TESL Canada Journal
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Teaching Writing in Rural Thailand: Considering New Perspectives
No full textThis article reports on a practical writing workshop for Thai teachers of English in a rural Thai setting. The teachers were participants in a Certificate in TEFL course sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA and taught by the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization, Regional Language Centre (SEAMEO RELC). The genre approach to teaching writing is proposed as a way of helping teachers look beyond structural elements like vocabulary, punctuation, and spelling. The social functions and language choices of three important genres of writing, Description, Anecdote, and News Item, are examined in the article. The principles and practices may be generalizable to similar situations, that is, places where English is taught as a foreign language
Exploring Culture in Texts Designed for Use in Adult ESL Classrooms
No full textThis article examines the presentation of culture in texts designed for adult learners of English as a second language in Canada. Guiding the analysis is a view of culture as a process of making sense of the world and a site of struggles of people with multiple and shifting identities over meaning and representation. The article discusses the role of texts as culture bearers in second language classrooms. It also addresses aspects of the method of critical discourse analysis, which is employed to tackle the following questions: What is considered cultural knowledge in the selected texts? Whose views of culture are presented in the texts? Do these texts allow students to explore and negotiate their own cultural experiences in the new Canadian environment? The article concludes that in the selected texts culture is constructed as a national attribute consisting of sets of stable values and behavior patterns, a construction that ignores the conflicts and fluidity of cultural forms that characterize human encounters
Same Task, Different Activities: Issues of Investment Identity, and Use of Strategy
No full textDrawing on activity theory and the construct of investment, this article explores how three francophone CEGEP students variously invested in a task that involved producing short documentary-style videos in English. Case study data included interviews with the students and teacher and student work portfolios. The analysis suggests that the appropriation of, or resistance to, particular strategies was related to the construct of motive and issues of identity. Although all three participants had a positive orientation to L2 language learning, differences surfaced about the value attached to classroom language learning, task preference, and attitude to group work. The author argues for task-based research that takes into account the sociocultural dimension of task performance and learner's perspective, as well as studies that involve a broader range of tasks than is currently the case in traditional SLA task-based research. Implications of the study for ESL teaching are discussed
Service-Learning as a Pedagogy to Promote the Content, Cross-Cultural, and Language-Learning of ESL Students
No full textThis article describes the incorporation of service-learning in a sheltered-content course called American Society for Japanese college sophomores studying in the United States. By engaging students in activities designed to address community needs, service-learning holds great promise for furthering cognitive knowledge, cross-cultural awareness, and language competences. After profiling the academic program, a definition of service-learning is provided along with a review of the preparatory steps leading to a weekend of service. The exercises developed to help students make sense of their firsthand experiences and a critique of this instructional activity round out this discussion
Hitting the Mark: Learner's Perceptions of Course Design in a Foundation ESOL Program
No full textThis article investigates a first-year undergraduate program in TESOL consisting of three strands: a language-based course, a theme-based content course, and a sheltered-content course. Learners rated different aspects of their development in language, skills, and strategies-as well as motivational factors-over two semesters. Overall, learners rated the language-based course more highly in the first semester and the two content courses more highly in the second. Three conclusions were drawn: first, variation in methodology and design of the content course is such that it is difficult to generalize about generic types of content course; second, our EAP course/program might benefit from progressing asymmetrically, by starting with a more extensive language component and ending with a more extensive content component; and, third, no course was perceived by learners to provide optimum language acquisition and skills development in every domain
Developing Program Standards for Adult ESL
No full textThe following article is a summary of the process undertaken by the Alberta Teachers of English as a Second Language (ATESL) in developing standards for adult ESL programs across the province. It outlines the various stages involved in this government1unded project, highlights the outcomes and learnings from each stage, and raises some questions related to the future implementation of program standards
Language -Learning: The Importance of Access to Community
No full textThis article is based on data derived from a four-year ethnographic study that followed two cohorts of ESL learners enrolled in mainstream Canadian primary classrooms from kindergarten through grade 2. It draws on sociocultural theory, based on the work of the Russian scholars Vygotsky and Bakhtin and developed in North America by Lave and Wenger (1991), Rogoff (1994), and others. In the article, we examine classroom practices that appear to offer our participants access to the linguistic resources of their community and those in which our participants appear to have limited access to these resources. Choral and small group activities are contrasted with Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences to show contrasting possibilities for access. We argue that speech situations in classrooms that are ludic or playful, that, in Bakhtin's (1981) terms, offer ever new ways to mean, are those in which children have the possibility of appropriating the words of others and of finding voices and utterances for themselves