Participatory Approach to Adult ESOL Curricula

Susan,

Here is a link to adult ESOL content standards that was created by the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) of the US Department of Education.

http://www.adultedcontentstandards.ed.gov/  

You may also wish to look at some documents on the website of the Comprehensive Adult Education Student Assessment System (CASAS).  CASAS developed a set of curriculum competencies that are applicable to both ESOL and Adult Basic Education (ABE) students.  They also developed a set of Content Standards that, again, are applicable to both ESOL and ABE students.  You can find both of these documents on the CASAS website, www.casas.org. 

Florida has developed 6 courses for adult ESOL, each with their own set of curriculum standards.  You can find all of these courses on the state FLDOE website, at http://www.fldoe.org/workforce/dwdframe/ad_frame.asp 

Philip Anderson

State of Florida Department of Education

Adult ESOL Program Specialist

Dear Susan and all,

Thank you for your posting on using the participatory approach with adults learning English. Research shows that students are more motivated to learn when they are studying what they need and want to know.

 A brief written a couple of years ago for the CAELA Network summarizes the research on student-centered instruction and provides examples of strategies to employ to make the classroom more student-centered. The brief, Evidence-Based, Student-Centered Instructional Practices, by Joy Kreeft Peyton, Sarah Catherine K. Moore, and Sarah Young of theCenter for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC, can be downloaded at http://www.cal.org/adultesl/resources/digests/student-centered-instructional-practices.php.

Some of these strategies include the following:

 Building on learners’ experiences and strengths while also teaching them how to use specific learning strategies to accomplish their goals

 Providing opportunities for students to use the target language to negotiate meaning with teachers and other students in group work, project work, and task-based interactions while also providing guidance, modeling, and feedback about progress

 Facilitating student work in pairs, in groups, or alone depending on the purpose of the activity, creating learning opportunities that mirror actual tasks in students’ lives The brief also references resources and materials that provide support for student-centered activities including student-generated stories.

The late Gail Weinstein’s Learners' lives as curriculum: Six journeys to immigrant literacy (1999; Washington, DC, and McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems.) is one example of how to use student’s lives as curricula.

I hope others will respond (thank you, Phil, for your response!) to Susan’s request and talk about the materials and resources you are using in your publicly–funded programs, whether or not you are using student-generated, participatory curricula in your classes.

 Miriam Burt

Subject Matter Expert, Adult English Language Learners Community of Practice

Hi Susan and all,

With my colleague, Andrea DeCapua, I have been involved in the type of participatory curriculum you refer to.  There is a chapter in our forthcoming book, due out this summer, on designing student generated literacy projects, and we cite Auerbach’s work in support of our own. Here is an excerpt: “When carefully scaffolded, a class project based on the creation of a booklet around some theme of common interest encourages and supports literacy development.  We refer to these extended literacy projects as "Theme Booklets."  Theme Booklets are organized collections of information that students gather and prepare in written form on a specific topic.  In creating these booklets, the class is actually creating a library of their own work… We categorize Theme Booklets into three types:  1) booklets that focus on formal schemata, explaining processes such as school routines; 2) booklets that focus on linguistic schemata, developing writing skills to support academic ways of thinking; 3) and booklets that focus on content schemata using curriculum content.” (Marshall  & DeCapua, forthcoming).  The book title will be: Making the Transition: Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners, published by U of Michigan Press.  In the meantime, you may want to check out our article, “The newcomer booklet: A Project for limited formally schooled students,” ELT Journal, 64, 396-404 (2010), in which we describe one type of booklet as it was developed at in elementary, secondary and adult ESL literacy programs.

Helaine Marshall

Associate Professor of Education & Director of Language Education Programs

LIU Hudson - Long Island University

P.S. This is my first post since we moved over to the new format & location, so I hope this works!  Hi everyone!