Clifford Hill

Assesment Activities for Nasreddin Story
English as a Global Language
Expanding Paradigm Part 1
Expanding Paradigm Parts 2-3

Dilek Tokay

Program, SIG II Panel II
SIG II Panel II Overall Plan
Ultimate Aim Pictures
Useful Links
Building Identities Through Learning Communities

Kristin Şendur

Running an Effective Support System

Nancy Karabeyoğlu

Best Practices for Standard Tests

Presentations

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Summer Institute at Work

Excursion

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Closing Ceremony

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Clifford Hill

This presentation features two approaches to alternative assessment based on digital technologies:
(1)    an approach developed for use with culturally diverse students in American high schools (many of whom speak English as a second language)
(2)    an approach developed for use with EFL students at Beijing University in China

Clifford Hill

This presentation focuses on problems associated with the multiple-choice format by analyzing a reading comprehension item from a standardized test. Among the problems to be considered are
1) The passage is presented without any meaningful context
2) It is incomplete and thus invites readers to make inferences to fill in various gaps
3) The tasks focus on low-level detail (e.g., defining a vocabulary item)
4) The distractors are built around inferences motivated by the incomplete passages
5) The students receive no meaningful feedback on their performance
Moreover, multiple-choice testing distorts the curriculum since teachers tend to avoid a constructivist approach to teaching reading comprehension for fear that it will mislead students on a multiple-choice test.

Jo Anne Kleifgen

This presentation explores the 21st century workplace and shows how workers function in settings immersed in multilingual collaboration and multimodal resources. A widespread belief about language at work is that everyone should speak the language sanctioned by the power structures, a view that is espoused in many U.S. educational and governmental institutions with “English-only” policies. The work setting described here shows how multiple languages are used efficaciously to accomplish tasks. The presentation also shows how mediating tools and inscriptions—writing, graphs, numbers, blueprints, images—are all contributing elements to communication and action at work.

Clifford Hill

This presentation uses research on language comprehension to provide a rationale for classroom activities based on stories from the traditional culture of EFL students. According to schema theory, these stories are easier for students to understand. To illustrate how a classical model of comprehension (factual, inferential, experiential) can be used to develop activities, a Hausa version of a story that is widespread in Muslim cultures is used.

Jo Anne Kleifgen

This presentation describes a curriculum designed to help Spanish-speaking eighth grade students in New York City develop their academic writing in English. The writing lessons integrate
1)    A novel curricular approach that helps students write about school subjects such as science and social studies
2)    A Web-based writing space that offers multimodal resources and tools for writing

Jo Anne Kleifgen

This presentation will demonstrate the use of a social networking website for a graduate course in language and technology. In addition to regular face-to-face class meetings, students draw on a number of resources—texts, voice, video, graphics—to extend their classroom experience to an interactive learning environment online. The presentation explores the students’ creative use of these resources for blogging and other communicative forms. The online platform is free and allows teachers to create a website to suit their pedagogical goals.

Clifford Hill

This presentation deals with intercultural problems that emerge as English becomes a dominant language in international communication. These problems range from attitudes of native speakers toward non-native speakers (e.g., failure to properly appreciate important aspects of non-native speakers’ identity such as educational background because of their accent) to domination of other languages (e.g., among the nearly 50 translations of literary work by the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, all but 2 have been based on an English translation rather than the original Turkish).