First Quarter in Denver

As I briefly touched on in my last post, I've relocated from Illinois to Denver and I'm now teaching on the University of Denver's campus at the English Language Center. It's a similar program to what I taught at in Illinois, but among other differences the terms are each 10 weeks long and referred to as "quarters" (fairly, since there are four in a year). This quarter I am working with intermediate level students on grammar and listening, speaking, and pronunciation skills. I'm also teaching a composition class to slightly lower level students.

With this class, Level 2 Composition, I'll be using weblogs and possibly Google Docs. I plan to post instructions for assignments to this weblog, which I haven't done on a regular basis. Hopefully I'll get my students visiting here addition to read each others' weblogs and commenting on them.

Google Docs: Good for Blogging?

I'm looking for different ways to write/publish online journals. For my new ESL classes at the University of Denver (Colorado), I might want to continue using Blogger as I did in Illinois. But Google has a fairly new document editor that allows you to post directly to weblogs, including Blogger. But much more interesting to me are the editing and revising features in Google Docs. I like to have students revise and edit their own drafts as much as possible. The "revisions" feature might be a good way to do accomplish the second goal; I like that you can easily compare different versions of a document. I used Google Docs to draft this post. If this experiment goes well, you may see many more posts here about my new classes here in Denver.

"GE Online" Term 072

Here at CESL we're starting a class called GE Online, or General English Online, for our Level 1 students. Each week we'll meet for two hours and work on developing computer skills that are related to learning English.

Even if you are not in Level 1, you can still learn from the activities we will do. So, I'll post some of our materials here on this weblog so everyone can access them. Please contact me if you need help or if you have any questions. You can also talk to your CESL teachers if you have questions about the computers we use in CESL. You can find my email address by clicking on my profile in the upper right-hand corner of this weblog.

Snow Falling on Cedars

This term I am teaching not a Novel and Film class, but an intermediate level reading class simply called "Novel Class." Our class text is a Penguin Reader adaptation of Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. We will read the novel before watching the film, which we'll do closer to the end of the two-month term.

I like the Penguin Reader version of the novel, and my class agrees that it's an interesting and engaging story. For those who haven't read the book or seen the film, I'm not actually spoiling the plot to say that there is a death investigated over the course of the book, as well as a murder trial. This has allowed for convenient vocabulary recycling, since the Integrated Skills Core class for this has a topic of crime and social deviance (the carrier content). In addition, the publisher does a great job of recycling key vocabulary. It isn't as trite and flat as a lot of ESL literature, however. It reads like an "authentic text," and is certainly still a challenge for the students.

You can soon read the student readers' descriptions of key characters from this novel, via the AE2 CESL weblog. I'll point directly there once they're available. Later in the term, students will post full reviews and summaries of the book. Those could very well be spoilers, I'll warn you.

My Media Intake

Since one of my classes, Advanced Communication, will be discussing media next week, I thought I'd write a post about which types of media I use regularly and what I get from them.

Though I don't post as frequently as I used to on my two weblogs, I still spend a lot of time online, both for entertainment and for practical reasons. For one thing, my husband and I have spent the last few months living in different states, and communication through email, instant messages, and his weblog have all helped me keep in touch with him. I also get a lot of my news from online news sources, getting most of my general news from BBC News and Reuters. For entertainment, I occasionally watch short videos on YouTube, though I usually wait until somebody points out a funny website or clip to me, I don't spend a lot of time surfing the internet looking for amusing stuff. Finally, I use the internet quite a bit to get information that I can use in my teaching materials. Sometimes I want articles on a specific topic that I can share with students, and there a lot of good pieces available for free on the web. Sometimes I just want an image to include in a poster, or I want directions to a place I am going for a class activity. Like so many other people, I turn to Google for help in answering a lot of those questions.

Though the internet is where I turn for quick answers and up to date information on world events, this isn't a very cozy way to get information or entertain myself. I still use old-fashioned books and my radio when I want to relax in the evening. It's much more comfortable to curl up on my couch with a paperback novel than my computer, though I actually haven't tried curling up with my computer. I can't imagine replacing my book-reading with reading on the computer, but someday I may stop using my old radio as I play music on my computer more and more frequently. However, I don't want to completely replace my radio consumption with just listening to mp3s. I like the local National Public Radio station for its intelligent reporting of local and global news as well as the music it plays.

One form of mass media that I avoid more than most residents of the U.S. is television. Well, I don't avoid all television programs- I really enjoy watching CSI and a few other shows. But I usually have something I'd rather be doing that watching TV. I watched much more TV before I moved out into my own apartment and suddenly found myself without one. Then I realized that I didn't really miss it, and I found other ways to fill my time.

I would generally prefer to watch a movie rather than a TV show, but since movies are so long, I sometimes feel guilty or lazy for taking so much time to watch them. I won't go into too much detail now about the types of movies I watch, and how and when I watch them- you can look forward to a future post about this when the A.C. class gets into the media unit.

Palindromes

In my Intensive Reading class, I have several students whose first alphabet reads from right to left. We've talked about how part of language learning is training our eyes to do what we want, whether you are reading carefully or just scanning a page for something. Reading in English, of course, requires moving your eyes from left to right.

Unless you are reading palindromes*. Today in reading class I brought in a list of palindromes, just I few from a site I found through a post on boingboing.net.

* What is a palindrome? See if you can guess from these examples:

God: deified dog.

Do geese see God?

Was it a car or a cat I saw?

**O.K., here's an explanation:

palindrome- a word or sentence that is the same whether you read it forwards or backwards, like "noon," "mom," or "racecar."

My 065 Students' Weblogs

During this fifth term of 2006 (065), my students will use their weblogs to showcase some of their written work. You can follow the links in my sidebar to see their work for yourself. Many of them have already started posting for my classes or for others.

For my Writer's Workshop students, at the fifth level of the CESL program, they will participate every Friday in the "Friday Five" journaling exercise. Since this is contributed to by native English speakers as well as ESL students, it is an authentic way to practice using language. Our other work in WW involves summarizing articles and responding to them, and will also include a survey report.

For my Novel/Film students, who are reading and watching Catch Me If You Can, posts to their weblog will be opinion essays in response to prompts about the characters, plot, and cinematography. Since these students do academic writing and are at the highest (6th level), it's different for them to do shorter, more informal writing. Look out for more of this, especially if you are a Tom Hanks or Leonardo DiCaprio fan.