The effectiveness of tutoring for improving pre-service teacher development

Pre-service teacher preparation in the United States is becoming progressively more challenging with respect to the demands on teachers. This study examined the impact of the tutoring approach on pre- service teachers’ skills to work with English language learners (ELLs) through a qualitative research design. Content analysis was used at the thematic level on student journals written to accompany the semester-long experience of tutoring. 50 pre-service teachers participated and data was collected from 500 written journal reflections for two semesters. Overall, the pre-service teachers gained an understanding of the challenges of working with ELLs and other positive impacts through tutoring. The findings suggest that pre-service teachers have perceived value of the use of the tutoring approach in the teacher preparation program, use of strategies during field-based experiences, instructional realizations, cultural sensitivity, and professionalism. This paper concluded by discussing the need for a teacher education program to assist pre-service teachers to assimilate pedagogies and apply through the tutoring approach

Tutor Training and Services for Multilingual Graduate Writers: A Reconsideration

Multilingual graduate writers make few appearances in writing center discussions. These students live, work, and write at the intersection of two subjectivities—graduate writer and multilingual writer—neither of which is the core population of native-English-speaking undergraduates with whom most writing centers have traditionally worked. Writers who are multilingual or “ESL”1 have received frequent attention (e.g. Blau and Hall; Bruce and Rafoth, Myers; Harris and Silva), and a handful of scholars have considered the challenges of tutoring graduate students (e.g. Pemberton; Powers; Gillespie; Snively). However, the research tells us little about how to work effectively with students who are both multilingual and graduate writers (hereafter, MGWs). In this essay, I place interviews with MGWs in conversation with a survey of writing center practices with MGW student populations. Based on the experiences of the MGWs I interviewed, I suggest that writing centers could better meet MGWs’ needs by adopting a more holistic approach to the writing process that is more disciplinarily informed and that resists creating false dichotomies between global and sentence-level concerns. I argue that for MGWs, sentence-level problems—even those that tutors might judge to be minor or moderate—may have serious implications for their professional advancement.University Writing Cente

Connecting Undergraduate Students as Partners in Computer Science Teaching and Research

Connecting undergraduate students as partners can lead to the enhancement of the undergraduate experience and allow students to see the different sides of the university. Such holistic perspectives may better inform academic career choices and postgraduate study. Furthermore, student involvement in course development has many potential benefits. This paper outlines a framework for connecting research and teaching within Computer Science- though this is applicable across other disciplines. Three case studies are considered to illustrate the approach. The first case study involves students in their honours’ stage (level 6, typically 3rd year) project, the second an undergraduate intern between stages 5 and 6, and finally, a MSc (level 7) project. All three case studies have actively involved students in core parts of the University’s teaching and research activities, producing usable software systems to support these efforts. We consider this as a continuing engagement process to enhance the undergraduate learning experience within Computer Science

What's New? Reaching Working Adults with English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Instruction, A Best Practices Report

In July 2001 the Center for Impact Research (CIR) completed a needs assessment, Barriers to English Language Learners in the Chicago Metropolitan Area, which detailed the needs of immigrant working adults for English instruction and determined the barriers they faced in learning English. CIR's 2001 report documented the fact that many of these employed immigrants take advantage of overtime, hold down two jobs, and are often subject to changing or rotating work schedules that make attendance at regularly scheduled classes difficult. Evening English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes that occur twice a week lasting between one-and-a-half to three hours also present difficulties, because they interfere with parenting and family duties; fatigue of the attendees after a long day's work also makes learning problematic. Some Friday evening and Saturday morning classes are available, but seldom are there any classes on Sundays. ESOL providers report that they are unable to schedule weekend classes because of the lack of trained and qualified teachers who are willing to work on Saturdays and Sundays. Volunteer tutors could assist ESOL learners, but they too are reluctant to make commitments for weekend hours. The metropolitan Chicago ESOL system faces an additional problem in that it cannot meet the needs of those immigrants who are interested in, and able to attend ESOL classes. CIR's analysis of demographic data finds an estimated total population of potential English Language Learners 18 years of age or older in the Chicago metropolitan area in 2000 at 277,700. According to the Illinois Community College Board, in Fiscal Year 2001 68,815 adults in the Chicago metropolitan area received some ESOL instruction through programs funded by the Board, meaning that only about one-quarter of the need was able to be met. Sixty-two percent of these learners were in beginning ESOL classes. Many area ESOL providers report long waiting lists for ESOL classes, and some say they are implementing lotteries for classroom places. How then, can ESOL learning be reorganized to enable adult learners who are employed to upgrade their English language skills? Can ESOL services be offered along a continuum, with systems providing various services, geared to immigrants with differing levels of commitment to learning English, as well as changing or rotating schedules and time limitations? How can effective learning opportunities be offered in the home, at the workplace, and in accessible community locations, such as shopping centers and churches

A systematic review of pedagogical approaches that can effectively include children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms with a particular focus on peer group interactive approaches

The broad background to this review is a long history of concepts of special pupils and special education, and a faith in special pedagogical approaches. The rise of inclusive schools and some important critiques of special pedagogy (e.g. Hart, 1996; Norwich and Lewis, 2001; Thomas and Loxley, 2001) have raised the profile of teaching approaches that ordinary teachers can and do use to include children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms. Inclusive education itself is increasingly conceived as being about the quality of learning and participation that goes on in inclusive schools rather than simplistic matters of where children are place

Facilitating academic words learning: a data-driven approach using a collocation consultation system built from open access research papers

It is essential and beneficial for ESP students to master collocations of a set of core academic words. Corpus analysis tools (e.g. concordancers) have been widely used in facilitating collocation learning, and promising results have been demonstrated in the literature. This paper presents a learner friendly collocation consultation system built from 50,000 open access research papers made available by CORE (https://core.ac.uk/). The research papers are grouped into four disciplines: Arts and Humanities, Physical Sciences, Life Sciences and Social Sciences. From these articles, useful syntactic-based word combinations (e.g., verb+noun, noun+noun, adjective+noun) are extracted, organized by syntactic patterns, sorted by frequency, and linked to their context sentences. Learners can search collocations and look up the usage of an academic word in any of these four disciplines by simply entering the word or selecting it from one of pre-compiled academic word lists. The paper will also show how the system was used in an initial study carried out with 15 international students studying computer science at University of Waikato, New Zealand

Responsive socio-cultural contexts: Supporting five year olds to become literate in a second language.

Learning one's own indigenous language and culture as a second language learner within formal mainstream education settings can pose many challenges, especially for students who have been raised in the dominant first language and who are just beginning school. This paper discusses a Māori language resource used by a Māori immersion teacher to respond to these challenges. This resource utilises community support to develop students' phonological awareness while simultaneously increasing their oral language. This study shows that within a relatively short period of time, students' phonological knowledge improved along with their confidence and ability to speak in Māori. With these skills they were then able to progress more successfully to becoming literate in Māori, their second language