report from Lubbock
It's been almost two months since I posted here; you might think I'd died, or fallen off a cliff, for as much as I've had to say about professional matters in general. It's true that I post a little on my other blogs, which I'll mention, but most of all, I've just been busy, and as I get older, I get a little more tired, and find it more difficult to go out of my way to point out something interesting.
But it is a new term, and I owe you an update, which I will provide. I teach a new class in writing dissertations and theses, for high-level graduate students. I used my eap2 skills to set up a writing project such that we would study a public issue (in our case Lubbock water crisis) and investigate how people feel about it; it's a fairly straightforward project on the perception of people toward an environmental condition (again, eap2 prepares me well) but the class is developing the project together, though they will write reports individually. If it ends up online (which I'd prefer), I'll keep you informed. Otherwise I'll just tell you what I've learned. In essence I've learned how theses look different in different departments, and use different styles, and carry different expectations depending on what any given department would call "data".
The other class is a high-level ITA speaking class, but the difference at Texas Tech, from other places, is that we (and the self-made textbook we use) identifies and graphs out discourse features that are crucial in the conveying of meaning and intent, features such as prominence, tone, thought groups, etc. We actually categorize and measure these things so as to give students, many of whom have adequate pronunciation and grammar, more insight into what is really hampering their ability to communicate successfully. It's very interesting and, in my view, somewhat cutting-edge, since other programs don't even really know how to
talk about some of these.
My last assignment is at the Univ. Writing Lab, but it's really my favorite, because I enjoy the people and it's more like working as part of a collective of very smart people who all practice a craft together; this also is a little more like CESL, and a little less like an academic department. Frankly, my office building is a little like Europe, with teachers of Portuguese, Italian, German, French and Spanish but about as much true camaraderie as the EU as well, and you have to give the office staff 24 hours to copy anything, and sometimes I long for the more free-wheeling ESL life.
It was at the writing center, however, where they actually assigned to me
this set of youtube clips which finally stirred me up to post in this blog. It's an interesting set on the problems in writing that ESL students have when encountering and trying to master writing in English. It stirred lots of memories in me, and awakened my passion for ESL writing, which in fact I am teaching, both at the lab and in the dissertation class. In this movie I saw my old friend Deb Healey, and was reassured that my skills, developed over decades, were valuable. I think the movie deserves its own review, which I will provide above, but in the meantime, I just want to say, I'm still here, still kicking, still teaching, basically, and walking home, since somebody lifted my bicycle in May.
I have two projects, both somewhat shelved, because it's so hard to get to the kids' schools, and soccer practice, in the time available to me. And, the walking, even the six blocks that it is, across a ten-lane road, exhausts me, for some reason. My shoes got to the point where nails seem to be sticking up into my foot but I've been to busy to simply buy new ones, or more appropriately, buy ones that are better designed for long walks at night. My two projects are as follows: I'm writing a book on language as a self-organized system, and in general I store my work
here, though I have the book itself elsewhere. Also, I have begun a serious study of text linguistics, which is really the linguistics of texters, as opposed to the linguistics of big books and entire tomes, which some people think it is, and which appears when you google "text linguistics." The fact is, this new field, the study of human communication behavior when phones and computers are mediating it, needs a name, although "computer-mediated communication" is close to acceptable. I struggle with it, because I'm really after text linguistics, yet I can't call it that; the name is taken.
So that's a report from the Hub City. The clouds come over in enormous colorful gusty-looking monsters but it rarely rains. The painters have moved in and sprayed chipped paint all over our yard thus causing us to suspect that our sunflower crop will have lead in it. Finally, the boys are both on soccer teams, thus causing a flurry of cross-town transportation issues not to mention finding matching shin-guards, a ball, filling a water bottle, etc. All for the purposes of activity, which supposedly makes them sleep better, but in fact, it's usually me who falls face-down on the pillow long before they do. I've found that wearing a fine-looking hat on nineteenth street increases my chances of being seen across ten lanes, so I do, and now people look at me oddly but go around me, and I limp across those lanes getting in the bicyclists' way.
Labels: cesl, chat, ita's, linguistics, self-organized systems, toefl, ttu, weblogs, wikipedia, writing, youtube
time and the toefl
It has been a while since I gathered my thoughts about this idea, and they have changed since a whole generation of Saudi students has risen up the ranks, struggling mightily with the issue of time. I almost feel like telling them, time is one of the skills, but it's the most important skill, since it is part of all the other three sections (I used to say that about vocabulary, but they can
learn vocabulary).
They've risen to the top of the program; they are fairly good writers, having finally mastered the spelling of five or six thousand words that they need the most, and picking up the western organizational habits by listening carefully and complying willingly to what their teacher says. So they have fairly good skills, and even their reading is not bad, if you give them enough
time to go left to right, pick up every word carefully, and put it together. But alas, this is where it falls apart. They are too slow, too deliberate. And they can't become
faster readers until they are
better readers in terms of pure quantity.
So the question is, when you have fifty questions in fifty five minutes, and a student gets 45, say, on the paper-based, turning into a 450 if all three skills are equal, and you wonder, if you gave him/her five more minutes, or ten, or fifteen, would it make a huge difference? I'm sure it would. I wonder about the other factors: how continuously rushed on the time can cause minds to slip in haste; how stress causes a freeze at crucial times, etc. I'd actually like to see this
tested out, live, with Saudi students. Maybe it has been! I'll do the research. A related question would be: how does this mirror their academic experience, or, in real life, do they actually
have that five or ten more minutes, if they choose to use it?
Labels: reading, toefl
toefl
Things are pretty busy around here, so I've limited my posts and that's good because, being an old guy and all, I have a lot less interesting material these days. But I did get an interesting phone call in that illuminated me on TOEFL developments, and I thought I'd share that since this is where I keep almost
everything I know; my office is so clearly a disaster (see below) that I can no longer find anything that is in writing.
When the TOEFL moved from the paper-based through the CBT (1998) and then to the iBT (2005), we were essentially left behind because we were not made an iBT station; we therefore give and teach the paper-based and my knowledge of the iBT is somewhat limited. It turns out that the new structure of the iBT, with its read-listen-write section, and read-listen-speak section, has students in a kind of a tizzy based on the fact that these are graded by human graders worldwide who have subjective analyses of their ability. And this, according to my sources, makes grammar
more important than it had been, partly because a surprising number of subjective decisions at least
appear to be made on the basis of grammar. Thus it is now a question of how to teach grammar for the iBT, how to teach grammar as a learn-to-integrate-it-on-the-fly skill.
The TOEFL has become more important, not less, and the Saudi mission now demands its students take one regularly and report the scores; this has made them
more TOEFL-crazy, not less.
It turns out we were wrong that the Longman paper-based book was about the only one left on the market, but there is in fact very little left on the market, besides on Amazon or the used book market. And the cd's for the Longman are coming out as digital and easier to get, apparently. I also heard about a Canadian computer thing called Can8, where you can record your own voice and compare it to others; apparently with the read-write-speak you want a good lab to record your voice and analyze it carefully, and all TOEFL classes are of course taught in up-to-date computer labs. How would I record voices in ours? I'm not sure but I know there's a way. The world is leaving me in the dust.
As for good iBT materials, there is plenty out there besides the set of Kaplan books we have around here; I heard of a Longman set, well-respected, Barron's 6th edition, and sets that attempt to combine iBT and paper-based. Bruce Rogers is also well respected although it was unclear to me whether that was an iBT set or what. The question now is how much to put on a CD-rom, and whether to make students lug around a phone book all day to study this stuff. The more online, the better, some people say, since the test is all online anyway. Shrink the book, and make it just a guide to the online tests. But make it clear what the test itself
looks like, because that's what the students want to know.
Labels: cesl, grammar, toefl
vocab. project/vocab. study
What I need to do now is back off, and let my students actually write about this, because it was done for them, and done on the subject they chose. It stirred in me, though, the desire to both lay out what I consider standard fare- what I usually say about vocabulary- and, a challenge to discuss any of the various issues that the discussion raises.
These are the things I tell most students:
Vocabulary is the most important element of your language study. Your ability to pick up, retain, and use successfully and quickly a large number of words will be the key to your ability to solve grammatical problems, improve your listening, and read fast enough to survive a test situation. Nothing is more important than knowing the words, and knowing enough to make a difference.
Some teachers claim that exposure alone will do it for you- if you read it and hear it enough, you'll get it. I don't believe that. I think most learners need a system and need to commit new vocabulary to memory. Your system is up to you- and if you choose to go without one, that's up to you also. If your TOEFL score has plateaued out at about 460, though, you could have vocabulary issues. If your TOEFL has plateaued at 430, you have much more serious issues, but that's another post. If you feel like you are treading water, think about how you are learning vocabulary. Do you have a system? Does it work? Is it time to change it? The system that worked in the lower levels no longer does.
I believe your system should teach you to stay in English rather than always lead you back to your native language. Put your list entirely in English. Make sentences that use the words. Study by reading the sentences, covering up the words and their English definitions on the left. When in doubt, find the definition of the word, in English, on the left side of your list, and go back to reading the sentences. Sentences should be easy except for the words you are learning. Add words from everywhere; study the list often.
Finally, it's entirely your business. I never collect the list, though I avidly watch and question what my students do and how well it works for them. I also watch to see who passes and how well, how quickly. I actually wanted my students to study this but had to admit that the effects of stress on vocabulary was closer to the class topic.
Let's go back to the teacher that claims that exposure is enough. You know who you are- maybe 50-60% of the profession, I have no idea anymore. I freely admit that exposure is a crucial element of the picture. Our minds organize by how important we consider things to be- and we judge that by exposure. But, unless my tests, 80 questions for a high-level class of 15, were mistaken, exposure isn't enough. There's always the possibility that I'm an alligator of a vocab-test maker, but I don't think so. It may be a weakness of the communicative system that now a person with the first five out of the six communicative skills- listening, responding nonverbally, speaking, asking for help, test survival, and reading, have made it as far as they have, without reading. I gave them the words beforehand, words they'd seen and used, and they still had trouble with it. Some of the words, I said to myself, how could you sit in this class all term and not know this? Yet some could & did. Non-readers, maybe, or deliberate project saboteurs. More likely, just people who have trouble with words.
This is why I crank out those vocab. quizzes in every class, that the better students keep requesting. They aren't, in fact, alligator-tricky, they're pretty straightforward. There's one other thing I say: There's no way I could cover more than 10% of what you need. The best I can do is challenge you: bring it to your attention, that you may be learning in an inefficient way, you may want to reflect on how you hold the football when you run, as the Salukis might say. My goal is to use my time in the best way possible, so that, if enlightening you about your own methods is a possibility, I'll make that more likely. If it flushes out the non-readers, so be it. Overall vocabulary scores, over the years and terms, have been very very accurate when it comes to TOEFL scores. I heard this one time, long ago, in ESL- that vocab. mastery is the best predictor of overall language mastery- but haven't been able to find a source, or prove it.
More about exposure soon- I don't intend to let that one go. Mark my words- I
like exposure- the more the better. That's partially my rationale for the quizzes- if new, simple, relevant sentences can add to their exposure to a word- that alone is good, whether they get the answer right or not. This presumes that they can read the simple sentences the words appear in, and have no trouble with the four simple choices. I'm interested in how having seen the word or not, elsewhere or in an isolated situation, affected the score. A word that came right off a list, the day before a quiz, and a stressful day at that, might be harder to learn, one would think, than one that had been committed to memory previously, and only recalled later. More later, I promise.
Labels: cesl, learning theory, reading, toefl, vocabulary
acquisition of present perfect
A colleague of mine is teaching the TOEFL class, and I remarked to her that one of the hardest TOEFL questions I ever heard referred to a simple response to the question: (W) "How are you?" (M) "I've been better." It could have been that TOEFL was trying to test the intonation- the speaker was clearly saying that he was not great. It could also have been that a real TOEFL would not have tested an answer that was so ambiguous (though this is a common answer, it can in fact be interpreted in two ways).
If you think too hard about it, you'll end up in a backwater of confusion, as I did on the day I was trying to teach my way out of this situation. But, this post is really about what my colleague said:
Yes, present perfect is difficult. They have a hard time figuring out why we need it.I thought this answer was a perceptive, incisive comment, coming as it did from a veteran language-learner and linguist, so I thought I'd save it. Though I've studied acquisition of relative clauses a little more carefully (see below), I've also had my eye on present perfect for several reasons. First, even at the high levels (where I teach
now), they have trouble with it; they haven't acquired it yet; and quite often I see sentences (given the time markers
until now or
since I got to Carbondale where one would typically use it. More often, we native speakers might use it naturally but they would not, and give us no time markers to show what they might have missed. In any case it is hard to pinpoint the fact that they
don't have it, but it is safe to say that although they were taught it as long as two or three terms ago, it is still on the horizon for them, and, a distant one at that...
in spite of the fact that it seems somewhat basic for us, essential to our concept of action, early-on in the systems of first language learners, and a basic building block in more complicated forms.
I'll explore this more later, but for now, I'll just say- you aren't born dividing actions into finished/not finished, set in time/not set in time, etc.; you have to acquire the need to express these things, as well as the ability, if you are an L2 learner; and, the situation is partly governed by how much you can get away with, on a day-to-day basis, without causing severe misunderstanding. If such a phrase as
until now will suit your purpose, and express the same meaning as present perfect, in spite of the native speaker's immediate reaction (this is grammatically wrong but I can live with it), then you get away with it- indefinitely- until you learn a better way.
That's it for now- until later-
Labels: krashen, language, learning theory, sla, toefl
toefl reading strategies
A debate is raging in my classes on how to attack the TOEFL Reading section. In CESL we still have the Institutional TOEFL, which gives a Reading section, 50 questions, 55 minutes, questions divided into about 5-8 distinct passages, 6-10 questions each, more or less.
As far as I know, the difficulty is evenly and randomly distributed, both within each set of questions, and throughout the entire section, so that if passage one is statistically harder than passage two, it's only a coincidence, and may not hold up on every test. The questions are distributed in relative spatial order, that is, questions derived from line 4 will appear before questions derived from line 7, but questions from the entire passage could be placed anywhere, and are.
The three pertinent attack strategies are:
1. Read the entire passage once through, trying to get main idea and purpose of the paragraphs; if you are unable to, read again. THEN do the questions. (this is my favorite)
2. Read the questions first. Then you know what you're looking for as you read.
3. Read the first and last sentence of each paragraph before you start. That way you know what the main purpose of the passage is.
I have vocally chosen #1 but told my students, by all means, practice a lot; try all three; do whatever works best. It's my
impression that #2 and #3 were originally developed for native speakers (for use on tests like the SAT, ACT, GRE, etc.); because they have quicker and better inferencing and skimming skills, they can spot it more easily when the first sentence
doesn't match the rest of the paragraph, or when a question requires careful clue-digging. But I feel that for international students, particularly lower-level ones trying to improve from 420 to 480, #2 & #3 are not the best choices.
I am curious about what the TOEFL world says about this issue. I would like to do research. I would like to know more.
Here's another question: Is using CCCCC at the end, still better than BBBBB? or AAAAAA? I stuck my neck out and said no, TOEFL was onto that, long ago, and changed it to get the CCCCs & teach them a lesson. Besides, if you get to the end, and have to go CCCCCC, you've already lost. You're staying in AE2. You failed to follow the cardinal rule of TOEFL Reading, which is FINISH & GET THE EASY ONES. You're a poor gambler. You shouldn't even be asking that question!
More later. By the way, it's an open debate. Your comments are welcome. Any pertinent sources, etc. would also be appreciated.
Labels: reading, toefl
