What the ESL teaching field stands for

The TESOL International Association has notified its members of the death of Dr. James E. Alatis, one of its founding members. I have been a member of this organization since the 1970s, and his writings meant a lot to me over the years.

As the notice says, "Jim Alatis, as he was known to many, will be remembered for his energy and his commitment to TESOL International Association and to the field of English language teaching. 'Our kind of teaching,' he once said, 'which accepts other peoples’ languages and cultures as equally valid to ours, is essential to cross-cultural communication, mutual educational exchange, social justice, and, ultimately, it is devoutly to be wished, world peace.' As the association works to support and encourage the work of English language teaching, he would urge us, as he told one interviewer, 'to continue to insist upon quality above all.'”

Peace Corps–Sierra Leone Staff Development

During May, SELI has been conducting an eight-session staff development training in Business Writing for the Peace Corps–Sierra Leone staff.

We've all enjoyed the sessions, mixing writing skills (style, cohesion and paragraphs) with genre writing and ongoing job writing requirements.

This is a great group of people to work with and they perform such an important function in Peace Corps–Sierra Leone. Hope we've been able to enhance that a bit.

Process Writing for Researcher Trainees

SELI gave a presentation on process writing to the Institute for Development's Researcher Trainee program at the British Council on May 14th.

This morning's session was twice as long as the March session we conducted with IfD trainees. We therefore delivered less and interacted more—all good—and with the support of Maryam, the trainer today, our presentation linked into the whole training better.

Everyone was very engaged and they asked a lot of good questions. I very much like nonfiction writing and research, myself. I enjoyed the morning, and I hope they did, too! 

Discourse Politics

The world is full of discourse politics (otherwise referred to as business communications)—power stances people assume in meetings to acquire control. You can't disregard people's stances and keep reacting to the words they say—as if you're a representative in congress objecting to a telephone number a colleague read from a phonebook while he's filibustering.

Here are a few of the strategies that come to mind: 

• remaining behind your big desk when people enter your room, using the distance the size of the desk provides to gain power; 
• making people wait when they have arrived for a meeting you called, to make it appear as if they are the petitioners; 
• using Krio instead of English to convey that you hold casual regard for a topic someone else takes seriously; 
• asking people to repeat what they've already explained, or account for things unnecessarily; 
• or just asking questions (especially confrontational ones)—question posers are automatically in a position of power, but if you don't answer, or don't directly answer the question, you take some of their power away.

These strategies make it difficult to take minutes at meetings because what is accomplished by the strategies is often unrelated to the content that was discussed. Maybe they were just trying to acquire the upper hand. . . maybe they were trying to make the meeting come to naught so they could take decisions privately instead. . . .

TGIF

Here's how we spend the end of our Friday classes now in our Course in Workplace English at SELI: playing Scrabble!

The members of the class are all avid bilingual dictionary users (we allow the use of dictionaries, since doing so makes it a learning activity in this beginning-proficiency class). At first I gave some support to the lower performing students but they, themselves, stopped me—everyone's too competitive to tolerate that!

The whole session is taken up with discussions about new words and what they mean. Since the words remain on the board throughout the game, participants repeatedly revisit them and recall their meanings.

This is a noun, isn't it, and not a verb? He's trying to add -ing to it!  That's an uncountable noun—you can't put an -s on it!

Course in Workplace English

SELI's new 14-week intensive beginning-ESL Course in Workplace English got underway this week!

The enrollees are university level or working adults who gained their education in some other language, and would like to develop the skills they need to apply for bilingual jobs in their countries.

All the current enrollees are French-speaking, and most of them are from Guinea. This is a SELI ESL class that contributes toward funding SELI's charitable work in secondary schools in Sierra Leone.