Digital Commons Network^™

Word Choice: A Neglected But Key Skill For Ell Writers, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

With all of the urgent, critical issues confronting education in general, and literacy practices in particular, why write a column on something as obscure as word choice? Word choice (sometimes called vocabulary choice or diction) often drops to the bottom of the “To Do” list for English as a Second Language (ESL), English, bilingual, and language arts teachers. Even when teachers are able to focus on writing to begin with (writing development is often the first thing cut when lessons run over), teachers of English language learners (ELLs) are too preoccupied with teaching grammar, spelling, organization, syntax, genres, and building …

Black Lives Matter In Teaching English As A Second Language!, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

The Winter 2020 issue of theIllinois Reading Council Journal published a special issue focusing on “action for equity,” with thoughtful articles and abundant family and classroom resources. This issue of the “wELLcome”column, which is dedicated to topics regarding English language learners (ELLs), continues in that same vein. In this issue, we place the spotlight on ELLs of African descent, their teachers, and their schools.

Music, Our Human Superpower, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

Research about music pervades every discipline because music touches every area of life. Studies revealing the salutary effects of music can be found not only in music educator research, but in research in psychology, speech and hearing, child development, neuroscience, and increasingly, health and wellness, aging, rehabilitation and recovery. Since my focus is especially in the areas of language and literacy, I research the positive effects of music on reading, writing, and learning languages - and of this, there is no shortage. In this brief Academia article, I share what I’d like to call an “homage-with-references” to our great Superpower, …

Truly, Madly, Deeply: Adverbs And Ells, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

In this issue’s column focusing on adverbs and English language learners, columnist Kristin Lems explores some of the basic but not-so-obvious features about adverbs that readers and writers need to learn in order to take advantage of these powerful levers of language. The odds are very good that your native English speakers will also benefit from this information—and you might learn a thing or two as well.

Louder Than A Bomb: Poetry Slams And Community Activism Create A Powerful Brew, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

Louder than a Bomb is the oldest youth poetry slam in the country, born out of Chicago's oral performance resources, including Second City. The article shares LTAB's beginnings, evolution, growth, and influence, and the author describes the experience of being a judge at the annual poetry slam.

Simulations In Educational Leadership Internship Programs, Stefanie Shames

Faculty Publications

This brief describes the state of educational leadership internships. Immersing future leaders in virtual reality simulations has the potential to standardize performance expectations and is explored as a method of harnessing the power of technology to provide practice in responding to actual situations while learning to lead.

All About The American Flap, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

In this column, I am going to talk about the American flap, a phonological feature of the American English dialect. Those of us with backgrounds in ESL/EFL learn about this in our master’s programs, but I have found that even teachers who have taken a course in linguistics may not be aware of the flap and its important implications for listening, reading, and spelling in English (Lems, Miller, & Soro, 2017)

Figurative Language: Are English Language Learners Falling Through The Cracks?, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

New Ideas For Teaching English Using Songs And Music, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Talkin’ Oracy And Svr, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Supporting Candidates In High Needs Settings, Janet Lorch

Faculty Publications

This presentation is based on two years of data from an Urban Teacher Residency of Masters of Arts in Teaching for Elementary Education. Teacher candidates are placed in residencies in Chicago Public Schools.

Learning English Through Music In The Digital Age, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

Three simple ideas for music activities that work well in the English language learning classroom. Although there are innumerable methods and techniques, I have selected three techniques that involve use of video because of the focus of this newsletter.

Scaffolding In L2 Reading: How Repitition And An Auditory Model Help Readers, Etsuo Taguchi, Greta Gorsuch, Kristin Lems, Rory Rosszell

Faculty Publications

Reading fluency research and practice have recently undergone some changes. While past studies and interventions focused on reading speed as their main goal, now more emphasis is being placed on exploring the role prosody plays in reading, and how listening to an audio model of a text while reading may act as a form of scaffolding, or aid, to reading comprehension. This article explores how two elements unique to repeated reading (RR) practices likely provide scaffolding for L2 learners’ reading comprehension: repetitions in reading a text, and having learners read along with an audio model of the text. Scaffolding is …

Transfer Pathways Beyond Articulation: A Partnership Initiative Between National Louis University And Triton Community College, Sherri Bressman, Ayn Keneman, Kristin Lems, Jason Stegemoller, Mary Ann Olson, Mary Rinchiuso

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Curricular Reflections In The Usa: Teaching Teachers The Edtpa, Todd A. Price Dr.

Faculty Publications

The Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) is an evaluation tool currently used across several states. The supposition is that teacher candidate performance can be measured. The express purpose of this instrument is to determine whether teacher candidates are ready to enter the classroom. Creators of the edTPA believe that this evaluation tool and the standards-based movement of which the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) play a part is more “rigorous” then other measures and will raise the bar for teachers entering the profession. Proponents …

Woody Guthrie, America's Merry Prankster, Kristin Lems

Faculty Publications

A “merry prankster” is a colorful person, real or legendary, who pokes fun at authority and the rich, powerful, and arrogant. The merry prankster appears small and powerless, but manages to outwit his opponents, often summing up the situation with witty one-liners — signal examples from medieval history and folklore are Mullah Nasreddin and Till Eugenspiel. In many ways, Woody Guthrie is an American merry prankster. Small in stature but large of intelligence, he used his wits, musical creativity, and people skills to defend the poor against the rich and powerful. He consistently made enemies of the privileged and those …

From “Outsider” To “Bridge”: The Changing Role Of University Supervision In An Urban Teacher Residency Program, Wendy Gardiner, Janet Lorch

Faculty Publications

This qualitative research study investigated a faculty liaison (FL) model, an alternative to traditional field supervision implemented in an urban teacher residency (UTR) program. In the FL model, professors teaching in the UTR program were assigned to school sites rather than individual teacher candidates to observe and provide feedback, evaluate teacher candidate performance, and connect coursework and classroom practice. Results indicate strong support for the continuation of the FL model in lieu of traditional supervision. Specifically, the FL model supported teacher candidate learning, both in the field and in university coursework; and enhanced school-university collaboration. The authors provide an analysis …

Review Of "Fundamentals Of Collection Development And Management (3rd Ed.)," By Peggy Johnson, Chris Diaz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Residency Programs And Demonstrating Commitment To Diversity, Kelly Mcelroy, Chris Diaz

Faculty Publications

This paper was presented on March, 28, 2015, at the Association for College and Research Libraries Conference in Portland, Oregon. Full Conference proceedings are available here.

Post-graduate internships, residencies, and fellowships have existed in research libraries since the 1930s, and have increasingly become a diversity recruitment and retention method of college and university libraries since the 1980s. These programs recruit recent graduates from Library and Information Science programs for training and specialization in some aspect of academic and research librarianship, usually under a term-limited contract of one to three years, often with a stated goal of contributing to the …

Towards An Assumption Responsive Information Literacy Curriculum: Lessons From Student Qualitative Data, Rob Morrison, Deana Greenfield

Faculty Publications

This chapter will describe how the collection of data on college student assumptions impacted the development and revision of credit courses in digital information literacy. Drawing on qualitative data from pretests, assignments, questionnaires, reflection journals, and student evaluations, the authors will detail their teaching experiences and the development of an assumption responsive curriculum which challenges students to draw connections between new material and prior questions, concerns, and beliefs. We will also discuss the impetus for the development of our pretest survey tool, thoughts on why student assumptions matter in the classroom, and provide excerpts from the qualitative student data that …

Save Our Schools Rally Chicago, March 17, 2013, Todd Alan Price

Faculty Publications

Using a video camera, I documented the historic Save our Schools Rally Chicago, March 27, 2013. Included was a march led by President Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), interviews respectively of Reverend Jesse Jackson, a special education teacher-Diana, and a healthcare worker, and footage of community members performing civil disobedience. Perhaps most compelling are the voices of students—high school seniors— who spoke eloquently against school closings.

Further Changes In L2 Thinking For Speaking?, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

Cross-linguistic research has shown that languages differ typologically in how motion events are indicated lexically and syntactically, and that speakers of these languages have different patterns of thinking for speaking (for a review, see Han and Cadierno, 2010). Spanish speakers express path linguistically on verbs, their path gestures tend to occur with path verbs, and their manner gestures may occur without manner in speech, whereas English satellite units, and their manner gestures rarely occur without manner in speech. Stam (2006b) has shown that the English narrations of Spanish learners of English have aspects of their first language (Spanish) and aspects …

School And Community-Based Childhood Obesity: Implications For Policy And Practice, Suzette Fromm Reed, Judah J. Viola, Karen Lynch

Faculty Publications

This introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Prevention and Intervention in the Community on the topic of childhood obesity prevention lays some of the basis for the state of affairs of the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States as of 2012 and the need for and types of existing prevention and intervention efforts underway. At the intersection of public health and community psychology, each of the five articles presents some insights into how prevention and intervention efforts currently underway are fairing and offers some implications for program developers and policy makers to start to turn around …

Understanding How Service-Learning Impacts The Dispositions Of Teach For America Candidates And Their Students, Dymaneke Mitchell, Sy Karlin, Todd Alan Price

Faculty Publications

This article is based on a study that assessed Teach for America (TFA) candidates’ dispositions toward service-learning before and after they developed and implemented a service-learning project with their students. This article may be used to understand the significance of raising alternative certification teacher candidates’ community awareness so that they may stay longer as teachers while also becoming more acculturated to their school and neighborhood surroundings. The authors assert that candidates will become more effective through carefully planned service-learning experiences with community partners and become better service and public education advocates.

Unintended Consequences: Reverberations Of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, Lauren Heidbrink

Faculty Publications

This paper details the socio-legal factors that shape the relationship between the child, the family, and the state, and the ways unaccompanied migrant children’s lives have come to be defined and contested. The legal identity of migrant children is socially situated within a history that intertwines social movements of helping professionals, legal jurisdictions characterized by increasingly intolerant approaches to juveniles, and shifts in the treatment of unauthorized migrant youth under immigration law over time. In a globalized world, this triangular relationship between children, families, and the state becomes increasingly complex and dynamic. Social policies and legal norms often lag far …

Why Gesture!, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

An editorial on the importance of gesture in understanding second language acquisition and in teaching language.

Complexity And Complicity: Quality(S) And/Or Effectiveness In Teacher Education, Todd Alan Price

Faculty Publications

The period spanning 2001 to 2015 could best be characterized in the words “shock and awe” in the United States of America. During this tumultuous time, the public good was placed under increasingly austere measures as a direct result of war, widespread financial speculation, and crash of the financial, investment, and real estate market(s). Subsequently, a banking industry bailout of epic proportions - shouldered disproportionately by average American taxpayers - led to political upheavals, and an increasingly divided body politic. Public education was severely impacted. With the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) school districts were placed under audit and …

Democracy Education: The Radical Teaching, Learning, And Doing Of Tao Xingzhi, Todd A. Price Dr.

Faculty Publications

The apex of China’s 1911 Republican Revolution, the election in Nanjing of native son Dr. Sun Yat-sen, heralded an historic break with autocracy. Tragically, Sun Yat-Sen’s democracy did not last long. A bitter period of feudal strife followed as warlords sought to carve fiefdoms out of the young republic. Humiliating concessions to Japan under the Versailles Treaty added to the new republic’s problems. Continuing violation of China’s sovereignty spawned the May 4th, 1919 student movement in Peking. Reverberations from May 4th helped launch a small communist party cell in Shanghai and a larger democracy movement across the country.

Trenchant feudalism, …

Unpacking The Language Of Stem For English Language Learners, Kristin Lems, Jason Stegemoller

Faculty Publications

This article is a follow-up to a workshop we presented at STEMTech 2013 entitled “Unpacking the language of STEM for English language learners.” We chose this topic because, in our roles as co-directors of the ESL STEM Success Grant (a 5 year national professional development grant from the Office of English Language Acquisition, U.S. Department of Education), we have been exploring ways that teachers across the grade levels can rise to the challenge of more effectively teaching English language learners (ELLs) in the STEM disciplines. (STEM, of course, stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.) When teachers embed their understandings …

A Biliteracy Dialogue Approach To One-On-One Writing Instruction With Bilingual, Mexican, Immigrant Writers, W. Jason Stegemoller

Faculty Publications

This interpretive study explores the writing and writing experiences of 2 bilingual, Mexican, immigrant undergraduates at a US university. Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester’s (2003) continua model of biliteracy situates writing interactions to understand how students explore and draw on their bilingual and bicultural resources as they develop academic writing in English in the university. Data include questionnaires, literacy history interview-conversations, text-based conversations, student writing, course syllabi, and assignment sheets. Biliteracy dialogues demonstrate how students approached writing. The 1st student, Diego, focused on negotiating what he perceived as appropriate to include in his writing, while the 2nd student, Nicolas, connected to academic …