Valerie Sartor

Teaching language also means conveying culture. Yet our students' cultural practices are often overlooked as English-the target language-and Western culture are presented. For example, language tests, which require critical thinking skills, may not be emphasized in non-Western cultures. These gaps pose problems for non-Western based students, specifically Arabs. At our academy I noted how cultural differences caused Saudi Arabian officers to struggle while learning English. Despite high military ranks, many Saudis lacked critical thinking skills. Allmnakrah and Evers (2020, pgs. 22-23) confirm that: "the development of strategies such as critical thinking as being essential for future success toward a shift in the Saudi education system vis-a`-vis Saudi 2030 vision." This article offers ways to include Arabic cultural norms and critical thinking skills in the language classroom.

This study provides an overview of how perceptions of the English language in Kazakhstan have altered over time due to political, economic, social and technological changes. The sociocultural framework includes language commodification and critical pedagogy concerning Indigenous languages; the methodological approach is narrative analysis combined with Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. Three generational shifts were identified, each reflective of sociocultural changes that have occurred as Kazakhstan has transitioned from Soviet republic to modern Indigenous nation: from the Soviet Era/Soviet Man; to Independent Kazakhstan/Patriots and Outsiders; to Modern Kazakhstan/Young Cosmopolitans. The ongoing popularity of English may eventually threaten the Kazakh language.

Employee input: From my first day as an ESL Instructor at DLI I have focused upon providing the highest quality student centered remote instruction possible. In order to achieve this aspiration, I have attended several conferences, studied the ALC curriculum, and quizzed my supervisor after every IPER for teaching tips. I have also read numerous grammar books, perused teaching websites, and followed expert teacher blogs to enhance my teaching skills and knowledge. Supervisory input: You have made a good start in adapting to DLI's unique instructional environment as well as our atypical (for now) distance-learning. Your choices for lesson presentations for the ALC are compatible with lesson objectives, the classes' overall ranges of skills, and various learning styles. As has been discussed, it can take some time to gain a comprehensive understanding of the ALC/DLI; please continue to ask for guidance from your colleagues or supervisory cadre as you continue to settle in and become more familiar with the instructional environment and expectations. 2. Student Support and Special Projects Employee input: To further support students, I have created beautiful, relevant, and engaging materials for each lesson. To create a positive classroom culture that builds respect and community, I have learned about my students' lives and cultures and offered them agency in regard to their learning. In terms of special projects, I volunteered for a duty detail that allowed me to teach students f2f, furthering my understanding of their lives and needs, as well as the assessments that they are required to pass. Also, I have volunteered on multiple field trips to engage in friendly information exchanges and to support cultural learning among DLI students. Supervisory input: You ensure your students have appropriate instruction and communicate your students' needs (atypical and otherwise) to your supervisor's attention in an effective and timely manner. Your commitment to supporting students' success leads you to volunteer regularly for additional assignments (such as Field Studies activities and your detail to the USAE learning center). Although your prior experience can contribute to these opportunities, as advised in order to enhance any further plans for other opportunities within DLI's overall mission please concentrate on developing a strong foundational awareness and expertise in the ALC curriculum. 3. Learning Environment Conducive to ESL Learning Employee input: My learning environment has been simultaneously engaging, safe, and challenging for students. I bring in diverse examples (realia; visuals; music; etc.) from their lives and cultures to engage their interest and motivate them. Additionally, I challenge my students, scaffold their learning, and differentiate the instruction appropriately. This encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning, as well as to teach each other.

H ow many times a day do you look at your smartphone? Why do you do it? To find information? To entertain yourself? To communicate with others? Smartphone usage is ubiquitous, regardless of age, gender, economic status, and location. In my recent teaching, all of my students use their smartphones more than their laptops.

In recent years, English language teaching trends, which parallel pedagogical tendencies for content classes, have become more focused on using technology. Scholars remain divided over whether technology has more positive or negative consequences.

KEYWORDS This article, aimed at both the observer and the observed, presents the need for compassionate collaborative assessment strategies. By building rapport between teachers and observers, assessments are viewed positively and genuine changes in teaching can occur. Compassionate observations also help teachers to meet standards while inspiring them to excel in their profession. As the approach discussed in this article involves the assessor and the assessed, K-12 teachers, ESL instructors in IEPs, and administrator/assessors working with ESL teachers will benefit from reading this article. Part One offers a theoretical framework by examining the philosophical issues of vision and ethics as foundations for establishing an inspirational environment that enhances expertise and collaboration between supervisors, teachers, and their peers. Part Two describes ways in which expertise and collaboration can be nurtured among educators. Part Three explains how vision, ethics, expertise, and collaboration apply holistically to collaborative teacher assessment. We offer an assessment example to highlight our method.

This article addresses identity issues among a specific group of Indigenous youth, young Buriat Mongolian students, born in Russia, who struggled to understand their sense of cultural identity while living and studying in Chinese Inner Mongolia. This qualitative research project employed ethnographic methodology. Sociocultural theory, specifically Bakhtin, was employed to analyse findings. Results indicated that ties to the land, family practices and spiritual practices are significant identity markers for the Buriat youth involved in this study and Buriat parents and elders taught young Buriats about the moral dimensions of living upon Buriat lands.

In recent decades, much research has been conducted concerning the well-being of transnational youth seeking education in the Western world. At the same time, educational research venues in the People’s Republic of China have expanded, despite difficulties associated with conducting fieldwork in China. In Russia, some scholars have investigated how Indigenous peoples, such as the Buriat Mongolians, have coped with political and economic transitions, while striving to maintain their Indigenous worldview. This article analyzes how young Russian-born Buriats, as transnational students studying in North China, maintain their sense of cultural self via their ties to the land – identifying first as Buriats, and second as Russian citizens. Finding inducate that Buriat identity persists through the link with the land; it is more powerful today than the linguistic link. As with many Indigenous peoples around the world, the use of Buriat language amog Buriats is steadily decreasing. This article uillistrates how the sociocultural and political context was crucial to the ways in which the focal children identified themselves, as Russians, Mongolians, and/or as Buriats.

In recent decades, much research has been conducted concerning the well-being of transnational youth seeking education in the Western world. At the same time, educational research venues in the People’s Republic of China have expanded, despite difficulties associated with conducting fieldwork in China. In Russia, some scholars have investigated how Indigenous peoples, such as the Buriat Mongolians, have coped with political and economic transitions, while striving to maintain their Indigenous worldview. This article analyzes how young Russian-born Buriats, as transnational students studying in North China, maintain their sense of cultural self via their ties to the land – identifying first as Buriats, and second as Russian citizens. Finding inducate that Buriat identity persists through the link with the land; it is more powerful today than the linguistic link. As with many Indigenous peoples around the world, the use of Buriat language amog Buriats is steadily decreasing. This article uillistrates how the sociocultural and political context was crucial to the ways in which the focal children identified themselves, as Russians, Mongolians, and/or as Buriats.

ESL writing teachers working in academic settings (e.g., high schools, community colleges, universities) seem to voice similar, recurring concerns: How do I help students reach beyond the basics of the five-paragraph essay? How can I motivate students to produce enough work of increasingly higher quality? This article draws on writing pedagogy to offer a set of teaching strategies and techniques for ESL academic writing. Four key concepts serve as a foundation: creativity, systematicity, operationalization, and validation. First, creativity is inherent in all humans, and writing teachers can cultivate originality and artistry in students. Recognizing and stimulating a student's artistic side is imperative because it creates pleasure as well as develops the writer's voice. In my classroom, I emphasize that to write well is an art as well as a skill. This emphasis implies that I am teaching academic ESL writing from the perspective of traditional academic skills, and also from the perspective of teaching writing as a creative endeavor. Second, systematicity also promotes good writing. In teacher development programs, teaching routines are encouraged because they create security, support development, and potentially encourage appropriate risk-taking in students. Also, famous authors tend to write at certain times of the day in certain spaces (George, 2005), so emerging writers should be encouraged to develop their own routines for writing. Third, operationalizing the essay or research paper into specific writing processes makes the work doable. The Chinese have a saying that " To get through the hardest journey, we need take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping. " Finally, validating an ESL writer's work remains crucial to supporting the emotional as well as academic needs of second-language learners. I have found that emotional validation parallels supporting the creative nature of my writers. In this article, I apply these four concepts to ESL academic writing instruction by means of these six teaching techniques: cultivating fluency in writing via creativity, teacher modeling of writing processes, reducing anxiety by breaking down the writing process into smaller tasks, increasing the accessibility of writing processes via collaboration, guiding revision, and achieving validity in assessment through writing portfolios.

In this article I explore how information communication technologies (ICTs) can promote L2 English language academic writing skills. For this article, I define ICTs as any communication device or application, including radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, and satellite systems. In the form of personal computers, digital television, e-mail, and even robots, ICT products can store, retrieve, manipulate, transmit, or receive information electronically in digital form. Because I focus here on ICTs in education, I use the term ICTs to refer primarily to software and hardware computer systems. In addition, educators and educational administrators use the term ICTs when they employ various systems to generate services and applications associated with learning via computers, such as video conferencing, distance classrooms, wikis, and chat rooms. Throughout this article I emphasize the wiki as an ICT that serves as an individual educational component; it is often nested within another ICT, Blackboard, a popular educational online classroom provider. Wikis are innovative and fairly new ICT software; they promote L2 writing skills for nonnative English speakers.

People are complex. Specifically, TESOL teachers are complicated souls, and those who choose this career are not only complex but also intriguing, dedicated, and adventurous folks. The basis of my assertion rests on the fact that TESOL educators and professionals often do not garner the same kind of academic respect, security, pay, or even classroom conditions as other teachers. Those who work, as I currently do, in university settings are housed in odd, ill-funded corners of the academy—sometimes in the English department, sometimes in the education or linguistics department, and sometimes independently in a non-academically accredited program, usually called the university's intensive English program (IEP). Currently, from the perspective of a newly appointed IEP administrator, I am constantly seeking ways to support my instructors. While thinking about how to support them, I searched the literature, specifically regarding teacher observations and assessment. Much exists on assessing students (O'Malley & Pierce, 1996) and on building rubrics to assess students (Rezaei & Lovorn, 2010), but little has been written about assessing the teachers at work in their classrooms. This area, of course, nests under teacher professional development, which is a growing and innovative field for TESOL educators (Bailey, 2001). Professional development for TESOL educators can be problematic everywhere. I recognize three fundamental challenges: standardizing ESL and TESOL certification programs, funding on-site and off-site teacher workshops, and motivating overworked teachers to continue to learn. Standardizing certification for TESOL educators in the United States alone is formidable; overseas, accreditation becomes a site of competition between British versus American certification. Regarding funding for TESOL professional development, both on-site and off-site teacher training can be considered too costly and time-consuming for many educational institutions, which are already underfunded by their states and governments. Motivation, however, is another issue. This article addresses professional development in light of teacher assessment techniques, focusing on the need to assess teachers in ways that uplift them and stimulate improvement. I found that the literature focused on observing and assessing teachers had several fundamental flaws. The first foible, and to me the most significant, was the lack of following the collaborative trend that has entered education in general and TESOL education in particular. The second glitch rests on the fact that teacher anxiety, which is noted among novice teachers (Ohata, 2005), and teacher confidence in the classroom (Eslami & Fatahi, 2008) can both be related to the evaluation that the assessor gives after observing a teacher at work in the classroom. No one likes to be criticized, so how can we assess a TESOL instructor with the aim of generating excellence instead of anxiety and fear? A third factor revolves around objectivity. Is it possible to observe a teacher once a semester and based on this

For decades I have taught ESL courses. Supervisors periodically assessed my teaching and I remember feeling evaluation anxiety: would I pass muster in order to qualify to teach yet another semester?  Now, as the coordinator of a Texas-based Intensive English Program, I support my teachers in two crucial ways. First: rather than evaluate, my observations are coaching sessions. Second: our assessment rubric is clear, pragmatic, and ongoing. This short article presents the rubric and procedure.

This descriptive article intends to inform readers about contemporary English language teaching in a remote Siberian university located in Irkutsk. The following areas are addressed: the Russian student population in Irkutsk and their options for their course of study; textbooks and English language proficiency; and finally, the Russian teachers of English, their teaching philosophies and methodologies.

Teaching Vision My first goal as a teacher is to create a tolerant, thoughtful classroom environment that encourages and supports diversity in culture and learning, with learners actively engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. This kind of class dynamic offers learners opportunities to interact as individuals, in pairs, and in small groups. The content focuses on the academic needs established by the curriculum, using communicative and task based methods aimed at comprehension and production, both oral and written. To effectively teach content I believe that teachers must be able to align their objectives to their tasks/activities, and to their assessments. Each lesson should be complete, with a beginning, middle and end, and each lesson should relate to those before and after them. Having the ability to align requires good organizational skills. In addition lessons should engage students by relating directly to their lives. Lessons must also capture the attention of all students, so the teacher must learn to differentiate the content and employ a variety of interactions to encourage scaffolding and peer learning. Teaching, thus, is a skill and an art, requiring a combination of rational and creative thinking, fused with compassion for all our learners.

Traditionally, ESL teachers are monitored once a semester by their supervisor, to determine whether they are doing a 'good' job. My view is that one observation cannot encompass the scope of a teacher's talents. I also feel that responsibility be shared: both the teacher and the observer  and other peers can meet and talk about ways to generate excellence in teaching. For example,  if you observe a disruptive student and see the teacher is having trouble, you as observer can hold a mini-workshop with your teacher and other teachers to find ways collaboratively to guide the student toward better behaviour. Or if you observe a teacher doing a GREAT job - why not ask that teacher to meet with her peers to express her methods? Observations should be ways to help everyone excel, not a way to rate and berate.

This is a 90 minute lesson (with a short break in the middle) designed for students who have already written some short essays for me. They are learning to improve both their skills and their sense of style as writers.
The teaching format is as follows: one class looks at a text, and has lexicon and grammatical exercises. The following lesson (displayed) analyses the writing. Lessons incorporate the 4 integrated skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Professionalism and Classroom Management Exemplary Criterion 11 Learning Environment Exemplary Comments This was both a fully successful and exemplary vocabulary lesson from ALC Book 13, pp. 59-61. Criterion 1: Your planning and coordination resulted in an exemplary lesson which enriched student comprehension, engagement, and communicativeness in the classroom. You prepared additional supporting materials for this lesson (i.e. PPT with images for vocabulary practice, vocabulary cards for a review game) that aided in enhancing the lesson's effectiveness and highly engaged students in the content. You included relevant, real world images (e.g. a dressing room, fabric/sewing flyer, for sale sign in front of a house) in your warm-up to activate students' prior knowledge and generate authentic discussion, challenging students to produce and explain the target vocabulary prior to the start of the lesson. You had meaningful activities that reinforced the target vocabulary, appropriately utilizing the remaining class time at the end of the lesson. One task required students to work in pairs to determine vocabulary words from your oral clues and write them on the board, addressing both listening and writing skills. You efficiently utilized your prepared resources along with the ALC text, creating seamless transitions between activities. Although you were having issues with your SmartBoard, you were still able to make use of technology to display the vocabulary images, stimulating student communication and accommodating those with visual learning styles.

Criterion 10 Professionalism and Classroom Management Fully Successful Criterion 11 Learning Environment Exemplary Comments Thank you for providing me the opportunity to observe your class. You presented a highly effective review lesson on grammar (noun endings) and adverbs of frequency for Book 28.

Employee input: From my first day as an ESL Instructor at DLI I have focused upon providing the highest quality student centered remote instruction possible. In order to achieve this aspiration, I have attended several conferences, studied the ALC curriculum, and quizzed my supervisor after every IPER for teaching tips. I have also read numerous grammar books, perused teaching websites, and followed expert teacher blogs to enhance my teaching skills and knowledge. Supervisory input: You have made a good start in adapting to DLI's unique instructional environment as well as our atypical (for now) distance-learning. Your choices for lesson presentations for the ALC are compatible with lesson objectives, the classes' overall ranges of skills, and various learning styles. As has been discussed, it can take some time to gain a comprehensive understanding of the ALC/DLI; please continue to ask for guidance from your colleagues or supervisory cadre as you continue to settle in and become more familiar with the instructional environment and expectations. 2. Student Support and Special Projects Employee input: To further support students, I have created beautiful, relevant, and engaging materials for each lesson. To create a positive classroom culture that builds respect and community, I have learned about my students' lives and cultures and offered them agency in regard to their learning. In terms of special projects, I volunteered for a duty detail that allowed me to teach students f2f, furthering my understanding of their lives and needs, as well as the assessments that they are required to pass. Also, I have volunteered on multiple field trips to engage in friendly information exchanges and to support cultural learning among DLI students. Supervisory input: You ensure your students have appropriate instruction and communicate your students' needs (atypical and otherwise) to your supervisor's attention in an effective and timely manner. Your commitment to supporting students' success leads you to volunteer regularly for additional assignments (such as Field Studies activities and your detail to the USAE learning center). Although your prior experience can contribute to these opportunities, as advised in order to enhance any further plans for other opportunities within DLI's overall mission please concentrate on developing a strong foundational awareness and expertise in the ALC curriculum. 3. Learning Environment Conducive to ESL Learning Employee input: My learning environment has been simultaneously engaging, safe, and challenging for students. I bring in diverse examples (realia; visuals; music; etc.) from their lives and cultures to engage their interest and motivate them. Additionally, I challenge my students, scaffold their learning, and differentiate the instruction appropriately. This encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning, as well as to teach each other.

As I observe my teachers, I note that many are creative and seek fun ways to open their classes - but an ice breaker is not a warm up! A warm up is an activity that has purpose, is connected to the objectives, and is usually "hot" - faster, shorter, and with a sense of urgency, rather than "cold" - like an icebreaker, where students play and get to know each other. So I have prepared this very short powerpoint to help teachers learn about warm-ups.

I just watched an ESL teacher supervise a series of powerpoint presentations, and I realised that the teacher as well as the students could use some help - the teacher could help the students before, during and after their powerpoint, and the students could also study the format before presenting information. We would not dive not a deep pool without checking out the water and having lessons, plus a lifeguard around?! This short powerpoint presentation can be used by both ESL teachers and ESL students.