Writing Successful Session

Proposals

Guidelines and Criteria

TESOL Convention 2021, Houston
 Overview

• Useful Information While Making Submission

• Choosing Context, Settings, Focus and Strands
• Session Types
• Essential Proposal Components
• Writing the Abstract and Session Description
• TESOL Approved Acronyms and Abbreviations

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Useful Information While Making
Submission

Title, Checklist for Proposal Rubric, and

Factors Disqualifying Proposal

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 Title Requirements

• Keep your title to 10 words maximum.

• Don’t use question marks or exclamation marks.
• The first letter of Verbs, Nouns, Adjectives, Adverbs
and Pronouns must be capitalized.
• Lower case must be used for conjunctions, articles
and prepositions of fewer than four letters.

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 Check list for Proposal Rubric
• Does your proposal highlight importance & appropriateness of topic to
the audience?
• Does your proposal address a topic of current interest in TESOL?
• Does your proposal make reference to current pedagogy, research or
theory in TESOL?
• Does your proposal indicate a coherent description of the session
content and plan?
• Did you clearly identify the objectives and outcomes for participants and
intended educational settings?
• Does your proposal indicate appropriate length, content and delivery
methods for your session?
• Is it a well written proposal in terms of overall clarity?
• Is your proposal free of typographical, grammatical or other type of
errors

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 Factors Disqualifying Proposals
A proposal will be disqualified if it:
• is submitted after 5 pm EST June 10, 2020 .
• is incomplete or does not follow the instructions in this Call
for Proposals.
• includes identifying information for the presenter(s) such as
names and institutions in the title, abstract, or description.
• promotes commercial interests.
• is submitted to multiple strands, whether the proposals are
identical or substantially similar.
• is plagiarized.

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 Now choose your strand,
context, setting, and focus.

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Choose Your Session Type
Types of sessions that you can apply for

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 Session Types
– Presentation
– Workshop
– Panel
– Poster
– Dialogue
– Teaching Tip

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 Session Types
Presentations –
• Individual or up to 4
presenters.
• Share ideas, experiences and
perspectives gleaned from
research or practice.
• Provide opportunities for
attendee participation.
• Serve as springboards
stimulating further discussion
Workshops -
•  Engage participants in
structured hands-on
development of specific
teaching or research
technique.
• Provide interactive activities
for attendees to share
information and participate
in simulation.
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 Session Types
Panels – Posters –
• Multiple, short • Academically sound
presentations/ scholarly or creative
discussions of a projects by 1-2
current ELT issue by 3- presenters.
6 presenters. • Present information in a
• Focus on practice, visually engaging format.
research, and/or • Highlight work through
advocacy. charts, graphs, maps, etc.

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 Session Types
Dialogues – Teaching Tips –
• Peer-to peer facilitated •  Oral summary of
session on a hot topic in presenter’s work in
TESOL.
relation to practice.
• Aim at audience
• Provide a synopsis of
involvement.
• Reflect strong, up-to-
the techniques,
date knowledge of the including brief
topic(s).  description of the
teaching tip.

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Writing the Abstract and
Session Description

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Now consider what to include
in your abstract and session
description.

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 Territory
• Establishes the situation in which activity is placed
or physically located.

Examples –
• Encouraging reflective teaching has become a widespread
practice in L2 teacher education.
• Educators in general, and particularly language educators in
an EFL context, need to evaluate teaching experiences that
have proved to be successful.

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 Reporting Previous Research
• Report or refer to earlier research in the field or refer
to terms used in the research area
Examples –
• Multiple Intelligences theory by Harvard Professor Howard Gardner in
1983 explained that learners possess different intelligences and apply
them in more than one way to interpret information, solve problems and
create things (Gardner, 1993).

• Experienced practitioners know that L2 teacher identity formation is a

co-constructed, negotiated, and ever-changing process. (Duff & Uchida,
1997) mediated by personal beliefs and socio-cultural factors (Flores &
Day, 2006).

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 Gap in the Research
• Indicate there’s a lack of knowledge or problem in the field of study
• Explain this motivated the study.

Examples
• While largely studied among L2 teachers, language awareness has rarely
been examined among educators of multilingual youth who are not themselves
L2 specialists.
• Yet, many academic-preparation programs often follow a traditional grammar
syllabus, which may not make explicit to students the way in which particular
lexico-grammatical structures are used in academic writing to achieve specific
purposes.
• Writing and conversation with colleagues are useful tools for
reflective teaching, but the privileged scientific report format
hinders the widespread publication of teacher reflections.

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 Goal –
What is the goal of your
session and how will you
achieve it?

Means 1 – Methods to achieve your goal.

Means 2 – How you will organize the talk or session to
achieve your goal.

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Means 1 – Methods to achieve your goal

• Explain how you will achieve your goal.

• Indicate research methods, procedures, plans of action and
tasks leading to the goal.
Examples -
• In the project, classes met once a week with the majority of
instruction and classwork delivered in an online format.

• This cross-sectional study was designed to explore the reflective

practices of pre-service teachers (N=10) registered in two
mandatory 7-week courses (i.e., Methods of Teaching EFL and EFL
Practicum) in a TEFL certificate program.

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 Means 2 – Methods to structure your session

• How is the talk organized?

• Include the methods and procedures which structure the
actual presentation.
Examples -
• This colloquium focuses on the sequences of classroom tasks
that recycle vocabulary to promote word retrieval and continued
independent vocabulary acquisition

• This presentation will briefly review research on academic

literacies of multilingual writers and report on the main
findings of a multiple case study with international, generation
1.5, and native-speaking students.

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 Combining Components in Your Session
Description
• Presenters can follow any of these combinations while writing
their proposals.

Territory + Research
• Research suggests that students will not gain university academic
language proficiency through incidental learning alone; intentional
learning is required (Schmidt, 1993; Schmitt, 2008).

Research + Gap + Means

• However, developing AWL-based classroom activities that employ
lexically-oriented approaches and promote independence in vocabulary
learning does not guarantee that students’ access and use targeted words
once the class is over. This colloquium focuses on sequences of classroom
tasks that recycle vocabulary to promote word retrieval and continued
independent vocabulary acquisition.
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 Outcomes - Research based

• Describe anticipated results, findings or achievements of

the study.
Examples -
• Results indicate that by the end of the course, PSTs are actually able
to imagine themselves as L2 professionals.

• This study contributes to the field in different ways. First, it provides

evidence that… Second, it describes what strategies…

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 Outcomes – Theory based
• Explain the intended or projected outcomes.
• Show their real-world utility to educators, students, or
other stakeholders.
Examples -
• In addition, these results provide insight into the
importance of English language ability in these same
classroom roles.

• We end our colloquium with a call for more forums

in widely-distributed publications for sharing
classroom practices and results of reflective
teaching

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 Attendee Benefits
• Explain the intended or projected outcomes for the
audience.
Examples -
• Participants will leave with handouts that detail
resources, key features, sample texts and pedagogical
applications to adapt to various classroom contexts.

• Presenters offer rationales for choices made and provide

handouts outlining pertinent steps, tips, and caveats in
order to inform teachers’ classroom practices.

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Summary of Proposal Components

1) Territory 5) Means 1
– Where (physical/ – How we will achieve
theoretical) this
2) Reporting Previous 6) Means 2
Research – How the talk is
– Relevance via citations organized
3) Gap 7) Outcomes
– What we need to know – The findings
4) Goal 8) Benefits
– What we will do – What attendees gain

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 Reflect
Please reflect on the following questions before making the final submission.

• Did I show that I was knowledgeable?

• Did I report some previous work?

• Did I explain step by step what I want to discuss?

• Did I explicitly present the outcomes/findings?

• Did I show how my idea is relevant to a larger

audience?

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 TESOL Approved Acronyms and
Abbreviations
L1 – First Language
L2 - Second Language
CALL – Computer Assisted Language
Learning
CBI – Content-based Instruction
CLIL – Content and Language
Integrated Learning
EAP – English for Academic Purposes
EFL – English as a Foreign Language
EL – English Learner
EIL – English as an International
language
ELL – English Language Learner
ELT – English Language Teaching
ESL – English as a Second Language
ESOL – English for Speakers of Other
Languages
ESP - English for Specific Purposes
IEP – Intensive English Program
ITA – International Teaching Assistants
NNEST – Nonnative English Speakers in
TESOL
SLA – Second Language Acquisition
TESOL – Teaching/Teachers of English to
Speakers of Other Languages
TEFL – Teaching/Training of English as a
Foreign language
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Thank you!

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