Connery Grammar is Palatable when Combined with Sweets

24/F 3:30 PM Van Sweringer

Type_Presentation: 90 Minute Concurrent session

PresentationTitle: Grammar is palatable when combined with sweets

ProgramStrand_Primary: English as a Second/Foreign Language

ProgramStrand_Secondary: Developmental/Basic Writing

Presentation_description:

Movies, games, food, and coffee-makers add to genuine language, interactive participation, and critical thinking necessary for academic literacy. Activity-based lessons encourage participation and capture the abstract concepts in the language classroom. Providing examples and sample lessons that have been used in a community college setting, these hands-on lessons are especially appropriate for ESL and English course instructors and tutors of all levels.

Session_summary:

I am submitting this proposal as a concurrent session; however, this topic can easily be expanded into a pre-conference institute (or both). The purpose of this presentation is to share instruction with other instructors regarding activity-based lessons. The literacy skills required for college success can seem overwhelming for many students, especially community college and ESL students. American Academic English can seem dry and rote (even for a linguistic nerd like myself!). Using activities, games, food, and realia significantly increases the class’s comfort level and participation, which in turn impacts their vocabulary and linguistic risk taking. Genuine language skills are embedded in each lesson. For example, specific language (reading & writing) skills are addressed and assessed through the targeted lesson. Also, informally, oral communication is developed as students are required to participate, and as they ask questions, they assist each other with vocabulary and negotiate concepts.

These lessons are a part of the students’ classroom instruction; as such, they do fulfill the learning objectives and outcomes for each course. The participants in this session will leave the session with specific examples of actual lessons that can be applied. Also, hopefully, the participants will embed hands-on lessons with their classrooms in the future. Explaining the value of an entire movie can be awkward; however, when that movie is used as a jumping point for four different organizational patterns, its value becomes more obvious.

The lessons presented are currently being used in the classroom, with tremendous results including an increase in participation (students state that they are also much more comfortable participating in other classes as well), dramatic increase in vocabulary and semantics, and a stronger showing on the tests, quizzes, and graded work. In fact, when I began to integrate these type of activities into every class, I actually reviewed my grading criteria because I thought I was grading inaccurately or had provided a ridiculously ‘easy’ test!

This directly ties in with CRLA’s purpose of sharing experiences and knowledge that have positively impacted student success—success that is present in the specific content area as well as expanding beyond the immediate scope. In addition to sharing my knowledge, I hope that other professionals will share their experiences (successful and horrid) so that the entire session can benefit from this shared knowledge. Hopefully, strategies regarding the application of these lessons can be shared as well. I am fortunate that my division dean is extremely supportive of seemingly unorthodox methods. Unfortunately, many colleagues do not have this support, and the participants can also share methods of communication and documentation that will enable instructors to implement some of these lessons. Ideally, the conversations sparked by this session will encourage informal “coffee” communication outside of the session.

Although this is targeted to the ESL classroom, I have used many of these activities in my developmental reading and writing courses as well as in college level ones like English Composition and Research Writing. Additionally, the tutoring program at HCC heavily encourages students to recognize and tap into their learning styles, and many of these type of activities have been used in the tutoring program (excellent for tutor training!).

I will open with an overview of the students and the course objectives. Then I will discuss the active lessons and provide examples of different lessons. Next, the audience will participate in a lesson of simples, comparatives and superlatives. They will use a variety of small candies for a lesson in description (vocabulary development and oral communication), and then they will compare and contrast the candies (vocabulary development, oral communication, cultural awareness), finally they will rank the candies according to agreed upon criteria (vocabulary development, oral communication and negotiation, cultural awareness). This lesson will take approximately 15 minutes (longer in an ESL classroom setting, but the group attending the session will have the grammar concepts). After the lesson, we will discuss the skills that students would develop as well as connections between the concrete experiences and the abstract knowledge measured.

Next, we will discuss “movie week” where the class watches an entire movie. This strategy has a significant amount of homework involved, but the students have always risen to the occasion. The week prior, the students have a significant amount of prep work regarding future discussion topics: the week of the movie, the students participate in guided discussions and complete ‘movie notes’ that address specific topics within the movie (to be filled out during the film); the weeks after the movie, the students write one mini essay based on the movie (summary/ response), and then they use the movie for practice paragraphs (class work or homework: using the movie as the basis for compare, contrast, cause, effect, & argument).

The participants of this session will be encouraged to share activities and resources that they have found useful, and these will be listed on a whiteboard or butcher paper. The presentation will be provided with my presentation outline. I also will provide handouts that include the specific lesson plans and ancillary worksheets. Also, I will include sample handouts from other activities used in class such as the coffeemaker exercise (process organizational pattern), with the lesson plan and genuine responses from the class.

PresenterBio:

With a decade of experience at Harford Community College, Leslie Connery is the Instructional Support Specialist for the Communications Skills Center, a walk-in tutoring center for all English courses as well as writing, study skills, and presentations in any course. She also teaches two courses a semester ranging from Developmental English through Research Writing. For the last five years, she has taught HCC’s ESL writing courses, which she also developed. At HCC, she is heavily involved in tutor training, multicultural projects, and the mentoring program. As an Instructional Support Specialist, she created a nursing remediation course and created a five-session nursing success study skills workshop program. Her MA is from University of MD, Baltimore County and is ISD: TESOL. Currently she is one of the co-leaders of the ESL/EFL SIG.