Proceedings of the CATESOL State Conference, 2005

Instructions: Click on either the author or on the article title to link to the complete article. All articles are in PDF format.

Authors of Articles

Articles and Abstracts

Acquiring Language(s): What Data Show
Stephen B. Ross
Data clearly indicate how children acquire the 24 consonants and 16 vowels of American English in six stages from before 18 months to over eight years. These are explained using ‘Simplified English Phonology’. Applications were made to different languages, where children (and adult learners) are the same

American Civilization and Language Through Art History
Seth A. Streichler
American culture classes focus on conventional perceptions of everyday life, but some students seek a more profound overview of the United States. This presentation discussed the use of American art as a vehicle for learning language and culture, leading students to view the U.S. as a richly varied civilization

Are Non-Native Speakers Able to Converse?
Dr. Eliana Santana-Williamson
What is taught in L2 speaking classes is not always based on the features of the spoken language. This article presents a corpus linguistics study on NS and NNS ability to use certain elements which are part of the structure of conversation and how that affects NNS’ ability to converse.

Error Coding Effects on Revision in Generation 1.5 Writing
Angela T. Foin and Ellen J. Lange
A comparison was made between the error rate of eight selected errors in an early draft where the instructor indicated errors and the final draft. The eight errors were examined individually; students were more successful in finding and correcting some errors than others. Implications for error correction and grammar instruction are discussed.

Exploratory Model on Advising Bilingual Parenting among Chinese Immigrants
Yeng Yn Chung and Chunbo Zhang
This paper examines how Chinese parental attitudes toward their children’s heritage language maintenance and development are affected by their own educational, cultural and immigrant experiences. Based on an analysis of parents’ various concerns, a model is proposed for advising first generation Chinese parents on raising bilingual children.

Film Ethnography: "No Man's Land" for an ESL Student
Miriam Ezzani-Kotun, Serena Gould and Jennifer Malia
The presenters discussed their ethnographic study which focused on the impact of linguistic, socio-cultural, heritage language, and ethnic identity factors on an English Language Learner. They displayed their main findings in a short documentary film tracing a 2nd grade Chinese boy's day-to-day experiences.

Horton Hears a Phoneme: Dr. Seuss for Phonetics and Pronunciation
Alayne Cramer
This article summarizes the workshop and highlights insights the presenter gained from a question asked by a participant. The workshop demonstrated the presenter's use of Dr. Seuss books to identify and enliven rhythmic patterns of speech and to teach specific sound patterns. But does using Dr. Seuss promote stilted speech?

Integrating WWW, Multimedia, and Culture in ESL Classrooms
Paoli Lee
The presenter introduced how to use a website that contains different strategies, WebQuest, forum, chat room, video segment, and Hot Potatoes, to facilitate students' practice. The content focused on cross-cultural communication that ESL students encounter in their daily life. Sample websites and useful tools are discussed within the article.

Integrating Assessment with Grammar-for-Writing Instruction
Patricia Porter and Deborah vanDommelen
ESOL college writing instructors often face the challenge of designing assessment tools that address the complexities of academic writing and that reinforce a holistic, discourse-based, learner-centered approach to instruction. This summary describes diagnostic and achievement procedures and rubrics for effective assessment that address varied learner populations.

It's All in the Game: Making Language Practice Fun
Linda Guebert
Structured language practice is important but sometimes boring and repetitive. Practice activities can be made more challenging and fun if they have an element of mystery or guesswork to them. This article describes simple games that can provide enjoyable practice of basic language forms.

Language Instruction Using Web Pages about US National Parks
Hyun-Ok Kim, Moonseon Kim and Seunghyun Yoo
Presenters showcased web pages and national parks in the United States, and demonstrated how to incorporate diverse teaching methodologies and web-related technology in language instruction. Intriguing web pages, creative lesson plans, interactive exercises, and original video activities were developed to facilitate students independent learning and cooperatively with their instructors and peers.

Playing Film Characters Dramatically Improves Students’ Speaking Performances
Hua Li (Linda)
International students with lower level English proficiencies usually have low English-specific self-confidence, which hinders their speaking performances. However, when they play their favorite film characters, they become brave and engaged, and their speaking skills improve dramatically. At the workshop, participants viewed clips of students' performances of the film "Brave Heart".

Preparing Second Language Learners for the New SAT
Deborah M. Levin
The new SAT exam asks students to critically read passages, write a timed essay, and answer questions about English grammar. For second language speakers, preparation is crucial. This paper discusses the format of this exam and considers strategies teachers use to help second language learners.

Sketch Reading and Summary Writing for Short Attention Spans
Bill Teweles, Ph.D.
ESL instructors nowadays need to be increasingly mindful of the decreasing capacity of many students to pay attention in class or to benefit from traditional textbook-based instruction. Fortunately, there are a number of alternatives, including dialogue-based sketches and video-clip summaries, available to those who care to explore and adapt.

Strategic Negotiation in Scenario Role Play
Gregory Friedman
A comparison of ESL learner utterances in scenario role play and jigsaw tasks found more modified output in the role play task. Negotiation of meaning in scenarios may be pushed by the need to achieve pragmatic aims. Scenario interaction appears to promote modification of output towards message acceptability, not merely comprehensibility.

Strategies for Teaching Critical Thinking/Composition Using Multicultural Contexts
Anna Lee McKennon
California composition teachers should develop teaching strategies using multicultural contexts that will help assimilate multilingual students, while forging a connection between the diverse racial and cultural groups that are represented in our current classrooms. Use of these strategies will create an atmosphere of mutual understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity.

A Student-Generated Multimedia Memory Book as a Task-Based Activity
Kevin Kornburger and Yuki Yamamoto
Take an old idea and make it new! Creating a memory book using a computer is an engaging and rewarding experience for ESL students. The necessary software tools come free with MS Office, and are surprisingly easy to use. See how Technology-Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) effectively assists task-based instruction.

Student Perceptions of Grammar Learning
Barbara Jonckheere, Rosemary Hiruma and Karen Fox
Using a self-report survey, researchers probed the kinds of grammar learning strategies used by 100 respondents in an intensive English program and explored the classroom activities they felt to be most helpful to their language learning. Students appear to favor active learning strategies with heavy input from their teachers.

Students' Personality Type and Attitudes Toward Classroom Participation
Paoli Lee
This paper reports on research conducted to examine the effect on an ESL classroom participation of students’ personality types. The participants were ESL students with various first language backgrounds. This research also investigated other factors affecting classroom participation.

Testing the Covert Method of Grammar Teaching: A Pilot Study
Holly Wilson
This paper presents the Covert Grammar Method and its relationship to focus on form. It reports an action research study conducted to test the method with adult intermediate ESL students. The results show that Covert Grammar techniques were generally perceived effective by students, supporting the noticing hypothesis and output hypotheses.

Textual Organization of Academic Writing
Tiina Hukari and Duane Leonard
This article provides another manner of teaching textual organization of the argument essay by using theme/rheme analysis. The article introduces the concept of theme/rheme, shows variety in theme with example paragraphs from a student’s own writing and shows movement from rheme to theme in academic texts.

Understanding Asian ESL Students: Translating School Cultures
Kasumi Kuwahara
Asian ESL students in the American public secondary schools are assessed by teachers utilizing the American school cultural norms. The students' behavior can be comprehended through translating their home country's school culture into American school culture.

Using Corpus Linguistics to Teach ESL
Drew S. Fagan
How can teachers select appropriate authentic texts that help support learning objectives? How can teachers make materials from these selected authentic texts? This presentation introduced a user-friendly corpus solution to answer these questions, along with a variety of sample activities created for ESL classrooms.

Using Radio Scripts in English Language Learning
Alven G. "Skip" Reske
Authentic radio broadcast scripts can be readily used as supplemental ESL reading material. Adapting those radio scripts to take advantage of online, multimedia, interactive elements creates enriched material for a web-enhanced reading course. This article examines the possibilities, the author’s online radio script adaptations, and offers Internet resources.

When it Comes to Teaching ESL Writing Online
Mei-ching Ho
This study investigates two college-level ESL writing teachers’ perspectives on their teaching in hybrid and completely online settings. The goal is to explore how the teachers perceive their role in the classroom and what technological and pedagogical constraints they have encountered. Suggestions for better online writing instruction are also included.

Writing and Identity in Adult Non-Credit Beginning Level Classes
Terrence M. Doyle and Grace Song
How beginning level students portray their identities in writing is examined. A model paragraph approach is proposed as a way to teach not only paragraph structure but also to provide students a way to get used to portraying their identity in writing and thus to decrease their inhibition toward writing.