Last week Betsy Parrish and I were in Saint Paul, Minnesota, recording three videos in adult ESL classrooms across the city. While it will be several months before they all are fully edited and ready for viewing and ordering as DVDs, it was clear that the videos are going to do a wonderful job of conveying techniques and nuances of teaching ESL.

In George Schooley’s class at the Hubbs Center for Lifelong Learning (part of the Saint Paul Public Schools), intermediate to advanced learners from a variety of backgrounds were engaged in highly interactive activities around reading material on birth order theory–a topic that everyone can relate to.

At the Arlington Hills Learning Center, run by the Minnesota Literacy Council, Jessica Jones led a session on listening skills, in which intermediate level learners listened to and watched video clips of interviews with people about experiences they had living in different cultures. Pre-, during, and post-listening activities guaranteed that the learners fully engaged with the material and each other.

At Neighborhood House, a community-based organization, Suzanne McCurdy taught a contextualized grammar lesson to intermediate learners. She focused on the past and present perfect tenses in the context of conversing about life histories–Suzanne’s and a couple of celebrities’. One delightful image I have is of a traditionally-garbed Somali woman talking with a young Latino fellow, filling him in on her knowledge of Marc Anthony (singer/actor and husband of Jennifer Lopez)!

Besides the tremendous skill and heart of these teachers, what strikes me over and over is the ability of the learners to be recorded on video without seeming even to notice that the cameras are there. We were able to film them at their completely natural best, fully engaged in the lessons. I can attribute that to the learners’ willingness and enthusiasm for the project, but also to the skill of our video crew, who manage some pretty incredible shots while somehow seeming to be relatively “invisible.” Quite amazing. I can’t wait to see how the videos turn out with our editing.

Three more class recordings are scheduled for April in the Washington, D.C., area. Mary Ann Florez and I will be on the scene!

Back in August 2009, MaryAnn Florez, Betsy Parrish, and I came together to begin work on the Adult ESL Training Video Project. We came up with an outline for a series of videos to train ESL teachers. The videos would consist of two types: 8 Core Lesson Videos and 7 Themed Videos (derived from the raw footage we took in filming the 8 core lessons). This outline is tentative, not set in stone. The topics may shift a bit as our thinking develops through the course of producing the videos. And of course the topics we cover will depend in part on the expertise and availability of teachers and programs who are willing to participate. Below is the outline we came up with.

Core Lesson Videos

These videos will be complete lessons, each an average of 30 minutes total taken from 2 hours of classroom footage and a later interview with the teacher. As we put the list of topics and classes together, we’ll also be trying to represent a range of proficiency levels, from literacy level to high intermediate.

1. Lesson planning: life skills theme (COMPLETED)
2. Multi-level: teaching students at differing levels
3. Low literacy: Employing top-down/bottom-up strategies; supporting print visually; drawing on learners’ prior skill and knowledge (COMPLETED)
4. Reading: Using narrative texts; pre-, during, and post-reading tasks; developing reading skills (skimming, scanning, inferring meaning, reading for detail, etc.)
5. Listening: Using authentic listening texts (e.g., interview or short video clip); pre-, during, and post-listening tasks; developing listening skills (gist, specific info, inferring meaning)
6. Contextualized language lesson I: Grammar
7. Contextualized language lesson II: Vocabulary, eg. jobs
8. Writing for a purpose: Stages, process vs. product. (Could also use footage from other lessons)

Themed Videos/ Derived from core lessons

These videos will be drawn from the raw footage generated from the above classroom video sessions. Each themed video will contain footage from several of the core lessons, edited together after the core lesson videos are completed. This list is tentative, depending on what themes are best illustrated in the core lessons. We will tell the teachers of the core lessons what themes we want to illustrate, so they will keep them in mind as they construct their lessons.

1. Developing oral skills, also pronunciation
2. Activity types—accuracy-based to fluency-based
3. Developing learning strategies
4. Checking and assessing learning, giving feedback
5. Classroom interactions: e.g., roles, grouping of learners for activities, minimizing teacher talk, giving directions
6. Practicing higher order thinking/critical thinking: e.g., how to give tasks, how to ask questions, how to use graphic organizers, listening and note-taking, academic readiness/transitions to higher education
7. Community building: e.g., ways to create an accepting environment, cultural sensitivity

We are excited to announce that the first two videos in our series, Teaching ESL to Adults: Classroom Approaches in Action, are ready to view online! Take a look and please give us your reactions by adding a comment to this blog entry.

Within a couple of weeks, we’ll have a DVD available for purchase. We are also working on providing an option to download the videos to your computer so that you can view them at full screen on your computer or burn your own DVD (provided you have DVD-burning software). We’ll let you know when both of these ways to obtain the videos are ready.

We expect to have two adult ESL training videos up on this website for your viewing by March 1, 2010. Each one runs about 30 minutes. Our two pilot videos in the series of eight are:

• Lesson Planning for Life Skills, with Betsy Lindeman Wong of Alexandria, Virginia, who guides beginning level learners through highly structured to open-ended activities, showing the progression of a life-skills lesson in talking on the telephone.
• Building Literacy with Adult Emergent Readers, with Andrea Echelberger of Saint Paul, Minnesota, who works with a Whole-Part-Whole approach to teaching literacy, using a learner-generated story of a shared experience and demonstrating activities to develop beginning literacy skills.

Soon we will also have DVDs available for purchase at the cost of the materials.