Presenters: Monique Mainella and Jerry Johnson

Monique and Jerry presented participants with graphic organizers that could be used for Pre-reading, During Reading and After Reading activities as well as assessment. They put participants in groups and had them create a graphic organizer for two well-known children's stories: The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood. This illustrated how students using the same graphic organizer for the same story could produce very different final products… all of them correct. When students negotiate meaning to create a graphic organizer, a lot of oral interaction takes place as students explain the way they see the story.

Presenter: Sylvia Schmidt

Sylvia's workshop was very practical and down to earth. She made the teachers feel that it was possible to do computer activities in the classroom; she explained that things might not always go well…. and a back-up plan is essential for your own peace of mind.

Sylvia walked us through many of the Récitlangues activities for ESL students that are on the Web. You may want to look at the learning situation on Flags (Projets - Nos propositions) - it is wonderful in its simplicity and students will really see that they can do research on the Internet in their second language. Here's the site: http://www.recitlangues.org http://www.recitlangues.org

Presenter: Jill Brook, assisted by Jennifer Lahey Arseneault

Some of the main points:

1. You can teach strategies in two main ways: by elicitation or by modeling. In elicitation, students are presented with a learning situation without being told which strategy to use. The teacher asks what strategies they used and they share their strategies with the class. In modeling, the teacher demonstrates a strategy, the students use it, reflect on its usefulness in the situation and other situations, and then are assisted by the teacher in using the strategy until they can choose and use it in appropriate situations autonomously.
2. The strategy being used should be named. It is important that everyone know what is being talked about. Jennifer gave a good example: CPR. You learn how to resuscitate someone by pumping his chest and breathing into his mouth but you haven't been given a name for this procedure. Then you are asked if you can do CPR but don't know what CPR is or whether you know how to do it.
3. Helping students to learn and use strategies is most effective when integrated into actual learning situations.

Presenter: Carolyn Faust

Resourcing has been defined in the Québec Education Program as making use of human and material resources.
One of these resources is, of course, the dictionary. Its use is now permitted for in all four skills of the secondary IV and V ministerial exams, allowing the exam tasks to be more authentic and less a hidden test of memory.

This brings about a vital question: How do we teach dictionary proficiency to our students so that they know how and when to use the dictionary effectively and efficiently, especially in an exam situation?

Using the dictionary as a resource needs to be explicitly taught, modelled and used in the classroom. Being a proficient user of the dictionary takes time and practice so we need to begin in the earlier grades and not in secondary IV and V. When it comes to discerning meaning from an oral or written text, its use should be one of verifying a hypothesis based on context clues. Perhaps by making it a collective process early on, students may grow to trust their ability to deduce meaning from context. This will enable them to trust their judgment as to when it is the most appropriate to pick up the dictionary, especially during an exam situation. This will be of particular service to the weaker or the more insecure student who may tend to be dictionary-bound. The collective process has as its goal autonomy and proficiency.

Teaching dictionary proficiency promotes the ability to find words quickly, to find the right meaning based on context despite long entries, to find the right spelling of words, to learn pronunciation and parts of speech, as well as to know when to use the dictionary and which dictionary to use.

How do we help our students develop dictionary habits? By encouraging them to have their own dictionaries in which they can highlight the words they have already looked up; by promoting the collective process through the use of a cooperative role (resource manager); and by practicing looking at context clues and verifying meaning collectively as a class to support their hypothesis as to meaning.

Although the skills of using a dictionary may be treated in the students' mother tongue, for example in their French class, it should never be presumed that students are proficient in using it. Whether it is a bilingual or monolingual dictionary, our students need to practice in the classroom setting so that the teacher can observe and monitor teaching practices based on these observations. Knowing explicitly how to help our students stems primarily from the observations we make during their actual use of the dictionary.

The skills learned through the use of the dictionary are transferable to other forms of resourcing. There is an old adage that states: the more you use a dictionary, the less you need one. So let's get resourcing!

In "good" groups: people are comfortable and there is a sense of community, i.e. a group of people with shared goal, interest and communication. In "bad" classes: individuality. Hence, it is important to foster a sense of community fast, right from day one. This ''sense of community'' also explains why it is often easier to teach heterogeneous groups, or students from the same program.

Tips to foster a positive environment:

• Group discussions will lift off with good prompts, topics & discussion questions.
  
• Use first names frequently, from the start. Use a seating chart and learn students' names before the end of the first class.
  
• Begin class with informal conversations, e.g. What's new? current events. Recommendation: 3-4 topics and get students to spend 5-10 minutes discussing at the beginning of class.
  
• Do tons of pair work. Individual work is for homework!
       For a grammar exercise completed as homework, get them to compare answers, hence reusing vocabulary.
      For pair writing: get each partner to use a different color pen. They must alternate on the page: one red sentence, one blue sentence, etc.
  
• Change partners often (this avoids cliques)
  
• Build 'shared experience,' sense of community (note this has already been established in groups from the same program)
      e.g. think about a story from your childhood; Partner A, tell Partner B about it; then vice versa; for homework, write your partner's story; then teacher selects some of the best ones to read later in class.
  
• Laugh! Even at students' jokes that aren't funny!
  
• Share some of yourself! Anecdotes, ask for advice on real problems (e.g. Should I come down hard on the latecomer who is about to come into the door? Should I accept late homework? Do you think the reason is valid? Is Movie X suitable for my 10-year-old child?)
  
• All grammar examples should be true sentences about your students. Students don't care about Jane and Bill.
  
• Do childish and fun activities early on and often. English should be the Mickey Mouse course (in the sense of fun) of CEGEP. (e.g. Have them repeat often and early, use quizzes and prizes, use role plays with partners but not in front of the class).
  
• Evaluate and analyze the environment in your class regularly and often.
  

Getting them back on task: if you ''read'' them to be confrontational, it is best to catch them at the end of class individually; otherwise, jokingly say, ''hey, you are not doing the work,'' smile, laugh, and most of the time they will say ''sorry'' and get back on task.

A fun environment is important. You can't tolerate somebody who doesn't want to learn and comes to class to ruin the experience for other students.