












































 
 

ISSN #2331-6845 

 
Welcome from the Senior Editor 

By Gertrude Tinker Sachs 
Georgia State University 

gatesolinaction2020@gmail.com  
 
 

A recent edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) gives front 

page coverage to the changes that are coming for Georgia teachers.  Rose 

French and Jaime Sarrio (AJC, November 23, 2014) wrote “Georgia Makes it 

Tougher to Teach” and discuss how they perceive “standards are designed to 

raise educator quality” by drawing on the work of the Georgia Professional 

Standards Commission.  While many Georgia-based educators bemoan the 

plethora of assessments that are crowding teacher preparation no one can 

deny that increased quality in all teachers is something for which we all 

aspire.   

In our ESOL work, we certainly would like to commend those in-service 

teachers who despite all odds, work hard to maintain their standards by 

engaging in school and outside of school professional development 

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opportunities.  It was wonderful to see so many of you at our 2014 fall state 

conference and to know that some of you are even presenting and reflecting 

on your own practice by going a step further to write about what you are 

doing in the classroom.   In all our teacher preparation work, we must all 

continue to insist on rigor and high expectations for our teacher candidates.  

We must also encourage our in-service teachers to professionalize the work of 

teaching by being reflective practitioners who write about their work.  I 

cannot emphasize this enough despite how difficult and challenging this 

aspiration may be.  

Our research papers in this Fall 2014 edition compel us to maintain high 

professional standards and positive attitudes for the education outcomes and 

possibilities for our students.   Mantegna offers us good news for the ending of 

the old year and the start of a new year.  She uses high level tasks such as 

video composition to empower high school learners to articulate the critical 

issues that confront them.  Indeed, it is the design of Mantegna’s tasks that 

promoted the deep engagement of her learners which showed their 

capabilities as “multilingual, multimodal communicators of 21 century skills.”   

Odo, on the other hand, offers us a perceptive take on assessment.  It is 

not the usual puzzle metaphor, just do all these pieces, get them to fit and our 

assessment will be perfect and complete.  Instead, Odo outlines his 

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dissatisfaction with the “fixed and constrained nature” of the puzzle metaphor 

to encourage us to develop a more organic view of assessment that relies on 

promoting “teacher’s assessment intuition” placing the power of assessment 

in the hands of teachers and not in a set of disparate and discrete tests to be 

placed in the student’s folder after completion.  Again, as professionals we are 

obligated to update our knowledge and perception so that we can move our 

understandings to new heights.    

Caspary, Wickstrom and Boothe bring us up-to-date on problem-based 

learning and information and communication technologies under the scrutiny 

of English for Specific (ESP) and Academic Purposes (EAP).  The authors 

compare the challenges and strengths of teaching and learning under different 

modes in business and academic settings.  They contend that in today’s world 

the imperative of English language teaching and learning is to incorporate 

more rigorously problem –based and ICT methodologies and processes. 

Early childhood teachers will find the article by Lado very instructive.   

Lado presents a detailed approach to using picture books.  She outlines the 

features and procedures for promoting “tellability” in using picture books 

with young learners.  Lado makes the approach very accessible because she 

not only illustrates the procedures but she also provides examples of picture 

books that can be used to employ the approach.   

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Our report by a colleague outside of GA is written by Fredricks who is 

based in Cairo, Egypt.  Fredricks brings home to us first-hand, the current 

political tensions in Cairo and she notes that “university faculty have been 

fortunate to work with adult learners who have been witnesses to and 

frequently agents of innovations and political change.”  Fredricks describes 

the work she does in Cairo and demonstrates to us how to work respectfully 

in contexts outside of one’s home country. 

Collectively, the articles in our Fall 2014 edition spell out hope and good 

will for the work we do in the new year of 2015.   We can see that there is 

always something new to extend and deepen our knowledge and insight and 

above all, uplift us to explore new worlds and ways of teaching and learning. 

A Happy New Year to everyone and we look forward to your spreading 

the word and the articles of our peer-reviewed GATESOL in Action online 

journal and we encourage you to write about what you are doing in your 

teaching context.  Don’t be afraid to submit your work to us!  We look forward 

to giving you encouraging and helpful feedback that will be invaluable to your 

professional development. 

Gertrude Tinker Sachs, Senior Editor 

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