The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the School of ESL and Immigrant Education (SoTL-ESL)

The SoTL-ESL News

I would like to invite you to my presentation titled “Using TBI in Canada: Can Sheltered Instruction Complement?”, which is taking place at 11:00 AM on Sunday, May 21 in B101 at Akita International University in Japan.

I will start off the session with a brief introduciton of the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLBs),which is a national standard and framework of reference for teaching adult ESL in Canada and adheres to the principles of TBI among other instructional approaches. We will then discuss its incorporation into adult ESL classrooms, using mainly components and features from the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model. I believe that there will be some SIOP strategies for you to take away and incorporate in your EFL/JSL and mainstream classrooms in Japanese teaching and learning contexts.

Thank you very much!

Do you teach an adult EAL class with exceptional students? Or, do you feel that some of your adult EAL students who are yet to be diagnosed with disabilities might benefit from differentiating instructions? Then you may find this article (pp. 6-9) useful:

Welcome to ADAPT Strategy: A 5-step Strategy for Inclusion in adult ELL Classrooms, pp. 6-9.

Follow this link to an article on developing reading comprehension through the use of SQP2RS published in March 2016 in TESOL Connections:

Developing ELL Reading Comprehension Skills: SQP2RS

Research interest in L2 reading strategy use has been growing considerably among second language practitioners and researchers. Reading strategies are the comprehension processes employed by readers to make sense of what they read (Brantmeier, 2002). As there is a wide consensus among practitioners that the use of a variety of reading strategies can help adult ESL students develop their reading comprehension, the present research investigated adult EFL students’ perceived awareness of reading strategy use in academic context in Nepal. The findings revealed that participants used all three categories of reading strategies at a high- and medium- usage levels. However, no significant differences in overall reading strategy use were found between male and female participants. Significant differences are found between the male and female participants (p < .05) in the means of 3 of the 30 individual reading strategies. Males’ mean values are significantly higher than females’ for Global 24 and Problem-solving 25, whereas females’ mean value is significantly higher than males’ for Support 10. Among the other 27 reading strategies, there is no significant difference between males and females, although females’ mean values are higher for 17 individual reading strategies and males’ mean values are higher for 10 individual reading strategies. The overall mean value for all the strategies taken together is higher for females; however, the difference is not statistically significant. These findings indicated that this particular group of students are aware of a variety of reading strategies. Global strategies are related to reading comprehension (Anderson, 2005). As Global is the least reported category of strategies, the use of Global strategies be encouraged among the readers. It is important that readers’ awareness of appropriate strategies be promoted since when readers are aware of the reading strategies they have already identified, their conscious decision to use appropriate strategies becomes helpful in comprehension of the text (Akkakoson, 2012).