• Making a Connection With Each Student: Research-Based Technique

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(This posting includes a handout link at the end of this post which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

Early in one term, I was starting a conferencing session with a new student, Anja. As she was sitting down next to me, she said, “David, I heard that you grew up in Chicago. I just had a homestay there!” I noticed that I immediately felt a connection to Anja that stayed with me from that day on.

There is some amazing research that explains how we make connections with others. And best of all, there are ways that we can apply this to building positive relationships with our students.

In their book Click: The Power of Instant Connections the authors, Ori and Rom Brafman, describe some enlightening experiments. In one study, some people volunteered for a made-up study about creativity. The researchers secretly set it up so that as half the volunteers left the researchers’ lab, someone wearing a badge with the same first name as the volunteers approached them asking for a donation to a charity. For example, if Cindy had just left the lab, she would be approached by a charity worker wearing a name tag that showed that her name, also, was Cindy.  Likewise, Susan would meet someone named Susan. The other half of the subjects were approached by someone with no badge. Now this is what I found remarkable. The first group whose same first names were on badges donated twice as much as the second group who saw a badge with a different name.

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• Three Ways to Use Authentic Materials In The ESL Classroom Depending On Purpose And Level.

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One day, a former student of mine, Jenny, wanted to ask me about an article that her present ESL teacher had assigned. The article was an opinion piece from a popular American magazine. The first thing that I noticed was that she had covered it with little translations above many of the words, including some whose meaning could clearly be understood from the context.

As with any materials that we bring to our class, a decision needs to be made about how to use authentic ones like that magazine article in a pedagogically sound way.

During a discussion about what authentic reading materials are on a TESOL list serv, some members felt it had to be something that was published in a native-speaker source.  But the consensus was that it could be anything that was written without simplification for non-native speakers.

However we define it, many of us ESL teachers will find reasons for incorporating authentic materials into our lessons. For example,
• The articles are more current than in ESL books.
• The content is of high interest or counter-intuitive.
• The article is especially relevant to the students currently in our class.
• We can help students develop confidence that they can understand things they might want to or need to read outside our ESL classes.

Three techniques for making authentic materials user-friendly for ESL students.

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• Fun Writing-Class Activity: Writing Hints and Solving Mysteries about Classmates

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(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)*

This posting is an updated version of a post from April 10, 2018:  • Writing Class Person Description Activity: Fun, Lively and Productive

I knew that this activity worked well with my ESL students. However, I hadn’t realized what they were experiencing internally until I did it myself.

Several of my colleagues and I decided to try out some activities by putting ourselves in the roles of students. And this was one of them.

In brief, we were randomly and secretly assigned one of the colleagues in the room. On a paper with only a number, we described the colleague physically and/or their personality and/or habit etc. Next we put all our papers on a stack, mixed them up and then each of us taped one on the wall. After that, we walked around reading the description and writing on a paper the name of the colleague being described. Finally, we shared our decisions with each other.

My insights into what students experience during this activity

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• Interviewing Candidates for a Writing-Teacher Position: Learning Their Approach to Dealing with Grammar in the Writing Context

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Our search committee for ESL Writing teachers completed the applicants’ interviews. However, unlike previous searches, we all felt completely confident in our ratings of the candidates. This was because of one part of the interview process that we had recently added.

Research of mainstream college instructors at our college showed that they expect students to have control of the grammar in their papers. Thus, our ESL Program realized the importance of selecting candidates who understood how to deal with grammar in the writing context. For this reason, we developed a part of our interview process that has been very effective for helping us choose the most qualified Writing teachers.

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