The CATESOL Journal

In this paper, two ESL teachers describe their attempts to encourage student mentoring, reading, and writing through a cross-institutional e-mail project. Th eir assignments and student interactions as well as the successes and problems related to the project are discussed. Th e e-mail correspondence between two pairs of students and comments on the impact of the project on these and other students in the class are presented.

Th is study investigated Asian international students’ self-reported preferences for class performance and class participation and whether these preferences were related to their English ability and personality type. A sample of 121 students from three colleges and universities in Los Angeles was administered a three-part questionnaire that contained demographic, language- use, and English language profi ciency items; questions about their preferences for studying; and a personality scale used to classify the students as outgoing or reserved. Th e researchers found the data consistent with that of earlier studies, in which Asian students were described as passive, respectful of their teachers, and bound by the need to maintain group harmony. As expected, language profi ciency was found to aff ect many of the patterns described. Th e fi ndings for personality type were not as clear-cut and will need to be investigated further

Since the introduction of communicative language teaching, many listening materials have focused on the development of top-down listening skills, even though many ESL learners still have difficulty with bottom-up processing. Many of the standard listening materials deal with bottom-up phenomena such as assimilation, deletion, and insertion only for function words; there are no listening materials designed exclusively to train students to listen to content words, though many have variable pronunciations (e.g., restaurant > restaurant, suppose > suppose). This paper discusses prototypical mishearings of content words by Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Korean, and Vietnamese speakers of English (n=18), based on the students’ written summaries of a university lecture and their subsequent performance on dictations of the segments that had given them difficulty in writing the summaries. All the mishearings were classified into four categories: (a) the phonological level, (b) the lexical level, (c) the syntactic level, and (d) the schematic level. Moreover, the hearing errors made at the phonological level were subdivided into substitutions, insertions, deletions, misperception of stress, and missegmentation. The paper also discusses what types of mishearings are most common in ESL learners’ listening and whether or not the frequency of each category above varies according to different first language backgrounds. Finally, this study addresses the pedagogical implications of the actual mishearing data from these ESL learners for listening instruction, arguing that ESL/EFL teachers should attend more systematically to bottom-up listening skills to help their learners more accurately process content words.

The California State University and University of California campuses have recently experienced an increasing number of nonnative speakers who enter their schools underprepared in English. This problem appears also to be common at community colleges. This study examines the personal backgrounds (e.g., age at time of arrival in the United States, number of years in American high schools, number of ESL classes taken in high school) of 54 Vietnamese graduates of American high schools and their perception of how prepared they are in English. The study also looks at what these students expect from ESL teachers and what classroom activities they find beneficial in ESL courses. While offering explanations for this particular group’s underpreparedness in English, the authors conclude that (a) these students value well-organized, prepared teachers and (b) they would greatly benefit from additional focused study in grammar and writing skills.

This article provides a reasonably accurate picture of the opinions, needs, and interests of CATESOL college/university level members based upon the results of a 1997 survey. As a whole, members work as part-time and full-time professors or instructors in one of the California college systems. Even though they perceive themselves as well trained to deal with L2 issues and have a great deal of contact with ESL students, members are dissatisfied with the lack of articulation with the other programs that deal with L2 learners on their campuses. As a whole, members actively participate in professional conferences, keep up-to-date in their reading of CATESOL publications, and are hopeful about the role of technology in the future. While able to identify a wide range of positive decisions, activities and programs on their campuses within the past five years, most respondents expressed the need for greater professional respect in their work settings as well as more support in providing curricular options and staffing.