I was invited to sit on a faculty roundtable and discuss challenges and strategies for effectively teaching students who come from a primary language background other than English. Though I do not research this area in particular, my teaching experience has provided me a great deal of opportunities to work with these students (I began teaching English in Moscow, Russia shortly after graduating with my BA, and while teaching at UCR, often had students who did not speak English in their household). Hosted by the World Englishes Committee in Georgia Tech's Writing and Communication Program, the roundtable took place on March 30, 2017 and featured (in addition to me), Julie McCormick-Weng, Malavika Shetty, and Peter Fontaine. An article describing the event can be found on TECHStyle, here.
My contribution was focused primarily on challenges with effective group work for ELL (English Language Learning) students. As I have witnessed multiple times teaching at Georgia Tech, group, team, or collaborative work seems to easily result in ELL students not learning what their EL1 (English 1st Language) peers are learning. In my class, specifically, where students are responsible for collaborating on both their software development and their technical communications, the ELL Students very rarely have a hand in the communication aspects of the course. That is, the EL1 students tend to override their contributions in the name of cleaning or correcting syntax and grammar. Though this is, on the one hand, a reasonable expectation for student teams to undertake, on the other hand, it means that 1) I have a harder time as an instructor identifying areas of weakness to instruct the (ELL) students; and 2) the ELL student doesn't have the practice-based learning in technical communication that the EL1 students have. I've also noticed that, just as we might expect racial or gendered minority students to be discriminated within a group setting, the ELL students experience the same kind of out-casting. As I noted in the event, these are problems that I am still working on solving in my classroom, so my solutions to date are limited.
During the event, Julie McCormick-Weng presented the results of a language-survey of Georgia Tech's students that she had conducted. Though she was unable to get a representative / statistically significant sample of surveyors, the results nevertheless demonstrated that Georgia Tech as a significant population of ELL Students, so determining strategies to effectively instruct them is critical.
My contribution was focused primarily on challenges with effective group work for ELL (English Language Learning) students. As I have witnessed multiple times teaching at Georgia Tech, group, team, or collaborative work seems to easily result in ELL students not learning what their EL1 (English 1st Language) peers are learning. In my class, specifically, where students are responsible for collaborating on both their software development and their technical communications, the ELL Students very rarely have a hand in the communication aspects of the course. That is, the EL1 students tend to override their contributions in the name of cleaning or correcting syntax and grammar. Though this is, on the one hand, a reasonable expectation for student teams to undertake, on the other hand, it means that 1) I have a harder time as an instructor identifying areas of weakness to instruct the (ELL) students; and 2) the ELL student doesn't have the practice-based learning in technical communication that the EL1 students have. I've also noticed that, just as we might expect racial or gendered minority students to be discriminated within a group setting, the ELL students experience the same kind of out-casting. As I noted in the event, these are problems that I am still working on solving in my classroom, so my solutions to date are limited.
During the event, Julie McCormick-Weng presented the results of a language-survey of Georgia Tech's students that she had conducted. Though she was unable to get a representative / statistically significant sample of surveyors, the results nevertheless demonstrated that Georgia Tech as a significant population of ELL Students, so determining strategies to effectively instruct them is critical.