research on Motivation and Education (both Teaching and Learning)

 Besides teaching English, I also at times proofread academic articles as one step in the publication process; this naturally gives me the chance to learn academic things that I would not normally get to learn. Sometimes it is in my field; sometimes it is not. Anyways, through this process, I have come across the quotations below about education, each of which I felt were well worth sharing. 

First and foremost, a commitment to lifelong learning requires an ethical responsibility to remain competent in their work as educators. 

- Tanju Deveci, Job Adverts

*****

The needs learners target does [sic] not have to be their own; they should also be mindful of the needs of others in their surroundings. Should they realize that they can contribute to the wellness of others, they will likely develop a sense of civic responsibility (21). 

This indicates that a learner’s receptivity to others’ contributions to his/her learning is as important as his/her enthusiasm for supporting their learning. (23)

Another interpersonal communication domain identified as important for lifelong learning is ‘engagement with instructors’, indicating that the type of interaction students establish with their instructor during their studies has a determining influence on the effectiveness of learning experiences in later years. (23)

 - Tanju Deveci, "Life-long Learning Skills" in The Skill Approach in Education: From Theory to Practice by Yusuf Söylemez & Firdevs Güneş

quotations from my reading and learning in education and EFL

As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply effected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another's voices, in recognizing one another's presence. 

- belle hooks, Teaching to Transgress 

The worst thing for student security is teacher insecurity.

- Marti Anderson 

We can formulate a rule of thumb: the more context, the less grammar.

Scott Thornbury, How to Teach Grammar, 4

 As mentioned, UBL posits that grammar is not an "out there" system but an emergent property of human communication and, furthermore, that actual language experience shapes language over the full life span.

(

Multilingual Turn, page 40; 

Bybee, 2010) 

...monolingual bias become unsustainable for the field of SLA...

Lourdes Ortega, "Ways Forward for a Bi/Multilingual Turn in SLA", The Multilingual Turn

(The question of bias is expanded on insightfully in Kachru's and Sridhar's articles in the Winter 1994 TESOL Quarterly.)

Regarding reading audience problems: 

Each writer has its own audience (intended readers) that might be part of a discourse community in which there is a degree of shared understandings and knowledge. Your class (the actual readers) may not be part of that discourse community and so they will make very different meaning and will need scaffolding if they want to read it as part of a particular community of readers. This is something to consider as you teach—what is your role as a teacher in this dilemma? 

- Leslie Turpin (4 Skills class) 

The magic of teaching happens when we can get the students off the page, out of the book and into the classroom community sharing the language together. 

Is serving a privilege? (Luke 1:73-75)

  Over the last week or two, I have been pondering these verses which come from Zechariah's prophecy following the naming of his son John the Baptizer - Luke 1:73-75. I read them in the HCSB translation of the Bible. The translation itself aligns extremely closely with all the other translations I checked, but this one is particularly beautiful.

  

  The context includes God's promises to Abraham and David, as well as John's role in bringing about those promises for the Lord's people. There is so much depth here; each phrase is worth pondering individually.

Dancing on the three tips of the Teaching Iceberg

Hawkin's model of the I, Thou, It Triangle which is meant to provide a balanced classroom. Sometimes a circle surrounds the triangle to signify the context or environment in which the class unfolds.

Get ready to dance on the 3 tips of this Triangle / Iceberg Source

In some recent feedback, my professor Elka Todeva used the expression, "the dance between the three tips of the triangle." We know the three tips of the triangle as Hawkin's "I," "Thou," and "It." The beauty of Elka's metaphor, though, is in the subtle reference to icebergs and the suggestion that each of the three tips of the teaching triangle have uncalculated depths beneath them.

So much we don't see Source

The metaphor also highlights the fact that we may be focusing on one tip at any given instant, but we are constantly in motion among the three, in a dance. This implies the emotions of teaching: we may associate dancing most easily with joy, but the other emotions of the classroom may also find expression here.

The 3 Tips of the Triangle, ready for dancing Source

"I need to learn that the pain I sometimes experience in teaching is as much a sign that my selfhood is alive and well as the joy I feel when the dance is in full swing." 

- Parker Palmer,  The Courage to Teach, 75. 

Predictability and Innovation - Where is the sweet spot of teaching?

 Van Lier's model of "Predictability and Innovation in the Classroom" probably resonates and represents every teacher's experience at various times. Something to ponder...

from the article, "Action-based Teaching, Autonomy and Identity (pg 53)"

a summary of material on Teaching English Modals

Function	Presentation ideas	Practice ideas
Requests	- Prep a scene with 1 person constantly borrowing stuff from another (2 students /friends?) “Could I borrow a pen?”, “Could I have a piece of paper?”, etc.	- Give pairs picture cards that suggest requests (tea cup, closed window, heavy box.) Pairs make and respond to requests. - Sts in a café. A is an annoying customer with constant requests. B is the waitress/waiter.
Offers	- Using classroom materials, demonstrate possible offers you can make: “Can I bring you a dictionary?” or “Can I open the door for you?” Each idea can be sketched on the board.	- Sts in a café. A is a customer who just wants coffee and quiet. B is an annoying waitress/waiter who keeps making new offers. - Card game with problems and solutions; A says problem; B must offer a polite solution.
Permission	- Convey that you are a thirsty student. How can you ask to get water? OR, get permission to answer an urgent call, etc.	- In pairs, at a border crossing. A is the customs officer; B is a traveler. A stops B to ask many polite questions.
Ability	- Prep a survey about abilities, 10 questions - Mime different abilities. Elicit or give the question and answer forms.  - Students write a report about a classmate’s ability	- Medical check-up: prepare a set of questions for students to ask each other as part of their visit to the doctor. Then they can add more questions. (This can be adapted for future and past uses.) - Describe an animal’s ability (give pics?)
Obligation / Compulsion / Advice	Draw or project common road signs. Elicit their meaning, helping to correct their forms.	- Have sts create a new sign for their study or living area. - Ask sts to write ideas of ways they can solve their life problems (debt, being unfit, oversleeping).
Possibility / Certainty	- Show a picture of a street with imminent events; ask “What might happen in the next 2 minutes?” - Use a video still to have sts predict what will happen next; then play the video.	- bring a box with unusual, interesting, and/or noisy items in it; ask what it might be used for; whom it might be used by; when… - show a pic of a business meeting with an empty chair; why is the chairwoman late? - guess the jobs of a series of people in pictures - Show the 7 Ancient Wonders; what must have been true about these places and their builders?
Regret		•Think of a trip that you took in the past. What are some things that you wish you did/didn’t do? –Tried local food, visited historical sites, enjoyed the night life, learned the official language,   –I could have gone zip lining when I visited Las Vegas.  I shouldn’t have bought KFC when I was in Nigeria (link)

*Most of these ideas from Scrivener, along with Celce-Murcia.

Other Key Points to Teach:
· “[V]irtually all the modals can express both logical probability and social interaction.” (Celce-Murcia, 141)
o The historical past is a way of softening requests that will help learners practically. (145)
· Both Celce-Murcia and Scrivener implicitly suggest in their formats that an overview of all of the modals may be helpful to students eventually.
· The presentation of functions might include a line that indicates the strength of the various modals in both positive and negative forms.

Three Sources for Teaching Modals
Celce-Murcia, Marianne and Diane Larsen-Freeman. The Grammar Book. 2nd ed. Heinle and Heinle, 1999.
Scrivener, Jim. Teaching English Grammar. Macmillan, 2010
Seven, Rüstem and Özge Seven. Türkçe ve İngilizce Açıklamalı English Grammar. n.d.

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Modals of Probability, positive and negative forms

In their chapter on modals, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman talk about teaching both the functions of the positive and negative forms. They also show how different modals often work within a single function. The content below is taken from their work, The Grammar Book, but it is displayed in a fresh way. This idea should be expandable to the other modal functions, and it could be expanded to show additional aspects of modality, like adverbials or vocab like "dare."

a Collection of general ideas for the ESL classroom

- Reverse Charades (acupuncture, party, wrestling, bank unicorn, pyramid) - no talking, just group acting and one guesser
- What's Yours Like? - all but one person know what the thing is, everyone gives an answer except the guesser(s)
- place yourselves on a map on the floor across the room
- Human Computer (Pronunciation)
- Conversation Circle
    + Skim, Convo Circle, then Detail reading
- matching of L1 and L2 new sentences
- Creation Computer
- introduce emotional language early (Interjections!)
- have an empty chair in the center, students may join and leave at will, always leaving one empty chair for conversation
- use the experiential learning cycle
- use realiia
- put on a small TED talk as a class
- have students research and present an issue within their society
- school/classroom newspaper
- Just use the words "it is isn't it not as" and see what sentences you can make
- draw a picture of using L1 vs. L2
- Community blackboard to get initial students input
- Jeopardy on the board with index cards
- Use page 108-109 from bell hook's Teaching to Transgress for a class activity: Whose excitement and responsibility should we find in the classroom?

an Overview of the English Question asking system

Here is my handout with a summary of the English Question System.

NOTES:

1. What is important for students to notice with regard to the form dimension
 of the Form/Meaning/Use framework? 

  - Uninverted questions can have a variety of functions.
     o One of these, for Wh- questions, is to ‘echo’ the question in order to be sure that one heard what was said by the original speaker.
  - Negative questions assume the form of the answer will be positive.
     o The word ‘not’ can either be contracted and added to the auxiliary verb before the subject, or left uncontracted and placed after the subject. (e.g. Isn’t he coming? vs. Is he not coming?)
     o Note for students: In these negative sentences, “amn’t I” is incorrect; “aren’t I” should be used. (Apparently "ain't" is related to this non-form.)
  - Inversion is the major challenge for students. It should be emphasized with new learners, but the other forms should be dealt with in detail with more advanced learners.

2. What should students know with regard to the way questions are used and how people answer YES/NO questions and tag questions in particular? 

- Learners need to know that there are short answers to yes / no questions and how to form them in different circumstances. (Larsen-Freeman and Celce-Marie, The Grammar Book, 212)

*The information in the black box is partially incorrect; tag questions and alternative questions are actually asking a question though the degree of uncertainty seems lower.

An Overview of the English Tense-Aspect System and Its Problem Areas

 Here is a Prezi that works through the differences among the various tenses and aspects of the English grammar system. it includes a summary of major problem areas as well. Below I have extracted a couple of the key thoughts from it. Quotations refer to the second edition of The Grammar Book.

 Bull's Framework makes a valuable contribution to this discussion because it clarifies that errors will typically occur along one of the axises of the appropriate tense. So, while we may often hear present simple and the past simple confused, it would be quite unlikely to find the present simple confused with the past perfect. To speak in The Grammar Book's terms, these are 'boundary problems'; we need clarity at the edges where things get murkiest.

 Related to the chart shown above, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman note that the bulk of the 'traffic' of our tense usage is located in the upper left corner. To the extent that this is true, we can expect to find the greater number of our boundary problems occurring there. We may assume, however, that similar errors lurk in the other less-trafficked, and thus less-practiced borderlands.

a collection of ESL Writing and Speaking Resources

Here are a few writing and speaking activities that I have collected:

Writing Activities (or Activity Types)
- Jigsaw readings with jigsaw writing responses being read by students
- Have students write in a project over the course of the semester... one topic, building a set of research and/or personal thought on the topic.
- Multi-genre writing - acrostic poem, limericks, diamante poems, biographical and character sketches, a letter to me in the future, newspaper style

- a writing needs assessment
- Ping Pong Word Association
- Cubing - described here
- writing a fairy tale
- research paper
- journal entries
- publish a magazine/newspaper
- class blog
- Plagiarism and Patchwriting: Purdue OWL “Summary, Plagiarism, and Quotation in Context” site, and OWL “Anonymous Paraphrasing”
- videos on writing strategies BBC / VOA

Speaking Activities (or Activity Types)
- Information gap & Jigsaw activities (Thornbury 56) - using "tango seating" - shoulders touching, facing opposite directions
- Role plays and simulations
- Contact assignments - interviewing outsiders
- video production by students on their cell phones, based on a script they write and have checked
- Missing Bag lesson - baby items, father items
- Speaking Needs assessment

a collection of ESL Listening Activities and Resources

What makes listening successful?- What to change: task, text, # of times
- hearing emotion and irony
- - teaching the layers of meaning
- can transcripts help in showing the layers?

Activities
- Watch 3 trailers pick the correct movie

from Helgesen
- dictate a short story, then have sts use a cloze activity to fill in the story as they imagined it with words for the boxes, while other missing words are supplied as they are heard
- Listen and raise your hands when you hear specific info
- What do I want to know? words I expect to hear?
- complete cloze activities first, then listen for correctness
- choose between types of conversation (dr. and patient, or not) and then write key words that show how you knew)("What are they talking about?" "What words give you hints")
- put main ideas on the board with distracters
- on the board: Order of the events, they listen and put them in order (extra for distracter)
- Find pictures of the situation on the web and have sts identify the best match
- have sts draw the situation with as many details as possible
-watch for emotions, how do speakers feel? how do you know?

from Penny Ur
- listening with gaps that students fill in; (silent listening with a video?)
- guessing definitions (person, place, thing, action) that the teacher gives

from Jack Richards
- identifying differences between a spoken and written text
- pair readings of the conversation audio previously heard

Wheatley comments that "people are literally clamoring for attention" (pg 90) while also relating a story of a teacher who spent the time listening to a student who had begun shouting at her. She also relates how it took some time for the student to realize that the teacher was really willing to listen since it had been so long since anyone had listened to him. This seems to me to be another salient point: people often do not expect to be listened to, or maybe just as accurately, they do not expect to be heard. A friend noted a while back that most people are only the 3-4 questions (of the right sort) from breaking down in tears about their own story, even to a stranger. We need to learn listening again, everywhere and often.

a collection of ESL Reading Activities and Resources

- Have students identify genre by giving them 3-4 completely different types of texts and asking for probable sources

- Have students write before or while reading to express their expectations and discoveries.

- Have students compare passages from simplified (for EFLLs) and original versions of a text.
Start with a discussion of how the students think language may be simplified for a new learner. Discuss, at the end, the question, "What does the author of the simplified version assume that the readers are and are not familiar with in terms of (a) their literary and cultural competence, and (b) their linguistic competence?" (Cots, "Critical Discourse Analysis in EFL Teaching," 342-343)

- Have students write their own questions, make summaries, monitor their own comprehension and motivation, review common transitions

- For work on reading rate - practice identifying phrases among similar phrases, short warmer activities; reread same material in detail getting farther each time, timed;

- Do reference questions backwards - (identify all the referents to a particular antecedent using various colored pens)

Online Reading Resources

https://readtheory.org/ 

https://rewordify.com/ 

http://cueprompter.com/ - teleprompter, to encourage faster reading / skimming / scanning

https://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp

http://cartozia.com/welcome-to-cartozia/ 

https://breakingnewsenglish.com/ 

https://www.elizabethclaire.com/products/easy-english-news-international-sales#een-scroll 

https://www.newsinlevels.com/# 

A Collection of Quotes on Learning and Teaching

We are so attuned to errors and so involved in ferreting them out that we tend to neglect to praise our students when they take a risk and get it wrong. Students are more likely to take risks if they see that risk-taking is noted and encouraged. So we should be on the lookout not only for what is correct but also for good attempts.

- Ann Raimes, "Errors: Windows into the Mind." College ESL, 1991.

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot.

- E. M. Forster, The Aspects of a Novel. (1956).

As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another's voices, in recognizing one another's presence. 

- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

Each writer has its own audience (intended readers) that might be part of a discourse community in which there is a degree of shared understandings and knowledge. Your class (the actual readers) may not be part of that discourse community and so they will make very different meaning and will need scaffolding if they want to read it as part of a particular community of readers. This is something to consider as you teach—what is your role as a teacher in this dilemma?

 - Leslie Turpin

This activity from Scott Thornbury's post, "V is for Vocabulary teaching" seemed useful and enjoyable:

I picked out 8 words from the text that I wanted my pupils to learn. Then I had my pupils identifying the words in the text. Task 2 was a selecting task where the pupils had to underline the words that were typical for India. They shared their work with a partner, explaining their choices. As task 3 they were matching the words with an English description from a dictionary. They also found antonyms and synonyms. Task 4 was a sorting activity where the pupils had to decide whether the words were nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. Finally, as a ranking and sequencing activity I had my pupils rank the words according to preference, to decide how important they thought knowing each word was. They discussed their ranking with a partner. (Mette B.)

TESOL Resources - Brainstorming & Online Collaborative Whiteboards

I am closing a professional (ESL) blog that I had, and I am going to transfer part of the posts here. Thus, the random splattering of resources.

Coggle is an online brainstorming / hierarchical organizing system.

Additional resources for online, whole class brainstorming include the following online whiteboards:
https://webwhiteboard.com/
https://awwapp.com/