Forty-six years ago, a bachelor’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages, or more commonly known as TESOL, became available to students at BYU–Hawaii, and on Dec. 2 there was a conference on campus commemorating the milestone where TESOL professors gave informational lectures.
“It’s an opportunity for the TESOL staff to present areas of the TESOL profession to the students of BYU–Hawaii,” said Jack Lambert, a junior secondary education major and TESOL minor from Wyoming.
He continued, “It gives students opportunities to develop professionally as they embark on their majors or minors in the TESOL field. They can learn how to become more effective teachers.”
Lambert is the president of the TESOL society and was in charge of introducing all of the presenters that day. The TESOL society’s plan is to help network and get to know the other students in the program and build relationships that can last far beyond university.
Presentations ranged from the use of computers in the classroom and teaching, a presentation given by Perry Christensen, to the autonomy of learning, a presentation given by Robb McCollum.
Leola Solis, EIL Academic 1 and TESOL Phonology professor from Tonga, gave a presentation on how understanding reactions in interactions can help teachers be more informed. In her presentation, Solis mainly discussed what teachers can learn based on how students react to compliments. She had attendees go around and give each other compliments and record the responses to said compliments. She then proceeded to use those reactions as examples for categories of responses to compliments and what they mean and how they can be interpreted by different cultures.
Solis talked about how she came to choose her presentation topic by saying, “I looked for something that I was interested in, and one of the things that I became interested in during my master’s program was discourse analysis. When I learned that I got to present, I decided to pick that topic because it’s helped inform my own teaching.”
According to the Linguistics Society of America, discourse analysis is defined as, “...the analysis of language ‘beyond the sentence’...discourse analysis studies the larger chunks of language as they flow together.”
Solis was not the only presenter to have an interactive lesson. Amanda Wallace and Tanya Smith gave a presentation on icebreakers that are different from the usual and can help students learning English as a second language improve parts of their speech.
These activities include one called “Snowball,” where each student writes a quality about themselves on a piece of paper, ball it up, and throw it into the center of the classroom. Students then grab one of the snowballs and find who it belongs to by talking to the other students.
Another icebreaker is one called “Time Machine.” Students are paired up then talk about where they would want to travel to if they had a time machine and why. This game in particular helps students with their usage of the past, present, and future tenses.
This conference was beneficial to professors and students alike. Solis mentioned wanting to implement some of the icebreaker games into her classroom, while student Josh Jung, a sophomore TESOL major from Korea mentioned some of what he took away from the conference.
Jung explained, “I’m starting to teach a voluntary Korean class for students in the Korean chapter and I want to adopt some of those concepts for that class.”
Jung also mentioned how the conference gave him a chance to network and that he would like to attend the conference again.