Padrón Campus

• Asking Questions in Class

  Gabriella Barsca

  PDF questionnaire leads students through the process of formulating and asking constructive questions to maximize class time. Competencies: 1D, 2D, 2C, 3C ,3D, 3F, 4C, 5B,

• Content-Based ESL Writing Curriculum: A Language Socialization Model

  Gulbahar H. Beckett-University of Cincinnati, Virginia Gonzalez-University of Cincinnati, Heather Schwartz-DePaul University

  In this paper, we propose a content-based, advanced level adjunct English as a Second Language (ESL) instructional approach for writing from a language socialization theoretical framework using basic principles of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and sociocultural theory of learning (Vygotsky, 1986). We emphasize an ESL curriculum that stimulates ESL students to learn domain specific knowledge, to develop cognitive and meta-cognitive learning and thinking processes, and to learn rhetorically and lexico-pragmatically appropriate writing (Raimes, 1983). We provide a complete review of the theoretical principles derived from research based on integrative curriculum for second language (L2) students. We explain how an adjunct course model (Adamson, 1993; Mohan, 1986) can be used to design the specifics of the course.

• Navigating Uncharted Waters: An Accelerated Content-Based English for Academic Purposes Program

  Kelly Hernandez-Miami Dade College, Michelle Thomas-Miami Dade College, and Cynthia Schuemann Miami-Dade College

  This article chronicles an English for Academic Purposes curriculum development experience of a grant-funded project to create an Accelerated, Content-based English curriculum for intermediate and advanced-level English Language Learners.

• Complete Lexical Tutor

  Université du Québec à Montréal

  Data-driven language learning on the web.

• Content-Based Language Teaching with Technology

  University of Minnesota

  Online module from the Center of Advanced Research on Language Acquisition.

• Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

  Corpus at Brigham Young Universty

  Free access to 450 million word corpus covering American English from 1990 to 2012.

• Project-based ESL Instruction

  Alberta TESOL, Mount Royal College, Calgary, Canada

  Summary of literature review on project-based learning.

• Teaching Language Through Content

  Center for Applied Linguistics

  Resource Guide from the Center of Applied Linguistics.

• Vocabulary in EAP

  Andy Gillett, Using English for Academic Purposes, UEFAP.com

  Using English for Academic Purposes: A Guide for Students in Higher Education.

• Vocabulary Profiler

  Université du Québec à Montréal

  A program that tells you how many words from various word frequency lists.

Learning Communities

• The Challenge of Learning Communities as a Growing National Movement

  Association of American Colleges and Universities

  Learning communities have become a growing national movement.1 Four or five hundred colleges and universities now offer them, and the number continues to increase. They are found in virtually every state, in both public and private colleges and universities, and in a diverse range of institutions. Learning communities are a broad structural innovation that can address a variety of issues from student retention to curriculum coherence, from faculty vitality to building a greater sense of community within our colleges. On some campuses, the learning community effort is very large; on others, it is small. On most, it is fragile, even if it has been in place for several years.

• A New Era in Learning-Community Work: Why The Pedagogy of Intentional Integration Matters

  Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning

  The pressure is on at that point to offer technical advice and an appropriate model for this scaling-up. But we resist this pressure. Instead, we now respond to teams' applications by asking another set of questions: Which students will be included? Why these courses? What kind of learning do you want students to experience? And so on. In other words, we deliberately shift attention away from the creation of learning-community models to the generation of learning.

• Sustaining Learning Communities

  Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

  Much has been written about the quixotic quality of educational innovation – here today, gone tomorrow. Seasoned educators recognize the pattern: good ideas followed by cautious optimism, hard work, and promising results. But once funding fizzles, institutional attention moves on. Who wouldn't want to hunker down in the privacy of the classroom?

• Kingsborough Community College currently supports three learning community

  Kingsborough Community College

  Learning communities involve collaboration, not only across academic departments, but across other institutional resources that serve student needs. Departments such as academic affairs, student development, and the library offer services and skills that contribute to the mission of learning communities and to students' experience of higher education..

• Learning Communities and Student Success in Postsecondary Education

  Derek V. Price

  Learning communities bring together small groups of college students who take two or more linked courses together — typically as a cohort. During the last few decades, many colleges and universities have started or expanded learning communities as a method to deliver curricula to students and forge closer bonds between students, among students and faculty, and between students and the institution. The learning community "movement" has grown in large part because of the leadership and advocacy of the Washington Center for Undergraduate Education at Evergreen State College. Founded in 1985, the Washington Center expanded its support for learning communities nationally after 1996 with support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the Pew Charitable Trusts. As of August 31, 2005, more than 245 learning communities were listed in the online directory of the National Learning Commons.

• Sustaining Learning Communities

  Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

  Much has been written about the quixotic quality of educational innovation – here today, gone tomorrow. Seasoned educators recognize the pattern: good ideas followed by cautious optimism, hard work, and promising results. But once funding fizzles, institutional attention moves on. Who wouldn't want to hunker down in the privacy of the classroom?

• Standards for the Senior Learning Community

  Wagner College

  By the end of the senior year, all students must successfully complete a learning community (LC) with a reflective tutorial in their major. The Senior LC is a summative experience that contains the following elements: a summative major course and an RFT that includes a 100- hour experiential component, a substantial and sophisticated written project, and a presentation.

• FYP First Year Program

  Wagner College

  Our First Year Program (FYP) is designed to help students take charge of their own education and use the tools that are necessary for active and lifelong learning. The FYP Learning Communities create conversations and links between subjects and courses. By linking those courses to genuine fieldwork in communities and organizations, students discover the connections (and sometimes the disconnections) between ideas and real-world problems. Beginning with the very first semester at Wagner, students are involved in real-world problems and field work directly linked to their coursework.

• Learning Communities at the Crossroads

  Ohio University: Linda Caron, Associate Dean College of Liberal Arts Henry Limouze, Associate Provost for Faculty and Staff Affairs Wright State University

  Although learning communities date back to the 1920s, the modern resurgence of learning communities began in the 1980s. By 2000, more than five hundred institutions offered learning communities; by 2007, 30% of first-year students at doctoral-extensive and master's institutions were enrolled in a learning community. Studies have shown that when done well, learning communities can make a critical difference in student success, especially for some minority and underprepared populations. Despite the growth in learning communities, they have remained an "add-on" component rather than being fully integrated into the curriculum and structure of the institution. In addition, institutional goals and assessments of learning communities (retention, transition to college) are not always the same as the broader educational objectives of learning communities (academic inquiry, integrated knowledge). Learning communities have not yet scaled up to the level where they transform the structure of the university. This paper looks at the entwined history of learning communities, general education, and liberal education; the current data on learning community effectiveness; the challenges now facing learning communities; and the possible future evolution of learning communities.

Student-Teacher Technologies

• Jing, Share Ideas Instantly

  TechSmith.com

  Give your students the information they need, when they need it. Use Jing to record your feedback as you grade papers, or take a snapshot to share with your class. Your students can even use it to collaborate, or ask questions!

• Voice Thread

  voicethread.com

  VoiceThread bridges the gap between real-time discussions and standard video lectures or online presentations. This makes VoiceThread the platform for teaching, learning, training, and collaborating, on-demand.

• Portaportal

  portaportal.com

  This web based service offers easy bookmarking to store and share your favorite web links.

• Ted Talks: Ideas worth spreading

  www.ted.com

  Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.

Corpus related topics for students and teachers

• Concordance

  United Arab Emirates University

• Just the Word

  www.just-the-word.com

  Online Thesaurus and list of common learner errors.

• PHRASE.IN

  Francesco Benetti

  Manual proof reading that works. Allows users to comparatively test two phrases.

• Easy Define v2.0 and InstaDefine Beta

  www.easydefine.com

  List it. Define it. Learn it. InstaDefine provides complete dictionary entries.

Teacher Resources

• Hot Potatoes

  The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source.

• Teaching content through a second language

  Cambridge University Press

  The results of foreign language immersion have shown that students can develop content knowledge at the same time as they develop language skills. In immersion, majority language students are educated in a new language. In total immersion programs, school activities from mundane tasks such as collecting lunch money to cognitively demanding tasks such as learning how to read are conducted in a foreign (second) language. Numerous studies of Canadian immersion programs have shown that English-speaking students schooled in French not only attain higher levels of proficiency in French than in any other school-based model of second language instruction but do so at no detriment to their native language, academic, or cognitive development (Genesee, 1987; Lambert and Tucker, 1972; Swain and Lapkin, 1985).

• Corpus Linguistics: What it is and how it can be applied to teaching

  Daniel Krieger, Siebold University of Nagasaki

  This insightful article describes corpus linguistics and its usefulness in teaching.

• A Six-T's Approach to Content-Based Instruction

  Fredricka L. Stoller and William Grabe

  Professionals in many instructional settings are developing approaches to content-based instruction (CBI) which emphasize the multiple benefits of integrating language and content instruction for second language (L2) students. The approaches vary, however, representing diverse contexts for instruction, different perspectives on the integration of content and language, and differing assumptions about content, language, and learning strategies. Despite differences in theoretical and practical orientations, these approaches to CBI uniformly view language as a medium for learning content, and content as a resource for learning language. In addition, they endorse purposeful and meaningful language use in the classroom, while assuming a distinction between academic and social language. Most approaches also assume pre-selected, predetermined content, specified in institutional curriculum guidelines or existing course offerings.