Forming a Critically Responsive Curriculum for Adult ESOL Learners

• In Event: 64.058 - Teaching and Learning in Adult Literacy and ESL Education

Abstract

In this paper, the author will explore findings from a practitioner-inquiry project conducted with an adult English for speakers of other languages (ESoL) class she taught as a teacher-researcher for immigrants in a large, northeastern U.S. city. Through analysis of the wide-ranging qualitative data collected over the year-long project, the researcher discusses how she, her co-educators and students pooled their interests and knowledges to generate a curriculum that was, at once, critical of dominant linguistic ideologies and responsive to students’ desires for English language learning. This paper speaks to a long-held tension in the field and offers new insight through rich empirical data about how this tension is approached in adult learning contexts.

Author

• Emily Rose Schwab, University of Pennsylvania