Observation Week 2: Feb 28 and March 1

This week for my observations I decided to focus on course objectives, course content/materials and did a short textbook evaluation for their class text. The students for both Reading 3 courses are using "College Level Reading 3", a series edited by Patricia Byrd and Joy M. Reid, which I know we have read articles published by both of them before in my TESOL courses at ISU so I think they have a pretty good authority in the TESOL field. According to Sue (the professor), the basic course objectives of Reading 3 at Heartland are for the students to master parts of English grammar, which includes syllable stress, word definitions, and correcting grammatical errors within sentences. Sue uses a book for her questions on error correction that is a designed like a TOEFL exam, since most of them need more experience with that content and plan on taking the TOEFL again soon. Other than that book, Sue creates her own materials and she said that all of the other ESL professors create their own materials since they were not satisfied with how the textbook approached grammar. After reading the book, I definitely understand what she meant. The textbook is certainly excellent in its realm (reading) and has varied and level-appropriate activities and has great vocabulary lists as well as very approachable reading selections. I would certainly not complain about it meeting its purpose in that area, but at the same time, there is little to no explicit grammar instruction in the textbook; it just makes the assumption that the students have already learned these things before which I (and Sue) believe is a huge oversight on the book's part. The students are still confused on what punctuation marks are called in English; they were calling a colon "two periods" and a semicolon "the period comma thing" and Sue had to correct them a few times before realizing that they actually never learned the proper names for the marks. That's where I believe having native speakers of English is a bit of a downfall because for us everything in English is just so innate and we cannot imagine that people do not know the names of punctuation marks! But even between me and Sue, there is a huge generation gap and her generation called exclamation points "exclamation marks" and I can see why English can be so confusing because it changes so frequently. The students just seem so confused because English has way too many rule exceptions to remember. Sometimes I cannot even remember all of them!

Something to note: students do not take a placement exam before attending Heartland. Some students have failed their TOEFL exam and are just biding time and improving their English in order to attend ISU or another 4-year college or university, or they already have full-time jobs here and are improving their English so that they can get promoted or function better at their current place of employment. Something else I found interesting was that in their native countries some were taught by British speakers of English so that is something else Sue has to factor into her teaching, because British English pronounces and call things different names than in American English. In a way, Sue has to kind of re-program their English and their pronunciation because that is where they have the most difficulty.

Other notes about the textbook; the textbook addresses 9 "competencies" or objectives of the course for the students, and that way the students can keep track of where they are in the competencies. 1 of these competencies is addressed explicitly in the chapters of the book. It includes a section specifically on reading strategies that students will be tested on in the chapter exams that Sue gives out (they have an exam once a month). Something cool I liked about the book was that it had links to the Academic Word List online; I believe we saw it in 345 with Dr. Seloni before. I'm glad that the book addresses that so that the students have a useful and easy tool to practice vocabulary. The textbook emulates the type of responses it wants from the students; it shows a great deal of examples and summarizing main points in order for the students to comprehend better. I think that modeling is hugely important in language in general but especially in ESL environments. They usually model the vocabulary terms or concepts with images; for example for the word "stress" they have a college-age looking student who has a disturbed look on their face as they look at an exam which I thought was interesting. I think that the students can relate to the photographs and can get a good sense of what the emotions are behind that vocabulary word. I think the textbook uses a variety of cultures in the images and gender is well-represented. The layout is comprehensible and goes in a nice succession of difficulty in the concepts; however, the book is rather boring as an external appearance and could use more colors to liven it up a bit.