________________________________

From: englishlanguage-bounces at nifl.gov on behalf of David Rosen
Sent: Wed 9/20/2006 7:33 AM
To: The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 672] Re: Curriculum, materials, ASSESSMENT



Colleagues,

Over the years I have seen some great program- and teacher-made 
workplace-focused, contextualized English language learning 
curriculum materials.  Some of it stays at the company.  Some stays 
with the teacher. Most gets lost when teachers leave, and programs 
end.  I am interested in trying to address that problem, to build 
workplace (English language and other) curriculum that can be more 
widely used by teachers in the classroom and online, and online by 
students.  Here is the first draft of my criteria for the solution to 
be developed.  I would be interested in having our guests' -- and 
others' -- reactions to the criteria.

1) Industry-specific, for example: healthcare, hospitality, built on 
accepted industry skill standards
2) Tailored to specific jobs within the industry, including specific 
vocabulary related to the job, but not limited to those jobs
3) Built on solid, adult education content standards: Perhaps someone 
has taken some of the best state level ESOL content standards and 
built a set of "meta-standards" for ESOL content which can be used 
nationally.  Does this exist? EFF and SCANS are possibilities, too, 
but they are not ESOL content standards.  What would you recommend here?
4) Built nationally (or internationally) but easily adaptable by 
teachers for local situations and for specific learners. In every 
industry there are standard writing tasks -- certain kinds of notes, 
reports, communications to the next shift.  There could be small 
pieces of instruction on how to write a shift change note in 
manufacturing, but this would need to be contextualized by a local 
teacher to the particular manufacturing context.  If the lesson were 
available, for example oin a wiki, a teacher could easily modify it.  
We might also have a record of the modifications and have lots of 
variations that others might use: shift notes for auto manufacturing, 
shift notes for pharmaceuticals manufacturing, shift notes for 
nurses, etc.  The new technology offers workplac basic skills 
curriculum the opportunity to develop very tailored models -- which 
are also available to others in the industry who want to sue them.
5) Available online as lessons which students could use directly 
online themselves or which teachers could use in  face-to-face 
(classroom) learning or online learning, using learning object 
standards so that small pieces of instruction can easily be selected 
and recombined, so for example, the instruction could be used for 
"just-in-time" language learning as well as the longer-term language 
learning needed to progress to proficiency in English.

Your comments, additions, suggested changes?

David J. Rosen
djrosen at comcast.net



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