To teach or not to teach ... 'bad' words

Recently, I viewed a very funny video about the many meanings of 'shit.' Although I have taught such common four letter words in the past, I wondered how my colleagues and friends (native English speakers and non-native English speakers) would respond to a query about teaching 'shit' to my intermediate-level adult students at a community college. Out of 10 people who responded via FB or email, not one of them waivered. They all said, "Yes, you should teach bad words." One even said that it is my 'responsibility' to teach them.

Here's the video. The performer is Finnish and definitely has a great sense of American English. I don't know if he was a comedian in his native country, but he definitely tickles my funny bone.

What do you think?  I did show this video to my students, and most of them (a dozen) enjoyed it. However, a few didn't seem to 'get' it. When you explain humor, it somehow kills it, so I had a brief follow-up reaction/reflection talk, advising caution (especially to the young adult males in my class) when attempting to use this kind of language with native speakers.

I agree it IS my responsibility as an instructor of English to non-native speakers to teach them awareness and self-consciousness when using four-letter words that can be seen as obscene or irreverent. I also want them to understand that context is extremely important - how powerful a definite or indefinite article is in changing the meaning of an expression. As a student of many foreign languages (Spanish, French, Quechua, Japanese, Arabic, Lingala), I find it easy to put myself in the position of my students. I would want to know these words in other languages I have studied to greater or smaller degrees, so that I might understand if someone is insulting or complimenting me.  It is up to each student to take what I've chosen to give, store it in memory, or throw it away.  

The Power of Pronouns

Have you ever thought that your use of pronouns might reflect your level of self-esteem and whether you belong or fit in a group?  Here is a link to a review of James Pennebaker's "The Secret Life of Pronouns." It came from brainpickings.org, which is a site you might want to subscribe to. (I think the name of the site captures the essence of it.)

I often start my ESOL classes with a brief review of the eight parts of speech. I am always amazed at how few students understand that our language and dictionaries are made up of words that belong to certain categories of speech. Why do we do that? It is so we can know how to use the vocabulary in a sentence.

What is a pronoun? Simply defined, it is a word that takes the place of a noun (=a word that refers to a person, place, thing, or idea). However, in English, we should not use a pronoun in a sentence unless it is obvious to the reader or listener what noun you are referring to. Here are some examples:

          "She loves to travel overseas."

If you had been talking about Maria previously and said the sentence above, I would assume that you were referring to Maria (="She").

Some languages such as Japanese and Spanish don't require a subject (often played by a noun or pronoun) to start a sentence, so you definitely need to be following the conversation or reading well to understand the subject of a statement.

         "Es muy interesante."  what or who is interesting?

Pronouns are useful, especially to allow us to avoid repeating the same noun:  "When John was at the zoo yesterday, John saw a giraffe."  Better and easier to follow would be to say "When John was at the zoo yesterday, he saw a giraffe."

For more in-depth coverage of Dr. Pennebaker's fascinating perspective on human social interaction and what language tells about our state of being, I recommend this recent 2017 Apple interview.  It will also connect to education and English language learning.

Teaching and Mindset Part 2

Teachers also need to get into a growth mindset. That is, we need to focus on our own growth and learning. Sometimes, we are made aware of other strategies for teaching students which are more 'fun' and incorporate more technology. I have done this with my college ESOL students. I get 'stretched' technologically and learn to teach a different skill (beyond English!).

However, after trying out new strategies, I sometimes realize (= learn) that I may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.  I am constantly being torn between doing what my gut instincts tell me to do, such as drill students and do choral pronunciation exercises, not as a steady diet but intermittently. Yet, I know that by current California standards of project-based learning, someone overseeing me for one class session might view such an activity as very old-fashioned or 'old school.'  If they asked me why I did it, however, there would be many sound reasons (pun intended) based on what I've learned from psycholinguistics and from my own personal journeys sampling or studying several foreign languages (Spanish, French, Quechua, Japanese, Arabic, Lingala, German).

The following Op-Ed article last spring from the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal (May 13-14, 2017 (Saturday and Sunday), page A11, titled "A Polymath Mastered Math - and So Can You" by James Taranto, who interviewed Barbara Oakley) caught my attention as it forced me to rethink some ideas that I'd been forcing myself to give up. My insides were telling me that many of my students had not done the hard foundation-building labor (often repetitious and drill-like) to control English's many irregular verbs and our variety of tenses. Many were not even aware that there were so many identifiable grammatical structures in English. As a long-term ESOL instructor (nearly 20 years), I have recently been informed that grammar can be 'picked up' in the context of reading, by noticing how writers write. That may work for native speakers much better than it works for non-native speakers because native speakers already have some language intuition, but I often hear from my immigrant students that they want more instruction in grammar, not just passive learning.

What struck me a few years ago in 2016 was that some former Swiss students who came back to the U.S.A. to visit - and reconnected with their former ESL instructor (me) - had not lost much of their English skills from eight years earlier. How was it possible that former students who had not been in the USA for nearly a decade nor been required to use English in their jobs could still produce such coherent and accurate English? How could they still correctly form a question in English and ask if they were using correct grammatical construction (they were! - e.g., present perfect, simple past, conditional, and so on)?  Could it be that they drilled it years before we met and drilled again before the Cambridge Exam? They memorized and practiced English for an expensive test that would mean the difference between getting a raise or moving up the job ladder by proving their overall comprehension of the language.

In the Wall Street journal article, the author of Mindshift (Oakley) says, with respect to learning math and science that "The way you learn intensively for a language is very similar to learning well in math and science." Although some believe that practice and repetition kill creativity, Oakley says, "One mistake we make in the school system is we emphasize understanding. But if you don't build those neural circuits with practice, it'll all slip away. You can understand up the wazoo, but it'll just disappear if you're not practicing with it" (quoted by Taranto in WSJ, 5/13/17).

Ms. Oakley comments that "many, if not most," of her engineering colleagues "are from countries that have educational systems completely antithetical to [ours]. In places like China and India, 'practice and repetition and rote and memorization are really important parts of education.'" Oakley also points out that our Western approaches can enhance creativity, but that "Asian approaches ... build solid foundations in the most difficult disciplines like math and science."

This article resonated with my instincts and thoughts about language learning. My own long journey with foreign languages has definitely impacted my English teaching strategies. Now, I am rethinking my own mindset. Is it fixed, or can I continue to grow and change - the same as I ask of my students?

Teaching and Practicing Growth Mindset and Political Correctness

Since 2015, I've been starting my Advanced ESOL Reading and Writing class with some readings about mindset and a TED video by Carol Dweck.  Why?  I have been frustrated with students who arrive in my class from their previous classes believing that they are "A" students, so everything that they do should have an "A" grade attached to it. First, where does this fixation on grades come from? While adult immigrant students earn credits for their ESOL community college classes, the grades do not impact their college transcripts. In other words, if they do well enough in their ESOL classes to move up to Basic Skills Writing courses, a grade of "C" or better in ESOL will not affect their chances of getting into a four-year degree-granting institution. Second, when there is nothing to lose by earning a passing level grade of "C," why is there still an obsession with grades? Third, if students are supposed to complete certain skills by the time they arrive at the highest level, why are a third of them arriving in the last "advanced" level course without what I expect are the requisite skills? Why do we ESOL professors feel pressured and compelled to move students on to the next level - to pass them because they're immigrants and can't be expected to be as skilled in English as a native speaker? Interestingly, in a class discussion about language and literacy across the world, one of my students said that she thought a big difference between her country (Colombia) and the USA is that in Colombia if a student doesn't reach the required level of skill in Spanish, for example, (s)he will have to repeat the class. No ifs, ands, or buts. They might even have to repeat it twice; it is the same for mathematics and science classes at the middle school level. In that way, it actually means something when students complete middle school. If they don't pass, then they can't go on to high school.

This is a point I need to explore further. There are 'triage' or two-tier apprenticeship vs. academic-track systems in Europe where students who don't have high enough scores on level tests get filtered out as pre-teens or teenagers into so-called apprentice programs (where the focus is on learning blue-collar skills and office/clerical skills for service-oriented professions) rather than academic or science-oriented careers.

When I got exposed to Brainology and the work of Carol Dweck in 2015, I had little idea how well it would work to help my students focus on learning and growing their minds. The concept of the fixed and growth mindsets was revolutionary to me and to my non-native Englsh-speaking adult population. In addition, it was empowering for me and for some of my students.  Since January 2015, I've had a handful of ESOL students who knew they were not going to pass my class who stayed in my course beyond the withdraw deadline (10 weeks of 16 week semester) because they decided that they could improve their essay writing, do advanced-level readings, participate in reading circle discussions or debates, build their knowledge of more advanced grammar structures, and be better prepared to repeat the class the next semester. One student who did this wrote in her portfolio reflection that it was one of the best experiences she had had in ESOL because she wasn't worried about her grade. Instead, she was focused on learning. Wow!

I have continued to use the growth mindset and find that it has worked for me and transformed my way of communicating to my students. This approach to teaching doesn't protect students from getting "D's" in my classes; it means, in my view, that they're not yet ready for the next level. (See Dweck above). I also share my own educational flops in my long journey through a four-year degree at UCLA and two master's degree programs (anthropology and TESOL). I let them know that I don't equate grades with intelligence because when I suffered from "D" grades, I know that I didn't suddenly get dumber. I was over-extended (working, commuting by bus over two hours per day, and emotionally stressed and depressed over a broken relationship). These were not excuses; other factors overpowered my ability to focus on classwork.

Praising effort over grades does not mean that a student should pass a class because they worked hard. Many of my students were hard workers, but they knew that they had not achieved the learning outcomes. Their English "muscles" were not strong enough to perform at the level of a college freshman.

Is it easy not to pass a hard-working ESOL student? No, of course not. However, I wish the previous professor had conveyed the same message to his/her students so that I wouldn't have had to deflate egos and overcome the bad attitudes of students who came with fixed mindsets - and saw anything as difficult as an attempt on the instructor's part to show/prove that they were not very smart. Some students told me that they "knew" all the grammar and passed at an "A" level in the previous course, yet they didn't know basic irregular verb forms (e.g., teach -> "teached") or how to use present perfect or simple past nor did they know that modal verbs are not followed by past tense verb forms (e.g., should "went"). On top of that, several of these same students complained that I should spend more time on basic grammar even though "grammar" was supposedly what "they already knew."

This is not a rant, but a suggestion that adult-level ESOL instructors use concepts from elementary school curricula to enhance their approach to teaching, in general. The Brainology reading for 5th graders in the public school was not too simple for advanced-level ESOL students.  A side benefit one semester was the revelation that one of my students connected to her son because he had studied the same reading. My adult ESOL student was fearful of going back to school, but as her children were out of kindergarten, her husband encouraged her to go to college and to seek a career outside the home. Learning to write in academic English was her first big step.

Just as the debate still sizzles in public schools, I have found that some of my colleagues teaching college-level ESOL courses are caught in a battle over what our purpose is. Is it to help students reach a level of English fluency and accuracy that will allow them to communicate well in a work or business context to colleagues and employees, or is it to equip our students with enough language to be functional, comprehensible, and "good enough" - assuming that they will improve over time with exposure to native English-language speakers?

I am torn between treating my students as I would want to be treated in a foreign country, studying in an academic setting, alongside native-born students.  Would I want to be passed along because it was viewed as not PC (politically correct) to fail me and force me to repeat a course until I had reached a more functional level in the target language in which I needed to express myself? If I continued on in a foreign environment and obtained a degree there, would my degree be worth the same as the native-born student's?  Are we cheapening the value of a UCSD degree by taking on so many non-natives who don't command the language into our degree programs?  Was the professor forced to pass me along because I was foreign-born and working hard to acculturate and learn the local language? Does it degrade the value of a degree from UCLA or UCSD if a non-native speaker receives a degree from one of these prestigious universities and is incomprehensible in English outside of a classroom context? When we discovered that President George W. Bush graduated from Yale University, did we not pause to wonder whether the standards of Yale were as high as we once thought them to be?

Now, in February 2018, I am still puzzled and asking many of the same questions.

Reading Circles - Part Deux

Now that I am in the midst of a new semester, I am doing some reflection on how the advanced level reading and writing course went in the spring. In particular, this reflection is tied to the Reading Circle experiment (see earlier posts 1 , 2). I plan to continue using the reading or literature circles based on several positive reflections from student portfolios last semester.

Here are a few examples of some of the comments. Several students did not mention the reading circles specifically, so these comments represent a biased sample where "circles" were specifically mentioned. Those that referred to the reading circles in their reflections said they were "an excellent idea" (MGA, 2015), "the best experience" (NT, 2015), and "a useful method." Some of the reasons they thought the circles were a positive experience is that they had specific roles to play which varied every two or three weeks. They had to learn how to think about the reading and hear alternative views and understandings of the work. According to one student, activities affected other reading experiences: "it helped me a lot in understanding the bottom line of the book that I am reading..." (JQN, 2015).

One huge benefit of the reading circle was that it helped to build a community in the classroom, a sense of responsibility for playing a role in their small groups. What made it work successfully in this classroom was the participation by 99% of the students. Without preparation, when a student was called on to contribute to their circle, they knew that they were failing their classmates - not the instructor. Each role counted since a "circle" was made up of five students, each playing a different role. In addition, a few students commented that they learned about different cultures through these discussions since one of the roles was "Connector." Often, students used this role to comment about how their experience growing up in another culture was very different from what was being described in an American context.

Another theme from the students who liked the reading circles was the feeling of empowerment that they gained from having others listen to their interpretation of a reading as a summarizer, discussion leader, or connector. Students didn't feel overwhelmed by trying to learn every new or unknown word and started learning how to infer meanings from context. They could count on one member of the circle explaining at least five new words from the article, and students could always discuss difficult vocabulary amongst themselves.

A final advantage and positive outcome of using Reading Circles was the opportunity to conduct formative assessments. When the students are involved in student-led discussions on the same readings, they face each other. This leaves the instructor free to move around the room and observe whether students are doing some critical thinking and learning to discuss ideas in English. At the end of the group activity, the instructor can merge vocabulary that came from the reading - put it on the board in its various forms (noun, verb, adverb, adjective). In this way, the whole class developed a common vocabulary list.

Is "just" a female word?

It has been many months since I took the time to write a think-piece here. One of my 2015 New Year's resolutions was to save my blog. However, instead, I worked on activating my Picturing English and my Mbote from San Diego (travel and wildlife observations) blogs. I also began a new career path, working in a community college.

A while ago, I ran across this article about Words to Eliminate from your Vocabulary but I never took the time to fully reflect on it here. "Just" and "that" were on the elimination list. Subsequently, I noticed another article re-posted on LinkedIn about the use of "just" in speaking - about how women tend to use it more and how it weakens whatever we express. After Ellen Leanse published results of her informal survey comparing the usage of "just" by men and women in a business context, the idea that women mark themselves as weaker or more tentative when speakking has gone viral.  More significantly to me, I realize that I am one of those women who regularly uses "just." Consequently, now every time I write or hear myself say "just," I remove the word or remind myself to avoid it in the future.

Of course, there has been a backlash to this view. After doing a little "googling" around, I have decided not to throw out all my justs.  Last month an alternative view was published. The article is long because the writer substantiates claims with citations and the research of academics. Krissy Eliot has published another fascinating examination of how women's speech is scrutinized and depicted in American culture. (Watch the video, at least.)

Men's speech is the standard to which my speech is compared. That is definitely something I need to think about before I automatically remove all justs - and you know which "just" I'm talking about, right? (There are many meanings of just, but the one I'm writing about isn't well defined at Merriam-Webster.) 

NB:  As always, I welcome my readers thoughts on any post. I also express my apologies to anyone who has been a follower and stopped visiting me regularly. This year I have only added about four new posts here, most of which have been directed toward ESOL teaching with lesson materials and thoughts about how to be more effective in the classroom. I feel liberated writing again about our many Englishes!

Making Connections in English

In the spring semester, I was pleasantly surprised to find out from my strongest students that what they enjoyed most in the first few weeks of our advanced ESOL reading and writing class was learning how to use connectors or conjunctions.  Even though this grammatical structure came at the end of their textbook, I introduced it at the beginning of our course. Because connectors are the glue with which words, sentences, and paragraphs stick together, it is worthwhile to reinforce conjunctions and transition words often throughout a semester or quarter. Having some variety of games for 10 to 15 minute reviews definitely helps. Most advanced level students believe that they already know how to use conjunctions very well.

It is easy to formatively assess how well students "know" grammatical structures of English, by starting the fall semester with a review session. Divide your class into groups of four or five students and ask them to list and define what parts of speech, functions of parts of speech, phrase, and clause (independent/dependent) mean.  Using SV to indicate to students "subject" and "verb" or a "clause" leads me to ask the class to define and give several examples of simple, compound, and complex sentences. The letters SV are often used in grammar books, so their use as representations for a clause are usually familiar to advanced level students.

By reading and sometimes clapping or walking in front of the class (taking one plodding step, for example, for each simple sentence), an instructor can illustrate why, as writers and speakers, we should use a range of connectors. Sometimes, to be emphatic, we might use a string of the same simple structure as in, "I love your smile. I love your voice. I love your soul." That would definitely have an impact on me!  However, if we don't use any conjunctions to connect sentences in a writing, I show how it starts to be monotonous for a reader by clapping as I read. Da da dadum; da da dadum; da da dadum, and on and on.

Because of my background in anthropology, I always try to give students strategies for learning in general by being aware of their human biological roots. For most of our history, language was spoken. Whatever students learn for written discourse can be used in speech. There is a connection between fluent and accurate speech and fluent and accurate writing. Some students seem to be better at writing because they are familiar with a lot of vocabulary and grammar structures, but they are shy about mispronouncing words. Thus, their speech lags behind. Other students are fluent in speaking because they are focused on communicating and not on the accuracy of their grammar or making pronunciation errors. They often have more difficulty at the advanced level correcting their grammar and vocabulary errors in writing because they already have well-developed habits of expressing themselves and making themselves understood in speech.

Native speakers of any language make allowances for non-native speakers. In addition, since there is so much redundancy in language, even if you only know infinitive forms of a verb, for example, you can get around very well without knowing tenses.  Many non-native speakers of English in this country who learn to communicate through immersion never master the correct academic forms of my language. That is why it is easier for a teacher to train a beginning-level student than an advanced-level student. Beginners see progress every day whereas advanced-level students sometimes feel that they are going backwards or marching in place. In fact, sometimes advanced students DO have to go backwards and relearn what they mislearned earlier.

One way to make students aware of connectors at an advanced level is to have them come up with the various types of types of sentences in a formulaic representation. If they have difficulty, you can guide them to come up with the forms.  Then have the class work in groups and put different types of sentences on the board. Ask them to share a range of connectors, too.

Your whiteboard might look like this:
SV. SV. SV. SV.  I like hamburgers. I don't like hot dogs. I like sweets.

SV, and SV.         SV, so SV.          SV, but SV.
I like hamburgers, and I like sweets. I like hamburgers, but I don't like hot dogs.  

SV because SV.   SV although SV.   SV while SV.
I like hamburgers because they are tasty. I like sweets although they are not good for my teeth. 

First, SV.             Second, SV.           Third, SV.
First, I heat the grill.  Second, I make the hamburger patties. Third, I put the patties on the hot grill. 

Along with a review of parts of speech, this is probably enough for a first meeting of class. It serves several purposes: (1) it helps the instructor to know what the students know and don't know; (2) the instructor and students start to get to know each other and to speak with each other in English; (3) the students start to see that they have a foundation to build on.  They build social and cognitive connections in English.

Adorkable and Hangry?

As an English teacher - and one who teaches to non-native speakers of English, I am often struck by words that are seemingly "invented" by speakers every year.  I often wonder whether these words sometimes crop up as slips of the tongue. For example, years ago, I remember meeting and talking with a very distinguished French professor in social science (Professor Bruno Latour) while he was at UCSD.  I was very nervous and excited to meet him, so as I was describing my observations at a symposium on chimpanzees, instead of saying "chimpanzee symposium," I said "chimposium." As soon as I said the word, he laughed and thought it was quite clever. In fact, the new word was what came out of my mouth as a result of being nervous and speaking quickly. I've used the word subsequently, of course, and it's possible that the term might have spread in our community of anthropologists, primatologists, and sociologists of science to refer to subsequent gatherings of chimpanzee experts. In fact, I found the word was invented and used more recently here with a slightly different meaning..

There is a TED talk that discusses neologisms such as adorkable and hangry (the title of this article) and how they become "real" words. The topic was especially intriguing to me because of my own memorable innovation (it's possible that many others have made that same slip of the tongue, however).  Because of that phenomenon, I can easily imagine words like "adorkable" (an adorable dork?) and "hangry" (simultaneous feeling of being hungry and angry) slipping out of someone's mouth while trying to describe their feelings of being both hungry and angry. I can also imagine listeners' approval and recognition of an imaginative new word and of it spreading from that one listener and speaker to his or her community and beyond. Ann Curzan doesn't address the "invention" of words such as "adorkable" and "hangry," but because of my own experience, I believe that sometimes new words or usages of words come into being as productions of some natural wiring in the brain that produces these combination words. In fact, an article about slips of the tongue and Freudian slips delves into this phenomenon and how these expressions can easily get picked up by an internet-wired community of speakers. I never tire of learning about language.

Was that a choice or a yes/no question?

Sometimes students have great difficulty understanding the importance of intonation when speaking. When a question has an "or" in the middle of it between two nouns, is the speaker asking you to choose between the two nouns, or is the speaker simply asking a yes/no question?

By changing the intonation of these two questions, a native speaker can differentiate between these two types of question. Can you say the questions below using two different intonations so that the meanings are different? 

Do you want to go to a movie or watch TV? (Choice)

Do you want to go to a movie or watch TV? (Yes/No)

In the choice question, the answer should be either "a movie" or "TV." However, in the Yes/No question above, the response should be "yes" or "no." Listen to the following videos to get an idea of what a choice question sounds like and how it is different from a "yes/no" question in intonation. The most important concept to keep in mind is the rising and falling intonation.

In a choice question, the voice goes up on the first choice and falls on the second choice as illustrated below.
                                 Q:  Do you want to go to a movie ⤴ or watch TV ⤵ ?

                                 A:  I'd like to watch a movie.

However, in a yes/no question, the voice goes up at the end of the question.
                                 Q:  Do you want to go to a movie or watch TV ⤴ ? 
                                  A: Yes. Let's do something relaxing.

If you have problems understanding the difference between the two types of question, listen to the examples and practice. Then practice some more. You should also record yourself using a device like Vocaroo.com. Try to approximate the pronunciation of the people in the videos. Have fun!

Spelling Matters

The word "matters" has a double meaning here. (However, matter actually has more than two meanings or uses.) One meaning in this post is that spelling is important (i.e., matters is used as a verb to mean it has significance or importance).  The other refers to the topic of this essay, Spelling Matters (i.e., issues, problems or difficulties).

Convincing students that spelling is important in English is a daily song and dance, especially in writing classes. Why do I care that students learn to spell words correctly? With word checkers built into Word software, why should anyone care?

Amazingly, many tests of English (the Cambridge Exams, IELTS (International English Language Testing System), SAT writing, AP writing, and so on) require test-takers to write by hand. Even if you take the internet-based TOEFL exam, there is no spell-checker on the test computers. In other words, the test candidate must demonstrate his/her skill in writing in English without a dictionary or spell-checking device on the computer. They are not allowed to bring any electronic equipment (e.g., cell phones, iPods, etc.) into the testing area. One letter can create a huge or embarrassing difference in meaning or perception: "mad vs. made," "sit" vs. "set," "to" vs. "too," "read" vs. "red," and on and on. Whether you are a native or a non-native speaker of English, mastery of spelling is a mountain we must all climb to become literate communicators.

I, like many others, fall into the group of educators that believes that spelling counts. Last year Loewenstein wrote a thought-provoking blog post for Edutopia which posed the question "What would happen if you were to eliminate subjects in your classroom?" That is, instead of labeling what students learn in school as "spelling," "reading," "writing," "math," and "science," why don't we focus on projects-based learning, which integrates all the skills that students need to communicate in the real world? 

While I'm not sure that eliminating the label "spelling" as a topic or subject of concern in school would make it any less of a pain for poor spellers, developing the habit of correct spelling does make a lot of sense. Similarly, it makes sense to learn how to add and subtract correctly. That means not being sloppy or lazy whenever you make any kind of financial transaction. When you enter an amount to withdraw from or depost to your checking account at the ATM, don't you pay attention to how many zeros you type in? The ATM doesn't have a checker for you? In the same way, sending an e-mail message to a work colleague can have a very strong negative or confusing effect if you misspell a word or leave words out. If you spell a word that exists in English, a spell checker isn't going to catch a mistake, so you can easily confuse a reader.

In a previous post, I published a photograph of a headline of the wrong word choice printed in the San Diego Union Tribune. However, when I searched for a link to the newspaper's online version, the headline had already been changed. My only proof of this public gaffe is the photograph. While this error was not a simple spelling error, it highlights the significance of word choice and word form as well as spelling. Living in a society with a written language system necessitates being careful about spelling and the words we choose to express ourselves. Words matter, and so do their spellings.  

SAT Writing vs. TOEFL Writing

The big news for educators this year has been that the College Board is redoing its Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) by eliminating the writing requirement in 2016. Is this a good thing? Will this de-emphasis on writing have an effect on ETS's Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)?

More than a decade ago, ETS (Educational Testing Service), which also makes the SAT, decided to create an online internet-based TOEFL (iBT - Test of English as a Foreign Language). In my view, this change was a vast improvement over the paper-based test as it included compulsory speaking and writing components. Before the iBT, I saw many of my Asian students proudly achieve the score of 450+ gain admission to local California community colleges. Later, however, I discovered that many of these same students were still taking ESL courses. Why? Although the paper-based TOEFL was supposedly their passport to entrance into and success in an American college, they found out subsequently that they had little ability to produce academic-level spoken or written English. The old paper-based TOEFL was not a great predictor of success for these non-natives in an American college system.

Not only were these students challenged to understand lectures in English, but they had to summarize and verbally restate in writing what they had heard in lectures. The skills that they needed to be successful at an American college were not just the passive skills (reading, listening, and structure/grammar) that they were tested on in the Paper-Based TOEFL (PBT). They needed to be able to produce English - not just recognize meanings or do error correction. They had to be able to rethink what they heard or read and interpret meanings. With almost no or little preparation or training for this approach to learning, they remained stuck in remedial ESL classes. With the advent of the iBT, many of these foreign students found a purpose to learning to be active producers of English.

It makes no sense to eliminate writing as a component of the SAT unless there is some other way to verify a college applicant's capabilities to produce English. Doing a timed written test in English is different from submitting a prepared statement of purpose for admission. This latter document was likely read and edited by multiple friends, family members, and paid tutors - and may not be an indicator of how a student will fare under college test conditions. Why is ETS planning to eliminate an important measure of the productive and critical thinking abilities of native English speakers while demanding measurable performances from non-native speakers on the iBT (internet-based TOEFL)?

Though I admit to preferring more creative writing in high school, I was grateful in the end that my 11th grade English teacher worked my class hard, so that the five paragraph essay was almost reflexive by the time I was a freshman at UCLA. I passed the Subject A exam of those days and was able to enroll in a required English course from my first quarter. The former "Subject A exam" still exists at UCSD, for example, in the form of The Entry Level Writing Requirement. Students who do not achieve at least one of several entry-level writing composition scores must take a composition course (for which they earn no credit toward their future degree) and pass an exam. An ESL instructor who teaches this composition course at UCSD through Mesa College told me that if a student fails the end of quarter writing exam, (s)he must repeat the course until a passing mark is reached.

As much as I am against the teach-to-a-test approach to education, if high school students know that colleges require a writing score from the SAT, they will prepare for it with the guidance of their teachers. This practice alone may send a message to all (i.e., parents, students, teachers, administrators) that critical thinking clearly expressed in writing matters.

For a supporting view, please check out this Washington Post commentary. For a broader view of the elimination of the writing component of the SAT, read Inside Higher Ed's news brief.

Assessing Grammar through Speaking

Recently I taught a course in high intermediate grammar. One of the SLOs (student learning objectives) was "Students will be able to ... produce in writing and speaking... [certain structures, such as present perfect with question formation and basic subject-verb agreement]." It is relatively straightforward to assess for grammatical structures in a writing assignment, but how does one objectively assess the "natural" production of certain structures in a speaking task? You can have students give prepared presentations, but this is somewhat "unnatural" in my view. What I would want to know if I were an English student is whether or not I can control certain structures in a "normal" conversational situation.

To get students to practice target structures in a conversation mode, I gave pairs of students a game board, with die. They also received a speaking rubric for the task so that they could see what they were being evaluated on. The game board has more than 50 squares with the base form of both regular and irregular verbs in each square.

Below you can preview the rubric and directions and decide if you like it before going to the pdf file link above. You can also see the game board which uses a bogglesworld's board template, which I like a lot. I modified slightly with with my own words.

BOARD GAME - SPEAKING ASSESSMENT

Target Features	4	3	2	1
Present perfect (questions, statements, short answer)
Subject-verb agreement (singular/plural)
Simple past (question formation, statements)
Irregular verbs (present perfect and simple past)
Pronunciation of -ed endings (present perfect and simple past)

Name___________________                                                                       Score______/20

Comments:

PRESENT PERFECT (questions, short answer, statements in positive/negative):

4 = Error-free use and production of the structures

3 = Occasional errors in use and production of structures

2 = Frequent errors in use and production of structures    

1 = Lacks control of use and production of structures

SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT:

4 = Always follows rules of subject-verb agreement

3 = Occasional errors in subject-verb agreement

2 = Frequent subject-verb agreement errors

1 = Almost no control of subject-verb agreement

SIMPLE PAST (Wh-Q, statements)

4 = Error-free use of the structures

3 = Occasional errors in use of structures

2 = Frequent errors in use of structures                

1 = Lacks control of structures

IRREGULAR VERBS (present perfect and simple past):

4 = Error-free use of the structures

3 = Occasional errors in use of structures

2 = Frequent errors in use of structures                

1 = Lacks control of structures

PRONUNCIATION OF -ed ENDINGS (present perfect and simple past):

4 = Error-free pronunciation of verb endings

3 = Occasional errors in pronunciation of verb endings

2 = Frequent errors in pronunciation of verb endings       

1 = Lacks control of pronunciation of verb endings

A Verb Game board** was used to elicit questions and responses in present perfect and simple past.  Students practiced for part of one period and "played" again the following meeting. They needed to practice "yes/no" questions in present perfect, short answers, and follow up wh-questions in the simple past. Answers to the wh-questions needed to use the simple past form of the verb in the original question. The paired speaking activity was recorded and rated for accuracy in use and production of target structures (about 2.5 to 3 minutes). 

**A partial view of the game board is attached at the bottom. It is not in landscape format. I printed boards and handed out dice for students to share for this activity.