Impact of ESOL Background on Instructional Design

Instructional designers (IDs) often come from previous educational backgrounds such as instructional technologies, teachers, or academic support staff (e.g., librarians). Other times, they come from careers in health, business, or military. IDs’ backgrounds and experiences enhance their work on designing training, courses, or other related job aids and informational material. This blog describes how my background experience as an English language educator affects my current work as a trainer and course designer. Examples of positive transfer from teaching English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) to instructional design, as well as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOTS) are shared.

Background Frame of Reference

Before becoming an ID, I taught Spanish, ESOL, and reading. I also served as a reading coach. However, teaching the English language was my dominant job. Here’s a list of my training experience:

• TESOL Masters of Arts in Teaching – University of Alabama
• California Teaching Credential and Bilingual (Spanish/English) Teaching Certificate
• TESOL’s Certificate in Principles and Practices of Online Teaching Program – University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire
• Experience teaching ESOL in US and EFL abroad both in-person and online

Positive Transfer

Learning is impacted by prior knowledge (and misunderstandings), a learner’s belief system, and environmental barriers and opportunities (Ormrod, 2012). Environmental barriers include economic, physical, political, linguistic, ethnocultural, and social ones. IDs with a linguistic background such as teaching ESOL bring the following competencies in their approach to their work: knowledge of how to differentiate learning opportunities, awareness of language barriers present in terminology and academic content-specific texts, and cultural and linguistic competence of different international students’ culture, language, norms, and religious beliefs.

Here are some general examples of positive transfer from my ESOL background that are beneficial to instructional design tasks:

• Consideration of student needs in lesson design to include alternative modes of representation
• Ability to break down tasks in suprasegmentals to scaffold instruction
• Recognition of the social aspect of group dynamics within certain conservative cultures regarding group work and individual class interactions in shared spaces
• Ability to identify tiered structure in vocabulary to highlight specific academic language as key concepts and terms for students to learn

I hope this blog helps IDs reflect on how their past work (and life experiences) provide a positive transfer to their current design efforts. For my situation, I leveraged my linguistic expertise.

SWOTs

Here’s a list of one area for each SWOT analysis:

• Strength in understanding the overall delivery of instruction and course materials regarding strategies and resources to make it comprehensible.
• Weakness in missed societal cues, personal biases, or assumptions in addressing the intersectionality of individuals with broad lived experiences from around the globe
• Opportunities in the research for improving second language acquisition through learning design
• Threats encountered when other teachers or students push back on the accommodations or scaffolding provided to specifically support English language learners

Can you think of more? I plan to revisit this blog and add to it as other examples come to mind.

Conclusion

The broader implication of my experience as an ID is that I rely on my overall knowledge as an educator. I’m thankful that I have an advanced degree in teaching so that I can use that foundation to ground the instructional implications in the design process. Moreover, I’m fortunate to have taught online (and taken classes online) before my becoming an ID to strengthen my contextual knowledge of the teaching and learning experience. Another reason is that many of my job interviews mentioned that they were looking for an ID who had experience teaching online.

The hidden dimension though is my deep knowledge of language use and how that affects learning. Specifically, in collaborating with faculty on course design, I advocate for the following:

• List key terms and concepts in course modules.
• Use informal and personalized language such as ‘you’ versus ‘students.’
• Use concise language.
• Use accessible (i.e., alternative text for images, proper headings, closed captions, etc) and inclusive language according to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) guidelines for bias-free language.

References

Ormrod, J. E. (2012). Human learning. Pearson.