All sessions are scheduled into rooms at the Convention Center unless otherwise noted. As effective ESL and EFL teachers, we need to know what students expect and hope will occur within the classroom. We need to understand the school cultures that our students represent. In this discussion session, we will discuss strategies for learning about our students' school cultures. Through individual experience and research, some teaching-learning implications of these perceptions are examined.
Students can feel threatened by evaluation, whether from teachers or peers.
Often the threat stems from cultural mismatches in how to demonstrate learning. Presenters share how to use authentic assessment as a starting point in designing integrated skills collaborative activities that empower through making assessment criteria explicit. The presenter, an ESL student, analyzes the interactions of several college-level ESL classes from a student's perspective, and describes her experiences dealing with cultural and personal communication conflicts. The presenter discusses how culture, language, and gender, as well as other factors, interact in the ESL classroom. Shannon Dyrud, Saint Cloud State University, Saint Cloud, Minnesota, USA Intercultural interactions in textbook writing The presenters, two from the United States and one from China, share their experiences in writing a series of English textbooks in China.