Stampede Breakfast Time

Oh no . . . I can't believe that the Stampede Breakfast and the pizza party are going to be on the same day. That's way too much high calorie food for a mere 3 hour period. Usually I love going to the Students' Union Stampede Breakfast. Oh well, at least I got to go to a Stampede Breakfast last Saturday. My local MLA was having his Stampede Breakfast right by my house at the Hillhurst-Sunnyside Community Centre, and I got to enjoy one of the best free breakfasts in town. The thing that makes it so good is that the breakfast always has excellent all-beef sausages every year. They also have hashbrowns, pancakes will all the fixings, and juice and coffee. The coffee is also really excellent too. Usually, at Stampede Breakfasts it's kind of watery and weak, but at the Hillhurst Sunnyside Stampede Breakfast this year, Higher Ground Coffee House (http://www.highergroundcafe.ca/) donated the coffee so it was strong and rich!

Anyway, I hope all the students manage to make it to at least two or three free Stampede breakfasts before Stampede is over!

Happy Canada Day!

It's July 2nd, and my legs are in pain! I went hiking yesterday to celebrate Canada Day, and I think this is the first time I have gone hiking in over a year. Anyway, I'm paying for it today. I kind of feel like an old man . . . maybe I am!

Yesterday I went to Lake Louise, and I climbed up to Lake Agnes. It takes about an hour an a half to climb to the top of the mountain, and it's so beautiful up there. There is a huge waterfall, and a lake. Once you get to the top, it feels so good to put your hands in the water and splash it all over your face. Also, at the top, there is a teahouse where you can get a pot of tea made with mountain water. After a long hike, it's amazing! It was the perfect way to spend Canada Day :-)

Back in Alberta

Here I am back in Alberta in the computer lab with my students. I arrived last night at about midnight, and I didn't go to bed until after 1 am, so you can imagine I was kind of tired when my alarm went off at 6 am this morning!

Anyway, I'm really glad to be back. I was happy to go back to Montreal to see my uncles, aunts, cousins, and Granny, but it felt good to sleep in my own bed last night. Also, it was kind of a hard trip too because my Granny is 92 years old, and she had trouble recognizing me. It also made me a bit sad to be walking around Montreal and seeing all the old places where I used to hang out. Probably one of the reasons I was so sad was because I have finally realised that I'm not going to be moving back to Montreal. I think for the past 18 years (holy cow - I've been living in Calgary a long time!) I have been thinking I could always move back to Montreal. However, this trip, I finally realised that it is highly unlikely I'll ever be going back to Montreal. It's time to let go, and that's a hard thing to do.

So here I am back. Actually, my poor students, I told them today that the EAP program has found a new teacher to take over the class starting on July 2nd. That means they will have had 4 different teachers by the end of the semester! The problem is that the university needs me to go back to my "real" job (academic coordinator). Because of that, there is a new guy starting next week. I met him before I went to Montreal, and I think he'll be okay. It's always going to be hard coming into a situation where you are taking over from another teacher, but I know that my students are SOOOOOOOOO great that they are going to be perfect model students for him :-) Plus, I'll still be around helping out in the background. I won't totally abandon EAP 1!!!!!

Also, I know they are going to blog and comment lots before the end of the semester . . . right???

Orange Julep, Smoked Meat, & Bagels!!!

Here I am in Montreal. I wonder if my students miss me. I hope they are all blogging lots! As for me, I am having a great time. I got to visit my 92 year old grandmother this afternoon. It was good to see her again. She is getting to be kind of forgetful. She asked me a couple of times who I was, and then she was amazed at how much I had grown. She also told me Uncle he was getting a big belly, so it was kind of funny.

Anyway, besides getting to see lots of cousins, uncles, and aunts, I'm also eating all the different kinds of food that I miss so much. Today I got to eat/drink the big three: Montreal Bagels and Cream Cheese, Smoked Meat, and an Orange Julep. The orange julep was so great. Orange julep is a kind of drink with some sort of secret ingredient that makes it so good. The restaurant itself is in the shape of a giant orange. You can't miss it. I have been going there since I was a little boy. The first sip of my orange julep brought back lots of memories!

Say tuned for more blogs about Montreal food . . . but now I have to go and check my students' blogs!

I'm Blogging Again!!

Hello EAP 1! I can't believe I'm teaching again this semester. I thought I was going to have a semester off teaching so that I could work on the curriculum for the EAP program at the University of Calgary. Unfortunately, the EAP 1 teacher who was supposed to teach this class is no longer teaching in our program, so I had to suddenly step in and start teaching EAP 1. However, I don't mind because this EAP 1 class is totally awesome! So far, I have only been teaching them for about a week, but I think we have already learned a lot together. Naturally, I had to get all of my students blogging!

Anyway, so far so good. It was a bit of a surprise for me when I found out that I had to teach this semester, but I guess it will be a good thing for me before I take my year off from teaching. Starting on August 2nd, 2008 I'm going to be taking a whole year off to finish my PhD. I hope I can get it done in just one year.

Anyway, I just wanted to welcome all of my new students to my blogging universe. I'm really happy that you are here!

Taking a loooong break

Hello World! I guess this just might be my last blog for a while. You see, I'm not teaching this semester. Instead I have been assigned to work full time on developing curriculum for the EAP program and also to be the full time "Academic Coordinator". That doesn't mean that I won't be popping in here from time to time to blog, but it just won't be as often as in the past. I can't believe that I have been blogging constantly for over four years now. It's amazing. Anyway, as for me, I'll be working in the EAP program for this semester as the academic coordinator, and then I am taking a one year "assisted study leave". It is kind of like a sabbatical for me to finish my PhD. Then, I 'm not sure what I'll be doing. One day at a time, eh?

Anyway, stay tuned for updates on the curriculum project I am working on for the EAP program!

The End of Another Semester

Well, this is the end of another semester. I’m going to wait until tomorrow to read the last blog entries of all of my students as I gave them until midnight tonight to finish their blogs. I really can’t wait to read them tomorrow. Usually I really get a sense of satisfaction at the end of a semester reading the students blogs and seeing their growth from the beginning of the semester until the end. If I ever do another presentation on blogs, I’ll be really proud to show off what my students did this semester. When I was in New York, a lot of people were very impressed with the work of my students from past semesters, and I think I may have even inspired some people to start blogging with their students. It’s amazing to think that I have been blogging for over 4 years now. That’s a lot of words written by both me and all of my students. It’s even more amazing for me to think that I have had 100’s of students since I started blogging 4 years ago, and I got to know them all so much better because of the blogs. I’m sure I became closer to my students because of the ability the blogs gave me to see into their world.

I guess the biggest news for today’s blog is that the final exam for the EAP 3 writing and grammar class is already over. I haven’t even looked at the final exams yet for my class, but I have finished looking at the term papers, and I was pretty happy – much happier than with the first term papers. With the first term papers, I had to come up with an emergency solution to prevent most of the class from failing (I wonder if the class knew I was giving them a “free” chance to pass). However, for this term paper, the vast majority of the students did quite fine. That made me happy because it was real evidence that the students were growing as English writers. My next job is to finish marking all of the final exams, and then enter everything into blackboard so that I can calculate the final grades. I have to get all of the grades into the office by the end of next week, and then it is up to the registrar’s office to process all of the marks.

After all of that, I have to get ready for next semester. It is going to be my last semester of teaching for a while because I am taking a year off from teaching in order to finish up my PhD degree. The big surprise from the spring summer semester is that I’m not going to be teaching EAP 3!! Instead, I’m going to be teaching EAP 1. It’s too bad because I was really looking forward to teaching all of the EAP 2’s from this semester. However, I’m sure I’ll have a great time with the new EAP 1’s. Also, Murray is going to be teaching EAP 2, and Regina is moving to EAP 3 instead. Oh well . . . they say change is a good thing!

Anyway, I want to wish the best of luck to this semester’s students. I’m sure you are going to take the campus by storm next semester!

One Down One to Go!

Today I finished my first presentation on vocabulary in university writing, and it really went well. You see, today I was part of a doctoral forum where doctoral students like me from all over the world presented their thesis proposals and the research they have been doing. I am still in the early stages of my research, but there were some people who are almost finished, and it was really interesting hearing what they had to say. It was a great opportunity to get some feedback on my research. It was also funny to hear that some Phd students hated APA citations!! It reminded my of my students in my writing class!

However, the best part of the conference so far has been the food! I have been to a deli every day I have been in New York. The sandwiches are amazing! I had a corned beef sandwich on rye bread with mustard that must have been one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten in my life. Corned beef is this slowly cooked meat that is cooked with spices and pepper. It is so good it melts in your mouth! I also have had pieces of New York style cheese cake as big as my head. They were the perfect balance of sweet and tangy cheese . . . so good! I have also had Matzo Ball soup, which is one of my most favourite kinds of soup, but you can’t find it in a restaurant anywhere in Calgary. On top of all that, I have eaten about 10 bagels and cream cheese since I got here. The bagels are so good and so chewy. I think I’m going to miss all of this great food when I get back to Calgary.

Last night, I went to the Broadway Musical “Chicago”. It was really amazing. I went with my doctoral supervisor and another grad student from the University of Calgary. I really felt like I was seeing a piece of real American culture. To be honest, I have never really understood musicals, and how every five minutes people seem to just burst into song for no reason, but having said that, I really enjoyed myself.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m not giving any presentations, but I’ll be in a lot of workshops. Friday is the big day for my presentation on blogs! I can’t wait to show off what my students have been doing this semester! And don’t worry, I’ll make sure I take time off from the conference to look for souvenirs for everyone (cheap ones!)

Going to New York Tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the big day when I leave for New York! I feel bad for leaving my students for a whole week, but on the other hand, I’m really excited to get the chance to go to the largest conference of ESL teachers and researchers in the world. Hopefully, I’ll learn some cool teaching tricks I’ll be able to use with the students back home.

Basically, I am going to New York to do two presentations. The presentation that I am most excited about is the one that I am doing on blogs. I think that this going to be my last presentation on blogs for a while, so I really want to do a good job. I have been doing presentations on blogs for four years now. I can’t believe that I have been blogging for four years. That’s a lot of words. Anyway, for this presentation I continued with my blog survey that I have been doing for the last little while, and I analysed the vocabulary in the blogs my students did in the Fall 2007 semester.

The results from my vocabulary analysis were really interesting. I chose 10 students at random from last semester, and I then put them though a vocabulary profiling tool created by Dr. Tom Cobb (http://www.lextutor.ca/). The vocabulary profile told me how many of the words my students wrote were from the first 1000 most common words of English, the second 1000 most common words of English, the academic word list (570 word families – Coxhead, 2000), and words that aren’t on any of those lists. In order to see if there was any change in the way my students use vocabulary, I took approximately the first 500 words they wrote at the beginning of the semester, and I then compared that profile to approximately the last 500 words they wrote at the end of the semester. What was interesting was that 8 of the students showed that they were using a higher percentage of the academic word list at the end of the semester compared to the start of the semester (one student stayed the same, and one student used less). When I saw those results, I felt it confirmed my initial suspicion that blogs are a way for students to grow and consolidate their vocabulary over a semester. This is just a pilot study, and so far, I have only done a graphical analysis. The next step would be to run a statistical analysis to see if what happened with my students’ use of vocabulary is significant. However, in the meantime, I’m pretty impressed! Keep on blogging – it works!

I’ll report on the results of the survey in my next blog.

Wish me luck in NYC!

Blogging for Academic Purposes

Gosh, I'm starting to realise more and more that it is really hard to take over a class half way through the semester. There are a lot of little things that I take for granted, that maybe another teacher wouldn't even be concerned about. I guess one of those things would be how I see the role of blogs in an academic writing course.

For me, I take it for granted that blogs are a complete different genre than normal academic writing. That means, all of the rules and conventions that the students are learning in class might not necessary apply when they are writing their blogs. For one thing, blogs are a totally informal forum for the exchange of ideas. When writing a blog, it isn't a one way flow of communication like it is in an essay. Hopefully, in a blog, I can get lots of comments so that this blog is more like a dialogue between me and the world. Also, while the stiff formality of the traditional academic essay has it's place, I feel that worrying too much about academic vocabulary and formal ways of expression will stop the flow of ideas, which is the whole point of the blogs. Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is okay to use your everyday language in a blog, and you don't have to worry about stuff like thesis statements, and topic sentences. Also the point of blogs is to get your ideas out of your head. Thus, I don't want people worrying about stuff like spelling, correct grammar, the perfect vocabulary word, or the right punctuation. The most important thing is just to get the ideas down into the blog. In fact, when it comes to vocabulary, if you can't think of the perfect word, just keep typing. You can type around the word, for instance. What I mean is, if you want to say the word "ladder" but you can't remember it, you can say this: I put a thing like some stairs up against the side of a tree and climbed up to pick an apple. See . . . it's the same thing, everyone knows what you are saying, and you don't have to waste your time looking words up in the dictionary.

Also, I find that when students type directly into their blogs, they tend to think in English. There isn't enough time to translate back and forth between their native languages and English. This helps to increase the speed the students can think in English, and it helps them get used to approaching writing tasks in English. However, if they start to worry too much about what they want to say, they might be tempted to start to think of their ideas in their native languages first. If that happens, I generally find that the grammar problems start to get worse and worse.

Anyway, I guess the point of this rant is that I take it for granted that blogs are an informal fun way to practice English and read what the rest of the people are thinking about in class.

Keep it fun!

Reacting to Student Concerns

It’s the first day of a new schedule today, and I wonder what the students think about it. I know that the administration here in the EAP program thought a lot about how to address the concerns of the students and create the optimal conditions for learning, and this is what they came up with. Basically, I am now teaching each writing class for about five hours per week, and the other teacher is going to teach the grammar class for about five hours per week. We are going to alternate the days that we teach so that the students can have a full two hours with one instructor on any given day.

It will be interesting to see how this works. On the one hand, I like the idea that I now have a full two hours to focus purely on writing. There is a lot of work that we can get done in an hour. I’ll also have more opportunities for writing in class. On the other hand though, I used to like the flow I sometimes was able to create from the one hour grammar portion of the lesson to the one hour writing portion of the lesson. While I totally believe in teaching grammar, I like to mix it up and take an untraditional approach to teaching the grammar in that I do a lot of activities that force the students to use the grammar structures I am targeting that day rather than traditional “grammar exercises”. It is almost like we are doing a lot of different activities, and the students are unconsciously focusing on the grammar targets for that day because of the activities themselves. After that, I like to then see if the students can apply the grammar I have been targeting in their writing. If I notice that the correct grammar structures are being produced, then I can move on. If I notice that the correct grammar structures are not being produced, then it is time for either more activities, or even some old fashioned grammar lecturing where I explain the grammar rules to the students on the board. More than any of that though I also like forcing the students to come up with their own questions about the grammar. The sneaky thing is that half the time I don’t answer their questions. However, I like to set up the conditions where the students are able to articulate the questions and truly understand what it is that they don’t understand. Once they really know the questions, they should be able to find the answers on their own. I need to do this, because once the students are working by themselves in their regular university courses, they aren’t going to have the benefit of a grammar teacher to answer their questions, so they need to teach themselves how to learn on their own. Additionally, it is impossible to truly understand the “answer” if you don’t really know the “question”. Remember . . . . the answer is 42! What is the question?

Anyway, despite what I have written above, we’ll try this new schedule and see how it works. Naturally, there are arguments for the other side that say that some pure focused and concentrated grammar instruction is just what students need if they wish to speak English accurately and fluently. Anyway, I’d love some feedback!

Recently, I carried out an activity in my class that I like to call the “compliment sandwich”. Here are the questions I asked:

Top Bun:

Something I like about the EAP 3 Writing Class
Lettuce:

General advice I would give to my EAP 3 Writing teacher
Patty:

Something specific I wish were different about EAP 3 Writing
Onions:

How I would make my wish come true
Bottom Bun:

Something else I really like about the EAP 3 Writing Class

While the students had some very valid comments on class size, table shapes, teacher personalities and the time table, I thought I would focus in this blog on the specific comments the students made that related to the EAP 3 Academic Writing and Grammar curriculum. I also thought I would leave out summarizing the compliment part (the bun) of the sandwich. However, I would like to say thank you to all the students who took the time to give me some compliments and brighten my day! It was good to know that some of you like my shoes. Anyway, what you will find below is a synopsis of the important points the students made from both classes of EAP 3 (lectures 1 and 2)

The students provided some interesting feedback for the writing and grammar class. First of all, students are looking for more flexibility choosing their own topics for the writing assignments. This could mean, choosing their own topics for the term papers, or finding new topics that could be added to the topics in the textbook. Some of the students felt that some of the topics were boring and that because the topics were boring, this sometimes made the class boring as well.

Students are also looking for more feedback on their writing assignments so that they can fix their mistakes and perfect a piece of writing before they move onto the next assignment. Thus, the students would like grammar errors not only pointed out in their essays, but also identified so that the students know exactly what their weaknesses are. The students felt that more specific comments on their papers would contribute to greater learning.

Additionally, the students would like to find a balance between writing and grammar instruction (some want more grammar, and some want less). However, basically the students are specifically looking for instruction that will lead to direct improvements in their writing. One example that was mentioned was that students would like to learn more about writing effective introductions and conclusions. While studying skills such as effective introductions and conclusions, the students would like to see a large number of clear examples they can learn from and use as models for their own writing. They would also like to see samples of essays from past semesters that earned top grades, and samples of essays from past semesters that failed. They could then compare their own writing to those essays and identify the gaps between what they are doing and where they need to be.

Along with finding a balance between writing and grammar, the students would like to spend more time writing in class, as opposed to doing the writing assignments strictly for homework. By writing in class, the grammar the students study can then be immediately applied to their writing. In other words, the students would like to see the grammar topics covered in class feed directly into the grammar they need for their writing assignments, and they want the chance to practice it in class. By covering specific writing skills and having grammar instruction to support those skills, the students feel they would be better prepared to analyse their own essays for mistakes. Students would also like more instruction on how to find the errors in their essays and learn how to fix these errors themselves. This means, the grammar curriculum needs to be flexible enough to react to the grammar issues that are arising in class. In other words the problems identified through the writing assignments would be addressed by the grammar instruction.

A final theme that came up more than once in the compliment sandwiches was the time the teachers have for students outside of the regularly scheduled class time. The students have a strong desire for more individual instruction, more time for questions, more personal advice for each student, and for more help after class. This could mean having more office hours, or simply making the teachers more accessible after class. Students indicated that they wanted help specifically from their writing instructors, and didn’t want the writing centre to replace being able to see their own teachers.

Phew, I think this is one of the longest blogs I have ever written! However, I really got a lot of interesting feedback from the students, and now I am trying to think of what I can do to enrich the learning experiences of each and every student enrolled in EAP 3. What I would like now is some more positive advice on how we could address the issues raised in the above blog so that we can put into practice some of the things the students would like to see changed in the EAP 3 curriculum. Feel free to make comments!

P.S. I still love the writing centre!

I forgot!!

I forgot . . .

I was also an usher for Cineplex Odeon Theatres in 1992. That was a great part time job. I got to see all the movies I wanted to see for free. I could also get free passes to movies for my friends. On the other hand, the uniforms we had to wear were humiliating (burgundy polyester blazers), and once I really embarrassed myself. All the new ushers were told that during the course of each movie, they had to do a "screen test" which involved going up to the big screen at the front of the theatre right in the middle of the movie, and putting your hand on the bottom right hand corner of the screen and feeling it to make sure it didn't get too hot. Needless to say, I only did this once. The audience yelled at me, and the screen itself was totally cool. Gosh, I was stupid!!

Happy Reading Week

It's reading week, and all of my students are working hard on their term papers that are due next Monday. I can't wait to read them. I have just finished marking the mid-terms, but I will save comment for a later blog . . . . . . nothing to worry about though!

As for me, I am now officially 38 years old. It was my birthday last Sunday. I can't believe that I am already 38. Since I started teaching full time, I have had 8 birthdays. Amazing. Even more amazing is that I have had the same job for such a long time. Before I became a teacher, I used to change my jobs quite regulary. In order, going backwards from teaching, here are a few of the jobs that I have had before the year 2000:

Flea market vendor (on and off from 1992 - 2000)
On-line antiques dealer
Pub manager
Bartender
Waiter
Magazine editor / graphic designer
Barnwood furniture carpenter and marketer
Purchaser for a large oil and gas company
Owner of a souvenir / food shop in Eau Claire Market & Chinook Mall
Assistant for a British important shop and company
Real Estate agent for Royal LePage
Customer Service / Marketing Agent for a tablecloth and linens company
Salesman for Futureshop
Computer assembly technition for an electronics company
Snack shop manager
Activities monitor for the ESL program at the University of Calgary
Bookshop clerk for WHSmith / Classic bookshop
French tutor
Cook for Dairy Queen
Waiter in a Chinese restaurant

I wonder if I missed anything out there . . . gosh that's a lot of jobs. Basically, that lists what I did roughly from 1988 - 2000. As you can see, not many of those jobs lasted more than a year. Now, what is my point for all of this . . . I guess my point is that it took me a while to "find myself", but once I had found myself I stuck with it. Now look at me . . . I love my job, and I'm pretty happy. Or at least I will be happy until I read all of the term papers . . . . just kidding!!

ALTHOUGH versus BUT

Today in class, we have some good grammar questions! Sam asked me a question about “although” and “but” and it really demonstrated to me how hard it is to explain English grammar sometimes. I mean, because I am a native speaker, I can feel what is correct and what is incorrect. However, to articulate why something is correct and why something is sometimes incorrect can be very difficult. Because of that, I often want to say to my students “trust me – I can feel that this is correct” or “just memorize the difference”, but I know that can be very frustrating for my students! Anyway, I have spent a few minutes thinking about what Sam asked me in class, and this is what I came up with.

The adverbial “although” means the same thing as “despite the fact that”. We use “although” at the beginning of a clause which contains information that contrasts in an unexpected or surprising way with information in another clause. For example:

Although it was raining, we went for a walk.

If it is raining, it is surprising that we went for a walk. The walk happened despite the rain. You can also feel that first it was raining, then we went for the walk. We cannot say this:

Although we went for a walk, it was raining.

If we went for a walk, it wasn’t surprising that it was raining. We probably already knew it was raining. The rain did not happen because of the walk. The rain was not an unexpected result of the walk.

Now let’s try but:

It was raining, but we went for a walk.

The coordinating conjunction “but” emphasizes the joining of two contrasting ideas. In the above sentence, you can feel that the two ideas contrast with each other. As a result, you can flip the sentence around.

We went for a walk, but it was raining.

You can add “but” to either of the clauses, but you can’t add “although” to either of the clauses. The coordinating conjunction “but” joins together two equally contrasting ideas. The adverbial “although” does not join together two equal ideas – one of the ideas is an unexpected result of the other clause.

Phew . . . that was hard! I hope that clears up the difference between “although” and “but”. If anyone understood my grammatical explanation, I’d really love some feedback!

Thanks for the great questions in class!

Textbook Trauma

Well, here it is, only February, and I’m already thinking about what textbooks to use in September. The worst part about picking out textbooks is trying to figure out the exact level of textbooks to match the level of the students in EAP 3. If the textbooks are too easy, they won’t prepare the students for university. However, if the textbooks are too hard, then the students won’t learn anything because they will be struggling too much with the material. There’s that, but then there’s also the fact that there seem like millions of different textbooks available. Some are good at one thing, but others are good at other things. The problem is that none of the textbooks seem to be good at everything.

I guess my dream textbooks would be textbooks that covered everything that we need to cover in class, had lots of Canadian content, and weren’t too expensive for the students. Having just those three criteria, however, still doesn’t help me because I don’t think there are any textbooks that fulfill all three of those requirements. s i g h . . . what to do . . . .

Anyway, this is turning out to be a really boring post all about textbooks. I wonder what my students think of as the ideal textbooks . . .

cold cold cold cold cold cold

Holy cow, it is cold outside. I guess there are hundreds of blogs across the Canadian prairies all saying the exact same thing right now, but boy is it cold! Whenever we have cold weather like this, I always freak out about my students, because I'm worried they won't dress warmly enough for the weather. I'll never forget the one time when one of my students got frost bite on his cheeks and nose. Both of his cheeks turned black along with the tip of his nose. It was really terrible to look at and very painful for the student. In the end, the tip of his nose fell off and now he has a frost bite scar on end of his nose. What's the moral of this story? Cover your nose with your scarf!

Anyway, that's enough about the cold . . . . let's talk about title pages instead. I was a bit dissapointed yesterday. Yesterday, both classes of EAP 3 had good copies of their essays on language learning due. In Ilana's class, all of the students except for one had an APA syle cover page, and they all counted how many words they wrote. You could translate that into the statistic that 95% of Ilana's students followed the proper format for a good copy in EAP 3. In my class, only 7 of my students had an APA style cover page and counted the words. That means only 32% of my students followed the proper format for a good copy in EAP 3.

Ilana 95%
Me 32%

What does this mean? Anyway, I'm handing back the incorrectly formated papers to my students today so that they can do a cover page and count the number of words they wrote. I have to admit I'm a little dissapointed because this year I wrote out an entire sample essay for them to follow. Or is it that I am too lax with my students, or I don't explain myself well enough? I know it seems a bit neurotic to harp on about something like a title page, but if students do follow the conventions set down by the instructor, it reduces their credibility in the eyes of that instructor. Oh well, I have decided not to freak out this time . . . but if it happens for the term paper . . . . . .

I LOVE the Writing Centre

I know, I know . . . perhaps most of my readers aren't quite as convinced as I am as to the wonders of the Effective Writing Centre here on campus, but it seems so cool that there is a place where students can get FREE help with their writing. Personally, I would charge between $150 - $200 an hour for private tutoring. Why spend all that money on a private tutor, when there is somewhere to go on campus? Also, I just found out that there are FREE drop in tutoral sessions available in the library. Here are the details:

Free Drop-in Writing Consultations
Starting February 1, 2008 Drop-in Writing Consultations are available in MLB 205 (located in the Information Commons in MacKimmie Library) at the following times:
Mondays 6:00 - 9:00 pmTuesdays 12:30 - 3:30 pmWednesdays 5:30 - 8:30 pmThursdays 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Appointments are not necessary for the drop-in sessions and may be limited to 15 minutes depending on demand. Sign up is at the IC Service Desk.

I copied all that directly from the website: http://www.efwr.ucalgary.ca/efwr/writingcentre

Anyway, I hope all my students take advantage of the writing centre and use it as much as possible. I bet my students don't know this little fact about me. When I first went to university, my writing was terrible. I actually went to the writing centre a few times, and they quickly showed me how to punctuate correctly and how to format an essay in an academic manner. So you can imagine, if I went to the writing centre when I was an undergraduate student, there is absolutely no shame in going there.

Well, I think I have pestered my students with information about the writing centre enough for today :-)

Another Semester Has Started

Here we are - it is now Winter 2008 already, and we have started a new semester here in the EAP program at the University of Calgary. I wanted to list some of the blogs from the last few semesters here in this post. I hope people check them out from time to time and see what former students of our program are up to. I'm sure that some of them are going to keep blogging. It really makes me proud to think that some people really embrace this format and keep blogging for years after they first started. In fact, for me, I have been blogging for almost four years. That's a lot of words!


Fall 2007 EAP 3
Ghazal
Matheus
Ahmed
John
Lisa
Haruna
Noor
Hadeel
Chinedu
Zahra
Eric
Lisbeth
Gennady
Charles
Julia
Mark
Allen
Inna
Bill
Ella
Wei
Maja
Joy
Tina
Megan
Theresa

Past Blogs
Hussain
Mohammad
Gerard
Loreta
Betsy
Estella
Yulia
Nikolay
Carlos
Amy
Nick
Leslie
Alif

Past Blogs
Becky
Sang Min
June
Kevin
Ted
Rayna
Edward
Sabrina
Kenneth
Serenity
Yichen
Steven

14 Minutes Left!

Holy cow . . . there are only 14 minutes left in the EAP 3 writing final exam. I'm trying to type as softly as possible so I don't disturb the people who are still in the exam. I can't believe the course is over. It's been a good 13 weeks. I actually feel like everybody's writing has improved, and that makes me feel good inside :-) I can't wait to put nice checkmarks beside all of the perfect thesis statements, topic sentences and concluding statements!

Anyway, now comes the big job for me . . . I have to mark everyone's final writing exams, calculate the course grades and then submit them to the registrar's office. I think I'll be drinking a lot of coffee this weekend. Usually the way I tackle the final exams is first I just mark them for grammar - making note of all the grammar, punctuation and word use problems. Then I read the exams again for content and organization. That way, I read each exam twice before I come up with a final mark. I hope people chose a lot of different topics. That makes it more interesting for me while I'm marking. The worst thing in the world is marking 25 essays all on the same topic. For example, if everyone writes about solar energy, I might just go crazy!

Well, I hope all my students stay in touch with me through the blogs. It's been a great semester. Good luck everyone!

The Pain Has Gone :-)

Phew . . . the pain from my root canal has finally gone. Today I celebrated by going to a Japanese restaurant for hot soba noodles and curry rice. It was so good. I went to a restaurant called Shikiji (http://www.shikiji.ca/). It is totally one of my favourite restaurants. It always reminds me of when I used to live in Japan. The lunch special that I had cost $12.85, but it is a huge amount of food. I'm always really stuffed afterwards. I guess I am not very classy because I judge how good a restaurant is by how full I feel afterwards, but still I think it is a good deal for the price. Anyway, for those of you that don't know, soba noodles are made from buckwheat. They are delicious and nutrititious :-)

Hmm, this blog isn't very serious today. I guess I am delirious because of the lack of pain. I better go back to planning the final exam . . . .

Abscessed Tooth!

Holy cow, have I been in pain that last few days. I wonder if anyone noticed at the Glenbow Museum how much pain I was in. It was totally killing me, both physically and mentally because I had been looking so forward to going to the museum, but then I couldn't enjoy it as much I would have liked to because I was concentrating so much on not showing any pain. You see, I have an abscessed tooth. Oh the agony. About 3 years ago, one of my teeth cracked, but I never got anything done about it because I didn't have any dental insurance. When I finally got dental insurance at the University of Calgary, I went to the dentist and they cleaned out all the rotten stuff and capped my broken tooth. However, I guess they didn't notice that the damage was much deeper than it seemed because I guess for the last year, my tooth has been slowing rotting from the inside out. Finally, last week my lower left jaw was killing me, and my face was getting swollen. I was worried that I had the mumps, so I decided to wait a few days and see what happened. By Wednesday, I was in agony, and it seemed like a toothache gone crazy, so I decided to see a dentist. The dentist took an x-ray of my tooth, and told me I had an abscessed tooth. Now, I'm on antibiotics because my entire lower left jaw was infected, and I have to go for a root canal operation on Wednesday afternoon. So, I'm taking huge amounts of ibuprofen, and tylenol with codeine trying to kill the pain while I wait for the infection to go away. Actually, the pain seems worse now than it did on Friday, and all the pills are making me nauseous. Anyway, if you are wondering why I'm kind of weird in class . . . blame it on the abscessed tooth!

It’s official . . . there are basically three weeks left until final exams. I can’t believe it. It seems like this semester has just flown by. I think it has been getting more and more interesting as well. I was really excited to be able to do the story “The Man who Planted Trees” with the students. One of the benefits of this semester, is the students are able to handle challenging materials that push them to their limits – like the story about the man who planted trees. With all of the challenging things we have been doing, I actually think the students are gaining new vocabulary and fluency this semester, which are two of my main goals. I think we still have a ways to go with grammatical accuracy, but I figure that as long as they are able to understand the world around them, and as long as they are able to make themselves comprehensible to the people around them, they are on the right track to success at university. I guess that is the two fold mission of the EAP program – facilitate the students understanding of the world and their ability to make the world understand them. In any case, I feel this is one of the most successful semesters so far.

Another exciting thing we have been able to do this semester is see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”. The best part about this is that no one fell asleep during the movie! Teachers are often hesitant to show videos during class time . . . especially longer movies. Usually I follow the “20 Minute Rule” which is that teachers should never do more than 20 minutes of anything because they students will start to drift off and become bored . . . or worse . . . unruly! However, I only had two days to show “An Inconvenient Truth”, so I had to divide the movie up into two one hour segments. That’s almost triple my 20 minute rule for each day. The great thing was though that Al Gore was such a compelling speaker, and the students were so interested in the topic, that no one drifted off. Now the fun part begins on Monday when we decide if we believe Al Gore or not . . .

Assignment Schedule has Changed!

I hope everyone got the memo today about changing the due dates for all the assignments. I'm going to paste it in here so that everyone can see it again.

Changes in due dates:

Essay #4: Thursday November 8, 2007
Essay #5: Friday November 23, 2007
Essay #6: Cancelled
Annotated Bibliography #2: Friday November 9, 2007
Annotated Bibliography #3: Cancelled
Book Report #3: Monday November 26, 2007

Remember – no classes Monday or Tuesday November 12 – 13, 2007

Combined Listening & Speaking Classes

All classes will meet together for the first hour after the grammar and writing class

2:30 – 3:30 Thursday November 15, 2007
2:00 – 3:00 Friday November 16, 2007
2:00 – 3:00 Friday November 23, 2007

I hope that all makes sense. It was hard for me to decide on doing this, but I think it is for the best. It seems like a lot of my students are suffering from "homework" shock, and may be it's time to ease back a bit on the official homework. My only worry is that the students will stop studying all together or that all studying will sink down to the lowest common denominator. One of the reasons we instituted the assignments as we did was so that the students would be using as much academic English as possible outside of the class. The goal was to push their learning to the next level. In the past, I used to give lots of suggestions for studying, but I found that if there wasn't a mark attached to an assignment, often the assignment wasn't done. However, the minute a mark was attached to an assignment, most of the class would at least make an effort at doing it. Thus, it becomes a fine balance between grading homework and encouraging students to do things on their own. Ideally, I would have a system where no grades were given, rather I would tell people if their work was poor, developing, satisfactory or outstanding. One of the drawbacks of grading things such as the essays is that if one person gets 85% on an essay, and another person gets 88% on an essay - does that mean that the person with the higher score is 2% better at English than the person with the lower score? I don't think so. I think we are trying to cut things too finely when we are using percentages. Rather, we should have broad bands.

Anyway, this is what is going through my mind at the moment. One thing that has driven all of these thoughts is the fact that I have such a large class this semester. Now I know why my French Professors in my undergraduate studies only assigned one essay per semester!

A Tell Tale Heart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4s9V8aQu4c

Yahoo, the mid-terms are marked - and there were no major disasters! Phew! I noticed that the students really get quite worked up at mid-terms time. People start to worry a lot, and they get nervous and stressed out. I feel kind of bad putting my students through this. The funny thing is that when I was a student, I never felt nervous during exams. I guess I just kind of accepted them. In the EAP program, when I first started noticing how worked up students get over the exams I started trying to think of ways to lower the stress. The way I thought I could do that was by being as explicit as possible about what is required for the exams. I really wanted the students to feel that there was a method to the mid-terms and they way that the exams are marked, rather than feeling like they (the students) are being buffeted about by forces beyond their control. What I mean is, too often, it seems like the students felt that the process of being evaluated on the mid-terms is random and arbitrary, when actually, we try to reduce the abitrary nature of the grading as much as possible through rubrics and collaboration between the teachers. At least, that is how it is supposed to work in theory. Anyway, the mid-terms are over now, and there is only half a semester left. I guess mid-terms are going to be stressful no matter what we do. I guess part of the problem is the nature of EAP itself. When I was teaching ESL, there were really no consequences. If the students weren't able to write an essay in English, it never really was a big deal, as long as we had lots of fun during the process of learning how to write an essay. But now, here in the EAP program, the consequences are really high. I mean, if the students don't pass, they don't get to go on into their faculties for regular studies. Also, there is the added bonus of being able to skip the effective writing exam if the students get a B+ in the writing course. Anyway, all this adds up to major consequences that you don't normally have in a regular ESL course. S I G H. I miss taking students to the zoo and having homework which involved deciding which animal was the cutest one at the zoo and drawing posters depicting just how cute it is. Now, it's all about transitions and adverbials . . .

However, one day all my students will be engineers, scientists, doctors, and teachers. I guess that's more important than picking out cute animals at the zoo . . .

The 2007 Alberta Teachers of English as a Second Language Conference is over! Wow, I never knew volunteer work could be so much like . . . well, work! You see, I was the Publishers’ and Exhibitors’ Committee Co-Chair, which basically means that I was in charge of getting the publishers to the conference, helping them while they were at the conference, and then sending them away happy at the end. That meant that I had to be at the conference at 6 am on the Friday of the conference to help the publishers set up, and I didn’t leave the conference until 7 pm that night. That was a 13 hour day. I was totally exhausted by the time I got home. On top of that, I also ran a workshop on blogging on the Saturday of the conference. It’s hard to believe that I have been blogging for almost 4 years already. I first started blogging with my students in April 2004, and I haven’t stopped since then . . . I think I have also done about 10 presentations and workshops on blogging since I started as well.

Anyway, the conference was actually kind of fun because it was great catching up with teachers from all around the province. The only problem was that the timing of the conference wasn’t so great. It fell this year right in the middle of mid-terms for the EAP program at the University of Calgary. This meant that I had to abandon my students on Friday so that I could be at the conference. I hope they did okay. I’ll be seeing their exams on Monday . . . fingers crossed.

Actually, I’m really glad that it’s mid-term time. This is a great time for us all to take a moment and reflect on how the courses have been going so far, and there is still time to make a change in direction if necessary. I think I’m going to focus on getting some feedback from the students after mid-terms about what we can do to maximize their language learning in the last six weeks of the program. In fact, if any students have any great ideas, don’t be shy to comment on this blog!

As for the teachers who came to my workshop last Saturday, thanks very much for coming. It was a pleasure sharing my experience and blogs with you! Please keep in touch!

Ogopogo

Ogopogo is the name of the moster that lives in Lake Okanagan beside Kelowna. But don't worry . . . I didn't see him (or her) while I was in Kelowna. I guess I spent too much time at the college. I got to visit Okanagan College on Friday to talk about ESL programs, and how our EAP program at the University of Calgary compares to their ESL program at Okanagan College. It was really interesting to visit another institution and talk about what is going well for us, as well as some of the pitfalls. Right now, Okanagan College is evaluating their ESL program, and they asked my PhD supervisor to go to their college and chat about what they are doing. I was lucky enough to get invited along by my supervisor so that I could sit in on the meetings.

The part that was the most interesting for me was the discussion about the validity of ESL programs, and how to establish that validity. By validity, I mean, are we really doing what we are saying we are doing. In my case, that means, is the EAP program at the University of Calgary really preparing students for undergraduate studies and raising students English to a level high enough so that their relative problems with English won't be the cause of failure in University. Does success in the EAP program mean that students are likely to be successful at University?

I guess if we want to know that, first of all we need to know that what we are teaching and what we are testing are the same things, and that they are all relevant to the academic English language proficiency needed for undergraduate studies. Are the appropriate language, concepts and strategies being covered in the EAP program? The curriculum would need to be checked against the final exams.

Next, it would be good to check what we are doing with another accepted method of assessing language ability. That would mean carrying out a study in which students who graduate from the EAP program take another accepted test and we compare those marks to our marks. That could mean seeing if students who pass the EAP program also pass a TOEFL test, or the like.

After that, it would be nice to know what is happening to our students once they get to university. We could do that by checking on their GPA's one year, three years, and upon graduation and comparing those scores to their exit scores from the EAP program.

If we did all that, I think we could be fairly confident is saying that yes, the EAP program is preparing students well for university (that is if all the results are positive).

Anyway, those are the kind of things we were talking about in Kelowna. Fun stuff!

Blogging!!!

I'm so proud of my students. Everyone is blogging really hard right now. Phew. I think we had kind of a shakey start this semester. However, I hope from now on that everyone is going to blog a lot. I guess the reason we had a shakey start this semester is that I totally left it up to the students to start their blogs. I guess I'm trying to test their "independent" learning skills. Actually, most of the students were able to do it no problem . . . but with others it took a little prompting :-)

Anyway, now everyone is blogging!

Hmmmmm . . . I wonder if anyone wants to come to my office hours today. You see, somebody threw a rock through my back window at my house. Can you believe it? I didn't even wake up when it happened. It happened last Saturday night, and when I woke up on Sunday morning, there was glass all over my back room. I couldn't believe it. It is a pretty big window too - about 4 feet by 4 feet so it is going to cost me around $500 to get it fixed. I'm so annoyed because it is not like I am a rich person living in a rich person's house. Not that I'm advocating throwing rocks through the windows of rich people, but at least they could afford to get their windows fixed. Ah well, I guess I'll have to eat less Swiss Chalet take out chicken this week. I even called the police, but there was nothing they could do to help me because they said it is basically impossible to catch the people who through the rock through my window. They did ask if I had any enemies . . . I wonder which student might be mad at me!

Ignore the Last Blog!

Okay . . . so my office hours have changed already. Here are my new and offical office hours:

Tuesdays 2:30 - 3:30
Thursdays 3:30 - 4:30

I promise I won't be changing them any more!

Last Friday I gave all of the students the day off because I had to go to the memorial service (funeral) for my grandmother. Gosh, I think I would have rather have taught. It was a really hard day. I was pretty okay until I got to the church and I had to sign the card that went with the flowers I bought for my Nana's (that's what I called my Grandmother) service. I started to write "Dear Nana . . . " and then I just lost it and started crying. It was also hard when my Dad delivered the eulogy. He talked to each person at the funeral individually during his eulogy, and pretty much got all of us crying a lot. My aunt especially was weeping the whole time. She tried to read a poem by William Wordsworth, but she couldn't go on and my Mum had to get up and help her to read the poem. They had asked me to read a Psalm during the service, but I declined. I just felt that I couldn't. It all felt a little bit weird for me anyway, because my Grandmother had requested an Anglican (a form of protestant christianity from English) service for her funeral, and there was a lot of talking about Jesus, etc. It was also weird because this was the first funeral I had ever been to. Isn't it amazing that I made it to the age of 37 without having ever gone to a funeral. When I was a kid, my parents didn't let me go to my grandfather's or uncle's funerals because they felt I was too young. Anyway, the last part of the service consisted of a piper playing "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes. The bagpipes always send a shiver through me. I guess they are touching something deep and ancestral in my soul as if thousands of years of history suddenly are welling up inside of me. However, for me, the hardest part of the funeral for me was after the church. After the church, we went to the cemetary, and suddenly my Dad gave me my Nana's ashes to hold. It freaked me out a little to be standing there with a small box containing the ashes of my grandmother. By this time, the weather had turned cold and cloudy and it was lightly raining. It was exactly like a funeral in the movies, with people dressed in black, huddled around a hole in the ground in the rain. I also had to put the ashes into the hole in the ground, and I had to get down on my knees to put it in. I got dirt all over the knees of my black suit, but I didn't care, I just wanted to put the box into the grave. Then the minister threw some dirt on the box and said a prayer. Finally, we put roses on the gravestone while a piper played a lament on the bagpipes. Once again, it was eerie hearing the bagpipes playing in the cold wind while we all stood there around the grave.

Anyway, after the funeral we went back to the church and there was a tea with little sandwhiches with the crusts cut off. It was all very English (My Nana was from English, as are my parents). I ended up sitting beside my high school physics teacher from grades 10 and 11, trying to make polite conversation, when all I really wanted to do was go home. It was strange being surrounded by so many people that I hadn't seen for so many years. After the tea, we all went back to my parents house where my Dad opened up a bottle of expensive Scotch. You see, my Nana used to like to have a Scotch now and then, we we were drinking it in memory of her. In fact, I remember being a little kid and mixing my Nana a Scotch and water. Anyway, it was 16 year old Scotch and supposedly very expensive, but I couldn't finish mine. It tasted like burnt wood and it made my lips numb. I guess it was wasted on me.

After that, we went out for dinner, just the family. There were 10 of us, and we went out for Chinese food. My Nana always liked Chinese food, so we went to a local restaurant in Olds. After that, I went home. It was a very strange day.

Spread the Word!

Hello Everyone! I have office hours!

Scott’s Office Hours

Wednesdays 3:00 – 4:00 pm
Thursday 2:30 – 3:30 pm

Please make an appointment if you want to see me.

The EAP Barbecue!

Here's a picture of me playing my guitar at the EAP barbecue just before the microphone broke and I couldn't play anymore. Hmmm, I wonder if someone broke the microphone on purpose . . .

Just about two weeks have gone by since the barbecue, and now we are entering the second week of classes. I'm really looking forward to this semester. I think I have a really good bunch of students in my class, and they all have a huge amount of potential. I'm sure that we are going to see a lot of language growth. The thing that excites me most about this semester, is that everyone seems really eager to learn. Some years I have been quite challenged by apathetic students who didn't really want to be in the EAP program, and couldn't care less about learning English, but this year, I think everyone is really motivated to learn. We did an activity in class where everyone had to write down their motiviations for learning English, and it seemed like the students were, in fact, actually motivated.

Here's to hoping this is the best semester ever!!

Taking a Semester Off :-)

It's the second day of the new semester, and I'm not teaching :-) Wow, in a way it feels kind of weird not being in the classroom this semester, but in another way it's really excellent because I can finally focus on all of my PhD stuff. I have already done a whole bunch of errands that I have been putting off for months in just one morning. Now, I'm just planning out how to make use of my time to the fullest over the next four months so that I can get as much done as possible for my PhD while I have time. The problem is that I know it is going to be so tempting to sit in the back yard and relax.

Anyway, I just wanted to let people know that I won't be posting as regularly as usual in this blog. If I start up a new blog, I'll let you all know.

Have a great spring and summer!

Final Exam Week

Final exams have started at the University of Calgary. There are a few things that can tell you this. The first thing I noticed this morning was that the parking lot (the cheap one on the edge of campus by Scurfield Hall) was full, even though it was only 8 o'clock in the morning. Secondly, when I went to get my omelet and cheese bagel in the social sciences building, there were students everywhere studying. There were also quite a few students sleeping on the benches. I think some of them must have been there all night. I even bumped into some of my own students when I came back to the Education Tower, but I think I freaked them out because I told them that it was too late to learn anything for the exam. They just looked at me in horror and fear. Ooops, I guess there is no such thing as a sense of humour before final exams :-)

I think part of the fun of going to university are midterms and finals. They really help you bond with your classmates, and it gives you a real sense of being a student. I remember hanging out with my friends, madly trying to study. I even remember we would look for places to study all night on campus, and then at about 5 am we would go to Denny's for "Moons Over My Hammy" and fourteen cups of coffee so that we would be ready for our 8:00 am exams. Although it may have seemed like hell at the time, whenever I bump into friends from university we always look back sort of nostalgically to the days when we were students. Now, when I talk to my friends it seems like life for a lot of them is only about mortgages and stressful jobs that are crushing their souls (myself excepted . . . my soul hasn't been crushed, yet!)

Anyway, I guess what I am trying to say to my students is ENJOY exam week. Study with your friends and eat pizza every night while drinking a six pack of pepsi cola. When you look back at all of this, it will be with fondness :-)

The Case of the Disappearing Scott . . .

Hello all . . . it's almost exam week! Eeep! I know that some of the students are freaking out, but I hope they are able to relax a bit before the exams. There is an optimum level of freaking out . . . you need to freak out just enough to drive you to study for the exams, but you don't want to freak out so much that you make yourself sick, and you can't perform at your best during exam time. There is a fine line between enough and too much!

I wonder if any of my students have ever taken a moment to think about where these exams actually come from. What I do in LEAP 4 is I take a survey of all of the reading we have done in the text book. I look at how long they are and how difficult they are. In order to do that, I use the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Readability_Test). That gives me a rough idea of what grade level a test is at. Once I have had a look at the type of readings the students have been doing, I then survey the tasks that they have been doing with those readings. After that, I match those readings and tasks to the Canadian Language Benchmarks (www.language.ca, I'm looking at CLB 8 and 9) and the course objectives for LEAP 4. Now I know what I am looking for and what I need to be testing. Next comes the hard part. I have to find a text. Now I do an exhaustive search looking for readings that are of the appropriate length, difficulty and topic. I also try to look for something Canadian. Once I find some articles, I share them with my fellow teachers to get their imput. After we decide which article to go with, I then begin to develop the test. In order to do that, first I re-write some of the sections / sentences of the article in order to make them more accessible. I then look at the vocabulary and choose academic words that the students should be able to guess from context. Then I pick and choose tasks from the textbooks and apply them to the reading in the text. As you can see, there should be no surprises on the final exam. The tasks all mirror tasks the students will have done in class (or at least, should have done - but they are in the textbook, so it is the responsibility of the student to study the textbook and be familiar with all of the tasks). Now I create the exam. Once that is done, I pass on an answer key and a good copy to the other teachers for their input. They come up with their feedback, and I adjust the final exam as necessary. This entire process takes about 6 - 10 hours. Crazy stuff, eh? And it's not over yet, once the students have finished the exam, I then have to check it over again and see if it worked, but that is a story for another blog . . . . . .

Study hard :-)

More Pictures of Seattle

Pictures of the Poster Presentation

Random Pictures from Seattle TESOL 2007

Seattle is Amazing!

I am having such a great time at the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Conference, that I don't even know where to start! Today was day two of the conference, and it was the day of my poster presentation. I couldn't believe how many people came to see my poster. I ran out of handouts in three minutes, and I brought 100 of them! I felt really bad for everyone who wanted one of my handouts, so I have posted the handout on line. It can be found here:

https://webdisk.ucalgary.ca/~sdouglas/public_html/index.html

One good thing about not having enough handouts is that I have finally worked out how to use my webspace at the University of Calgary to make a webpage. It's funny, because so many people think that I am some sort of internet expert, but actually, all I do is just muddle along one step at a time. I think that should be the title of my presentation for next year's conference, how to muddle your way through the net.

Anyway, I really enjoyed having the chance to meet and talk with so many people. It was fascinating to hear what people are doing with their blogs all around the globe. I hope many of the people that I spoke to today will have a chance to drop me a line and let me know how they are doing with their blogs. Over the next few days I'm hope to post more and more information to my U of C website so that people can access more information about blogs and how to use them in their classrooms . . . exciting stuff!

English Only ESL Classes - Great Rule, Necessary Evil, or Oppression?

I wonder why I am so crazy about English only in the classroom. I am sure that is comes from a number of sources ranging from the way I was taught French as a kid and as a young adult, and from the different ideas I was exposed to while I was in graduate school studying Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL).

You see, when I was a kid studying French, English was FORBIDDEN in the classroom. In fact, if we spoke English, our teacher would have a fit and we risked being sent into the hallway or even the Principal's office. This way of teaching didn't stop as I got older either. When I was 17 years old my parent's sent me away for the summer to Trois Rivieres - a city halfway between Quebec City and Montreal. I guess you could call it the Red Deer of Quebec. Anyway, while I was there I went to CEGEP to study French - it is like a college. Can you picture me? I little 17 year old guy all by himself for the first time? It kind of reminds me of some of my students who are studying here in the LEAP program right now. Anyway, not only was English forbidden in the classroom, it was forbidden EVERYWHERE! That's right, I could drink beer (illegally), smoke cigarettes and ignore doing my homework, but if I ever spoke English anywhere in the city at all and I was caught, there were huge consequences. And I mean huge! You see, the CEGEP had not only teachers, but also monitors who hung out with us after class. On top of that, many of the local people in the city knew that Anglophones came to study French every summer and they kept an eye on us to. If we were caught speaking English at any time, we would get a warning. You only got three chances. If you were caught on the third time . . . you were put on a plane back home! I'm serious. I personally know people where were kicked out of French programs for speaking English too often. Even me, your teacher got caught speaking English one time. I remember I was in a pool with some friends and we were swimming. As some of my students probably know, I love talking, and suddenly I just started shouting to some friends in English to come and jump into the pool. Right behind me was a monitor! Holy cow, did I get in trouble. It was really serious. They had me totally freaked out that I was going to be sent back home. From then on, it was French only for me.

So you can see that from a young age I have been indoctrinated that the best way to learn a langauge is through the immersion method. It is almost like a Canadian way of doing things. I guess that it has affected me a lot,but you know what is amazing . . . . I speak French :-)

Going to Seattle :-)

There is less than one week before I go to the annual TESOL conference in Seattle! I'm really looking forward to going this year. For those of you who don't know, TESOL stands for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. It is probably the largest ESL type conference in the world, and there are going to be some really famous professors and researchers there. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the grammar book used in LEAP 3, but the author of that book is doing a big presentation. I can't wait to go . . . gosh, I sound kind of like a geek, don't I?

Anyway, I have the honour of doing three things while I am in Seattle. I'll be doing a poster presentation on the Thursday of the Conference, a hands-on showcase of my students' blogs on the Friday, and finally a workshop teaching teachers how to use blogs with their students on the Saturday. It's going to be fun :-)

What I would like my students to do is please complete this survey (please click when you are ready):

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=957272685523

I'd like to share your opinions with my colleagues in Seattle.

Thank you in advance to everyone who does this survey!

Me and My Mum

This is a picture of my mother and I :-)

It was recently my mum's birthday, and we went to the Palliser Hotel in downtown Calgary for their Sunday Brunch. I think this must most definately be the best Sunday Brunch in all of Calgary, if not Alberta (well, actually the Banff Springs Hotel would be a close second). This brunch is absolutely fantastic. It has a mix of breakfast items and lunch items. For example, you can have a gourmet omlet made for you while you watch, or you can get Belgian waffles made fresh in front of your eyes. There are also other amazing things like eggs benedict and eggs pacifica. Eggs pacifica is one of my favourite breakfast dishes. It is an english muffin with smoked salmon on top. Placed on the smoked salmon you have a gently poached egg, and it is all topped off with a sauce that is out of this world. Yum. Actually, I kind of go smoked salmon crazy when I go to the Palliser for Brunch. I take huge amounts of smoked salmon. I just can't get enough! They also have lunch items like roast beef, and things like that, but I usually stick to the breakfast items. Finally, there is a large variety of cakes and desserts. It is all amazing. Unfortunately, it is a little bit pricey. For one person, brunch is $40 and there there is tax and tip, so if 4 people go, you can end up spending around $200. However, it was my mum's birthday, so it was worth it :-) If anyone ever has their parents visiting town and they want to splurg, I recommend the bruch at the Palliser Hotel.

International students frustrated by LEAP program??

I have been feeling a little down lately because of an article I read in the Gauntlet. I wonder how many of my students read the student paper here at the University of Calgary. When I was an undergraduate student, I read it every week. Anyway, just for fun the other day I picked up a copy to read while I was reading lunch, and right there on page 7 was an article about the LEAP program. However, this certainly wasn't the LEAP program that I know about. Basically the article was arguing that the LEAP program wasn't fair to international students because it was a waste of their time and money because they are not learning anything. Eeep. Students were also claiming that they were learning things in class that they were already familiar with. I guess they mean stuff like they had already studied how to do the present perfect tense, so why study it again?

Anyway, this is the online link to the article http://gauntlet.ucalgary.ca/story/11102, but if you pick up a current issue of the Gauntlet, you can read the article there too. I wonder what my LEAP 4 students would think of this article. I really hope that now, because of the program, they are able to do things in March that they could not do in January. I guess that is the real measure of a program. If a student can say "now I can do this, but I couldn't do it before" that would be a way of demonstrating that they have learned something. Anyhow, I won't let this article get me down, but sometimes I do feel that I am faced with an almost impossible task compared with a normal professor at the university. It almost seems like if students fail in the LEAP program it's the teacher's fault for not teaching, but if they fail in normal university it's the learners fault for not learning. Complex stuff . . .

I Miss the Cat!

Okay, okay, I know. At first I totally didn't want to babysit my friend's cat. But for 10 days I got to know this kitty, and now that his is gone, I feel there is an empty place in my heart . . . s i g h.

On the other hand, there is no more kitty litter all over the floor of my kitchen, and my toes are safe from night time commando attacks!

It's weird, it was really nice having Rocky around for 10 days. I think the funniest thing that happened while Rocky was staying at my place was when I was renovating the upstairs apartment in my house. I had just painted the floor leading up to the stairs of the upper apartment. Anyway, I was upstairs working on the bathroom when suddenly I heard this weird meowing. I looked down the stairs and there was Rocky standing in the middle of the fresh paint. Poor Rocky, I ran downstairs and picked him up. His two front paws were totally green on the bottom. I was really worried because I didn't want him to lick his paws and get sick from the green paint, so I carried him like a baby to the kitchen and tried to clean his paws. Unfortunately I couldn't get all the green paint off of his feet, so he had green paws for about 3 days . . . . poor Rocky.

Also, I totally spoiled this cat while he was living with me. For instance, if I was having a bagel with cream cheese and lox (smoked salmon), Rocky would get some creamcheese and lox too. However, he didn't like bagels, so I ate his for him. Also, once I got sushi from T&T Supermarket, and I let Rocky pick off the raw fish from the tops of the nigiri sushi, and I would eat the rice. Hee hee. I don't think he is going to like the hard dry cat food he is going to get at him Mommy's house :-)

Oh well . . . no more cat for me. But it was fun while he was here!