Important Research For Writing Persuasive Essays

Important Research For Writing Persuasive Essays

via Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo on 11/8/10

When having students write persuasive essays, I've always found the most difficult issue is teaching the idea and importance of including opposing views and counter-arguments. In fact, on occasion I'll admit to having decided that it is more trouble than it's worth, and skipped that step entirely.
No more, however.
A survey of over one hundred studies in the last fifty years now concludes that arguments that include opposing views with counter-arguments are more persuasive. Here are some excerpts on a report about the study:
…if we bring up opposing arguments, then shoot them down, not only is the audience more likely to be swayed, we also see a boost in our credibility.
Overall this is a nice conclusion, in that not only is a balanced argument more appealing morally, it is also more persuasive. And it doesn't matter whether counter-arguments are introduced at the start, the end, or mixed in; as long as they are refuted, we are more likely to persuade the audience.

The Best Resources, Articles & Blog Posts For Teachers Of ELL’s — 2010

via Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo on 11/1/10

My gradual "roll-out" of 2010 "The Best…" lists continues.
This is my annual list for teachers of English Language Learners. I will be posting a separate one for ELL students in a month or two.
You might also be interested in:
The Best Sites For Teachers Of English Language Learners — 2009
Here are my picks for The Best Sites For Teachers of English Language Learners — 2010 (not in order of preference):
Teaching ELL's The "Unplugged" Way: Jason Renshaw has been writing an excellent series of posts about teaching ESL/EFL/ELL students the "unplugged" way — without a formal textbook, with few materials, focusing on their lives and interests, and making it "conversation-driven." He's now putting all of the posts in this series on one page, so I'd encourage you to explore The Road to Teaching Unplugged – Ongoing Archive.
Handwriting & Learning A Second Language: The Wall Street Journal has a somewhat interesting article (and video) titled How Handwriting Trains the Brain. I was particularly interested in what it says about how writing helps the brain learn a new language (over using a keyboard). That makes sense to me. In my teaching ELL's, computers supplement language learning, but the majority of writing is done by hand.
How Subtitles In Music Videos Teach Literacy: The Boston Globe has a useful article headlined Watch and learn:How music videos are triggering a literacy boom. It's about the use of subtitles in music videos as a tool to teach native-language literacy, and shares some good stories and research. Many ESL/EFL teachers are very aware of the usefulness of subtitles in second-language instruction, too.
Appropriate Use Of Tech: "The Appropriate Use of Technology in the EFL Classroom" is a nice presentation by Ronaldo Lima, Jr.
ESL Lesson Plans: "The Library Of ESL Lesson Plans: North Carolina Curriculum Guide" is an impressive collection of life-skills lesson plans developed by several local community colleges.
ELT & Technology: ELT and Technology is the title of a wiki created by David Deubelbeiss of EFL Classroom 2.0. It's chock-full of useful information.
Using Film: Using film and moving image to enrich ESOL teaching and learning is a very nice listing of different ways to use film with English Language Learners. It was written by Cormac Conway and Michaela Salmon.
Speaking: David Deubelbeiss, founder of EFL Classroom 2.0, has just shared an excellent speaking activity he uses with his English Language Learner students. He calls it Pass The Paper, and also shares a helpful PowerPoint.
My New York Times Guest Post: English Language Learners and the Power of Personal Stories is the title of a guest post I wrote for The New York Times website. It provides a good overview of the ideas I shared in my book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work.
More NY Time Resources: 10 Ways to Support English Language Learning With The New York Times is an excellent resource that has just been published on the New York Times website. It's a must-read for teachers of ELL's.
Creating A Jazz Chant: Most teachers of ELL's, especially Beginners, are familiar with the "jazz chants" developed by Carolyn Graham. These are short, musical….chants that can be used very effectively in the classroom. She has written books sharing them, and I, like many other teachers, have created our own. Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto has written an excellent blog post sharing the process Graham uses to develop these chants.
Another Article By Me: Education World published my short article titled "Using A Star Chart to Teach English Language Learners." (it's not about astronomy)
Academic Language: Teaching Academic Language to English Language Learners is a PowerPoint from a Webinar presented by Dr. Robin Scarcella, Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. It has some useful information.
Top YouTube Videos: David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0 has given us all a gift by compiling his Top 100 Youtube videos for EFL.
Writing Exercise: Sean Banville, the man behind Breaking News English and a bunch of other websites used by ESL/EFL teachers all over the world, has written a post in his blog describing a neat Paired And Group Writing Activity.
Getting ELL's To Thrive: Getting English-Language Learners to Thrive is the title of an article I've written for Teacher Magazine. It was published today. You need to register in order to access the entire article, but it just takes a few seconds to do so.
Connect With English: I've written before about Connect With English. It's a video series for English Language Learners by Annenberg Media. It has good supporting materials, is very engaging for my students, and is on The Best Popular Movies/TV Shows For ESL/EFL list. All episodes are available online and for free. We show it once a week to our Intermediate English classes.Though the supporting materials are good, you do have to pay for them. I thought readers might be interested in this one page worksheet that we use instead. Students have to make predictions based on the title of the episode, explain if their predictions were correct, write several questions about the episode that they ask a partner afterwards (who then writes the answers). It's good listening, speaking, and writing practice. My colleague, Katie Hull, created it for our students to use. Katie and I, by the way, will be writing a book together on teaching writing to English Language Learners.
Teaching Tips: Survival Tips for Teaching Kids English: 30 Tips & Resources is a great post from Shelly Terrell sharing ideas for teaching young English Language Learners.
Movie Clips: Movieclips has immediately become an indispensable website in my "teachers' repertoire" of links.
It has thousands of short video clips from movies and they're not blocked by our content filter! And they're available without registering — except for clips that have "mature" content. That in itself makes it a wonderful resource. But that's only part of why I like this new site so much. What makes it a real winner is that that clips are categorized by theme, character, setting, mood, and more. They're incredibly detailed.
Improvisation: I wrote a post about using improvisation in the classroom. It's titled Improvisation In The ESL/EFL Classroom — At Least In Mine.
Great Teacher Blog: "Frenchfrog's Little English Pond" is the name of a blog written by Laurence Haquet. She creates great interactive books that are exceptional learning tools.
Make Your Textbook Come Alive: Animating your Coursebook is the title of an amazing post, and slideshow presentation, by EFL teacher Marisa Constantinides. If you have to use a textbook in your class, it's chock-full of great ideas on how to make it come alive. It's designed for an ESL/EFL class, but the strategies can be used by any teacher and for any textbook. And, heaven knows, so many textbooks are dead and can use a little re-animation!
Using Metacognition: A Pretty Darn Good Lesson — If I Say So Myself is a humbly-titled post I wrote about what I think is a pretty good lesson we did in our Intermediate English class.
First Day: Resources For The First Day Of Intermediate English Class is another one of my posts.
Student Blogging: "What advice would you give for blogging with ESL/EFL students?" is a post by Sue Waters. In it, she shares advice I have offered, and asks for more suggestions.
Feedback is welcome, including additional suggestions.
If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.
You might also want to explore the 530 other "The Best…" lists I've compiled.

The Learning Network: Going Into Detail: Developing Proofreading Skills

The Learning Network: Going Into Detail: Developing Proofreading Skills

via NYT > Education by By SHANNON DOYNE and HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO on 11/8/10

Lesson Plan | Using strategies for finding and fixing mechanical and grammatical errors.

In Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda

via NYT > Education by By ERIK ECKHOLM on 11/8/10

Lessons to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained urgency after suicides, are causing culture wars.

The Learning Network: Resources | Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War

via NYT > Education by By THE LEARNING NETWORK on 11/5/10

Resources for learning about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.

The Learning Network: Blogging History: Interpreting Civil War-Era Primary Sources

http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e52092edb45466b1e1619e23b9a3c31d
Sent to you via Google Reader

What A Great ESL Site!

here's another site to go along with the one i sent you guys last week that might be helpful (?)

via Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo on 11/3/10

I've posted about the Minnesota Basic Education Site before, but it's been quite a quite awhile.
I was recently pleased to see that they had completely redesigned it, and it looks great!
It will certainly make one or more of my year-end "The Best.." lists.
Thanks to Ed Tech Essentials for prompting me to take a look.

Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

How cool is this? I'm thinking we could use it to make parts of our lessons more interesting and/or give kids a chance to show their learning through this...

Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

“Learning Chocolate” Looks Good For Vocabulary Development

via Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo on 10/24/10

Learning Chocolate is designed for English Language Learners to gain basic vocabulary through many interactive exercises.
I'm adding it to The Best Sites Where ELL's Can Learn Vocabulary.
Thanks to Christine Burgmer for the tip.

Excerpt from Alfie Kohn's Huff Post Piece

A great piece by Kohn in which he deconstructs the "politics of reform" and the language we use to push our ideological agendas. Here he brings his discussion to education: 

Alfie Kohn: How to Sell Conservatism: Lesson 1 -- Pretend You're a Reformer

Consider, finally, the case of education. Seymour Papert, known for his work on artificial intelligence, began one of his books by inviting us to imagine a group of surgeons and a group of teachers, both from a century ago, who are magically transported to the present day. The surgeons visit a modern operating room and struggle to understand what's going on, but the teachers feel right at home in today's schools. Kids, they discover, are still segregated by age in rows of classrooms; are still made to sit passively and listen (or practice skills) most of the time; are still tested and graded, rewarded or punished; still set against one another in contests and deprived of any real say about what they're doing.

Those tempted to point defensively to updates in the delivery system only end up underscoring how education is still about delivering knowledge to empty receptacles. In fact, snazzier technology -- say, posting grades or homework assignments on-line -- mostly serves to distract us from rethinking the pedagogy. Interactive whiteboards in classrooms amount to a 21st-century veneer on old-fashioned, teacher-centered instruction.

But enter now the school "reformers": big-city superintendents like Joel Klein and, until recently, Michelle Rhee; big-money people like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and a batch of hedge fund managers; Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his ideological soulmates who preceded him in the Bush Administration; Waiting for 'Superman' director Davis Guggenheim; and the reporters, editorial writers, and producers at just about every mass media outlet in the U.S. School reform, as these people understand it, and as I've discussed in a previous post, involves a relentless regimen of standardized testing; a push to direct funds to charter schools, many of them run by for-profit corporations; a weakening of teachers' job protection -- and the vilification of unions that represent teachers -- so that those who have failed to raise their students' test scores can be publicly humiliated or fired; threats to shut down low-scoring schools; initiatives to dangle money in front of teachers who follow orders and raise scores, or even in front of certain (low-income) students; and a contest for funding in which only (some) states willing to adopt this bribe-and-threat agenda will receive desperately needed federal money.

This business-style version of reform is routinely described as "bold" or "daring" -- in contrast to the "failed status quo," which is blamed on the teachers' unions. (With education, just as with parenting, even people who are reasonably progressive on other issues suddenly sound as if they're auditioning for Fox News.) There's much to be said about each of the policies I've listed, but for now the point to be emphasized is that, just as with the Tea Partyers who rally to stop the "tyranny" of mild federal checks on corporate power, or the parenting writers who urge us to "dare to discipline" our children (even though 94 percent of parents of preschoolers admit to spanking their children), the school reformers are in fact accelerating what has already been happening over the last couple of decades.

Even before the implementation of what should be called the Many Children Left Behind Act, states and school districts were busy standardizing curricula, imposing more and more tests, and using an array of rewards and punishments to pressure teachers and students to fall in line -- with the most extreme version of this effort reserved for the inner cities. Before anyone outside of Texas had heard of George W. Bush, many of us had been calling attention to the fact that these policies were turning schools into glorified test-prep centers, driving some of the most innovative teachers to leave the profession, and increasing the drop-out rate among kids of color.

Yet the so-called reformers have succeeded in convincing people that their top-down, test-driven approach -- in effect, the status quo on steroids -- is a courageous rejection of what we've been doing. 

Here's what would be new: questioning all the stuff that Papert's early 20th-century visitors would immediately recognize: a regimen of memorizing facts and practicing skills that features lectures, worksheets, quizzes, report cards and homework. But the Gates-Bush-Obama version of "school reform" not only fails to call those things into question; it actually intensifies them, particularly in urban schools. The message, as educator Harvey Daniels observed, consists of saying in effect that "what we're doing [in the classroom] is OK, we just need to do it harder, longer, stronger, louder, meaner..."

Real education reform would require us to consider the elimination of many features that we've come to associate with school, so perhaps the reluctance to take such suggestions seriously is just a specific instance of the "whatever is, is right" bias that psychologists keep documenting. At the same time, traditionalists -- educational or otherwise -- know that it's politically advantageous to position themselves as being outside the establishment. Our challenge is to peer through the fog of rhetoric, to realize that what's being billed as reform should seem distinctly familiar -- and not particularly welcome.