CATESOL conference was an exciting experience.

I have never been to any conference

in the USA. Technology allows us to be flexible and attend the event at a convenient time.

However, I prefer to meet people in person than the online platform. The representatives of my

choice were great.

The first topic of my interest was the topic of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. I will write

a research paper on culturally responsive pedagogy. The speaker talked about cultural

differences between students in the Chinese classroom and the American classroom. It was

interesting to listen to their behavior of appreciating the teacher and staying silent, and finding

ways to help them be more open and trustful.

I was excited to meet David Burke, author of Slangman because I am working with

international students, and they would like to engage with American culture fully. I did not have
a chance to listen to the presentation due to the technical issue. However, idioms and slang are

not the common language learning parts they used to learn.

Another speaker that brought my attention was Doctor Stephen Krashen. It looks that so

many people like him because they made so many good comments and thanks to him for his

engaging English language learners' stories. As a non-native speaker, I appreciated his comments

about speaking with an accent that many people are struggling with when they talk, so they

prefer to stay silent.  

I will take with the ideas about different research methods that I can use for my research.

I will also use many different stories to prove my point educational for ELL students, as Krashen

did. People love to listen to exciting stories, and more likely, we will remember stories than just

scholarly research.

One of the presentations at the conference was writing the notes on Padlet about another

form of wall comments. They talked about Linoit that has a similarity with Padlet. Linoit

allowed more pages to post for free than Padlet, easy to set up, and much more color to play

with.

My opinion that the CATESOL conference is for experienced teachers or for those who

had little experience in teaching. Some professional term was not easy to engage with, and some

discussion had no sense to me. Only Krashen's stories were interesting to listen to and realize

how many things we might miss about ELL learners' cultural outcomes.