Insights from cognitive psychology for the ESL classroom


Written by - Jeff Brown, George Brown College

Reflecting on the question of what recent findings or ideas ESL teaching might take from other fields, I suggest that recent insights on learning from the eld of cognitive psychology are worth exploring. Cognitive psychology is the study of the neural processes that underpin mental operations such as memory, attention, and creative problem-solving, among others. It is a broad, multi-disciplinary area of study, and its empirical findings have been drawn upon by a range of other fields. ESL teachers would do well to take notice of some of these findings.

My remarks here draw exclusively upon Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s (2014) fascinating book, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. I highly recommend it to anyone curious about the vast body of research in cognitive psychology.  Continue Reading →

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Literacy lessons


Written by - Rachel Heydon, Emma Cooper, & Annie Tran, Western University

Core Concepts from Multiliteracies for Language Teachers in Contemporary Times

Three nine-year-old boys are sitting on a porch in urban Canada. They are engaged in a multiplayer session of Terraria, a video game that purports to combine the creativity and freedom of a sandbox environment with the strategic requirements of an action game. Each child is holding his own device—an iPod Touch, an iPad, an android tablet. Their eyes are xed on their own screens, sometimes scanning over to the others’, ngers busily pushing and swiping as they build biomes. During the game, one of the boys opens an Internet browser, types in a term from the game, and the children collectively research how to nd an element they want. Through the search results they read blog posts from other players and add their own information to the mix.  Continue Reading →

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Professional Development, Research, Teaching
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The interdisciplinary nature of language teaching


Written by - Julie Kerekes, University of Toronto

The English language classroom is one of only a handful of settings in which language is used and learned simply for the sake of using and learning it. Beyond the classroom, English is used for a myriad of transactional reasons—getting things done—and relational reasons—using language to build relationships. Just as one’s L2 is used beyond the classroom in innumerable disciplines and for in nite purposes, so too can multifarious elds contribute to our approaches to teaching the language. Here I will touch on three that have in uenced my teaching in ways that have been useful to my students in their real lives, beyond the classroom.

The rst is phonetics (i.e., how the human body makes the sounds of a particular language). How can English learners’ awareness of phonological processes enable them to accurately articulate the sounds of English which do not exist in their native languages?  Continue Reading →

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Let’s remember


Written by - Eufemia Fantetti

Years ago, while I still lived in Vancouver, I came across the Italian translation of Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” online and sent it to my father.

He called as soon as the mail arrived. “Thank you for the nice poesia you sending, so beautiful.”

For a moment, I considered letting him think I wrote the poem. I wondered how bad it would be for my karma to be so low as to claim authorship. This mistaken identity situation happened once before by accident, when my parents wrongly assumed I had written our graduating drama class production—a little known play called Oedipus Rex. I was a member of the chorus, dressed in a black, hooded cloak with my face painted to look skeletal. I crawled around the auditorium stage in this harbinger of doom costume with eleven other teenage girls,  Continue Reading →

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Editor’s Note


Written by - Brett Reynolds

Brett ReynoldsInterest in generative and transformational grammar peaked in the 1970s, while interest in cognitive linguistics (CL) has been growing since the mid 80s. In our lead article, Frank Boers explains how CL can be applied to teaching vocabulary and phraseology.

We have three articles on language tests. Shayla Ahmad reviews the Reading Section of the CELPIP-General Test, an alternative for immigrants wishing to demonstrate English- language ability. Beverly Baker and her colleagues at the University of Ottawa report on their research into telephone oral interview tasks in university admissions. And Elizabeth Jean Larson & Clarissa Lau review the STEP test for elementary and secondary students.

With this issue, we begin a series of articles on the least you should know about various language.  Continue Reading →

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Exploring Rhyme and Reason in Vocabulary and Phraseology


Written by - Frank Boers, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

No-one will dispute that language learning is to a large extent a matter of mastering myriads of words and phrases and that it therefore relies heavily on memory. Many pedagogy- minded applied linguists concur that a word or phrase is more likely to be remembered if the learner consciously “engages” with it in one way or another (Schmitt, 2008). This, then, raises the question of what kinds of cognitive engagement with lexical items are relatively fruitful, and how teachers (or materials writers) can prompt students to give these a try. This article considers a handful of proposals for stimulating engagement with words and phrases that are in broad agreement with a school of thought known as Cognitive Linguistics.

Cognitive Linguistics (CL) emerged in the 1980s as an alternative to the then dominant Chomskyan-style descriptions of language,  Continue Reading →

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A Review of the Reading Section of the CELPIP-general Test


Written by - Shayla Ahmad, George Brown & Humber Colleges

The Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program-General (CELPIP-G) Test aims to assess the general English language functional proficiency of individuals for adapting to life in Canada. The distinctiveness of the CELPIP-G Test, in contrast to other leading proficiency tests in the industry, arises from its design and use for Canadian immigration purposes. Apart from IELTS (International English Language Testing System), it is the only test that is accepted by the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) for permanent resident and citizenship purposes (“Citizenship and Immigration Canada”, n.d.). In addition, the test uses the English variety spoken in Canada. Accordingly, it exposes individuals to Canadian English rather than other varieties of English used in other proficiency tests. Using Bachman and Palmer’s qualities of tests (1996) as a framework,  Continue Reading →

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Assessment
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Telephone Oral Interview Tasks in University Admissions Language Testing


Written by - Beverly Baker, Joselyn Brooksbank, Irina Goundareva, Valerie Kolesova, Jessica McGregor, & Mélissa Pésant, University of Ottawa

Interactive functions and reports of anxiety

We report here on research we undertook to examine the entrance tests for applicants to second-language teaching programs in either English or French. In particular, we were interested in examining the speaking portion of this test, a one-on-one telephone interview. Individual one-on-one interviews are still the most common method of assessing speaking for high stakes contexts such as these (Luoma, 2004), and they are often conducted by telephone for cost and time savings.

This oral interview task follows a standard format, consisting of a warm-up, two separate tasks (a role play with the interviewer and a single long turn discussing an opinion on an issue), and a wind-down. The complete interview lasts approximately 10 to 15 minutes.  Continue Reading →

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Assessment, Research
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Steps to English Proficiency


Written by - Elizabeth Jean Larson & Clarissa Lau, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

A review of the framework and its writing continua
Abstract

Given the current increased presence of English Language Learners (ELLs) in our Ontario elementary and secondary classrooms, teachers are faced with a challenging task of assessing each student’s language ability, placing students in suitable programs, and tracking progress. The Steps To English Proficiency is a tool developed by the Ministry of Education, team of educators, and experts in assessment and content that will support classroom teachers to make appropriate decisions and continue to track their students’ performance in order to make the most suitable choices for their students. This article will specifically review the writing portion of the framework and hopes to provide insight to teachers who may be interested to adopt this framework by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of this framework.  Continue Reading →

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Assessment, Professional Development
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Language on the Orient Express: A Guide to Mandarin for English Teachers


Written by - Eric Henry, Saint Mary’s University

Foreigners living in 1920s Shanghai apparently counselled new arrivals that “those who learn Chinese go mad” (Kane, 2006, p. 17). Certainly there has been a long tradition of outsiders looking on the Chinese language as a confusing mass of chicken-scratch writing and syncopated bursts of rhyming syllables. In turn, Chinese people themselves were often portrayed by Westerners as aloof, inscrutable and incomprehensible to outsiders. The reasons for surmounting such racist representations are pressing for both English- speaking students of Chinese and teachers of English to Chinese, particularly in light of the crucial role China will play on the global stage in the twenty-first century. With this in mind, this article provides a general overview of Mandarin Chinese geared towards teachers and students who have had limited exposure to the language.  Continue Reading →

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Supporting Blended Learning in an EFL Teaching Environment


Written by - John Allan & Jennifer Wicks, Centre for Teaching Excellence, College of the North Atlantic - Qatar

Supporting blended learning at a college with a face-to-face classroom model can be a challenge, particularly in an EFL learning environment. Faculty need clear guidelines about the institutional definition of blended learning, a strong sense of why they should “blend” technology and face-to-face methods, as well as the know-how for tools and resources amongst a range of other considerations. In order to better support faculty, our Learning Technologies team offered a Blended Learning Workshop Pilot Series to support a culture of learning starting with basic technology tools and resources freely available to faculty. The following describes how we went about creating and delivering the series, and provides insights into what we learned from the experience and feedback from faculty.

Blended Learning

We have decided to use the definition from the University of Central Florida’s Blended Learning Toolkit for the purposes of our pilot series,  Continue Reading →

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Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in a Disciplinary Context


Written by - Percival Santos, London Academy, London, UK.

Critical thinking (CT) is a fundamental defining concept of a Western university education (Barnett, 1997) and it lies “at the heart of EAP” (de Chazal, 2014, p. 12). However, there is  a  discrepancy  between  the  findings  of  several  experimental  studies  that  show  CT to be particularly suited to a content or theme-based approach, and how it is currently conceptualized  and  taught  in  many  English  for  Academic  Purposes  (EAP)  programs. Some EAP foundation programs tend to regard it as a discrete transferrable skill- one not necessarily embedded within a particular theme or subject.

This article aims to answer one question: how can CT best be taught to EFL/EAP students? It will argue that integrating the teaching of CT within a discipline or subject is particularly effective for EFL learners.  Continue Reading →

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