Impact of ESOL Background on Instructional Design

Instructional designers (IDs) often come from previous educational backgrounds such as instructional technologies, teacher, or academic support staff (e.g., librarians). Other times, they come from their intended careers in health, business, or military. IDs’ backgrounds and experiences enhance their work in 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, weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOTS) are shared.

My Background Frame of Reference

Prior to becoming an ID, I taught Spanish, ESOL, and reading. I also served as a reading coach. However, teaching 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

Examples of Positive Transfer

Learning is impacted by prior knowledge (and misunderstandings), a learners’ 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 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) provides positive transfer to their current design efforts.

SWOTs

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

Strength in understanding 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

I first drafted this as a submission to a call for articles on the different previous careers that IDs experienced and its impacts on their current work. I never received any response from the editors. I searched for possible publications but cannot find anything specific to it. Nevertheless, numerous articles mentioned the variability in IDs’ backgrounds. 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) prior to 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. For example, I advocate for key terms and concepts be listed in course modules. I advocate for the use of informal language and the use of personalization such as ‘you’ versus ‘students’ in the course descriptions to provide a more inviting nature of the narrative. I make sure the language used is concise and thorough to reduce the number of questions. Most importantly, I make sure the language is accessible (i.e., alternative text for images, proper headings, closed captions, etc) and inclusive according to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) guidelines for bias-free language.