Joe McVeigh

I’m back from a terrific time in Chile, hosted by colleagues at Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago. They were wonderful hosts, and while there, I gave a talk called Teaching Languages with Technology. Several of the teachers at the university joined in and gave brief demos of the way that they use the language lab, electronic whiteboards, and blogs.   You can download the PowerPoint slides here or view them online here.

For possible inclusion in a forthcoming book on culture, we are seeking brief stories of experiences that you as teachers have had that involve aspects or dimensions of culture and intercultural communication. These stories could be situations or realizations that you have had personally or could be experiences that you have had with your ESL/EFL students.

Please summarize the incident in a brief paragraph or two—sorry, there isn’t space for stories longer than 200 words.  In your write-up, note the country or culture in which you were teaching or working, and the country or culture of the student(s) involved. Also, be sure to let us know the age group of the students and the educational context in which the story takes place.

We are particularly interested in vignettes that would illustrate cultural challenges or competence in the following areas

1.      Culture and language

2.      Culture and nonverbal communication

3.      Culture and identity

4.      Cultural conflict and adjustment

5.      Culture and education

6.      Culture and social responsibility

Please include your name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Send your contribution to me at the email address at the end of this message. We’re sorry that we can’t include all of the accounts.  If included for publication, your story may be edited for length and style. Contributors whose stories are included will be notified and appropriately credited in the text.

If your story is about your own experience, use the first person. If you are writing about a student, write in the third person and anonymize their name.Many thanks for your help.

Joe McVeigh, Middlebury, Vermont, USA

Ann Wintergerst, St. John’s University, New York, USA

Please send contributions and questions to joe@joemcveigh.org or use the contact form.

If you’ll be at the TESOL conference in Denver, Please join me for the presentations listed below. Handouts and PowerPoints will be available a day or two after the presentation. Check the Resources page for teachers, trainers, and consultants.  I hope to see you there.

Designing Effective Reading Activities

Thursday, 3/26/2009, 1:00 PM - 1:45 PM

Convention Center 407

Jennifer Bixby, Joe McVeigh

How can materials writers design more effective reading activities? The presenters share a menu of exercise types that writers can incorporate into prereading, reading, and postreading materials. The presenters then demonstrate the development of a sample reading lesson designed to build academic success.

Exploring College Slang

Friday, 3/27/2009, 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM

Convention Center 504

Joe McVeigh and Ann Wintergerst

The presenters describe a survey of U.S. undergraduate college students to discover which slang terms were most commonly used on campus. They present an online dictionary of terms with definitions and examples. They share a list of the most common terms and offer suggestions for teaching slang to ESL students.

Current Trends in ESL/EFL Publishing

Saturday, 3/28/2009 3:00 PM - 4:45 PM

Convention Center 304

Joe McVeigh, Louisa Hellegers, Pietro Alongi, Sherrise Roehr, Laura Pearson

A panel of professionals discuss trends in ESL/EFL publishing and answer questions from participants. Topics may include the respective roles of authors and editors, the impact of technology and of second language research, and changes in international and domestic markets.

Submit a question to the panelists here.

In mid-December I was flying back to Burlington, Vermont from LaGuardia airport in New York. A couple with a small child, dressed in a slightly unusual fashion were in the wrong seats, and were properly relocated to the very back row of the 20-seat plane where I was sitting. The father had something very like a luggage tag attached to him. It turned out that they were refugees from Bhutan, who were being relocated by an international immigration organization, after having spent 18 years in Nepal. I was able to talk with them a little in their limited English. The man told me that in addition to speaking Drupal and Nepalese, that English was like a mother tongue to him. Then the twenty-something flight attendant got on the intercom and gave the safely briefing. The man looked at me and said, “She’s speaking two languages right? American English and something else?” I had to inform him that, although it may not have been a very good model of language, she was in fact speaking American English and nothing else. He sighed. I thought at that time what an important role ESL teachers play in the lives of people like this. A nice reminder during the holiday season that the opportunity to make a significant difference for people is why many of us teach ESL in the first place.

Congratulations to authors Jo McEntire and Jessica Williams on the publication of Making Connections Intermediate: A Strategic Approach to Academic Reading. This terrific intermediate level reading book has just been published by Cambridge University Press, and the whole editorial, marketing, and production teams deserve a hearty round of applause. You can learn more about this title at the CUP website. I helped with the development editing of this title and it’s great to see it in print!

I’ve only just learned of a new job posting by Middlebury College for a Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing—a renewable three-year position. The posting is listed on the TESOL online career center here. Note that though this may appear to a TESOL professional  like an ESL writing position, it is actually for someone to teach writing in content-based courses to both native and non-native speakers. The deadline is November 15th so don’t delay. Please spread the word to qualified candidates. Visit the links below for more information about the workplace.

• Middlebury College
• The Middlebury Writing Program
• More on the Middlebury Writing Program
• The Middlebury Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research

Researchers have long believed that individuals communicate as much or more through non-verbal communication as they do through the actual words that they use. Edward Hall and Erving Goffman have suggested that facial expressions, gestures, body language, and tone of voice can be responsible for more than two thirds of the meaning that is conveyed. Naturally, the experts have been called out to analyze the recent presidential election debates in the United States. This article in the Los Angeles Times outlines the ways in which candidates Barack Obama and John McCain either reinforce or undercut their message by their use of non-verbal communication. If this is true for native speakers of English, imagine the impact on non-native speakers, and the challenge of learning not only a new language, but also a new language of gesture and non-verbal communication.

We know that gender roles have changed over time and that, to some extent gender roles vary from one culture to another. Yet we usually think that as a culture becomes more “modern” the differences between genders become smaller. But some new studies, summarized in this New York Times article suggest otherwise. As John Tierney writes in his article, if these scientists are right, “men and women shouldn’t expect to understand each other much better any time soon.” Oh, well.

After careful deliberation, the 2008-2009 TESOL Nominating Committee (pictured at left) has put together the slate for elections for upcoming positions on the Board of Directors and the 2009-2010 Nominating Committee. View the slate and read the candidates’ biographies and positions on the TESOL web site here. Active TESOL members with voting rights will receive ballots by e-mail or mail in October 2008. The deadline for voting is January 12, 2009.

On Saturday, May 3rd, 2008, I’ll be at the Northern New England TESOL conference to give a talk about the Middlebury Slang Project. In January of 2008, students in a course I was teaching at Middlebury College collected slang from their fellow students. They then wrote dictionary definitions, winnowed the list, surveyed fellow students to determine frequency, and put it all together on a web site, complete with audio files for the ones that are more difficult to pronounce. You can see the resulting web site here. I’ll be joined in this presentation by one of the students in the course, Alexis Mussomeli. Warning, the contents of the site are definitely R-rated as befits the primary interests of college age students. See a photo of the presentation here: Download copies of the handout and PowerPoint presentation here.