Coming to the U.S. and adjusting to a new environment can yield familiar stories of migration, but the challenges experienced are unique to each migrant. For adult ESL learners, the challenges encountered in the adjustment process go beyond language, and shape their perceptions and L2 identity. While ESL classes provide learners with critical language skills needed to navigate those experiences, a gap still remains between classroom learning and real-world engagement. In this presentation, I will present a curricular model that attempts to facilitate this transfer by re-framing how engagement happens in and outside the classroom. By closely addressing the social and affective conditions around engagement, learners can find ‘ways in’ to their communities while overcoming barriers to survive and thrive in their new environment.   

Identity formation is accepted to be crucial to the language learning process. However, there is less emphasis on identity formation in pre-service language teachers. Using the tools of cognitive metaphor theory (Lakeoff, 1984), this paper follows my own path as a language teacher from a pre-service novice teacher, then intern, and finally mentor of a new pre-service teacher. Looking at what metaphors I utilised at different parts of my teaching journey, my analysis highlights how language encodes the influence of the relationship between the classroom and workplace climate on teacher identity formation. This project aims to help instructors take control of their own language and reflect on the embodiment of shifting pedagogical values. Moreover, this project can also help teacher trainers understand the shaping influence of language choice on the educators they are training or hiring.

This project is a small-scale study that explores interpretations of writing prompts in a sample of 26 community college ESL students. Based on an analysis of survey responses and student essays, the collected data reveals a mismatch between the task requirements and students’ interpretations of the writing prompt, which results in students producing various essay genres and content that are disconnected from the essay questions. As we conceptualize L2 writing as a problem-solving process, the findings suggest that anticipating expectations from writing prompts should be included in that process. L2 writing teachers should raise students’ awareness of the role of writing prompts in completing various writing assignments and facilitate the transformation of writing prompts to student texts. 

This project investigates Chinese university EFL students’ extensive reading habits (ER), illuminating their motivations for reading and their access to materials. Ultimately, a re-definition of ER is proposed to account for today’s digital reading landscape while attempting to preserve the deeply engaged states of focus, or flow, strived for in ER.

California AB 705 requires community colleges to take steps that will enable students to complete transfer-level English courses with in a year.  For students not fully prepared for First Year Composition, the bill recommends the creation of co-requisite courses. This paper urges colleges to consider the unique learning challenges students will bring to these courses when developing curriculum.  This means developing curriculum, teaching strategies, and pedagogy that attend to not only the academic challenges, but also the specific language and affective learning challenges students will face.  A robust co-requisite course will address the personal, social, cultural, and academic needs of these students while encouraging their success and allowing them to become part of the college community.

Ong, Park, and Ryder et al., among others, offer theories about the complexity of audience. Based on a combination of these theories and sample essays, this paper presents a model of audience awareness and methods for analyzing student writing to help teachers understand students’ conceptualizations of audience, respond to their writing, and create assignments. 

Conversation exchange programs offer a unique opportunity for international students to develop their interactional competence. Based on my evaluation of one conversation exchange program, I will share findings related to participants’ motivations, perceptions, and learning; offer recommendations for administering such programs; and demonstrate their usefulness in preparing learners for university life.

Numerous researchers have demonstrated the benefits of peer feedback activities in collaborative L2 classrooms. However, peer feedback presumably requires students to have a higher proficiency in English so we tend to assume peer feedback can only occur effectively in academic contexts. This project explores how to implement peer feedback activities in non-academic courses where teachers may have difficulty giving feedback to large numbers of students. In this study, I demonstrate how I adapted existing academic approach to design and implement peer feedback lesson plans and materials in an adult non-credit ESL class. My project findings show that when implementing peer feedback in non-academic contexts, a teacher needs to clarify the term ‘feedback’ first and reveal the purpose and benefits of peer feedback activities. Notably, my project also found a teacher in non-credit courses may have to model how to give compliments and comments clearly for the students to be clear.

This paper explores the metaphors of immigration in the US, as it is presented in the current media climate, using a two-part analysis: 1. a metaphorical analysis of several images and photographs on their own, and 2. a Critical Discourse Analysis–informed study of the metaphors in US citizens’ discourse, using as data their responses to an online survey about said imagery. To accomplish the study, the photographs chosen for this paper show scenes of immigration, a majority of which are portrayed from the immigrants’ point of view, a claim supported by the analysis in Part 1 (the metaphors projected by the images unto themselves). Part 2, the principal analysis, explores the metaphors in participants’ responses to open-ended survey questions regarding the same images as in Part 1, thus illuminating how media imagery informs the discourse of US citizens. I will then compare the metaphors in Parts 1 and 2 with that of prior research, to discuss the differences (or similarities) in the past with the present, thus contextualizing the findings within the history of discourse on immigration in the US and around the world.

Peer-work is a practice ubiquitous in second language acquisition classrooms, and is widely understood to be pedagogically beneficial. The effects of attitudinal or motivational behaviors on the success of peer-pedagogical activities, however, often go under-appreciated. While several studies have been done on the linguistic functions of peer-pragmatics, this essay encourages L2 instructors to re-conceptualize peer-work as a social exercise in which L2 learners are agentive participants with individual motivations and goals. Through qualitative observations made in adult-learner emergent-literacy courses, and adolescent English language development classes, I move to re-frame peer-work as a community-of-practice, into which L2 learners may move fluidly in and out of, based on factors of individual will and goal-sharing. I end with applicative suggestions for structuring L2 peer-pedagogical activities.

In Teotitlàn Del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico: Zapotec artisans continue to practice thousand-year-old traditional art forms. Globalization and the commercialization of artisan production worldwide have created new opportunities for communication and connectivity and are dynamically shaping these Oaxacan artisan’s concerns as language learners and artists. Artisans are eager to engage with outsiders in English about their craft and to express how their history and identity are inextricably linked with the artifacts they produce with their hands. In this paper I will share a narrative-based English for specific purposes (ESP) curriculum designed for a collective of indigenous female weavers in Oaxaca. Participants will learn about learner-centered pedagogies employed during the curriculum design process as well as important insights about transnational identities and English language learning for indigenous learners with limited literacy skills.

Art, in all its forms, enhances adolescent L2 learners’ identity formation and L2 acquisition. Findings from a qualitative study of high school students enrolled in French and Spanish classes demonstrate that when students are engaged in activities that involve art, they exhibit greater investment in their L2. The social identity constructs of agency, communities of practice, and imagined communities provide a means to analyze what learners think about the role of art in their identity and language acquisition processes. The findings from this study reveal the power of art as a pedagogical pathway toward L2 acquisition—a pathway that provides opportunities for adolescent learners to explore and dream as they try on new voices in search of identity.

English learning in Thailand begins at an early age. English is a required class in all level and school. However, the English teacher in Thailand usually uses a conventional teacher-fronted approach, and students remain relatively quiet and passive. My proposed curriculum is designed to offer young Thai learners, ages 9 to 13 years old, the opportunity to learn English abroad in the U.S. Drawing on learner-centered and task-based pedagogical frameworks, this curriculum encourages the young learners (YLs) to be actively engaged and develop their competence. Since the children immerse in the target language country, they gain more opportunities which are missing in Thailand, namely to use the language outside the classroom and in authentic situations. As a result, these YLs not only develop language abilities, but also improve interpersonal skills and confidence.