Online Reading Circle

An ESL literacy reading circle is like a professional book club.  It's an opportunity to read articles or books about teaching ESL literacy and get together with other instructors to discuss what you’ve read.  In our reading circle we meet once a month.  The facilitator chooses an article or book chapter on some aspect of ESL literacy and forwards it to the members.  Sometimes these articles are quite theoretical.  Other times they are advice for the classroom, complete with exa

For our first reading circle of the new semester, we have chosen to read Adult English Language Learners with Limited Literacy by Martha Bigelow and Robin Lovrien Schwarz. It is an interesting article, and I am sure it will give us lots to talk about at our reading circle on Wednesday. 

The article provides a literature review on research on adults learning to read and write for the first time in a second language.

Many ESL programs use portfolios for learner assessment, yet instructors not always sure what to put into a portfolio or how to enagage ESL literacy learners in the portfolio process.

Happy New Year!

To start the new year, we are going to watch a training video instead of doing a reading. The video, Lesson Planning for Life Skills, brings you inside a classroom. Although they do not label the class as literacy, the teacher uses a host of strategies aimed at emergent readers.

Many ESL literacy programs are based on learning outcomes. With this in mind, December's reading circle is a very short excerpt on setting learning outcomes for literacy learners. Click here and read pages 4 -5 which outline advantages of placing learning outcomes at the centre of a curriculum.

Achren and Williams' article, Learners with Low Literacy in the AMEP is the reading for the November online reading circle. This article has a plethora of activities, appropriate topics, and strategies for working with beginning readers. I first read this article a couple of years ago and experienced many ah-ha moments. I encourage you to read this short article and reply with your thoughts on it. 

With October here already, I thought, instead of a reading an article, we'd watch a wonderful training video: Building Literacy with Adult Emergent Readers. This 15 minute video shows what goes on inside one ESL literacy classroom in Minnesota. Andrea, the instructor, teaches with purposeful activiites that are fun and effective.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to to visit Andrea's classroom at the LESLLA conference in Minnesota.

It is September already! The reading circle for September is from the LESLLA 2009 conference held in Banff, Alberta. Trauma and Learning, by Janet Isserlis, discusses some of the issues practitioners face when dealing with learners affected by trauma. It touches on some of the approaches that are helpful for these learners.

The reading circle article for August is Bringing Beginner Readers to a Text by Mary Annesley. The article contains many teaching ideas for introducing LIFE leaners to a text and is taken from a larger work on explicit reading instructions. Click here to open the article. Now scroll down to page 28 for Annesley’s article. We will be reading pages 28 – 39.

For July's online reading circle, we will be reading  Engaging English Language Learners with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education, by H. Marshall, A. DeCapua and C. Antolini. This short paper follows a high school teacher of learners with interrupted formal education who uses the MALP (Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm) model. 

The MALP model: