• Assessing Learning in the Adult ESL Classroom
• Tasks to Promote Critical Thinking and Learning Skills
• Effective Grouping Strategies in the Adult ESL Classroom
• Tasks to Develop Oral Skills: From Accuracy to Fluency

Like the first three DVDs, this fourth volume can be purchased either directly from the New American Horizons Foundation for $5.00 each plus shipping, or by credit card from Create Space for $6.00 each plus shipping.

• Assessing Learning in the Classroom, developed by MaryAnn Florez
  
• Tasks to Promote Critical Thinking and Learning Skills, developed by Betsy Parrish

The videos are also now available for purchase as DVDs, either by sending an order form and check or money order to New American Horizons Foundation, or by using a credit card on CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon.com.

Our videos will be featured at a workshop led by Betsy Parrish and MaryAnn Florez, the ESL consultants on the series, at the TESOL convention in New Orleans, on Saturday, March 19. We hope to see some of you at the convention!

Volume 1

Lesson Planning for Life Skills: Betsy Lindeman Wong of Alexandria, Virginia, 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: Andrea Echelberger of Saint Paul, Minnesota, 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.

Volume 2

Growing Vocabulary with Beginning Learners: Karli Boothe of Arlington, Virginia, demonstrates a contextualized approach to introducing and reinforcing vocabulary within a lesson. She uses a variety of vocabulary development strategies and activities to promote learners’ interaction and active engagement as they master words and concepts.

Working with a Multi-level Class: Susan Watson of Prince William County, Virginia, offers techniques to deal with differing levels of language ability within one class, including use of grouping strategies, differentiated materials, and a small group project.

Developing Listening Skills with High-intermediate Learners: Jessica Jones of Saint Paul, Minnesota, leads her class through a lesson on the theme of cross-cultural experiences, including pre-listening activities, tasks learners complete while listening, and follow-up activities.

Volume 3

Teaching Grammar in Real-life Contexts: Suzanne McCurdy of Saint Paul, Minnesota, uses a contextualized approach to presenting and practicing grammar with her intermediate level learners, allowing them to recognize and use the simple past and present perfect tenses in the contexts of life histories and personal experiences.

Cultivating Writing Skills at the Intermediate Level: Sheryl Sherwin of Washington, D.C., guides learners through a series of activities that prepare them to complete a writing assignment. She utilizes a pre-writing survey assignment, group discussion, graphic organizers, and target text models to help learners take command of the process of writing.

Developing Reading Skills for Intermediate/Advanced Learners: George Schooley of Saint Paul, Minnesota, takes learners from pre-reading through follow-up tasks using a text about birth-order theory. He demonstrates how to make reading lessons highly interactive by connecting content to learners’ lives, using graphic organizers, and having both group and individual tasks.

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!

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

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.