many years have no alumni department, that I know of, so we are it for them as well. They come to the TESOL reunion, and find each other, but rarely do many of them know many of us very well, unless they actually worked in both locations. I don't know about you, but the people I've taught with over the years are in many ways my closest friends; I don't want to lose touch with the lifeline that helps me find them, or at least find out what may have happened to them. Sometimes, if someone is looking for a certain colleague from their era, and this isn't my era, I can't help them right away, or use my meager record-keeping system (I have only e-mail addresses, besides their personal accounts) to find someone who
can help them. But as long as we keep some form of reunion / gathering / accounting system alive, there is hope. And that, I think, is important, and I don't want to let that go, and let that fall silently into the depths of my un-dealt-with e-mail. Thank you for reading this far; contact me if you're still interested!
Labels: cesl, personal, siuc, tesol
TESOL presentation
I will be presenting at the TESOL International 2015 Electronic Village Classics in Toronto.
Presentation Title: For Better or Worse: Grammar technology and the language learner
Presentation
Description: This presentation shows the technology that students are
using to learn and write, so that practitioners can adjust accordingly
Day and Time: Friday, March 27 2:30-3:20 PM
Computer Station: MAC 4
All invited!
Labels: google translate, grammar, internet, language, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing
Google translate muscles into the personal conversation business
Luckerson, V. (2015, Jan. 14).
Hands-on: Google Translate Is Now a Way Better Travel Companion.
Time. Hands-on: Google Translate Is Now a Way Better Travel Companion.
Dougherty, C. (2015, Jan. 14).
Google Translate App gets an upgrade.
New York Times blog. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/google-translate-app-gets-an-upgrade/?_r=0.
May, P. (2015, Jan. 14).
Google's new Translate app shines in a crowded field.
San Jose Mercury News.
The new app makes a lot of promises. Life will be much easier, they say, for every schmuck like me who is about to sojourn into a place where the local language is different from mine. I'll simply point my phone at the "atenciao piranha" sign (see picture, third article) and I'll know that there are piranhas in the river.
The first things that are wrong with this picture are 1) I can't turn on my cell phone outside of the country, and 2) I can't seem to keep it charged. There's also the fact that 3) it's pretty obvious by the fish picture that the sign is about fish, and, 4) I wasn't about to go skinny-dipping in the Amazon anyway, but let's disregard those. Here are some more serious ones. 5) Translation programs can make things worse, 6) Not every language is as easy to translate as Portuguese, 7) Siri can add an unexpected dimension to a personal situation, 8) phones don't work as well after you smash them into the concrete barriers that hold up hotels.
Here are some interesting points brought up by the articles. First, the fact that Google has moved in on this business has increased the success of machine translation so that it is definitely on a track toward better in virtually every language. It promises 38 (out of what, several thousand?), ok, but it's improving on those 38, and it's got the money to hire people that are making those better. So we're living in a time when machine translation, instant, by phone, is in its infancy, but nevertheless, capable of overturning everything we know, if only because it can only get better. The last time I checked Google Translate, Spanish and French were already pretty good (the first article mentions this), a number of languages were miserable, but there was a wide variety and clearly an arc toward better in each one. If they are getting better, we are dealing with a dynamic system which as one article says "might put high school Spanish teachers out of business."
Here's one thing that's scary. The geeks at Google are proud of themselves in that they made Google Translate better by turning Google's massive calculation apparatus on the languages themselves. May quotes Cattau as saying, "We base translation on machine learning, by looking at billions of Web pages that have been translated into other languages," says Cattiau. "We find 'dog' has been translated millions of times into 'chien,' for example, so the computer now knows the two mean the same thing." Ah, but the computer is doing exactly what people do, basing its experience entirely on learning and reality. Thus, we can trick the computer, or we can change the meaning of things simply by changing the way they appear. How is the computer supposed to know? It's pretty easy with a word like 'chien' which is pretty uncontroversially, universally recognized to be 'dog'. Their claim of course is that roping in thousands of translation statistics helps them strengthen their assertion that 'chien' actually means 'dog' which is not complicated, in this situation, by other factors. In the world of translation it's usually complicated by other factors. Translation is dogged by these problems, in fact.
More later. I'm going to see what my phone does with "y'all cain't".
Labels: grammar, tesol
Toronto 2015
I've accepted an invitation to present an Electronic Village Classic at the TESOL 2015 Convention in Toronto, which brings up a number of other topics. The presentation is called
For better or worse: Grammar technology and the language learner and in brief it shows how technology changes the student's process of learning, as well as the process of writing, the final product, etc. I often show free grammar-check programs and show what they do to the writer. Ironically teachers often stop by hoping to just get computers to fix the problems; it's as if nobody really wanted to deal with grammar in the first place. The site for the presentation is
here though obviously it will need to be updated.
So here are a couple of other issues related to Toronto. First, are my good friends the Webheads going to be there? I hope so. Toronto is one of my favorite cities. The Webheads are my favorite people. This would be wonderful.
Second, do you need a passport to get into Canada nowadays?
Third, what about the SIUC reunion? I feel like I'm sitting on a lot of information, and I don't know what to do with it. Last year, I couldn't organize a reunion, because I didn't go to Portland; I'm not sure if they even had one. I have all these e-mail addresses in my inbox, and information from SIU alum...
I need to forward it to someone. Nobody was interested in keeping track of people when I took it over, but I said,
SIUC, your international alumni are your most valuable resource. Even now, what I have is a set of e-mail addresses bottled up in an e-mail box that has become impossible to maneuver, due to the fact that SIUC put it all on Outlook Express, and I can't seem to view the entire mailbox. There are hundreds in there, but they are deep on the inside, constantly covered up by more recent correspondence. Time to clean out the box, Tom!
But it's also time to dust off this presentation. I was pleased to be invited, pleased to accept; I hope it can happen. Oh Canada!
Labels: grammar, tesol, writing
May report
So what have I been doing with my life? Several things. My semester of work is over here; I worked half-time, partly in an ITA class, and partly in the University Writing Center, but I will teach full-time in the ITA Workshop in mid-July, so that counts to bring my appointment up to the 3/4 time I am paid for. What is annoying about working half-time is that whenever you teach
anything, your worrying expands to fill up the space, so you
might as well be working full-time, because you're worrying full-time. I try to put time into other things, and do; I've been writing, I've been working on my music, but above all, we have two new children and have to fit them into our family routine, and this has all been quite draining. I turned 60, and some days, I feel very old.
But, before I give up, I have a couple of things I want to do. I've been collecting essays about acquisition, and I'm thinking of publishing them. I've also been writing about language as a self-organizing system, and I want to collect that writing as well. These, as I envision them, are two separate books, hopefully published this year, as I've already done the vast majority fo the writing. The first has this running title:
O to be estar: Essays on language acquisition. The second has this running title:
Language as a self-organizing system. That second title is rather boring; it might need some work. But that's where it stands. These are both collections of writing that put my work out into the world. Having them on google docs, or blogs, doesn't seem to be doing it for me. Not that anyone will read it in its CreateSpace form, either. But it will make me feel like I've put it out there better.
In fact, I've become interested in the process of putting things out there in little home-made books, if only because a book is something you can hold in your hand, and bonk people on the arm with. Lately I printed my most recent
e pluribus haiku, 875 poems in a single volume which is still only $5 (+ shipping), and I find that quite awesome, sorry about the plug, but basically if I make a string of these, and put out the writing that I do, it gives me a feeling of being an author that I don't quite get from being a teacher, or being a fiddler, or being a father, all of which I am being, but which reward me in different ways. Applying this to my ESL career, there are things I've learned, and I want to say them; I want to put them out there. If I have a single book, I have a place where I can point that encapsulates my philosophy. This blog, obviously, is one place. But this blog is fading into obscurity. The best thing about it is its pink and gray (very stylish) appearance, and even that, to tell you the truth, gets old. I hate the font. I can't keep up the links on the template. I'm getting impatient with it as a mode of communication.
I missed TESOL this year, and might even miss the one in Toronto, if I'm not careful, and I
love Toronto, cold as it is in March. There are people I love who go to TESOL, and I miss them, even though they are busy integrating technology into classes, and I am not. I have gone this far and not mentioned at all how I"m on the cutting edge of using EdModo; I'm not. I've lost the desire to tell the world to get with the program and get students to use the language in new environments. To some degree, this will happen on its own, with or without me anyway. There is one more book in me, though, and that's how technology has influenced the language, the grammar, and the way people learn language and grammar. It has, in fact, created a new world, and I'm in a better position to expound on this than most people, so I should, and perhaps I will. This, you'll notice, is a distant third, it doesn't even appear in my top two. Alas, either it'll happen or it won't, what else can I say?
Stay tuned. Here's hoping this blog doesn't go the way of the wooly mammoth.
Labels: creative, ita's, self-organized systems, tesol, webheads
one month, not much to show
Somehow it's less impressive to tell people that I'm working on
three books, than to tell them I'm working on one. Maybe it's because you lose some credibility when you keep working on even one, and never finish it. Such as it is, though. I have one on language as a self-organizing system; I have a novel, at least one (which has been going for a long time), and I have an autobiography, which at least I'm qualified to write.
I did get a few things into paperback form (see above) this summer, so that, if you really want to read my writing (most of which is
stored on the web, see template, fish around, you'll find it)...you can have a nice little createspace-made version. I recommend the two below as among the best but more are coming. I have taken to publishing them myself. I figure it will be simpler that way, if I ever become good at it, and I will always own the stories, which for some reason I'm attached to. In fact it's not easier; it's taken me more time; it's been laborious.
I have a friend in the TESOL business; she started
Wayzgoose Press; she prints a variety of ESL/EFL books and I could team up with her; she might even be willing to publish some of what I've written. I have only begun to actively publish ESL/EFL things; most of it, I did for SIUC, and is still floating around the SIUC/CESL Dropbox, being used at CESL, where it should be. To tell the truth, I could create more, and even want to; I've done it for years, and wouldn't mind doing it some more. But I'm serious about the three books above; I
want to finish them; I have a lot on my plate already.
Meanwhile my short (one month and a half) vacation is over; it's back to work here in Texas soon enough. I have to accept some of what's finished as what's finished, and keep on going. Now I'm in the ITA business (International Teaching Assistants); I have less to say, in general, here, but I'll keep you posted.
Labels: cesl, personal, tesol, ttu
Leverett, T. (2013, Apr. 4).
Remembering the Ghosts of TESOL Past and Renewing Friendships at TESOL 2013.
TESOL Convention Blog.
It turns out my blog post was a little different from the others, reminiscing about conventions, rather than giving practical advice, or telling more about what TESOL is. One challenge would be to study this situation, write truly helpful blogposts, become a regular contributor, and use it to link back to my sleepy outpost. It might not happen, though; I'm pretty busy. I wish them well though. I have the sneaking suspicion that blog posts are about as well and carefully read as, say, IS newsletters used to be. Maybe I should just rephrase that as "as carefully read by me".
Labels: bib, personal, tesol
Grammar technology: For better or worse 2013
Leverett, T. (2013, Mar.).
Grammar technology: For better or worse. Internet Fair Classics, invited presentation. TESOL Convention, Dallas, TX, USA.
This one was a little harder for me logistically, because I'd been in Illinois beforehand and had to come back to Texas in order to do it. Nearby my friend Vance was doing a webcast from that same Classics presentation. Dallas was a nice city; I enjoyed it, unexpectedly.
Reactions from teachers were interesting. One that stuck with me was a woman who wrote off use of grammar technology by students as plagiarism. I didn't want to dispute with her the subtle difference between simply copying someone else's paragraph and calling it yours, and taking some paragraph in native language, yours or someone else's, and crunching it through a machine. In this sense "plagiarism" is redefined as "getting one's English paragraph without actually constructing it in English," but it can be seen as a related form of laziness, unwillingness or inability to do the work.
It is clear to me, though, that it's not always motivated by these things, which are so familiar to teachers especially in places where students don't
want to learn so much as to survive, pass or move on to a better place. I look at it more this way: The technology is there; it's free; why would you
not use it, or at least try it, until you were told loudly and clearly that it was prohibited?
My friend told the story of how students did in fact use both kinds (electronic dictionary, one word at a time, and Google Translate, one sentence at a time), and eventually settled on one-word-at-a-time systems because of their teacher's extreme reaction to GT's garbled variants. Teachers do in fact respond negatively to big vocabulary words that you couldn't possibly have known already, put into complex native-language grammatical patterns that are difficult to decode. If the students slog through and construct sentences in their own English, they'll have better luck with this kind of teacher, though. And this is what would happen, according to her.
I spent a long time talking to a guy who saw it somewhat like I did. You have to keep your eye on this software, and learn what is available to students. You have to know what they can do with it the minute you turn your back. You have to assume that they are going to use it at every possible chance
and that they are genuinely interested in learning the language. You might as well be honest with them about the fact that it's there, that they can use it, that it will affect what they write, and that it will affect their learning, and for example that it will cause their high vocabulary to belie their true ability, and rub some teachers the wrong way. Students, incredibly enough, come away from it all with a sense of what they still need to become fluent, and are even able to talk about this and pass it along to other students.
Labels: bib, grammar, personal, tesol
I looked forward to the TESOL Convention in Dallas this year, even though I had to arrive late and in fact couldn’t get there until this morning (Saturday). By chance I walked right into the plenary, rather than the main entrance, where I could register. I finally found the Electronic Village, where my friends of many years were doing their usual things, preparing for webcasts, finding cables, trying to make things work. I love the Electronic Village; though I am incompetent at such things, they’ve always accepted me as part of the CALL-IS and as a regular presenter. I gave my presentation, which was about the influence of grammar technology (translators, grammar checkers, etc.) on student writing and learning, I felt lucky to be part of TESOL and part of this group.
In fact the whole convention seemed lucky to me in the sense that I seemed to run into the people I needed to, even in such a short time. I went to presentations on writing, one about teaching writing using Jing movie software, and had coffee with materials writers who talked about the changing world of publishing. As usual we talked about conventions of past years. This is a group of friends that I see only once a year if I’m lucky, always in various cities, always with an interesting backdrop. Baltimore one year was raining cats and dogs. In Tampa I lost my wallet, but a hotel worker sent it back to me later. In New York one year it was snowing and very crowded in the hotels. My friends are consistent though. They know me and care about my family and my general well=being. These friendships cut through the years and is the most important thing abut the convention to me.
I think of TESOL as a large group of teachers, worldwide, who gather annually, share one city for part of one week, tell stories, meet old friends, do TESOL business. Some get wrapped up in IS politics; some measure what they can take home from the sessions in very practical terms. Some take taxis and some drive to town or walk everywhere. You can spot TESOL people in the hotels and the airport, not only by their bags, but also by their character, and also because I’ve seen some of them over the years. Every once in a while you see someone famous, like Stephen Krashen, or Betty Azar. I know the organization is not perfect and has had its ups and downs. But as I look back over the years I’m still proud to be part of it, and my luck is holding up. It’s been good to me.
I’m a Texan now; I moved to Lubbock in August and have been learning about the place as fast as I can. Texas is a place with its own music, a sense of national pride (even though it’s just a state), and wild weather. People are very friendly. I’ve been welcoming my friends here now, as a Texan. I was walking through Dallas with one friend, because we wanted to see the infamous grassy knoll; we encountered a nice old policeman with a West Texas drawl, and a kind of guide at the knoll who explained that piece of Texas history, showed us what happened and where. Dallas seemed peaceful, even though that spot itself was somewhat busy with traffic. If the ghosts of the past are still with us, then Kennedy’s would be right at that spot, I imagine. In the same way, I feel the ghosts of old TESOLs. But they have to move around, from city to city.
Labels: personal, tesol
Doing Dallas
I'm getting excited about the upcoming TESOL convention in Dallas, TX so I'm reviewing all my old stereotypes of the city so I can look around and get some idea of how they compare to reality, while I'm there. There's really only one thing I want to see - the grassy knoll - but I know that the city has a wide variety; I'll only be there for a couple of days, so I'll forgive myself if I don't get out to see it all.
Recently I relocated to Lubbock, TX, so I find myself flying into Dallas frequently, and I'm rapidly learning more about the place. It's huge, when you come at it from above; the plane cruises in over miles and miles of lakes, roads, houses, people, buildings. It stretches all the way to Oklahoma in the north, Waco to the south, and to the west is Fort Worth and yet more suburbs so that it stretches perhaps farthest to the west. They call it the Metroplex here, and generally people are more fond of Fort Worth than Dallas, but you practically can't get anywhere east, without going through it, and that's like all driving in Texas, it takes a while, might as well enjoy it.
When they made that television show I think the idea was to associate the name "Dallas" with ostentatious, arrogant wealth, the kind that makes ordinary people gloat when bad things come to very rich people. I can tell you that it would be hard to have a town as enormous as Dallas
not have a good share of that kind of wealth, but I'm also sure that there's a lot more to the place, it being as huge as it is. My favorite story about the place is of the Fort Worth newspaper owner, a millionaire himself, who, when going to Dallas, always packed a sack lunch, because he didn't want to contribute to the city's economy. So there's no question that its bustling attitude has produced a few enemies over the years. I'd like to see what this means on a practical level; to some degree, it's the capital of the Texas empire, though I suppose a lot of the oilmen, like the Bushes, called Houston home. And Houston to some degree is even worse, at least in terms of "sprawling" or "bustling" or "ostentatious." It's hard for me to even get a handle on the place.
It's kind of like California in the sense that, at first, you think San Francisco is just a big city, maybe number 18 in the nation, you can handle that, it's not too huge. But you get out there and find out, it's surrounded by dozens more, and some of them like Oakland and San Jose are also right up there, and it takes you hours to drive through the place, and pretty soon you're taking a huge breath when you finally do make it out of the place. Dallas is the same. Fort Worth is also enormous; though Lubbock is in the top hundred in the nation, it's not even in the top ten of Texas, and there are at least three or four in the Metroplex alone that are larger.
One thing I like about the place, though, is that it's developed its own brand of music. Austin is in on this, if not the center of it, but so-called 'red-dirt' encompasses all kinds of Texas music, mostly country, and it's got its own style, a kind of authentic country very distinct from Nashville country, earthy, unapologetic. Its artists are original and many live in Dallas or Austin, and play the circuit, and have plenty of work. Whole radio stations are devoted to
"red dirt"...and there's enough of it that these stations don't have to play anything else. Right now, as the world comes to Austin for the famous SXSW (South by Southwest) festival, I'm sure people are hearing plenty of it, though I'm new to the area, and am not totally familiar even with SXSW. Last I noticed, it had added an educational-technology aspect to its conference, so that people even as I write are listening to talks on the state of the art in ed-tech and tech in general; this I'm sure is to help Austin develop its computer industry (it claims to be the main competitor to the Silicon Valley in innovation and tech developments). SXSW started out as merely a music festival, only a few days; now it's music, film, and computer, and more I'm sure, and it's well over nine days. And these people, they invite everyone down to sunny Austin, which I'm sure is nice in mid-March, and they check out computer innovations and then go straight out to Austin, where it's like that other show, Austin City Limits, all night every night, and they have a grand old time. You can't argue with that.
I'm not sure if Dallas will have much red-dirt, or a night life anywhere comparable to Austin's; I'm not much of a night-lifer anyway, though I'm kind of taken by this red-dirt stuff. It's my adopted state, so my perspective has changed, and now I'm thinking of tipping a cowboy hat, and saying Howdy y'all, welcome to Texas!
Labels: personal, tesol
2013 report: Developments in the grammar software world
I've been doing a lot of research in preparation for my upcoming TESOL presentation,
Grammar technology: for better or worse, and I have a few informal comments about my conclusions. It's a huge field, and I have half a mind to write a book about it, since nobody else seems to be doing it. But it's developing the world quickly, and changing the language, so there is a lot to say.
First, I've come to like Grammarly, for a number of reasons. At first, like many ESL/EFL teachers, I considered most technological interference to be damaging to our students, based on my observations, and as a grammarian I was critical of their claims that couldn't always be carried out and in fact led people astray quite often. By the way there is no shortage of grammarians who are willing to point out how and where they might have gone wrong in trying to interpret and correct someone's errant grammar, but that's not my point; of course they are imperfect. So is the elephant in the room, Microsoft Word's grammar-check, which is automatically loaded onto word programs and thus is an ubiquitous contributor to all writing products. Word's grammar-check needed some competition, and got it, and now both of them are improving, and thus we approach, slowly but surely, a situation where grammar-correction programs get a lot of things right most of the time. We no longer see non-words in writing; we no longer see subject-verb matching errors. These programs actually
teach people some grammar some of the time; we teachers have a hard time admitting that.
The reason I like them is that they were basically a couple of Ukranian guys (I think) who had a good idea, and got a wealthy venture capitalist to back them; they planned and set up this company by themselves, put a huge investment of time and money into it, and jumpstarted it to where it is now. They made one of their headquarters Kiev, presumably so they could keep their families there while they ran this new business. Their other center is on Market Street in San Francisco, but they are very active online (where they make Facebook memes and spend thousands on Google Adwords); their investment is huge but it was timed well and they are now a major force in the grammar-correction business (I read somewhere recently that businesses already pay $3 million a year on grammar correction - don't quote me on that, because I've lost the reference, but it's a huge amount, and it's mainly because businesses
care about how things
appear. I think their idea to get computers to perfect the grammar-correction process is noble, and it's already being done by Word anyway; it has certain and not necessarily good effects on the language, but that's not their problem; and, I think if someone has a good idea, at some point we should just recognize that and admire them.
So what else is there to report? First, my presentation itself has gotten some interesting reactions, such that I've concluded that it's much like marriage itself, which it's named after. Many people consider that good grammar technology will simply solve all their problems, much like marriage; they say, basically, show me the software and let's get this over with. They're tired of grammar always getting in the way of their students' trying to say what they want, and they have absolutely no problem with simply getting grammar technology to simply solve this problem. The other ones, of course, complain so bitterly that they are ready to teach writing absolutely
without technology, without even a computer, without Word grammar-check, or especially without the constant translating of whatever phone/electronic dictionary students happen to be using. These teachers are ready for a divorce (from technology) and aren't in much of a mood to negotiate. They are basically sick of the technology actually impeding the writing and impeding our ability to figure out what our students meant. And they have some justification for their outrage; technology has at the very least made the whole process of teaching writing much more complicated. If technology has taught them to not trust themselves, you have to rebuild that trust. If it has taught them that passives should be ironed out at all costs, you have to explain what that's all about and hope they believe you over their little tech coach/advisor. If they live and breathe with a translator by their side, you have to adjust to that somehow. There is no easy way out.
That's why I say: For better or worse. I see the development of Grammarly and its competition with Word grammar-check as somewhat inevitable. Even if grammar-check developed slowly, it would still
develop, and the results of its omnipotence and ubiquity would slowly but surely change the language, as it is doing as I write. I'm not justifying it, or saying it's good; all I'm saying is, it's like climate change. Get used to it! There's no going back.
Labels: grammar, internet, tesol, writing
not going to Philly, but plowing forward anyway
The TESOL world leaves this week for Philadelphia, and I'm a bit sorry about that, that due to a personal schedule conflict I'm staying home this year, and minding the home fires. It's ok; I needed a rest, and my topic, grammar technology, requires some reflection at this point.
That's because several things have altered my view. First, it has now been a few years since I taught upper-level writing, and I see the world now from the view that is far more down in the trenches, with the lower people coming up. They, for the most part, are by vast majority highly connected, highly technological, yet way behind in grammar, as far behind in grammar as they are ahead in listening. It's quite interesting to watch what appears to be very good oral fluency, very poor grammatical understanding.
And why is that? I've taken to believing that technology's most insidious feature is its undermining of one's confidence; that alone does more harm than the "cupertinos" (ironically named for the home of Apple in California) or their grammatical counterparts, the things that lead us astray when we try to understand someone's true meaning; the hiding, or systematic altering, of what one intended to say.
Now how to get at this: write about it, learn about other teachers' point of view, etc.; that's what I'd like to know. I'm at a loss as to where to go with my exploration. How can I prove that I know what I think I'm seeing? A new survey might help; more about that later. And, I may have a guest blogger on here; stay tuned.
I've taken to saying, if you see any Quakers out there in Philadelphia, tell them Tom said hello. I'm not sure if they're the ones with the funny hats, or not. Please, no oatmeal jokes.
Labels: grammar, internet, personal, tesol, writing
TESOL report
Leverett, T. (2011).
Grammar technology: for better or worse. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL 2011, New Orleans LA USA, March.
I only had one presentation at TESOL this year, and it was repeated from last year, but improved a little, and I learned a lot. I left in a hurry, unable to have talked to my own colleagues, who actually teach more writing than I do these days, and was surprised, when I did finally talk to them (at the convention) that a group of them were seriously considering giving up the computer lab altogether (we can teach writing without the computers: if the distraction of the computer interferes so totally with the writing process, why should we tolerate it?)....the essence of their complaint is that students get caught up in individual words and sentences, often going from the computer they are working on to their phone and back, or to Google translate, translating from native language words, then chunks, then whatever will fit into a machine; they then lose sight of more global issues like development, essay structure, etc. The students' idea is that high quality involves grammatical perfection and if this must be sought constantly, then so be it; they will do what it takes.
My colleagues on the tech side of the equation were equally adamant: writing with computer gives us more writing, more revising, better writing, better revising; the research has been clear over the years. Furthermore writing with pen or pencil puts other issues such as handwriting in our laps which we don't really want, and finally, the obvious observation that since all writing is done by computers these days, it is silly to set up what is essentially a false or unrealistic writing environment in which their product will be unlike any other thing they will ever write.
But by far the most interesting observation is that whatever distractions computers provide, computers can also remove the distractions, or at the very least minimize them, so that if you want to concentrate on paragraph-level or essay-level production, you simply remove the ability to go back and forth (clicking on words, checking the internet, using a cell phone or PDA, etc.). For example, alphasmart.com makes keyboard drafting tools, common in elementary school and places where online access is limited but many keyboards are necessary anyway; they can be bought cheaply and even restored easily (this colleague does this regularly); and, students can then, with a simple keyboard, write first, upload later.
I hadn't really thought of this, having been more caught up in the grammatical aspect of what students do with the technology. My main questions: How does the technology affect their writing? How does it affect their learning? and How does it affect
the language?? - I got some interesting responses to. Many had opinions about Word's grammar-check - one said that Word 2010 was
worse than Word 2003 (I would like to know
how, but that's a question for later...), and there was plenty of support for my main suppositions: that grammar technology snuck up on us, like Spell-check; that it was designed for native speakers and thus not always doing exactly what our students need; that students' using it at every level has its consequences that teachers must be aware of and deal with; that knowing what will be more difficult for our students (as a result of technology's influence), and what will be easier, or no longer as important, will be crucial for the future of our profession.
On that note I pointed out to several people that I was surprised that writing teachers weren't beating down my door trying to better manage the technology they are already seeing people use constantly. In fact some people
did go quite a ways out of their way to find me and get my advice (my handouts are available at the link above) and in general it was a productive session, well worth an eight-hour drive down through the bootheel, and the entire state of Mississippi.
Labels: bib, cesl, personal, tesol, writing
Boston
these are pictures from
Nina
This is a restaurant where an old fish market used to be....where we ate on Sat.!
Labels: tesol, webheads
