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CATESOL Orange County Chapter Conference

Spring 2012 Professional

Development Workshop

A Dramatic Approach to Literature in ESL by Dr. Susan Stern

Saturday, March 3, 2012

California State University, Fullerton

This workshop will demonstrate and give hands-on experience in using dramatic activities to complement and enhance the study of short stories, plays, and novels in ESL classes, both to integrate literature study with language learning, and to help students understand, appreciate, and enjoy a work of literature. By the end of the workshop, instructors should feel sufficiently prepared to adapt this dramatic approach to any selection of fiction or drama for their ESL classes, from the simplest of scripts or stories for lower-level students to full length novels or plays

Dr. Susan Stern is a Professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, where she has enjoyed teaching all levels of ESL for over 20 years. Prior to that, she was a Lecturer in ESL at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Stern holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also taught a variety of ESL classes. She received her M.A. in TESL, her Secondary Teaching Credential (English/French), and her B.A. in English from UCLA.

Workshop Agenda

8:00 – 9:00 a.m. Coffee, Registration, and Publishers

9:00 – 10:30 a.m. Welcome and Stern, Part I

10:30 – 11:15 a.m. Publishers’ Fair

11:15 – 12:30 p.m. Stern, Part II

12:30 – 1:20 p.m. Lunch, Publishers, and Poster Presentations

1:20 – 3:00 p.m. Stern, Part III, and Closing

TEFL students,

Please arrive at the IP office by 7:15am. Lunch will not be provided at the conference, so expect to purchase lunch at nearby restaurants. You can expect to return to the IP office around 3:30pm.

POSTERous Session Epiphany

Just had a posterous epiphany yesterday. We held a poster session, a required piece for our TEFL training program. Our students created posters demonstrating their knowledge on a topic that they had learned in the program. We opened up the session to our department staff, students, interested parties. For two hours our soon-to-be-graduated students talked to mostly strangers about their posters. One colleague of mine asked his students to interview and review each poster and poster presenter. They had two hours, one hour to interview, and then back in class, they would debate on which posters were done well. They had to vote on the three best ones. As these students were leaving, I was chatting with this colleague about what he had planned to do. I offered to take quick snapshots of each poster with my iPad and upload these pictures to our posterous program blog (tefl.posterous.com). He went back to his class and with the classroom projector, showed the snapshots (uploaded to posterous) to his class and they debated. He later said that it worked exceptionally well, that his students were able to discuss more effectively with the visual aid of the snapshots. It took me all of 5 minutes-during the crazy chaos of the poster session- to upload the poster snapshots to our program blog. Minutes later, my colleague (in a different part of campus) was using these snapshots for his class. Amazing, easy, and fast. Thanks Posterous!