Education Commons^™

Who’S Afraid Of Multilingual Education? Conversations With Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Jim Cummins, Ajit Mohanty, And Stephen Bahry About The Iranian Context And Beyond, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

More than 70 languages are spoken in contemporary Iran, yet all governmental correspondence and educational textbooks must be written in Farsi. To date, the Iranian mother tongue debate has remained far from the international scholarly exchanges of ideas about multilingual education. This book bridges that gap using interviews with four prominent academic experts in linguistic human rights, mother tongue education and bilingual and multilingual education. The author examines the arguments for rejecting multilingual education in Iran, and the four interviewees counter those arguments with evidence that mother tongue-based education has resulted in positive outcomes for the speakers of non-dominant language …

Essay Writing Instructional Lexicon And Semantic Confusion, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

“Introduction,” “body,” and “conclusion” are the most accessible words in the instructional lexicon for ESL writing teachers when they want to describe the structure of a typical five-paragraph persuasive or argumentative essay or its shorter variations for standardized tests such as TOEFL and IELTS. They are frequently employed to refer to the three tiers of the hamburger essay in textbooks, on classroom boards, and in YouTube tutorials.

Not surprisingly, English learners also might give you the same words if asked what the main components of an essay are. Like ESL teachers, students usually use the same terms or their equivalents …

Reading Poetry In Standardized Efl Test Preparation To Increase Meaningful Literacy Engagement, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

This article reports the process of an action research project on the impact of reading poetry on student literacy engagement in an EFL standardized test preparation course. This research project was conducted in a class of eight female Iranian adult professionals preparing for the First Certificate of English (FCE) examination, provided by Cambridge English Language Assessment. Standardized tests are believed to narrow the curriculum, to reduce emphasis on complex thinking, and to have “washback” effect on the quality of teaching. In this project, in order to improve the quality of the students’ literacy engagement two particular measures were taken. In …

Adolescent Literacy And Collaborative Inquiry, Rob Simon, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

In a teacher education classroom in Toronto, groups of middle school students, teacher candidates, and university researchers, members of our research collaborative, the Teaching to Learn Project (Simon et al., 2014; Simon & the Teaching to Learn Project, 2014), discuss projects developed from curricula they coauthored for Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986). Maus documents Spiegelman’s father’s recollections of the Holocaust and the author’s own struggles to come to terms with what it means to be the child of a Holocaust survivor.

Youth and teachers involved in the Teaching to Learn Project collectively worked through what historian …

Teaching Anglo-American Academic Writing And Intercultural Rhetoric: A Grounded Theory Study Of Practice In Ontario Secondary Schools, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

This qualitative research project is a grounded theory study of the experiences of five EAL (English as an additional language) academic writing instructors with intercultural rhetoric. Following the academic conversation about contrastive/intercultural rhetoric, this investigation explores narratives of classroom practice in Ontario secondary schools in order to underline L2 writing activities that are sensitive to intercultural rhetoric. This paper includes explanations of the phenomenon of intercultural rhetoric as identified by the interviewed instructors and lists practical strategies employed by the participants. These strategies are organized in three categories: (1) strategies that use the potential of students’ first languages and mother …

A Practice-Oriented Definition Of Post-Process Second Language Writing Theory, Amir Kalan

Amir Kalan

ENGLISH:

This article is a synthesis of the scholarly literature on the post-process approach to teaching second language (L2) writing, particularly college and university composition in English as an additional language. This synthesis aims to offer a definition of post-process L2 writing that can readily lend itself to practice and be more accessible to practitioners. All the publications that had either substantially or marginally discussed post-process theory since 1990 were systematically reviewed in order to answer the following question: What is a definition of post-process L2 writing theory that can readily lend itself to pedagogy and actual practice for helping …