CoTESOL Annual Fall Convention

November 14-15th, 2014

Riding the Rails of Engine-uity

CoTESOL is the Colorado branch of TESOL, a professional organization for Teachers of

English to Speakers of Other Languages. The conference brings presenters from around the
region to share strategies and techniques that support linguistic and culturally diverse
populations. Over two days, professionals in the field of TESOL present demonstrations,
workshops, discussions and papers which delve into linguistic teaching methods, critical
pedagogy, social justice, technology, artistic forms of learning. I find that each year I attend
CoTESOL and other professional conferences, I come away with many great resources,
knowledge, and ideas to incorporate into my teaching of English.
The first session I attended, Engaging Asian students in classroom interactions, discussed
research findings with regard to English learners from Asian language backgrounds. The findings
of the research presented that cultural factors (power distance, individualism vs. collectivism,
and Uncertainty Avoidance) and students self-perceptions play a significant role in the level of
classroom interactions of speakers of Asian languages. This lack of involvement from this
particular population presents challenges for ESL instructors in using collaborative and
cooperative learning methods. The presenters provided specific strategies for improving Asian
students class participation, which were founded on cultural differences between U.S culture
and Asian cultures. The takeaway from this presentation for me, was recognizing that culture
difference plays a huge role in how ESL learners interact in the classroom. As an ESL instructor,
it should be a priority to help all learners feel comfortable and safe in the classroom as much as
possible. It helps to know more about the cultures of my students so I can better understand the

learning environment that they are used to, and gently adapt my classroom to help them make the
transition from their cultural norms to U.S. cultural norms.
Another useful session I attended was Music options for ESL teaching materials. I
attended this session because I love music and know that it is a great tool for teaching grammar,
vocabulary, patterns, pronunciation, etc. Music and song lyrics can be used to teach the four
skills of English language: reading, writing, listening speaking, as well as culture. Song lyrics
can be used to teach specific language structures like future tense verbs or modals. The
incorporation of music into an ESL classroom can help students with audio learning styles. The
presenter provided many example music activities that ESL instructors can incorporate into their
lessons. I found this session very fun and memorable. I hope to use the presenters ideas for
developing my own music lessons for ESL.
One of the more technological sessions I went to demonstrated how smart phones can be
incorporated into the ESL classroom. Entitled Integrating smartphones into the 21st century
classroom, this workshop revealed many ways technology can work in our favor as instructors to
millennial ESL learners. I discovered tools like: Kahoot and Quizlet (which create online
quizzes), Socrative.com (which provides assessments, games, and scavenger hunts), Pollev
(which guides group brainstorming), and QR Codes (image files), which creates scrambles,
jigsaws, and generates GR Codes. All of these online tools make English language learners more
engaged and connected by using modern devices they already own. I am excited to use these
tools in my ESL classroom!
The next session I attended, Using corpora in the L2 classroom, was presented by two
TESL/TEFL CSU MA students. I found this session very insightful in presenting research-based
techniques for lesson development. Corpora are helpful resources for ESL instructors and

curriculum developers in that they provide many examples of authentic usage of language. They
are also helpful for ESL learners in that they can search specific words, lexical bundles, and
idioms to see how they are used in authentic texts. The presenters demonstrated an example
search for such as to see how this lexical bundle is used in authentic language. The corpus
brought up many samples of how such as is used. In addition to demonstrating sample corpus
activities, the presenters shared various corpus software including COCA (Corpus of
Contemporary American English), LexTutor (a free corpus), Corpus of Spoken Professional
American English, Time Magazine Corpus, Google Books: American English Corpus, Focus on
Grammar, Touchstone, and English Idioms in Use. These are helpful tools for designing
pedagogically sound materials and lessons for ESL teaching. I intend to use these in my lesson
development.
The most exciting session of the two-day conference, was the Saturday morning session
Phonological Awareness: What your brain resists knowing. The presenter explained that
phonological awareness is the ability to perceive the sounds of language beyond the conscious
level and that it flies below our perceptual radar. She relates that if our brains were aware of
every individual sound we produced, the brain would be overwhelmed. She believes that without
phonological awareness, teachers of English are reduced to mere speakers of English, able to
model but unable to describe accurately how spoken English works. This presentation opened
my mind to how I can utilize phonological activities to better support English language learners.
The presenter outlined that English is a stress-based language and that most ESL learners need to
be directed to the individual sounds of English. For example, the word university begins with a
/y/ consonant sound rather than a /u/ vowel sound as it is spelled. This means that the /y/ sound is
invisible. The presenter mentioned it is best to teach ESL learners patterns, not rules, because

English has too many exceptions. She noted that instructors should tell ESL students that the
sounds of English are different than the sounds of their first languages, and that they cant
replace the difficult sounds in English with sounds from their first language. The presenter
developed a color vowel chart, which provides a visual guide to the 15 vowel sounds of English.
Each sound is represented by a color and item with that sound in the word (e.g., green tea, silver
pin, red dress). The chart provides a visual way for English learners to organize what they hear. It
is user friendly, and provides a fun tool to analyze the phonology of English vowels. I intend to
use this chart with my students as a way to become phonologically aware of the challenging
vowel sounds of English. I can create games and activities based on the color vowel chart to
teach pronunciation to my English language learners.