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Reprint from ESL MiniConference:
A Report from TESOL 2007 in Seattle
The Roman gods had ambrosia; we English teachers, our
annual TESOL convention. This year an estimated 7,500
ESL and EFL professionals from around the world
communed just west of Mount Olympus in Seattle,
Washington, during the week of March 21st to 24th, at
the absolute peak of cherry blossom season amid the
cool, humid airs billowing off the waters of Puget
Sound.
The Washington State Convention Center was the main
thoroughfare for these thousands of language teachers
and learners, who became very familiar with uphill
streets with names like Pike, Union, and Olive Way,
and the 5th Avenue, 6th Avenue, 7th Avenue, and 8th
Avenue cross streets. Fifteen minutes between sessions
was more than enough time to find rooms, whether at
the Convention Center or down the street at either the
Sheraton or the Grand Hyatt.
No, the buses were NOT free!
I would like to be one of the first to apologize to
the city of Seattle for possibly hundreds of
uncollected bus fares that may have resulted from a
wild rumor
which had many TESOL participants believing that "the
buses are free" in this magical city. The truth is
that everyone in Seattle--from the homeless to the
highest authorities--is significantly more polite than
people coming from nearly anywhere else on the planet
would be accustomed to, and bus drivers tend to just
shake their heads slightly if someone leaves without
paying the fare, especially someone with that
wide-eyed "touristy" look. It was also a little
confusing that during peak traffic times in congested
areas there are "free-ride zones," though this means
the ride is free only if you also dismount while the
bus is still in the zone.
By descending via several flights of old steps within
the marketplace, it is possible to arrive at Western
Avenue and Seattle's busy waterfront area, with an
aquarium, and rides and ferries whose attractions
include whale watching in the open seas. Along the
waterfront buses are free, but walking is very
pleasant, too.
The people of Seattle are polite, friendly, generous,
and helpful. Any question you ask is answered with a
perfect combination of relevant information and
sincere interest in your understanding. The city has a
culture of extreme tolerance in which people of all
walks of life and all persuasions peacefully coexist
in a mainstream of sophisticated communicative
rituals. A gentleman at one of the Convention Center
entrances high-five-knuckled me after I handed him
several quarters. People are more patient than in some
other big cities. It is rare for someone to enter a
crosswalk without waiting for the walk signal. If you
ask for directions, you will have the attention of the
person helping you until they are sure that you are on
the right track. "Excuse me" is heard many times in
the course of a day. The people here are nice.
The TESOL Convention experience
My TESOL 2007 experience began Thursday morning at
7:00 a.m., when I was processed for on-site
registration, which took less than 10 minutes. I had
not been planning to attend this year's convention
until, in mid March, my home university and Kansas
TESOL asked me to serve as the KATESOL delegate at the
Affiliates Assembly and receive our 25-year plaque.
Once I was registered, I attended most of a
7:30 a.m. discussion session, "Best Practices in IEP
Faculty Assessment," led by Mark Algren (University
of Kansas) and Christine Coombe (Dubai Men's
College). About 25 people were at this session,
and participated in a large group, semi-structured
conversation about transparency, fairness,
faculty involvement, and relevance of faculty
evaluation procedures at the different intensive
English programs represented. Their three discussion
questions were: 1) What three things do you like most
about your assessment system? 2) What three things
do you dislike the most about your assessment system?
and 3) What do you think are the three most important
elements (or considerations) of an assessment system?
It was nice to see familiar faces and meet new
officers at the 8:30 a.m. assembly. Outgoing TESOL
president
After the Affiliates Assembly, I ran over
to catch the conclusion of a very interesting
plenary, "From ESL to Harvard: An Immigrant's
Perspective," by Mawi Asgedom, a refugee of
the Ethiopian civil war. It was beautiful to
be part of the "group hug" at the end of
his talk, as more than 1,000 ESL teachers
gave each other a traditional African
blessing, following Asgedom's directions.
At 12:30, I was so torn between three
different things I wanted to see--"Grow Your
Own Rural Bilingual Special Educators," "Linking
ESOL Students and Senior Citizens," or
"Japanese Students and World English,"
that I tried to go three different
directions at once, and then gave
up, sitting down to catch
my breath and gather my thoughts.
A visit to the Six Arms Pub
It was at this point that I decided
to take stock of my situation. A solid
start to the day was in danger of disintegrating
into hectic flurries to and fro between
sessions, and me not being able to enjoy
even one complete presentation. As big as
TESOL is, with sessions sprawling into
two nearby hotels and an overflowing
convention center, it is really to the
point that attendees ought to have at
least a month of exercise in advance--both
short distance sprints and longer endurance
runs--and the steep inclines of the streets only
accentuated
this physical aspect of the events.
I started scratching items off my
list, to clear the way for sessions
which I truly felt I needed to see. I
realized that if I was going to see
Diane Larsen-Freeman's 2:00 plenary,
I would need to forego "TESOLers for
Social Responsibility," and perhaps
would be able to catch the very end
of "Navigating the Special Education
ELL Highway," but not "Working Memory
Effects on Interlanguage Variation."
My dilemma settled for the time being,
I decided to concentrate on getting
lunch, taking advantage of the opportunity
to search out the "Six-Arms Pub," which
a fellow ESL teacher at home had highly
recommended. I found the place, had
a small glass of their "Terminator
Stout," and ordered a black-bean
burrito, which I carried back to
the convention site to nibble on
throughout the early afternoon.
An amazing plenary speech by Diane Larsen-Freeman
Because I was early, I was able
to get a great seat for "Dynamics
of Change," Diane Larsen-Freecom's
plenary. I was very happy that I
was there from the start for this
session, because I also got to see
Keith Folse, of the University of
South Florida receive recognition
as the 2007 TESOL Teacher of the
Year. It was heartening to hear him
give credit and praise to his own
high school Spanish teacher, and
he donated his award check to his
old high school in her name. Folse
is a co-author of the very well-known
"Blueprints" composition practice
series.
In explaining the title of her talk,
Larsen-Freeman reasoned that "everything
is changing all the time...there is nothing
static in life..., but we try to make things
static by giving them names...an enduring
identity." Yet, quoting Heracles, she
said, "You cannot sip twice from the same
river."
Larsen-Freeman's dual emphases in
her presentation were chaos/complexity theory,
and the Seattle TESOL theme of "Spanning
the Globe: Tides of Change."
First, she used information from the
Web site of the National Oceanic &
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
to define "tides." According to the
NOAA, said Larsen-Freeman, tides are
related to winds and currents, and
ocean levels, which fluctuate daily.
The sun, moon, and earth interact,
she explained, and their combined
gravitational forces influence
tides. She noted that there is a
phrase in English, "sea changes,"
which "resonates with tides," or
profound changes.
Among the changes affecting the
TESOL profession, according to
Larsen-Freeman, are the following:
an increased need for English around
the world; a lowering age at which
people are first introduced to English;
the rise of computer-assisted and content-based
instruction;
a number of "world Englishes"; changes
in the origins of international students;
different adult ed populations; different
populations in schools; a growing achievement
gap in public schools; and NCLB legislation,
bringing "a sea change in how instruction
is conducted."
Occasionally throughout her presentation,
Dr. Diane Larsen-Freeman would show a
PowerPoint slide with a picture, phrase
or short quote, and use these as points
of departure for the next section of
her talk. At this point, we saw a slide
suggesting that ocean tides are
associated with certain kinds of effects:
Larsen-Freeman also reminded the audience
of a quote from Chaucer: "Time and tide wait
for no man," adding her insight that tide-like
changes in education "profoundly affect our
lives, and those we work with."
"We tend to see changes as something we
have to live with," she said, forcing teachers
to prepare students for exit exams, mathematics
exams, and reading exams. We are "at the
mercy of policymakers," explained Larsen-Freeman,
who might be positive to education when times
are good, but not when times are bad.
Continuing to build her tidal analogy,
Larsen-Freeman reported that tides vary
not only in time, but in place. In Northern
California, she explained for example, there
are two unequal tides each day; in the Gulf
of Mexico, there is one daily tide.
"Local factors influence tides," said
Dr. Larsen-Freeman, listing five of these
factors: 1) configuration of the coast;
2) depth of water; 3) topography; 4) wind
force; and 5) atmospheric pressure.
She quoted again from the NOAA Web site (http://co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/restles6.html), to
make the point that tides cannot be predicted
based on short-term observation data.
The important thing to remember, said
Larsen-Freeman, is that it takes "years
of observation to start to be able to
describe and predict tides....You have
to look!," giving another example, of
hearing a weather report on the radio
of clear skies while seeing out the
window that you are in the middle of
a winter snow. "You have to learn to look!,"
she repeated. "If you really want to know what's
going on at your local scale, you have to look
at your local level."
The learning and teaching of language,
according to Dr. Diane Larsen-Freeman,
are affected by the same factors and
the same principles as tides.
To illustrate some of the dynamics
of language use, she gave the
following quick examples: the idiom,
"too many irons in the fire";
non idioms, such as "Have you heard
the news?, "Who would have thought
it?", "I am simply amazed,"
"I was just trying to help," "It's
none of your business," "Speak
for yourself," and "Watch your
step/tongue"; word pairs, such
as "beyond repair," and phrasal verbs,
such as "I ran across an old friend."
Dr. Larsen-Freeman is a professor of
education and linguistics, and director
of the English Language Institute at
the University of Michigan, also the
home of the Michigan Corpus of Academic
Spoken English (http://micase.umdl.umich.edu/m/micase/),
and she paused to tell the audience that this
corpus has nearly 2 million words today. According
to data from MICASE, the 14th most common English
utterance
in academic language is "Um," reported Larsen-Freeman.
The 15th most common utterance is "Uh." And the
fourth most common phrasal verb is "end up."
Conventional collocations and conventional
language constitute 55 percent of spoken
and written discourse, said Larsen-Freeman,
so "certainly there are aspects of language
which are stable." However, she continued,
"Language is not a straight-jacket....language
systems are constantly changing."
As an example of ways in which such
changes can occur, Larsen-Freeman looked
at the verb "be going to," which she suggested
can be traced at least as far back as Shakespeare's
The Winter's Tale, Act V, Scene 2, in which
the Clown says, "Hark! the kings and the princes,
our kindred, are going to see the Queen's
picture....";
and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act IV, Scene
3,
in which Bardolph says, "...the duke himself will
be
tomorrow at court, and they are going to meet
him."
She likens these uses to the phrase "are journeying
to"
in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act
I, Scene 3,
in which Pantheno says, "To-morrow, may it please
you, Don Alphonso
with other gentlemen of good esteem, are journeying
to salute
the emperor...."
"To be going to" originally meant some kind of
motion,"
said Dr. Larsen-Freeman. Yet, in the same play, Two
Gentlemen of Verona, she pointed to an exchange
between Duke and Valentine in which the meaning of
"be going to" seems to shift. In Act III, Scene 1,
Duke says, "Sir Valentine, whither away so
fast?,"
and Valentine answers, "Please it your Grace, there
is
a messenger that stays to bear my letters to my
friends,
and I am going to deliver them." The
Duke's question concerned where Sir Valentine was
headed, but the answer explained, instead, to what
purpose or intention he was taking an action,
explained
Larsen-Freeman, "no longer motion, but intention."
This distinction surfaces in the use of what
she referred to as the "neural action routine"
of phonologically reducing "I'm going to" to
"I'm gonna."
Looking at the sentence,
"The intention use is routinized," explained
Larsen-Freeman, "but not the motion use."
...THIS ARTICLE WAS LEFT UNFINISHED AT THIS POINT...
2021 The Multilingual Adaptive Systems Newsletter
It was easy to recognize
fellow convention-goers by their distinctive
turquoise-colored bags, an apparent effort by the
event planners to incorporate some of the typical hues
of the cobalt, chromium, and copper elements found in
petrified wood, the official gemstone of the state of
Washington.
The famous Pike Place Market was six or seven blocks
downhill from the Convention Center, and well worth
the more labored walk back up. This is where you can
find the original Starbucks, and lots of fish,
produce, flowers, and baked goods for sale in the
open. Pike Place is the oldest farmer's market in the
United States, according to the March 2007 edition of
the Pike Place Market News, which also communicated
the results of recent voting of the Market community
naming Harry Calvo, of Pure Food Fish, and LaRita
Walikmaki, of Manzo's Produce, as the 2007 King and
Queen of the Pike Place Market. The market celebrates
its 100th birthday this August 17th.
At north end of the waterfront district
is the Seattle Art Museum and accompanying Olympic
Sculpture Park, where I stopped for a quarter of an
hour one morning on my way in to the convention. The
museum opened just this January, and is financed by
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. The outdoor
sculpture park is quite breathtaking, in odd
juxtaposition to the old Space Needle nearby, which
was built for the 1962 World's Fair and whose
distinctive shape was reflected in most of the
architecture in the cartoon "The Jetsons," also from
the early 1960s.
Jun Liu made a personal visit to the meeting, and
presented the 25-year awards to me and the
other three recipients: Mississippi-Alabama TESOL,
Korea TESOL, and TESOL Arabia. The Affiliates
Assembly also did some business, including a
vote not to support a proposal tying TESOL
convention planning to plans for an organization
with CCCC, the Conference on College Composition
and Communication, and a vote in support of a
proposal encouraging TESOL to be more proactive
and inclusive in communicating with English
teaching professionals and stakeholders in
other countries outside the United States. In
comments during the discussion leading to this
affirmative vote on the "Resolution on International
Advocacy," affiliate representatives spoke to
the importance of three main issues: 1) the need
for TESOL to have a collective voice; 2) there
being at present too much policy focus on the
United States in TESOL initiatives; and 3) the
fact that more than 150 countries have TESOL
members. The Affiliates Assembly unanimously
endorsed the resolution, with the following
text:
That whenever possible TESOL frame
its position statements and advocacy efforts
with reference to international standards and
conventions and use language that makes them
applicable in multiple geographic contexts.
I have read large sections of
Diane Larsen-Freeman and Marianne
Celce-Murcia's "The Grammar Book,"
and I used Larsen-Freeman's very
sensible "Techniques and Principles
in Language Teaching" as the main
textbook for an ESL methodology
course I taught for several years
recently. And she was featured in an ESL MiniConference Achievement
Profile not long ago. But
this was my first time to hear her
present. She is perhaps the most
articulate and data-driven ESL/EFL
professional I have ever heard speak.
scouring beaches
seaweed and seashells
flotsam and jetsum
I am going to the park,
it is not acceptable to say
X I am gonna the park,
but it is acceptable to say
I'm gonna go to the park.
Original report by Robb Scott was intended for the spring 2007 edition of ESL MiniConference Online, but was left unfinished
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