Brett's ESL Blog

I was drawn to the paper that I read for this post because of its comparative nature. The focus being whether ELL students had better results by working with partners, or working with technology. Since both of these ideas are usually viewed positively by educators, I was curious if there would be hard data that suggested that one of them was intrinsically better than the other.  The author does a great job at setting the stage not only for his paper’s focus, but for the plight of ELL students in general. I feel like it transcends normal research papers and almost serves as a narrative of some systemic problems that ELL programs face. He outlines the difficulties that both ELL students face, and the concerns of teachers who are struggling to adapt to an increasing amount of ELL students in their classrooms. He also details some potential strategies that could be utilized to solve some of the issues he raises. The bulk of the data provided is more qualitative than quantitative. The ...

This article struck me because it’s topic is something that I had no personal experience with. The challenges that L2 learners face are daunting, but to combine that with a visual impairment presents a number of obstacles for traditional teaching methods for ESL. I was intrigued to see what best practices were shared and if there were any technology solutions that seemed to work in these situations.  This article was written by educators in India and I was fascinated with the section of the paper that detailed the struggles of teaching visually impaired students that the authors feel are prominent in India compared to other countries around the world. Particularly, I was shocked by the shared statistic that 75% of disabled children in India don’t attend school. It was eye-opening for me to see how differently the entire system of education is handled in another country. The authors shared a couple of common assistive technology examples (text to speech, voice recorders, etc.), but...

I was intrigued by this article because I had not heard of seamless learning as a technical term. The idea behind it is that learning should not be restricted to the classroom, and since mobile devices are becoming commonplace, learning will take place “involuntarily” through technology use in daily life outside the classroom. A great example provided is that when ESL students are consuming online videos in English from services like Youtube, they’ll be improving their listening and speaking skills.  The authors shared a number of seamless learning theories, including behaviourism, constructivism, and connectivism and looking at the differences between formal and informal learning. I had never considered how important informal learning is for ESL students. ESL teachers are preparing their students for utilizing their skills in daily conversations and interactions, which are for the most part, informal. It stands to reason that informal interactions are where they stand to gain val...

The article I’m reviewing, Challenging the Neutrality Myth of EdTech was one of my Google Alerts this week and I was amazed at how it hit all the right notes as far as my interests are concerned. The author, Tim Stewart, focuses on the growing presence of data collection by educational technology, particularly on how student information is being collected. He also writes on how collected data is used to evaluate teachers and how ESL teachers are particularly affected by this. It’s hard for me to remain unbiased since I work in IT, but I found this article to be a bit alarmist in nature. Stewart brings up that TESOL has become political in nature and how increases in technology use for TESOL have furthered that nature. He mentions the political history that comes with teaching ESL (colonization, globalization, etc.) and mentions that the developers of the technologies that are frequently used in education do not have the same values as those teaching it, which I thought were some inter...