November 2004
Advocacy in ESL
Transition, Turmoil & Hope
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"How September 11th Changed the ESL Profession"
Excerpts from Chapter One of New ESL MiniConference Book
The following are excerpts from the first chapter of "Transition, Turmoil, and Hope," a new
book which compiles the first two years of Achievement Profile interviews, as
published in the ESL MiniConference Online. The full text is available as a pdf file at
www.eslminiconf.net/eslbook. A paper version
is forthcoming.
Chapter One Excerpts:
New York City is like one big ESL classroom, with hot dog and coffee vendors reinforcing a
newcomer’s first efforts at communication; busses with advertising messages supported by
powerful visuals lurching through the streets; an endless flow of diverse cultures articulating and
gesticulating to convey everything that unites and everything that separates them.
When the World Trade Center fell to the ground on September 11, 2001, it crushed the lives,
hopes and dreams of more than 3,000 New York City residents and visitors to the city. Every day
for months following the attacks on the towers, the New York Times ran several pages of short
biographies and photos until readers had learned about nearly every person who died that September
morning. Reading those stories no one could miss the multicultural, multiethnic, multinational
dimensions of the pain and sadness felt by families and friends of the victims.
If your subway ride to work each morning took you through Times Square-42nd Street Station,
you would have walked respectfully through a makeshift shrine in the space between four pillars,
with flyers posted by those searching for missing relatives, messages of condolence and faith,
and, on the cement floor, candle flames in honor of those lost. Quietly grieving New Yorkers
experienced about six weeks of a spiritual bond bridging their differences as they sojourned
through once familiar and routine pathways during their daily commutes, before things slowly
returned to something like ordinary life and the posters and candles were cleared away.
There were immediate effects at ESL programs in the New York City. As academic director at a
language school based at Manhattan College, in the Bronx, I remember clearly how the campus
responded to news of the terrible attacks downtown.
The day of the attack on the World Trade Center, classes continued as normal at our program.
About 11:00, teachers read a brief bulletin to their students about what had happened, and then
proceeded with their lessons. At the 12:10 lunch break, many ESL students joined Manhattan
College students outside at the prayer vigil. During the lunch hour that day, the computer lab was
also a busy place, with students alternately e-mailing friends and family, and checking Web sites
for information about what had occurred.
In the subdued atmosphere that prevailed at the NYSTESOL convention in Rye Brook, there
were a number of poignant moments. The fire-orange, red and yellow leaves in the woodlands
surrounding Rye may have offered a reassuring signal that the cycle of nature continues
unabated, even in the face of horrible experiences such as New York and America had recently
seen. There is a certain predictability to the change of seasons, and participants in the weekend at
the Rye Town Hilton likely returned home with steadier nerves and a clearer shared vision of the
future of our chosen vocation.
Repercussions from 9-11 were felt not only at university programs. The rhetoric of the “War on
Terror” rekindled the anti-immigrant sentiments of mainstream America; Massachusetts passed
English-only legislation prohibiting bilingual education in K-12 public schools; Western Kansas
elected a state board member whose campaign advocated refusing to educate the children of
undocumented immigrants. At the same time, “No Child Left Behind” brought a renewed focus
on the academic performance of English language learners in public schools, requiring schools,
districts and states to show “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) in disaggregated data for this
group. ESL teacher education programs grew as districts sought ESL endorsements for regular
classroom teaching staff in an effort to meet AYP.
I started the ESL MiniConference Online in the months following September 11, 2001, in an
effort to fill the gap between annual conferences and the workaday lives of ESL teachers. During
the past two and a half years, ESL MiniConference has documented methodology debates;
concerns about poor working conditions for part-time teachers; political arguments for and
against bilingual education; the controversy over the restructuring of the ERIC Clearinghouses;
and, primarily, new information generated at local workshops and regional conferences in the
U.S. and around the world.
The first five profiles were published in April, 2002: Marianne Celce-Murcia, Betty Azar,
Edward Erazmus, Renee Lajcak, and Robert O’Neill. Marianne Celce-Murcia is the co-author of
The Grammar Book (Celce-Murcia, M. & Larsen-Freeman, D., 1983, 1999. The Grammar Book,
Heinle & Heinle.), one of my prized possessions as a new ESL teacher heading overseas to
teach. Betty Azar’s Understanding and Using English Grammar (Azar, B., 1981, 1992, 1998.
Understanding and Using English Grammar, Prentice Hall.) was another key resource for me in
my earliest ESL teaching experiences. I was overwhelmed with relief and quite honored when
both of these well-known ESL professionals agreed to be interviewed for the ESL
MiniConference Online.
The following note from Carol Gillespie, president of Washington State
TESOL, is typical of responses to our interviews of high-profile members of the profession.
Professor Erazmus was a member of my masters research paper committee, 1983-1984, and it
meant a lot to me when—with the assistance of his daughter via e-mail—I was able to reestablish
contact and get his answers to my interview questions. I can still remember a
KATESOL meeting in Salina, Kansas, in 1983, when keynoter James Alatis was talking with
Professor Erazmus and referred to him as one of the early TESOL pioneers from the University
of Michigan. Professor Erazmus helps to connect us to those early days when Kenneth Pike and
Charles Fries were so influential in linguistics and English language teaching.
When I rated the top 10 sessions in five different categories in the weeks leading up to the 2002
TESOL Convention, I received the following message from Renee Lajcak, director of the
Midwest Teacher Training Program, in Madison, Wisconsin:
I was intrigued by the fact that her TESL certificate program was not affiliated with a university,
but was her own private enterprise, and as it turned out her interview was one of the most
interesting we did.
It was difficult to locate an e-mail address for Robert O’Neill, but well worth the effort. I had
been thoroughly entranced by his quick wit during two presentations he made at meetings of the
Japanese Association of Language Teachers (JALT) in the early 1990s, and also thought his
video (now CD-ROM) course, “The Lost Secret,” was ingeniously conceived. He warmed to the
task of answering my interview questions, and then pushed the ESL MiniConference in an
important direction when he encouraged me to find researchers to publicly debate his comments
about grammar teaching on the Web pages of the newsletter.
That summer debate grew to include an all-time hero of mine, Stephen Krashen, as well as a new
star in the field of second language acquisition, Bill VanPatten. A number of readers contacted
me to let me know that they were using the debate in teacher-education courses and as the focus
for professional workshops.
The standard questions for these “Achievement Profile” interviews are the following:
What are your principal projects, and what is on
the back burner?
How did you start your ESL career? Who influenced your decision?
What were some important formative experiences in the early stages of your development?
What are the four or five language/culture backgrounds with which you are most familiar
as a teacher? Which ones are you familiar with from the perspective of a language
learner yourself? What insights have you gained in how to meet the needs of English
learners from these cultures and language backgrounds?
If you had to give three pieces of advice to a new ESL teacher, what would they be?
What do you see as the most important issues facing the ESL/EFL teaching profession
today?
In 10 or 20 years, few will be talking about September 11th anymore. Hopefully, the content of
our discourse will be constructive, peaceful and optimistic, rather than further horrors of war.
Nevertheless, something changed on 9-11 and our profession is undergoing tensions and stresses
which are radically redefining the landscape for most of us and for anyone considering a career
as an ESL teacher. It is my strong belief that the unguarded comments of these 39 teachers can
help us remember what is best and what is most essential about the activity of teaching English
to speakers of other languages.
Chapter One Preview by Robb Scott
2004 ESL MiniConference Online
...
By Wednesday afternoon, floods of e-mail messages had arrived from former students and our
associates all over the world, expressing their grief and solidarity. "God bless you all, God bless
liberty, God bless America," concluded a statement from a former student of ours now living in
France. "I know it's a terrible moment in your lives," wrote a student from Peru, "but I also know
that American people never give up and that you are bigger than your problems." The marketing
manager at HIT International Education in Turkey wrote, "Our hearts are with the whole
American nation."
...
As a member of the program committee for NYSTESOL’s annual conference scheduled for
October 19-20, 2001, I also remember serious consideration being given to possibly canceling
the event, but it turned out to be one of the most memorable ESL gatherings in the history of the
New York affiliate. Whether examining new ESL materials while sipping coffee provided by
McGraw-Hill, celebrating at the opening night reception and Saturday's President's ball, or
standing outside enjoying the autumn splendor of the woods that surround the Rye Town Hilton,
this year's 600+ conference-goers showed a strong interest in exploring the deeper issues facing
our profession, in the somber aftermath of September 11th's World Trade Center, Pentagon and
Pennsylvania airplane crashes, the more recent anthrax scares and the ongoing U.S. military
strikes on Afghanistan.
...
During the year following the Al-Qaeda attacks in America, intensive English programs at
colleges and universities across the country struggled to protect teaching jobs while applications
from international students dropped precipitously. By early 2003, prestigious ESL programs at
the University of Berkeley and the University of Minnesota were shut down, and career ESL
instructors were being retrained for new occupations. Programs which survived were moving
quickly to a new model, less dependent on elite, educated students from abroad; ESL publishers
shifted resources to the development of new materials better suited to meet the needs of first- and
second-generation immigrants whose less-schooled dialects differ significantly from the standard
English required for academic success at the university level (Reid, J., March 13, 2004. “Ear
Learners and Learning Styles,,” Keynote speech at KATESOL Conference.).
...
One lasting impression for me from the emotionally charged days and weeks following
September 11th was the importance of remembering the people who influence our lives, and
helping to make their ideas, experiences, insights and suggestions more widely accessible to
others who may benefit from them. That is where the idea for the “Achievement Profile”
interviews came from.
(Gillespie, C., January, 2003. Letter to the Editor, ESL MiniConference Online.)
(Lajcak, R., March, 2002. Letter to the Editor, ESL MiniConference Online.)
(O’Neill, R., April, 2002. Achievement Profile, ESL MiniConferenceOnline.)
Robb@ESLminiconf.net