Curriculum Research Paper Saja Elshareif 3/14/13

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Introduction Although English Language Learners (ELL) enrolled in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), Intensive English Programs (IEP), and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) choose to learn English in an ESL setting for different reasons; each of these students share a struggle that unifies all of their contexts: conversation. This may be because students have never had explicit instruction for naturalizing their speech, turn-taking, or pronunciation. For the last two semesters, I have been the facilitator of a conversational hour for ELL students called, Coffee Talk. During this year, I have worked with international students from all different backgrounds and levels of English. Although Coffee Talk is an unofficial, non-credit, and voluntary program, some students have been attending my sessions twice a week since August. These students are motivated language learners that are looking for opportunities to become fluent in conversation, an aspect that seems to be missing from their own classroom instruction. Based on the needs of the six students that I have been working with for the past year, their individual accounts of classroom experiences, and my own research; I strongly believe that apart from listening, reading, speaking, and writing courses; ELL students should have access to a conversational course as well.

Background Every couple of years or so, the University of Illinois at Chicagos (UIC) writing center hosts a research assistantship for a TESOL graduate student. Among the responsibilities of the research assistant is to organize and facilitate Coffee Talk. The program is run according to the research assistants discretion, so it differs from year to year. In the year 2010, the designated Coffee Talk

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coordinator structured the conversation hour similarly to a speaking classroom. Students were notified via email of the topics that she had pre-chosen for the weeks to come. Although topics would be informal, following the lines of describe what you did this weekend, or what are your favorite foods and restaurants, some students would arrive with prepared bullet-points. I am unaware of whether the coordinator had given students a needs assessment, but overall, the topics seemed to work well for those students because they were mostly lower-level proficiency students from UICs IEP Tutorium. During this time, the Coffee Talk coordinator also invited non-TESOL undergraduate tutors from the writing center, myself included, to join the conversation hour. Each tutor was placed with a group of 2-3 students and they would discuss the topics that were handed out. The coordinator would then notify students when it was time to switch to the next question or sub-topic. Although this version of coffee talk gave students a chance to speak, I am not sure whether it gave them enough freedom

As the writing centers current research assistant, I chose to change the construct of Coffee Talk by providing students with individualized attention. Instead of planning weekly topics on my own, in the beginning of the semester, I informally asked the students to propose what they thought Coffee Talk should consist of. Interestingly, none of the simple topics that the coordinator had chosen in 2010 came up! I now realize that this may have been the case because; whereas the Coffee Talk in 2010 had a population majority of students from UICs IEP tutorium, my students are international MBA students with different needs.

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Student Profile The graduate students I work with are in an accelerated International MBA program that does not include an ELL component. According the UIC website, the students are exclusively recruited from China, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand. Other than a short interview upon arrival, the students are not required to take the TOEFL, nor is their proficiency tested in any way. The program guidelines for being accepted; however, are as follows: a bachelors degree with satisfactory grades, strong English language skills, strong analytical and quantitative skills and appropriate professional experience (over three years preferred) (UIC n.d). In reality, although these students are excellent spellers with specialized vocabulary that is specific to their field, they are lacking in basic conversation, pronunciation, and confidence. When asked about their English learning experience, the students unanimously conveyed that the instructors in their home countries focused only on reading and grammar and always taught the target language using the L1.

As based on my Coffee Talk experiences, I believe that the MBA students in the International Management Program should have access to a conversational course at UIC. They are only here for 12-months, and it is cognitively overwhelming for them to have to learn English on their own while taking a full schedule of year-round classes. In addition, the students only have one year after graduation to find employment, before they are sent back home. Therefore, the course could serve in place of Coffee Talk, as a means of supporting students language learning and career advancement.

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Expressed Needs During Coffee Talk, the students comfortably speak about their language gap. As the gap changes, so do the conversations that take place during the hour. For example, when we first started, the students had only been in the U.S. for a month. During our initial meetings, the students expressed that they were interested in topics such as: how to start a conversation; how to approach strangers; and how to make friends with native speakers. These topics came up because in this time, students were getting used to being forced to converse in English everyday. Although they had endless opportunities to speak, they were at loss of words, and were

misunderstanding due to colloquial, non-textbook expressions. At the time, one of the students even burst into tears, saying that her biggest fear was earning a degree from America, and still not being able to speak in English by the time she went back home to Taiwan.

Goh and Burns, authors of, Teaching Speaking, advocates the idea of language learners planning, monitoring, and evaluating their speaking development, as a way of realizing their needs, They should also develop greater knowledge about themselves as second language speakers, and greater understanding of the demands of various speaking tasks and effective strategy use... (p.142, 2012). Since the beginning of our sessions, I have encouraged Coffee Talk participants to keep a small notepad with them wherever they go. During the week, the students use these notepads to write down new words or expressions they had overheard or been exposed to. The students also noted things that they were unable to explain and other general questions that were relevant to their speaking practice. This method of logging language gaps has

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allowed students to play an active role in their speaking development by monitoring the gap that exists in their language learning.

As a result of their language tracking, students have expanded their evaluation of language and extended their note-taking to involve television conversations and newspapers. The learners even began highlighting unfamiliar words in advertisements, magazines, interviews, obituaries, and a variety of other things that we now review in Coffee Talk. When we read articles together, I encourage the students to define words based on context, but they are unable to do so in most cases. For example, they might read close in That was a close call, the same way that they would read close the door. They do not stop to consider that close can be used in different ways, with different pronunciation, and this makes them very confused and frustrated. Another example is the word deliver, how could you say: deliver a baby, deliver a package, and deliver a speech, and still make sense. Also, how do you know whether deliver a speech means to take a speech and hand it to someone else, or whether it means to speak. I realize that although we have reached out to new mediums, all of these concerns that we are addressing still revolve around everyday language and conversation.

Planning the Course According to Goh and Burns, In some situations, students may be from the same age, gender, language, and national backgrounds, and the teacher can broadly assume a common basis of social and cultural understanding of the classroom situation as it relates to language learning (p. 172, 2012). Since the MBA students all come from Asian backgrounds with similar English

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learning experiences, the main objetives of the course will be easier to formulate. Since it is a conversation course, the overall goal should aim to enhance students ability to socially interact by using conversation skills, key strategies, and confidence to speak in the L2. The course should also help students to adjust specific pronunciation issues that hinder intelligibility. American culture and social aspects would also be integrated to help make the students path to interaction an easier one. Nonetheless, specific objectives should be decided by the students themselves so that it is most beneficial for them.

Needs Assessment In order to assess students needs, I have created two surveys. Appendix A showcases the initial survey that would be sent out to students before the course officially begins. The questions in the survey inquire about students backgrounds and allows them to rate their own proficiency. This survey serves the purpose of providing the instructor with information about students experience with English language learning, and students country of origin. In turn, the instructor would have a better idea of the level of similarity in students L1 backgrounds. Appendix B includes a survey that allows students to define what they think the course objectives should be. Students are invited to rate importance of pronunciation, strategies, vocabulary, etc. this allows the instructor to evaluate and prioritize students needs as based on their opinions. Additionally, this survey would be the main informant of the syllabus.

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In addition to the surveys, I would incorporate an activity that would also assess the students needs as the course went on. Daily interaction with speakers outside of the classroom would be encouraged and students would be required to reflect about the interactions in an online blog. Students will have to complete at least 10 of these throughout the semester. The logs could be as simple as asking someone for directions, ordering food, or more lengthy conversations (appendix C). Students would be asked to describe the situation, note any new or interesting things that were said, and to think about how the conversation could have went better. This activity would have the students constantly being aware of gaps, new vocabulary, and to evaluate their progress as the course continued. The activity is also informant to the instructor about the students language development and changing needs.

Acitivities and Strategies Students ideas, which will be relevant to their own encounters and struggles will be supported through the incorporation of authentic materials and imitating real-world situations. Homework assignments would include activities that would be transferable outside the classroom. Possible examples might be: writing an email to someone in class about meeting up for lunch, chatting with a classmate on instant messenger and bringing the dialogue to class, and engaging in dialogue journaling, as based on Holmes and Moulton (1997). In the article Dialogue journals as an ESL learning strategy, Vickik Holmes and Margaret Moulton (1997) discuss using dialogue journals as a means of helping students to feel more confident about using the L2 outside of the classroom. The dialogue journals are described as interactions because they require an unedited, uncorrected, ongoing conversation exchange, typically between student and teacher.

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Although the instructor may ask students to write in a certain format such as a letter or a bulleted list, Holmes and Moulton (1997) suggest that the dialogue journals help improve students confidence to converse because they are spontaneous. Students are never given topics to talk about in their journals, just like they would not be given prompts to speak about when engaging in real life conversations. These dialogue journals may also be used as conversations between the instructor and the students about their changing needs and gaps.

The article, Intercultural Conversation: Building Understanding Together, by Karen Dooley is especially pertinent to this type of activity and the tools that students need to be supplied with beforehand. Dooley (2009) explains that when conversations between native speakers (NS) and non-native (NNS) occur, there is a heavier burden on the NNS to make the engagement a successful one, The classroom studies have shown that speakers of accented or foreignsounding English are not only rejected as legitimate conversation partners but also expected to carry the heavier part of the communicative burden, and even blamed for miscommunication labeled incomprehensible (p.3). This argument seems to be a valid one. According to one of my students, ordering lunch from Subway was the one of the most difficult experiences, I used to only go to Wendys even though I wanted a sandwich. They speak very fast at Subway and become angry with me when I dont know what to say! Americans are impatient when I lose my words. Thus, as Dooley explains, it is excruciatingly difficult for students to leave their comfort zones and practice the L2, out of fear of rejection. Dooley (2010) suggests that a crucial step that could help make these speaking opportunities more successful and less traumatic, is to help ELL students to improve their conversation skills by providing them with ways to check, diagnose,

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and fix their own misunderstandings with the L2 (p. 4). Part of this plan would be to teach students how to save face by introducing methods that can by the learners time. Such methods include fillers (well, um, er), blaming external factors (Sorry I cant hear you), or using confirmation checks ( Do you mean...?) (4), all of which can be taught in a conversation class and practiced amongst ELL peers.

Like Dooley, Nakatani (2010) cites several others and encourages the fact that, the use of communication strategy (CS) can solve communicative disruptions and enhance interaction in the TL (p. 116). Nakatani (2010) also advocates the use of communication enhancers and believes that they also can develop English as a foreign language (EFL) learners oral proficiency in classroom settings (p. 117).Yasou Nakatani (2010) also contributes to the discourse about teaching conversation by suggesting that ELL students can benefit from communicative strategy. Nakatani conducted a study which dealt with Japanese English students studying at Tokyos University of Science. The students were enrolled in a 12-week course which was taught in a communicative approach and specifically focused on implementing communication strategies into the curriculum. Although the results for maintaining discourse and negotiation of meaning was proven to have enhanced learners communicative ability, the number of modified input was relatively small because students location did not provide enough opportunity for students to practice speaking (p. 116).

An interesting supplemental material that I have found is, McGraw Hills Conversational English (2010). I have recently incorporated this book of American expressions into my coffee talk, and

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it seems to work well! The book is divided by a Topic and Situation index and provides sections for formal and informal sayings. In each section, the book presents a topic and lists common expressions that are used. I think this book would work well in a conversation course because it is authentic in material. In fact, it even identifies which choice of expression is polite, mildly vulgar, and vulgar. I appreciate the fact that the book does not provide students with a one-sided view of language as being strictly polite. In addition, the book pays attention to register, classifying expressions as slang, formal, and informal; all of which would be relevant to a conversation classroom. I would incorporate this text by asking students to choose a topic from the book and role-play a conversation using some of the expressions provided.

Conclusion Overall, I think there is a definite need for UIC to provide the option of a conversational course for the International MBA students. In my previous version of this proposal, I suggested that the course be open to the tutorium students as well. I chose to revise that because it might be more difficult to teach conversation when the population and levels are varied. It was already difficult for me to find sufficient information about conversation courses. Most of the research that was available was concerned with speaking courses which do not necessarily amount to the same thing.

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References Dooley, K. (2009). Intercultural conversation: Building understanding together. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(6), 497-506.

Goh, C. C., & Burns, A. (2012). Teaching speaking: a holistic approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Holmes, V. L., & Moulton, M. R. (1997). Dialogue journals as an ESL learning strategy. Journal Of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 40(8), 616. Nakatani, Y. (2010). Identifying strategies that facilitate efl learners' oral communication: A classroom study using multiple data collection procedures. The Modern Language Journal, 94(1), 116-136.

Spears, R. A., Birner, B., Kleinedler, S., & Nisset, L. (2010). Mcgraw-hill\'s conversational american english, the illustrated guide to everyday expressions of american english. McGRAW HILL.

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Appendices

Appendix A: Background Survey http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5NS3B3R

Appendix B: Second Needs Survey http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5FL9SD5

Appendix C: Conversation Log http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5PZ3LQX