TALGS 2009 Conference Program (PDF)
TALGS Conference Purpose Statement (PDF)

Hey--these people know how to organize a conference. A tip of the hat to East Carolina University graduate students Zuzana Elliott, Yi Sun, Lamont Cannon, and Chad Elliott, and their mentor, Dr. Lida Cope, along with a number of other key individuals who helped to make the sixth annual TALGS one-day conference (TESOL Applied Linguistics Graduate Students) on February 21, 2009, in Greenville, North Carolina, a spectacular success. There were 90+ attendees at the event, and the East Carolina University community did a superb job of giving participants an unforgettable experience.

Concurrent sessions were just 30 minutes, so speakers really had to be on their toes, talking quickly, and moving efficiently through their powerpoints. Participants go a clear sense of what each speaker felt was most crucial to communicate, and, at this pace, there was no time to lose enthusiasm or interest. In addition to a core contingent of local and regional Carolina speakers, there were presenters from California, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and England.

Of three concurrent sessions at 9:00, I attended "Corpus linguistics: A real approach to language teaching," a standing-room-only presentation by Courtney Cunningham of Western Carolina University. "ESL students should be exposed to as much authentic text as possible," she said, "because students learn English in order to use it."

Cunningham gave several interesting examples of ways to use corpus research to know the frequency of certain phrases, to find strategies for interpreting, and "to determine how a word behaves."

"ESL students want to use English in the real world, as naturally as possible," she explained. "They want to be able to function communicatively in the target language community." Recommended corpus Web sites were: www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk, americannationalcorpus.org, quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/ , www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/sbcorpus_obtaining.html, and www.athel.com .

Cunningham suggested that teachers consult corpora, both written and spoken, to develop lessons using authentic text; use sentences from corpus collections for vocabulary purposes; and use corpus data to answer questions about language that cannot be answered based on intuition. She also recommended choosing textbooks with a corpus approach, such as Pearson/Longman's "Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (2002), and consulting research on using corpora to teach.

At 9:35, I attended "Making the standards 'real' through teaching thematic units," by Kristie Barnhill, a kindergarten teacher in Los Puentes, a two-way Spanish immersion program at Snow Hill Primary School, in Snow Hill, North Carolina.

Her students include ELLs from Spanish-speaking families together with children from English-speaking families who opt in to the dual-language program. All students receive the curriculum through both English instruction and Spanish instruction. Barnhill provides the English instruction, including accommodations for English language learners.

She brought the English Language Proficiency Standards alive with video clips and explanations from her own classroom. In one clip, for storytime, Barnhill introduced and reviewed vocabulary with pictures on a board, as well as puppetry with nifty stuffed animals and other theme-based puppets, purchased with her own money from http://www.nationalschoolproducts.com .

"It's important that students know what the goals are or were themselves," said Barnhill, who conducts discussions with her students in which they are asked to remember and express the standards-based goals of their class activities. She also gave nice examples of ways to seamlessly incorporate assessment into her lessons, for example, working knowledge of shapes into a math conversation. "I try to find ways to make it a group assessment and individualized at the same time," she explained.

In addition to the sea-shape math lesson she demonstrated, Barnhill recounted having very good success with a camping theme, including using a tent as the reading center and learning about the solar system and stars, etc... She bundles more than one standard into a lesson or long-term theme. "You can tie it all in and make it work for the children," she explained.

After the coffee break, I next attended, at 10:25, "Team teaching by a native English teacher and a Korean English teacher in Korean public schools," by EunHi Seo of the State University of New York at Albany. Seo explained her research on patterns of interaction and classroom dynamics in a new paradigm that teams native speakers of English with Korean teachers in Korean K-12 public schools.

The native English teachers in this new team-teaching program implemented by Korea's Ministry of Education have bachelor's degrees from the U.S., Canada, England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. Their roles are to provide English support and to facilitate the professional development of Korean English teachers, according to Seo.

The needs of students in these Korean classrooms, she explained, are improved results on entrance exams and in the job market, as well as enhanced academic success, motivation, and progress in English skills.

Seo's research questions were: 1) What patterns or roles make their team teaching effective? and 2) What instructional implications can be drawn from the findings?

She analyzed data from three different classrooms: grade 5, grade 6, and grade 7. The Korean teachers in each case were winners of a government sponsored English teaching contest.

"I focused on instructional activities and instructor development and activity flows," said Seo, who described the following typical pattern in lesson delivery: