Uncharted Tesol

Takeaways from TESOL

Christopher Collins shares his takeaways from the 2015 TESOL convention.

TESOL 2015, in Toronto, was my second TESOL convention. I attended the 2010 conference in Boston, as it coincided with a visit home from Japan. At that time, I was teaching in Japan, with a vague notion of returning to the United States at some point in the future, and hopefully teach in a university setting. In fact, the only thing I really hoped to get out of that convention, was more information about how to achieve that goal of teaching at a university in the U.S. In reality, I don’t think I was able to find much about jobs — I don’t clearly remember anything tangible in any case. What I do remember is feeling kind of lost and aimless, because there were (and are) so many presentations at TESOL, one is advised to do some planning before attending. On the other hand, I did have the opportunity to meet some of the students and faculty members from the New School MATESOL program, which turned out to be the most memorable aspect of my attending that conference. Fast forward to 2015 in Toronto. 

Now I am teaching at a university in the United States, in New York, and I went to TESOL with a specific itinerary of presentations to attend. I determined this itinerary by doing three things: 1. While waiting for a film to start at a cinema, I used the TESOL app to browse every presentation that looked to be of interest to me. My professional interests include, in particular, vocabulary acquisition, corpus linguistics, and reading skills. So I found lots of presentations on those areas. 2. Then, while still sitting in my seat at the cinema, I went through the list of presenters A-Z, and looked for names of people I knew of or knew personally. 3. Finally, I reached out on twitter to see if anyone had any recommendations. This process allowed me to come up with a very busy schedule. 

Once in Toronto (after a lengthy but fun road trip with co-workers from my department that included copious amounts of junk food, debate, loud music playing, and an extended interview under the bright lights of the U.S.-Canadian border), and at the convention center, I started to adjust my schedule. Why did I do this? Well, I ran into co-workers, I talked to people I didn’t know, and I wanted to see more presentations by presenters that caught my attention. In this case, I took great inspiration from presentations by Eli Hinkel and a presentation by William Grabe and Fredricka L. Stoller. I liked seeing Eli Hinkel so much that I went to see her twice. I’m not sure how to translate what Eli Hinkel said into meaningful words in this blog post. She emphasized that review is fundamental to vocabulary acquisition. She told jokes. She emphasized review. She told more jokes and talked about “shame motivation.” She answered questions. And she emphasized review. (Actually, this person summarized Hinkel’s thoughts about vocabulary acquisition better than I can.)

William Grabe, who has written excellent books and numerous scholarly articles on reading skills, presented with Fredricka L. Stoller on what they call “reader’s theater.” Reader’s theater is a reading fluency building exercise that I quickly used in my classes after returning from Toronto. The idea is to take a reading that you have worked on with students and turn into a TV-interview script. You have to slightly modify a text to make it interview-like, but frankly this is not time consuming. Then, students choose roles, and practice reading their role at home. Grabe’s point is that by repeatedly reading a specific text, the students are getting reading fluency practice. While I was in Toronto, I had my students working with three readings on the theme of whether or not governments should spend public money on sporting events such as the World Cup and the Olympics. The readings took different stances, and each was easily adapted into the reader’s theater format. The students seemed to enjoy reading for their classmates (who read along with the scripts), and I felt that this task was something I will use again, probably more than once a semester. 

How else did I spend my time at TESOL? Through social media, I met a number of educators from around the world, and had productive, interesting discussions. I went to a variety of presentations, that reinvigorated me for the final month of the semester, and I could sense that I brought that energy back to my classroom. I also took some professional inspiration, and gave a presentation at a faculty meeting after the convention. This conference has proven to be a productive one for me, and I look forward to 2016 in Baltimore. 

Author’s Biography:

Christopher Collins has been teaching English since 2003 and at Columbia University since 2013. He has also taught in Japan and the Czech Republic. He received his MA TESOL with a concentration in Curriculum Development from The New School in 2011. His professional interests include vocabulary acquisition and Extensive Reading.