Biliterate education in Floria

Hi all,

Read the article or listen to the podcast from NPR about a bilingual immersion program in Miami. It nicely speaks to one of our most recent class discussion: Students use of L1 in the English classrooms.

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141584947/in-miami-school-aims-for-bi-literate-education

Enjoy,
LS

In honor of national coming out day: Give a damn campaign

Dear TESOLers,

Check out this website that presents some powerful and thought-provoking information and videos on a wide range of social and political issues that surround GLBTcommunities. Most of them are relevant to you as future teachers. Hope we all "give a damn" one day.

http://www.wegiveadamn.org/

See you tomorrow,
LS

Annotated Bibliography on L2 reading research

http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2010/readings.pdf

Article on native language use

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110921172849.htm

More on CLT in China (some counter arguments)

http://iteslj.org/Articles/Liao-CLTinChina.html

and see The need for Communicative Language Teaching in China by Xiaoqing Liao--This is a response to Bax's arguments. ELT Journal, 2004.


More to come tomorrow...

An excerpt from the article titled" Critical Pedagogy in ELT: Images of Brazilian Teachers of English"--TQ Critical Pedagogy Special Issue

"Freire (1982, 1984) spoke relentlessly about the empowering effects of
literacy on people who are outside the world of writing. Obviously, he
understood literacy as the reading-writing of the authentic word and
world and not as a mere parroting of words dictated by the elite. Just as
literacy can empower those who are illiterate, learning English can
empower those who are excluded from the English-speaking world. To
achieve this empowerment, we as Brazilian teacher educators, together
with our student teachers, need to deconstruct the ready-made packets
of principles, methods, techniques, and materials in ELT that are
imposed by the center and passively consumed by the periphery. We
need to stop emphasizing only linguistic and technical competence. We
spend most of our classroom time trying to make students repeat
another’s words fluently, trying to erase the traces of their identities
shown in their accents. If we want to change the route of ELT in Brazil
and form empowered teachers, responsible for their practice and able to
construct their own methodologies and materials, we need to question
the supremacy of linguistic and technical competence to the detriment
of political competence. We need to question the principles, the methods,
and the curriculum that have dominated undergraduate courses for
English teachers, and we need to do so with them while we are teaching
them."

Critical Thinking vs Critical Pedagogy

Great article on how two concepts overlap and differ:

http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/burbules/papers/critical.html