Volume 24, No. 1 Winter 2006

TESL Canada Journal     Volume 24, No. 1  Winter 2006   

This article highlights how citizenship and citizenship education are sites of contestation. I have analyzed the process of curriculum making of the LINC 4 & 5 Curriculum Guidelines (TCDSB,1999) through three stages: from production, through reception, to implementation. The production stage is investigated by contrasting commentaries from two members of the Advisory or Specialist Committees who helped to prepare the document. The reception stage is investigated through interviews with five present or former LINC teachers, who discuss how they used or are using the Guidelines apart of their curriculum-in-use. Although this LINC document can be characterized as representing a "Liberal democratic" approach to citizenship and a transactional approach to citizenship education in a multicultural framework, a minority position supporting a more critical and transformational approach to citizenship education is also evident.

The aim of this article is to raise awareness in L2 education about the relationship between second-language learners' linguistic choices in the L2 and their identities. The author reviews empirical research and language-learning narratives that show that L2 learners may purposely use nonstandard L2 forms. Using a poststructuralist framework to conceptualize identity, the author argues that these second-language learners use nonstandard language in the L2 in order to create positive identities, and in some cases to resist social inequalities, in the L2 community. The implications of this research for second-language teachers are discussed and suggestions for classroom practice are offered.

For content-based instruction (CBI) to work to its maximum potential, a concerted planning effort must be made to address language objectives, combined with effective instructional strategies that target and assess student performance in relation to those objectives. In this article, after considering various models of content-language integration, we purpose a flexible and dynamic planning model for content-language integration. This model has been helpful in our work with ESL teachers learning to conceptualize lesson planning and curriculum development using CBI across a variety of K-12 settings. Examples implementing the planning model are provided using a curriculum about Arctic exploration and Inuit cultures.

This case study examined factors that affected a Korean physician's learning and use of ESL in an English-speaking country, using data from interviews, observations, notebook memos and e-mails. The findings indicated that individual factors-personality (perfectionism and extroversion), occupation, beliefs, and motivation—and social-contextual factors—lack of contact with native speakers and insecurity about speaking English in the presence of other Koreans—influenced the participant's learning and use of ESL. The findings also revealed that the participant's motivation and extroversion played a role in overcoming the social-contextual obstacles limiting learning opportunities, which illustrates interactions between individual and social-contextual factors.

When I visited Canadian elementary and secondary schools over the past 10 years, many teachers told me that it was difficult to get English-as-a-second language (ESL) parents involved in K-12 education. I was often asked by teachers, "Why don't they show up at school?" The absence of ESL parents from school is often misinterpreted as parents' lack of concern about their children's education. However, many ESL parents indicated that they care passionately. Instead of assuming that ESL parents do not care, educators need to understand the barriers that hinder some parents from participating in their children's education. This article explores the barriers affecting ESL parent-teacher communication based on relevant literature and the author's reflections. It goes on to identify parents' and teachers' varying perspectives on ESL learning, followed by an indication of successful strategies to improve ESL parents' participation. The article concludes that schools and teachers must take the initiative if the resource of ESL parent participation is to be fully utilized.

Extensive research has been conducted about feedback on writing in both L1 and L2 classrooms. Although much of the research suggests that correcting grammar does not help students make long-term improvements, many teachers continue to believe that they must correct all errors. In addition, students report that they want teachers to mark errors. This article reports on the attitude of students of English as a foreign language when presented with feedback that that gives motivating, positive comments coupled with suggestions for improvement. Many students learned to accept this feedback, but any wanted the addition of correction of very grammatical error.

This study is based on a survey of 1,305 university students enrolled in English and other foreign-language classes across year levels in four major universities in France . It explores the factors that promote or hinder multilingualism, with special attention to the following questions: What are the beliefs and attitudes of students enrolled in various postsecondary institutions across France toward learning a foreign language? How do these beliefs and attitudes change as students progress from beginning first-year students to upper years? The results suggest that the reasons first-year students typically have for studying a foreign language have more to do with internal factors (e.g., personal attitude) that with external factors (e.g., social value). Moreover, this trend becomes more pronounced with upper-year students whose motivation to learn a foreign language compared with that of first-year students is influenced less by perceived societal beliefs and more by intrinsic reasons.

TESL Canada Journal     Volume 24, No. 2   Spring 2007   

This article draws on the results from 18 round-table discussions and a symposium that involved community, education, and government stakeholders in building a vision for quality, equitable ESL education. The findings suggest six pillars of effective ESL education: comprehensive programming; responsive funding allocation; cultural competence; networking, collaboration, and coordination; capacity-building and advocacy; and effective leadership. Also examined in this article are the notion of the educational entitlement of ESL learners and the roles of community, education and government stakeholders in building effective ESL education.

Immigrant students who attend high schools in small Canadian cities are likely to be few in each school. Consequently, they receive limited English as a second language (ESL) services and support by school personnel. This study aimed to acquire a deeper understanding of the organization and provision of ESL services in high schools in a small city with few immigrant students. Results indicate that the limited ESL support and services available in these schools pose challenges to the educational success of these students; however, sufficient resources and support would enable meeting their educational needs better; even given their low numbers. Suggestions for improvements are provided.

In the United States and Canada , as in many other countries, it has become common for teachers not specifically trained in English as a second language (ESL) to have immigrant and minority language students in their classrooms. These students, who are generally learning English along with the culture of their new countries, present many challenges for their teachers, who are often not appropriately trained to meet their needs. Often teachers of mathematics, science, and other content-area courses feel less than prepared for these students and lack the skills needed to accommodate instruction to their unique needs. In addition, these same teachers often harbor attitudes and beliefs about immigrant students that are not conducive to the development of a safe learning environment and are difficult to alter. This article describes how a community-based service-learning project (CBSL) was used to begin to investigate the attitudes and beliefs of preservice content-area teachers toward English language learners (ELLs). In this study many participants exhibited some level of change in their attitudes about working with ELLs.

Although the relationship between research and language teaching is often discussed among applied linguists, the views of language teachers are often reported anecdotally, if at all. Our article explores how language teaching colleagues in a Canadian university view this relationship as expressed in open-ended questionnaire responses and contributions to follow-up discussions. We ask what research issues interest colleagues and how teaching insights might contribute to research. Responses proved remarkably full and frank, and our investigation elicited ideas for a collective effort to develop a shared program of language teaching research.

In this study it was hypothesized that field dependence or independence would introduce systematic variance into Iranian EFL learners' overall and task-specific performance on task-based reading comprehension tests. One thousand, seven hundred, forty-three freshman, sophomore, junior and senior students, all majoring in English at various Iranian universities and colleges, took the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT). The resulting 582 field-independent (FI) and 707 field-dependent (FD) students then took the 1990 version of IELTS. Using SPSS commands for collapsing continuous variables into groups and participants' IELTS scores (based on the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles), four proficiency groups were identified for each cognitive style. From each proficiency group, 36 FD and 36 FI individuals were selected through a matching process. The resulting sample of 288 participants took the Task-Based Reading Test (TBRT) designed for the study. Data analysis revealed that individuals' cognitive styles resulted in a significant difference in their overall test performance in the proficient, semiproficient, and fairly proficient groups, but not in the low-proficient group. The findings also indicated that cognitive style resulted in a significant difference in the participants' performance on true-false, sentence completion, outlining, scanning, and elicitation tasks in all proficiency groups.