Volume 25, No. 1 Winter 2007

TESL Canada Journal     Volume 25, No. 1  Winter 2007    

This article describes the implementation of one element of an adapted language arts curriculum for Deaf students in a bilingual (American Sign Language and English) educational setting. It examines the implementation of writing workshops in three elementary classrooms in a school for Deaf students. The typical steps of preparing/planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing were carried out by all students in both languages to create stories and produce final products in both videotaped American Sign Language and written English. The effective practice of writing workshop was adapted to meet the learning needs of Deaf students by including visual processing, meaning-based teaching strategies, and bilingual methods. By having opportunities to create and revise stories in their first language (ASL), students experience an increased sense of ownership of their work and developed some of the metalinguistic skills that are essential to becoming effective writers.

Linguistic minority students in schools must acquire and operate in a second language while negotiating mainstream texts and content areas, along with negotiating an emerging new sense of social identity. This article presents journal data from an Australian ethnographic study that explored the relationship between second-language use, textual practices in school, and the representation of identity. Such texts normally lie outside the dominant school discourses, but for students they are a powerful means of negotiating identity and gaining vital language practice. For teachers journals provide critical insights in the experience s of their students and into their developing language competence.

Studies investigating cultural influences on second-language writing have been mainly product-oriented. Moreover, research on writing processes has mostly focused on the strategies of writing and learning to write. Writing processes where we can see the evolution of the writer's identity and beliefs have been less adequately addressed. Therefore, this article focuses on the dynamic relationship of culture, identity, and beliefs with regard tot the writing process (the micro-process) and the process of learning to write (the macro-process) in the ESL context. A study consisting of two cases was undertaken to examine the reconstruction of the writer's identity and the evolution of the learner's beliefs in an ESL context. Data for Case A include writings by and interviews with a first-year ESL student; data for Case B include class observations of and interviews with students and their teacher in an ESL writing class. It has been found that the notions of culture, identity, and beliefs are interwoven; they work together to reshape the learners' beliefs in terms of education and writing and to reconstruct a writer's identity that incorporates multiple influences and multiple intentions. Recommendations are offered for guiding ESL students in the exploration of their first and host cultures and for facilitating the evolution of beliefs and the reconstruction of identities.

Large scale testing in English affects second-language students not only greatly but also differently than first-language learners. The research literature reports that confounding factors in such large-scale testing such as varying test formats may differentially affect the performance of students from diverse backgrounds. An investigation of test performance between ESL/ELD students and non-ESL/ELD students on the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) was performed to investigate whether test formats in reading comprehension affected the two groups differently. The results indicate that the overall pattern of difficulty levels on the three test formats were the same between ESL/ELD students and non-ESL/ELD students, except that ESL/ELD students performed substantially lower on each format and that more variability was found among ESL/ELD students. Further, discriminant analysis results indicated that only the multiple-choice questions obtained a significant discriminant coefficient in differentiating the two groups. The results suggest a lack of association between test formats and test performance.

This article reviews theories and research on revision in second-language (L2) writing. It examines how and what L2 writers revise, compares the revision practices of skilled and unskilled L2 writers, and suggests instructional practices to help learners improve their L2 revision skills.

TESL Canada Journal     Volume 25, No. 2   Spring 2008   

This article investigates the strategies that EFL students used and how they adjusted these strategies in response to various listening test tasks. The test tasks involved four forms of listening support: previewing questions, repeated input, background information preparation, and vocabulary instruction. Twenty-two participants were enlisted and interviewed from a sample of 160 business major students based on their listening anxiety levels. Overall results showed that various listening tasks influenced test takers’ listening strategies by varying degrees, with previewing test questions tending to have a greater effect on strategy use than other types of support. This study also found that both anxious and non-anxious students knew how to use the available information before taking a test; however, while doing the task, many students lacked competence to employ the strategies they intended to use. Finally, the article discusses some subtle problems reported by the interviewees and also provides scope for future research.

This study investigated the extent to which word games and culturally relevant songs and stories could motivate senior secondary school students in Nigeria, thereby enhancing their performance in English. A pre-test/post-test control group design was used. The sample consisted of 100 senior secondary school II students randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. Four instruments were designed, validated, and used for data collection. Four hypotheses were formulated and tested. The findings revealed that the use of word games and culturally relevant instructional activities was beneficial for these students, as they served as an effective motivational strategy that contributed to better performance in English-language learning at the senior secondary school level.

Given the increasing numbers of ESL students in Canadian classrooms, this study investigated how teachers of mainstream classes assess the written work of ESL students and whether they use different assessment strategies for ESL versus non-ESL students. Interviews were conducted with seven mainstream teachers from a private high school in Ontario. Although within-school variation was evident in the participants’ approaches to assessing the work of both ESL and non-ESL students, most participants modified their assessment strategies when marking the work of ESL students. This finding suggests a need for school-level discussions and structured professional development activities relating to assessing ESL students’ work.

This case study addressed issues of ESL mainstreaming by examining a teacher’s experiences and needs in teaching a social studies class where ESL students were mainstreamed. Extended observations, semistructured interviews, and documentary analysis served to unravel classroom dynamics, showing that the teacher modified various aspects of teaching to accommodate the needs of ESL students, which facilitated their access to the content, but at the same time created problems that had not been examined or predicted by past research. This study exposes the dilemma of providing comprehensible instruction to ESL students and highlights the role of differentiated instruction in diverse mainstream classrooms and the place of students’ first languages in learning academic content.

This article focuses on an attempt by a teacher education institute to empower non-English majors to teach English at the primary level, drawing on a preservice English-language teacher education program for undergraduates at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. The course, which has been running for three years, aims to develop student teachers’ skills in analyzing grammatical features in primary-level writing, based on a three-step approach designed by the author specifically for non-English majors. The article also explores the difficulties that student teachers face in learning to identify, classify, and explain various types of errors, including suggestions on how to empower student teachers to help primary-level pupils understand and use grammar rules effectively.

This article examines the code-switching (CS) practices of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) young children in kindergarten and grade 1 classrooms. The author argues that their use of CS went beyond relief of psycholinguistic stress or coping with liminality (sense of living between two languages and cultures). Through several narratives constructed using ethnographic data, the author explores CLD students’ use of CS to respond to the sociolinguistic and sociopolitical dynamics that they encountered in their early-years classrooms. CS enabled students to address their language and literacy needs, assert their identities, and defy subtractive and assimilative orientations that they experienced with respect to lack of incorporation of their first languages. Further, data affirm Cummins’ (2001) assertion that students do not passively accept dominantgroup attributions of inferiority, but actively resist the process of subordination.

Recent instructional trends in the field of TESOL emphasize teaching language through course content. The dual focus of content-based English instruction (CBI) provides a way for language teachers to engage learners with challenging material while increasing their linguistic proficiency. This article describes a unit in a CBI course at a Japanese university that was designed to promote the development of critical consciousness (Freire, 2005) through the analysis of a film. Students identified race- and gender-related issues, engaged in discussions about these issues, and finally wrote a critical response paper to the film.