TESL Canada Journal
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“They’re Different From Who I Am”: Making Relevant Identities in the Middle Through Talk-in-Interaction
No full textThis qualitative study builds on earlier research on language and identity by focusing on how Canadian Generation 1.5 university students enact their identities through talk-in-interaction. Drawing on (applied) Conversational Analysis (CA) to analyze critically the production and management of social institutions in talkin-interaction in tandem with Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) to examine the cultural resources individuals draw on to describe, identify, or make reference to other people and themselves, I undertake a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of data from semistructured interviews with four Generation 1.5 students conducted in a large, public, English-medium university in British Columbia. Rather than approaching the interview as a neutral technology that seeks to discover “truths,” I theorize the interviews as meaning-making ventures in themselves, adopting a reflexive orientation that recognizes that data are situated representations co-constructed through interaction with the interviewer. The study reports on how these students, in response to the interactionally occasioned constraints “inhabiting” our talk, produced identities that aligned with select “scholarly representations” from the applied linguistics literature that casts Generation 1.5 students in the middle. The study reveals how identity, power, and social issues are produced and managed in talk-in-interaction and how insights from M/CA might address matters of social justice in educational contexts
Helping Children to Learn at Home: A Family Project to Support Young English-Language Learners
No full textThe Coalition for Equal Access to Education (CEAE) is a Calgary-based nonprofit organization committed to working with community, education, and government stakeholders to promote access to quality, equitable education and services for K-12 English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners. CEAE is active in developing innovative projects, research publications, and informing policy and decision-makers on issues that affect education and services for children and youth. In addition, the organization engages in community development initiatives through literacy development support for ethnocultural children and youth, leadership training on active parental involvement, and promotion of systemic change and cultural competence. In its work to address the complex needs of ESL children, families, and the professionals who support them, the CEAE has developed Helping Children Learn at Home, a parents’ program that supports ethnocultural parents in creating healthy learning environments in the home, in understanding better and addressing their young children’s learning needs, learning about the Canadian education system, and contributing to decision-making processes in schools and in the community that affects their children’s educational success. This article describes the program and the pilot session completed in February 2011. The evaluation phase included feedback from the participants, the CEAE staff, and the curriculum developers in order to produce and publish a completed version of the document, which will be available for use by other agencies
The Myth of FANBOYS: Coordination, Commas, and College Composition Classes
No full textThe claim that the words for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so (FANBOYS) constitute a complete list of English coordinating conjunctions is examined though syntactic analysis and found wanting. This analysis is presented as an illustration of the need for teachers constantly to question the choice of material that we present to our students and our reasons for presenting it
Depth versus Breadth of Lexical Repertoire: Assessing Their Roles in EFL Students’ Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition
No full textThis study explores the roles of depth and breadth of lexical repertoire in L2 lexical inferencing success and incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. Students read a graded reader containing 13 pseudo-words and attempted to infer the meanings of underlined target words. The Word Associates Test (WAT, Read, 2004) and the Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, Schmitt, & Clapham, 2001) were administered to measure depth and breadth of lexical repertoire respectively. To rate retention of inferred meanings, I administered the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS, Paribakht & Wesche, 1996, 1997) with a repeated measure design. The results indicated that (a) both breadth and depth of lexical knowledge correlated positively with long-term retention of inferred word meanings. However,depth of vocabulary knowledge indicated a higher correlation; and (b) scores on both breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge had a significant positive correlation with success of lexical inferencing through reading, but depth of vocabularyknowledge was a stronger predictor of inferencing success
Official Language Bilingualism for Allophones in Canada: Exploring Future Research
No full textThis article offers a review of policy and research as they relate to Allophones and their access to French Second Official Language (FSOL) programs in English dominant Canada. Possible areas of future research are woven throughout the review as questions emerge in the summary of relevant literature
An International Graduate Student’s ESL Learning Experience Beyond the Classroom
No full textInternational graduate students are coming in ever-growing numbers to English-speaking countries. Educators have long believed that the successful English-learning experience of these students in their home countries will naturally lead to success in their academic studies and social life abroad. However, this may be not true. Using my English-learning experiences as a basis for research, in this article I explore the role of target-language improvement in adaptation to new environments. Based on a supportive sociocultural theory of second-language acquisition, the article provides recommendations for assisting international graduate students, especially those from East Asia, to enhance their academic performance and quality of life in Canada
A Critical Role for Role-Playing Pedagogy
No full textThis article draws from practitioners’ experience and from scholarship in a variety of disciplines to construct a rationale for incorporating what we call “critical roleplay” in the English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) classroom. We discuss the historical significance of role-play in TESOL and explore why this type of pedagogy has become less prominent in scholarship from recent decades. We argue for a new direction in role-play pedagogy that foregrounds critical thinking as essential to academic literacy. We describe several role-play activities that were successfully implemented in college-level EAP classes to demonstrate that academic role-play can be both cognitively challenging and linguistically relevant
Immigrant Students Navigating Canadian Schools: A Longitudinal View
No full textFindings are presented from studies of the academic and language achievement of 1,307 young immigrant students whose educational history was traced from their arrival in Canada and entry into primary education in the early 1990s until their graduation from secondary schools. Five major findings are reported: school mobility, disappearance and dropout rates, success in provincial examinations, eligibility for postsecondary education, and ethnolinguistic differences in academic success. Findings reveal distinct differences in academic success related to immigrant class, gender, and first language (L1), whereas differences related to age on arrival (AOA) are less apparent. These and other findings are reported and described, and implications for pedagogical policy are presented
“Like a newborn baby”: Using Journals to Record Changing Identities Beyond the Classroom
No full textThe purpose of this article is to describe the sociocultural learning of 40 secondyear students in a Bachelor of Arts in English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) program in Auckland, New Zealand. These learners participated in a teaching and learning intervention involving journalized community placement. The study illustrates how reflective journals can be used as a vibrant teaching, learning, and assessment tool, enabling students to make connections with the culture of their host country, to reflect on their experiences of language socialization, and to become aware of their own investments. Students from the four categories of EAL learner (immigrants, international students, study-abroad students, and refugees) participated in a real-world community/workplace writing reflective diaries recording their observations and interactions. Qualitative analysis using discourse positioning reveals students describing themselves in relation to themes of changing perceptions of English abilities, changing identities relative to the host culture, and participation as socialization. The article concludes that writing reflective journals helps learners to evaluate how far they have come as learners and citizens and to find spaces for the enhancement of human possibility (Norton,2000). The practical pedagogical implication of the study is that combined with journaling, community placements contribute to a positive, future-focused “pedagogy for authentic being” (Barnett, 2004)