Illustrated Language

My younger daughter and I made croissants for breakfast today...a process which began yesterday. You can see the pics on Instagram. I'm posting the final one here! This is an example of how YouTube and face-to-face classes combine. I took a croissant class at Sur la Table last year; for me, it's really important to be able to feel and smell as I'm cooking, so YouTube alone is not enough. I've made croissants two or three times since then. Yesterday, I forgot exactly how to do one of the folds, so I checked with a pastry chef I've watched before on YouTube (Here's the link:  Classic French Croissants  ). That online reinforcement/review was croissant-saving! One of the ways of using social media with international students has to do with cooking. Many of the Saudi and Kuwaiti students I had a few years ago were young men who had never even boiled water. Alone in the US, they craved their moms' cooking, so they Skyped with their moms and followed direc...

Slideshare on Implementing an International Online English Language Learning Program Having read articles on the use of social media in Thailand, the Republic of Georgia, South Korea and Ghana, I noticed some similarities with my own experience using Skype and Rosetta Stone to teach English in Madagascar, Honduras, and the US.  I joined I Want to Learn English, a 501 c(3) organization, as its sole employee and academic coordinator in 2010. My job was to develop the online English program the founders of the organization had started as a dream of providing English education to the people they had met during mission trips in Honduras and Madagascar. While IWLE was based in the Episcopal Church, it was not an evangelical organization; it was a purely educational endeavor. The premise of the program was the following: 1. Set up computer labs with internet access and Rosetta Stone licenses in three countries: Honduras, Madagascar, and Delray Beach, Florida. 2. Des...

I'm overwhelmed with communication tools at work. Why is she smiling?? Image from https://medium.freecodecamp.org/imagine-react-router-as-your-switchboard-operator-f4f1ac22188c

While I was working in the house today, I had the radio on in the background and heard this report from Freakonomics Radio . It is called "Boo...Who?" and it is about publicly registering displeasure by booing. I immediately thought about it being the offline version of posting a bad review to social media. In this podcast, which was recorded in 2011, contributors discussed this function in the realm of sports and artistic performance. What struck me when considering public booing in comparison to the online version is that the online version offers much more protection. While an opera-goer might hesitate to boo Pavarotti in person, surrounded by other opera attendees and facing the legend himself, he might not feel the need to hold back from behind a screen and a name like @NYOperaLover. As in the case of drivers who become incredibly aggressive while inside their cars, scathing attacks online come from a place of safety and anonymity. (Well, some online attacks...and I'...

I love languages. For as long as I can remember, I begged my Irish-American parents to teach me Spanish. I had to settle for Sesame Street lessons until I was old enough to learn it in school. I took Spanish all through high school and practiced outside of class whenever I could. I have always felt that I did not really study Spanish; it feels like I am remembering it. I have spent most of my life in South Florida, where Spanish really is a second (or even first) language, and I lived just outside of Mexico City for five years. My husband is Mexican, and we are a bilingual family. Learning Spanish has served me well! In college, my major was chemistry, and my prescribed language choices were Russian, German, or French. I chose German, and those classes turned out to be the best classes I took at UF. I took Deutsch Intensiv, which meant all German (no translation allowed) from Day 1, two hours a day. Everyone in the class learned extremely quickly, and we all stayed together for mor...

This coming year, I will be teaching two sections of ESL support in a local parochial high school. The courses are designed to provide international high school students (from 9th-12th grade) practice in speaking, comprehension (reading and listening), second language strategies, and writing. The job is not to teach an ELA class but to teach the communication skills necessary for students to pass their ELA and all other classes. For this reason, I found the Digital Native article especially interesting. I have a lot of leeway in deciding exactly how to run the class, but I do have a coursebook and have the expectation that after two years, students will be able to earn a 100 on the TOEFL iBT, a pretty high standard. Considering how to integrate Web 2.0 tools is an important part of what I am doing now to prepare for the school year, and this article gave me many more issues to consider. In the article, the authors discuss the reasons for the seeming lack of transfer of online abilit...

I have been posting products on my Teachers Pay Teacher's (TPT) online store  ESL Solutions  for a few years. I post some free products and some paid products. All of my products are for the ESOL classroom, and all of them involve the use of art to illustrate the grammar of speaking and writing! I have made a little bit of money over the years, but not enough to fund my older daughter's dream of going to Yale; in fact, she's been more successful through her own endeavors! That said, my sales are greatest during the months of August/September and then again in January because this is when new English-learning students most commonly start school. My most successful product is a two-level series containing a set of books (student workbook, tutor manual) and flashcards for teaching survival English to newly-arrived elementary school kids, from grades 2-5. I developed this program when I was volunteering as an ESOL tutor at my local elementary school. I taught kids from Latin ...