ESL and Teaching with Technology

Checking In

Do you have NNES students in your classes? How is that going?

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Have you taught NNES students before?

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What were your big takeaways from reading and talking about teaching a mix of native English speakers and NNES students?

Terminology

ESL = English as Second Language

EFL = English as a Foreign Language

ELL = English Language Learner

L2 = 2nd Language Learner/User

NNSE (or NNES) = Non-Native Speaker of English

International Student = Non-US Native

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Intersections of NNES Writers and Tech

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• NNES writers may depend on different technologies in order to read and compose.

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• NNES writers will have unique, valuable experiences with mass media, social media, and mobile media.

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• NNES writers may ask to use familiar websites and programs instead of those highlighted in class.

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Technological Meets Cultural Literacy

Tony Silva’s Top 10 Strategies

• Provide across-the-board help.
• Include more work on planning/invention.
• Teach writing in stages (e.g., separate revising from editing).
• Offer realistic strategies for planning, transcribing, and reviewing.
• Focus on audience expectations.
• Provide strategies for unfamiliar textual patterns and text types.
• Familiarize students with grammatical and lexical resources.
• Instruct students to write on one topic from a variety of perspectives.
• Make syntactic and lexical options available in the contexts of students’ writing.
• Acknowledge, and address, international students’ overall distinct needs.

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Technological Meets Cultural Literacy

Tony Silva’s Top 10 Strategies

• Provide across-the-board help.
• Include more work on planning/invention.
• Teach writing in stages (e.g., separate revising from editing).
• Offer realistic strategies for planning, transcribing, and reviewing.
• Focus on audience expectations.
• Provide strategies for unfamiliar textual patterns and text types.
• Familiarize students with grammatical and lexical resources.
• Instruct students to write on one topic from a variety of perspectives.
• Make syntactic and lexical options available in the contexts of students’ writing.
• Acknowledge, and address, international students’ overall distinct needs.

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Negotiating Cultural Differences

• All students could use a primer on the history, function, and social norms of specific technologies and genres.

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• Simple, step-by-step walkthroughs of specific procedures and processes are especially important for NNES students who may be unfamiliar with particular interfaces and programs.

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Technological Meets Cultural Literacy

What are the cultural literacies involved in:

[Writing an email?]

Typing a paper in MS Word?

Writing a discussion post in Blackboard?

Finding and organizing sources online?

Organizing group work (group chats, etc)?

Writing a blog post?

Using social media? (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter)

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What are the potential difficulties for NNES students?

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Building on Existing Strengths

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Are there online/digital writing situations in which international students are perhaps more skilled than domestic students?

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Building on Existing Strengths

International students may have experience with:

-Writing programs with different capabilities than MS Word

-Social networking tools other than the standard options (facebook, twitter, etc)

-Multimedia applications for keeping in touch back home (or up to speed on hometown events)

-Technologies for documenting travel and sightseeing

-Finding resources (including news sites, etc.) for research

Design Technologies with NNES Writers

Design units/activities can add additional levels of complexity for NNES writers, such as:

• Learning a new platform with both user interface and language barrier
• Tough to keep up with an in-class tutorial
• Can be tough to understand online tutorials in English, or takes lots of time/effort to find in native language or translate

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What strategies can we use to address some of these problems?

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Design Technologies with L2 Writers

Design-focused assignments can lead to fruitful discussions about intercultural communication, too.

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• Focusing on process and how we learn to use different technologies
• Using highly-visual texts from different eras, cultures, etc. as examples to analyze

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Design Technologies with L2 Writers

Using the following links, pick a movie poster comparison in the Buzzfeed piece. (link)

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Then, using the Culture and Color article (link) and the CARP principles, try to unpack the visual messaging of the posters.

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Consider:

1. What do these analyses reveal?

2. Do you think this would be a good activity for your students?

Additional Resources

The Purdue OWL (obviously)

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/586/1

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ESL Technology.com

https://esltech.wordpress.com/

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50 Essential Resources for ESL Students

http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/50_essential_resources_for_esl_students/

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