Joined the local Mystery Book Club through the local library. We met last Sunday and it was fun chatting about the latest book. They will be hosting a lunch for Catriana McPherson and Simon Wood, both new writers, who will tell us good things about their books.

Read Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood’s – ‘Spartan Gold’ book for the club. Read about 3/4 of the book and then put it down. I was a little disappointed. Either Cussler is getting more formula with every book or else I am just noticing it. The characters in the book, a married couple are too good, too perfect, hardly ever fight, always have the best clothes, shoes, watches, boats, equipment, cocktails, etc. To say they are a little two-dimensional hardly covers it. Also, the scrapes that they get themselves into really defy rational thought. I understand this ain’t great literature and it’s only meant to be entertaining; but really, they volunteer to go into a huge compound of the worst criminal bad guy ever to retrieve a bottle of wine ‘to complete the puzzle’? Who would do that? For me anyway, it just stretches the fabric of credibility. Anyway, I will probably still get his next book because I think I am a little hooked on the adventure parts of the stories.

Getting out on my bike almost everyday and it really helps in keeping the weight down and controlling joint pain. I can almost tell the difference in as little as one day.
Reading a new author: Catriona McPherson and her Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Blood Stains. The book is entertaining and I do think I will ‘go the distance’ with this one. However; I have problems with her transitions from one scene to another. I am frequently confused about what it is that just happened. Too much of a jump. She is clearly writing in the M.C. Beaton style with books very like Beaton’s entire Regency period series. All the books in that series are good and Beaton is top notch! I am going to hang in here and see if it is worth reading another one of McPherson’s mysteries.

Muddiest Points Journal

Beers: Choosing not to read: Understanding why some Middle Schoolers just say No.

Ms. Beers has done a lot of research into the difference between highly motivated students and highly unmotivated students. I like to say that these two groups are from different countries they are so very different.

I think of students as three groups. These are 1) A/B students, 2) C/D students and 3) F students. The A/B students are intrinsically motivated and will do what they have to do to get their grade. I would have to be a really bad teacher for these students to ever flunk or do badly.  The F students are in class for who knows what reason and usually drop out right away or just stop coming (college sophomores.) The students who will actually benefit the most from really good instruction are the C/D students who are struggling the most and who need the most help.

Beers talks about motivating the unmotivated student. On page 19 she writes: 1) They like to choose their own books from a narrowed choice. 2) Have the teacher read aloud… 3) Compare the movie to the book 4) Read illustrated books. 5) Do art activities based on books. 5) Read non-fiction material such as comics, sports, drawing, cars, fashion, makeup, etc. My experience with Korean students for five and a half years confirms all of these listed points. Students don’t like workbooks, they would much rather read magazines or books about fantasy or science fiction. They do get confused with too many choices and they do like to look at movie clips that match the reading material and they do like to create art projects around a theme.

At my last school students read fables and tales out of a workbook. They watched a video that matched the ‘tale’. Later, I broke them into groups and they had to draw and write the story using their own words and tell it again to the class. They practiced this several times, then had to pick a tale and do their own Powerpoint to show and tell the class. They loved it and were very creative!

At the school I am at now; we are very publisher-workbook bound. After teaching the book two semesters, I now know it is basically a grammar book wrapped around with vocabulary made into lesson plans. What possible relationship does this have in regards to turning them into life-time readers? ESL experts like Stephen Krashen agree that the two best ways to learn a language are 1) reading in that language and 2) listening to the language being spoken. Is a single student going to walk out of my class wanting to read books in English? Even one? If there was even one I would say it was because they already had that desire before coming into this class. Endless grammar lessons, regardless of how carefully disguised, is not going to give them what they really need.

Beers: Choosing not to read: Understanding why some Middle Schoolers just say No.

Are students ‘illiterate’ or ‘aliterate’?

Ms. Beers touches on a lot of points that come up in my classrooms. More of my students are ‘aliterate’ rather than simply ‘illiterate.’ In other words, they choose to not read even though they can do so. She quotes Mathewson (1985) “If children are to read, they will need not only a favorable attitude toward reading but also an appropriate motivation.” (pg. 842).

Before I came to South Korea I was working as a substitute teacher at Job Corps, Sacramento and mostly for the Academic Dept. The sole ‘job’ of that department was to get students to pass the GED test. In the entire time I worked at Job Corps (16 months,) I think I had one student, a girl, who absolutely could not understand simple fractions. It was highly likely she would never pass that test because in addition to a lots of fractions, there were all kinds of other math problems too. However; she was really the exception to the rule there. The students did have the capacity to past the exam but they weren’t. At the time I was doing a year in Calteach and got lots of examples of how to teach math and spent much time doing that and as a result,  at least two of my students passed the test.

However; so many other students languished in the program and did poorly. Why? Instinctively I knew why but couldn’t put it into words; now, five years later I can. There was no student accountability. The GED teachers let the students come in and work out of self-help instructional booklets and do ‘self-study.’ For low-level, low-motivated students, that is a really bad idea. Those students need external ‘motivators’ from the teacher in terms of grades, tests, assignments, quizzes, progress charts, etc. It is okay if the motivation is external at this point in their lives, because they will respond to that. Like Ms. Beers says on page 19, (unmotivated students) “don’t like to go to the library.” They get overwhelmed when told to pick a book, they don’t know where to start. So, at my current school, students are given massive amounts of external motivators (quizzes, mid-terms, finals, speaking tests, written tests, language clinics.) All of these items work to keep them on-task and get them through the semester. Last semester I had 75 students, twice a week, and did not flunk even one student. However, as ESL students, are they really getting what they need from the program?

Focus Question: Attitude Theory

Given that low-motivated students as well as ESL learners seem to prefer different materials from highly-motivated students; how do we incorporate these into the class room? My students tell me they would rather read magazines about sports, cars, fishing, science, science fiction and books about fantasy and science fiction. How do I incorporate these materials into the class in a structured way and break out of the heavy publisher-workbook cycle?

There is no doubt in my mind that publisher workbooks and text books dominate the field of reading. The workbook I am using now is Oxford-University Press. It is hard to argue with the affordable price and the interactive materials that accompany every manual. The publisher has even set up a web site for students to access where every lesson plan  on the site is in audio. That is the good news. The bad news is that this book is basically a very fancy grammar book. There is no authentic reading material, much of the stuff in the book are lessons students have had before and it is beating the same old horse, over and over again, which is grammar. I wouldn’t even call it very interesting.

As an ESL teacher or as a teacher of reading; I think my job is bigger than teaching to this year’s test. My job is to get the students to become life-time readers and develop those and their writing skills both. I don’t think this type of workbook  is doing anything to achieve those goals. Rather, they probably work to turn students off to reading.

           BLOG – READING COMPREHENSION

 

Reading Definitions  

Reading is a basic life skill.  It is a cornerstone for a child’s success in school, and, indeed, throughout life. Without the ability to read well, opportunities for personal fulfillment and job success inevitably will be lost.  –Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading.

 

Richard Anderson and the Commission on Reading define reading as the process of constructing meaning from written texts.  Skilled reading is:

constructive: learning to reason about written material using knowledge from everyday life and   from disciplined fields of study;

fluent: mastery of basic processes to the point where they are automatic so that attention is freed for the analysis of meaning;

strategic: controlling one’s reading in relation to one’s purpose, the nature of the material and   whether one is comprehending;

motivated: able to sustain attention and learning that written material can be interesting and informative; and

a lifelong pursuit: continuous practices, development, and refinement.

The U.S. Department of Education has stated that children are expected to learn to read in the primary grades, kindergarten through third, when most reading instruction is given.  By fourth grade, students are expected to read to learn.  The Department continues “Over time, learning becomes more complex, with heightened demands on students to use reading skills to analyze or to solve problems.  Good reading skills are required to study geography, do math, use computers, and conduct experiments.  Even motivated, hard-working students are severely hampered in their schoolwork if they cannot read well by the end of third grade.”

Certain abilities must be developed that work together to create strong reading skills (The Little Red Reading Book).  These core abilities include:

o       Phonemic awareness,

o       Alphabetic principle,

o       Sound-spelling correspondence,

o       Decoding ability,

o       Spelling, vocabulary and writing skills,

o       Comprehension skills.

Learners become engaged in literacy as they grow more strategic, motivated, knowledgeable and socially interactive.  (Alvermann & Guthrie)

Students have extensive opportunities to read for a variety of purposes and to apply what is read every day.   Students use discussion and writing to organize their thinking, and they reflect on what they read for specific purposes.

Students are taught and given opportunities to apply the following comprehension strategies for constructing meaning: making and confirming predictions, visualizing, summarizing, drawing inferences, generating questions, making connections and self-monitoring.

In the Duke and Pearson article, Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension, the authors stress over and over the important of teaching students to learn to make predictions about what they are reading, every several pages. They are indicating that reading is an active process not a passive one, and that good readers make predictions about what will happen in the text. This is putting students into the mind set of thinking about what they are reading and seeking to make some sense of it rather than sitting passively digesting a gob of meaningless words.

When I first came to Korea I joined a church and every week the church minions would hand out a small four page program flyer printed in English. After lunch, one of the church elders would assemble his people below decks for an English lesson. They would all dutifully tramp downstairs with these little flyers in hand and laden down with dictionaries, computers and the like to ‘learn English.’ I was invited to sit in several times so I could ‘help’. My help consisted in reading a couple of paragraphs now and then. Basically, the class would dissect the entire sermon, word for word and translate the whole thing back into Korean so the members could understand it. They spent literally two hours poring over these little publications. After several times of sitting in on these gatherings it occurred to me that it was highly unlikely that any of the ‘students’ there had any idea of what it was they had read or what it meant. All they were doing was processing a conglomeration of words.

Later, when I was at a publisher’s book sale event I listened to a talk by a man who had written a book about, simply, metaphors.  It was his contention that the English language is just stuffed full of metaphors which cannot be ‘dissected’ for meaning, they have to be understood as a whole. I had never thought of it in quite that way but as I came away from his talk, I began to see the truth in what he was saying. For example: A man is but a weak reed, the road was a ribbon of moonlight, that man is such a dog, her hair is spun gold, her look was pure ice, his handshake was a clammy fish, he’s got ants in his pants, he’s got a bad case of jumpy monkeys, etc. Are any of these things literally true;? No, of course not. These are all metaphors to explain how one thing is like another thing and there is no literal translation. It is a concept that is being stated which needs to be understood. Therefore, it follows, that translating written text word for word is frequently not going to make good sense.

With some of these stumbling blocks in mind; how are we going to teach English learners or new readers how to read for meaning?

 

Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension, By: C.R. Adler – Reading Rockets.

1. Monitoring comprehension

Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to “fix” problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.

Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:

• Be aware of what they do understand
• Identify what they do not understand
• Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension

(Dealing with Asian students can be very difficult in this regard as it is really important for them to ‘not be wrong.’ Students will say absolutely nothing rather than risk saying it or doing it incorrectly. Losing face in class in front of classmates is also a problem. This is a problem with any low-level students who have such a track record of failure that they will consciously mask everything ‘they don’t know’ rather than admit there is something they do not understand. This is an indicator of how little confidence they have in themselves.)

2. Metacognition

Metacognition can be defined as “thinking about thinking.” Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and “fixing” any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.

3. Graphic and semantic organizers

Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or using diagrams. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters.

4. Answering questions

Questions can be effective because they:

• Give students a purpose for reading
• Focus students’ attention on what they are to learn
• Help students to think actively as they read
• Encourage students to monitor their comprehension
• Help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know.

Teacher’s can engage in Think Aloud by asking questions out loud about what this is or what that is in the book and thereby model for the students the need to ask questions themselves about what they are reading.

7. Summarizing

Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:

• Identify or generate main ideas
• Connect the main or central ideas
• Eliminate unnecessary information
• Remember what they read

Effective comprehension strategy instruction is explicit

Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. In explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling (“thinking aloud”), guided practice, and application.

• Direct explanation

The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.

• Modeling
• The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by “thinking aloud” while reading the text that the students are using. (Modeling activities work very well in the ESL classroom by giving explicit instruction to the students about how they are to do an exercise. “ Shin, ask me a question and then I will answer.” Shin “How are you today?” Answer, “I am fine, thank you. How are you?” etc.
• Guided practice

The teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy. (I stand and listen to students as they practice the activity to see if they have ‘got it.’)

• Application

The teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently. (I monitor the class to see if I can hear errors in their speech or review their written work. Speech and written work show consistent errors in the use of personal pronouns and past tense verb conjugations.)

Effective comprehension strategy instruction can be accomplished through cooperative learning, which involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks.  (Research shows that Asian students prefer to work in pairs or small groups and this does in fact work for them. Usually they like doing that much more than working independently.)

Reading therefore becomes an active rather than passive process. It starts with examining the book to be read. If we are allowing students to pick their own books, they will start with the cover and see if it interests them. The question can be, what do we think the book is about based on the cover. (Example The Hobbit – shows a picture of a short, round man with hairy, bare feet. What’s that all about?) Then we read the title and perhaps the content page to see more about the book and if it looks interesting. We might even turn it over on the back and read what is on the back.

Therefore, as active readers, we will stop and ask ourselves whether or not this book holds our interest. Also, what is happening in the book? Do I understand the action, the plot? Do I need to go back and reread something again so I understand it better? I ask myself as I go along; what is happening here and am I enjoying reading this?

Again, the reading becomes an active exercise with many stops in between times to assess and reassess the book. While working with students; they need to write about what they have read to reinforce understanding and to clarify their thoughts about the book and seek to express their understanding of what exactly is going on in the book.

Checking for comprehension becomes a multi-level task for the teacher  with little stops all the way along the process.

PUBLISHERS TEXTBOOKS

Authors Peter Dewitz, Jennifer Jones and Susan Leahy discuss the impact and effectiveness of publisher’s core textbook programs in their article Comprehension Strategy Instruction in Core Reading Programs.

The Programs

We chose to review the top five best-selling basal

reading programs in the country, as identified by the

Educational Market Research Group (www.ed-market

research.com). We studied and evaluated McGraw-

Hill Reading, SR A Open Court, Harcourt Trophies,

Houghton Mifflin Reading, and Scott Foresman

Reading.

Conclusions

Core programs provide the methods and the content

of reading instruction for large numbers of classrooms

in the United States. As such, they may be the most

influential textbook series in the country (Chambliss &

Calfee, 1998). An extensive review of effective schools

in California found that although the use of core reading

programs may have had a significant impact on student

achievement, the programs’ influence is tempered by

leadership, achievement expectation, a regular assessment

system, and staff development (EdSource, 2006).

McGill-Franzen et al. (2006) found little evidence that

the use of a core program had any impact on improving

the reading achievement of at-risk students. The

structure of core reading programs and the methods of

instruction may contribute to their negligible impact on

at-risk students.

Our analysis of comprehension instruction in core

reading programs demonstrates several shortcomings

that may undermine their efficacy. First, the comprehension

skills and strategies curricula are wide but not

terribly deep. The structure of the curricula is often

incoherent so that students and teachers do not know

how skills and strategies relate to one another or how

acquiring these sets of skills leads to becoming a better

reader.

I have used the Open Court books as a substitute teacher in California.  These are massive and intimidating volumes that really cannot be used by the teacher without comprehensive instruction first. If I was a kid in those classes, just the size of these books would scare me.  My feeling in using the books is that is probably easy for the low-level or ESL student to become confused shuffling through these pages for their relevancy  and the relatedness of one thing to another. Although the publisher is certainly working on an agenda of purposefulness, that purpose is not always readily apparent.

I am currently working out of Smart Choice, 2^nd Edition, Oxford University Press that is combined with classroom video and audio download. It is all very fancy once you figure out how to work the systems.  However; on pg. 38, the grammar lesson is Suggestion vs. Obligation or what I should do versus what I have to do. Guess how many students in my classes (college sophomores) knew what an obligation was? Try not one. We had to go to the hand-held dictionaries to look that word up for understanding.  Previously on pg. 16 they studied bungee jumping, driving a racecar, rock climbing, parasailing, windsurfing, riding a motorcycle , flying a plane and skydiving.

Most students had no idea what bungee jumping is, they have never seen a racecar except maybe once on TV, very few are familiar with rock climbing, none of them knew what parasailing was; most have never been in an airplane and wouldn’t even consider skydiving. They all knew what motorcycles were. On the next page the book discusses hang gliding which most students  are not familiar with and skiing which most of them have never done. There was a discussion of riding bicycles. Boys here ride bicycles and very few girls know how to; it just becoming more popular for girls.

There are many pages that discuss different locations around the planet. I have students who barely know their continents or what’s the capital of Japan.  I feel good about reviewing  geography because that is something they do need to know; but, parasailing? Relevant in what way? Their idea of a big vacation is taking a ferry to Jeju, the closest island to Korea.

At my last school, my co-teachers spent a lot of time on complicated grammar lessons regarding the present, past and future continuous. I discovered that most of my students didn’t truly know simple past tense and simple future. I pulled a chart from the Internet that was a listing of common verbs. The present was on the left; then the student could run their finger to the immediate right and find the column with past tense and the next column for future tense. If they had the chart immediately in front of them and I then asked them to find the proper verb tense, they could do it. Otherwise, they could get about as far as I am, she is, he is, we are, I did, she did, so on.

There is a real and significant question, in particular where I teach, which is: what is the effectiveness of teaching random grammar exercises which are then unrelated to anything else the student is learning at that time?

Back to Oxford U Press. Here is the reading which pulls in the grammar exercise. “Do you have a gym nearby? You should use it. You don’t have to exercise every day, but you should do something three times a week. Thirty minutes is enough. Remember you can review for a test and jog on a treadmill at the same time.” Then there is an additional reading about marathon runners that uses ‘should’ phrases several times. Okay, then, the writers have taken a grammar exercise they think is important and integrated that into a lesson plan about health and fitness. They also talk a lot about stress which is something students relate to and can understand.

Is this authentic reading? Are these exercises relevant? Is studying this stuff useful and are students really learning anything? Is this book actually boring?

Review of students preferences over several classes indicates that they hate workbooks and like to read ‘authentic’ materials such as newspapers, magazines and books. Are workbooks a necessary evil to get across important vocabulary and grammar points? Can  we have to have the workbook plus authentic reading examples? If students pick their own reading materials how can we be sure they are getting a comprehensive set of the basics? Do we let them pick their own books for recreational reading or SSR?

I do not meet with my students every day; only twice a week for 50 minutes. I am currently trying to stuff as much homework as possible down each week so that we can have instructional time on the reading. For example; what is the meaning of suggestion? What is the meaning of an obligation? What is a daredevil (prior reading) what is a parachute and what is a disaster? Confirming that students even understand the vocabulary of what they are reading in this simple (?) workbook takes time. Then in addition to that, I am trying to check for reading comprehension as well as their listening comprehension. So, my hands are pretty full!

CONCLUSION –  The publisher’s workbooks are what everyone is using in any modern ESL classroom. There is no arguing with the fact that the books are accessible to students and are reasonable in price. In addition, the publisher has cleverly devised a teacher’s manual that is interactive on the computer and has both sound bites and correct answers for the questions that will pop up on the screen. It is certainly difficult to argue with the efficiency of these programs. However; all the technologies aside, is this still the best way to teach English? Is this the best way to teach reading or writing? Are these books interesting or boring? Are these going to build life-long learners or just students who breath a huge sigh of relief when the damn required class is over and throw the hideous book in the trash the moment they are able? In the big picture, what are we teaching here?

These workbooks take a grammar lesson and then build an entire lesson around that. Why not go in reverse and take a reading lesson and build a grammar lesson about what is in the reading?

For example, take the poem: The Blind Men and the Elephant – John Saxe. (1885).

It was six men of India (where is India?)

To learning much inclined (what does inclined mean?)

Who went to see the Elephant (went is what verb form?)

That each by observation (what is observation?)

Might satisfy his mind. (what does satisfy mean?)

We go on to read the entire poem of how the blind men felt all around the elephant and all describe him completely differently. What is the significance of the poem? Then we watch a video cartoon of the poem and students do a writing exercise and retell the poem their own way.

I have personally used this poem and this technique effectively in classes many times. Students love retelling this poem in their own special way. They get a big kick out of it actually and have fun with it. How much fun is the ‘should and have to’ lesson plan? I would count that in the pretty much negative fun zone. Of course, not all learning is supposed to be ‘fun,’ but can’t some of it be fun?

Anyway, the debate, no doubt, continues.

CW

REFERENCES

Anderson, Richard. Reading Definitions (2014).  – Retrieved from Web, http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/jblanton/read/readingdef.htm

Duke, Nell K. and Pearson, P. David. Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension, Journal of Education, Vol. 189, Numbers ½. 2008-2009.  Print.

Adler, C. R. – Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension. Retrieved from Web.        (2014). Reading Rockets. http://www.readingrockets.org/article/seven-strategies-teach-students-text-comprehension.

Dewitz, Peter, Jones, Jennifer, Leahy, Susan. (4/12/2008) Comprehension Strategy Instruction in Core Reading Programs. Vol. 44(2). Reading Research Quarterly. Print.

Wilson, Ken. Smart Choice, 2^nd Ed.,  New York, NY, Oxford University Press.(2011).  Print.

 

BLOG ON WRITING

Elaine Garan in Smart Answers to Tough Questions discusses writing. In her chapter, Reading Aloud, she states “students develop new vocabulary just from listening to stories….(it is) especially important for ELL and for students who need vocabulary development. ….especially ELL (students)…need to hear the difference between conversational language….and the more structure language of print……this strengthens …writing skills.

HIGH SCHOOL/COLLEGE STUDENTS

I liked what Regie Routman (Writing Essentials…)had to say about making students accountable for their own comprehension and having them writing in small spiral notebooks and answering questions posed for their silent reading time. As indicated before, my class is highly divergent meaning that the levels go from very low to very high. My low students struggle every week to keep and the high students are bored silly. Students meet two times per week for the semester. How can I, during this really short time period, effectively help both groups? Stephan Krashen, Phd and expert in the field of language learning has said time and again that reading is key to learning the language. That would be learning the language to both speak it and to write it. Given that we work out of Oxford U Press workbooks each week, we teach to the test and there is exactly one Literature class on the whole campus with a few students each semester, what can I do to create a bridge to reading which will  ultimately help student write better and be more fluent?

I think putting responsibility into their hands is really key.  This week I will start to show the Goodreads Listopia of Young Adult Reading books. Three of the books on the list are actually coming out in movies very soon. Those are Mockingjay (of the Hunger Games series,) The Hobbit and the Maze Runner. I can show a trailer from the movie, which should intertest students,  and then show the book on the Goodreads list. These books can be got from eBook reader sources like Amazon.com, ITunes and others. Also, the big bookshop over here, Koyobo book will usually stock books when a movie is coming out. Well known books are often translated into Korean and then also sold in English. I want them to read the books in English but will accept them reading in Korean. Hopefully, they will move to reading in English. I may ‘showcase’ a book a week and then go backwards to Harry Potter and The Lightning Thief which came out a few years ago. The Giver, Divergent and Twilight are all sold here too. I am not that hot on Divergent or Twilight series but if it gets them to read, it’s all good!

This summer, I taught a group of Japanese students who were are about 16 or 17 years old. They were in the US to learn English and some culture. The specific class I taught them was supposed to be a research and writing class. Students had been given topics about US History  and they were supposed to research the topics and write on them. We dutifully trekked to the library every day for them to do their research on the computers. I informed the class I needed their first papers the next day.

The following day I got a half dozen really nicely typed papers which I began to review. One paper after another after another was a copy, word for word and line by line of text the students had pulled from the Internet. I thanked them for the papers; did not grade them and handed them all back. I began to explain (without using the word plagiarism) that they couldn’t do this. They couldn’t just copy down what another person had written off the Internet. They were all stunned. I honestly think I was telling them something they had not heard before.

After a number of false starts, they students finally settled into finding articles on the Internet in Japanese, translating those into English and reporting on what the article had said. I gave them very basic instruction on how to reference an Internet article and they copied and pasted the site line on their text. I told them that was good enough. Given where we had started from, I did feel like it was enough.

The most alarming part of this story, really, was the student continual dependence on their Smart phones to ‘help them write’ their papers. They had so lost confidence in their own abilities to put pencil to paper they were almost helpless without the computers. My instincts tell me this problem goes far beyond just Japanese students. I talked to students about developing their own voice when they wrote which may or may not have sunk in.

One of my friends is an English teacher at a community college campus in the LA area. She indicates that plagiarism has become such a bad problem that all the professors are now utilizing a computer program to screen all papers for lifted text. She has told me that she will flunk a student for plagiarizing someone else’s work. How did it all get to this? Computers are no doubt a staple of modern-day life. Unfortunately it is sometimes a little difficult to tell who is the servant and who is the master.

HELPING STUDENTS DEVELOP WRITING SKILLS

 

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/1/  – This is an excerpt from Purdue Online Writing Lab as guidelines to give particularly to ESL students to help them to avoid the unintentional pitfalls of plagiarism which can have extreme consequences on American campuses.

(Purdue University students will want to make sure that they are familiar with Purdue’s official academic dishonesty policy as well as any additional policies that their instructors have implemented.)

Intellectual challenges in American academic writing

There are some intellectual challenges that all students are faced with when writing. Sometimes these challenges can almost seem like contradictions, particularly when addressing them within a single paper. For example, American teachers often instruct students to:

Develop a topic based on what has already been said and written	BUT	Write something new and original
Rely on experts’ and authorities’ opinions	BUT	Improve upon and/or disagree with those same opinions
Give credit to previous researchers	BUT	Make your own significant    contribution
Improve your English to fit into a discourse community by building upon what you hear and read	BUT	Use your own words and your own voice

High school students might not face the same harsh punishments as their college friends, however; most of them are college-bound and they should learn the rules about this issue sooner rather than later.

 

COMPARING MY KOREAN STUDENTS TO THE COMMON CORE REQUIREMENTS FOR CA PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Common Core

State Standards
for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects

for California Public Schools

Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve

Reviewing the Common Core Standards, particularly for writing, it appears to me that my ELL students are generally operating at about the 1^st grade American grade level. Probably a little higher for reading.  A first grader should “be able to make logical inference and support conclusions drawn from the text. They should be able to identify central themes and explain how and why people do things. They need to be able to analyze how two texts are similar and use illustrations and details from a text to describe key ideas.”

Given that my students are Korean and are raised speaking, reading and writing Hangul; the 1^st or 2^nd grade level is not too bad. Hangul does not use Roman letters but rather their own unique symbols that are similar to Chinese symbols. The only English spoken here is generally Konglish which is just hybrid English words that have taken on a Korean pronunciation (computer, coffee, sofa, etc.) So,  not only do students have to learn a new language in terms of listening, speaking and reading, all the word symbols are completely different. There is no commonality between English and Hangul at all. So, the average person learning to speak French, Spanish or German would have an easier time of it than trying to learn Hangul.

ELEMENTARY LEVELS

Referring back to my lesson plans with The Princess and the Pea (Oxford University Press,) we would first watch a short video that told the fairy tale. Then we would read the story. The book is created as  story script, like a play, with different parts. I would have one student be the Princess, then the Prince, the Queen and then the King. Each would get to wear a crown (their favorite part.) The ‘actors’ would read their scripts and other students would read along. I tried to always pick the highest students to read so that they wouldn’t struggle so much and also as an example to the lower student that ‘it could be done!’

MINI-WRITING TASKS:  I would create a series of typed words that corresponded to the text such as: Queen, King, Princess, he, she, they, did, do, left, is, are, in, out, etc. etc. I typed the words up, laminated the sheet and cut the individual words out.  Then I keep the words in a metal can and would take the words out and scatter them on a bench. Then,  I had students come up with their printed worksheets (saving paper,) pick out several words and then write a sentence for me. I usually asked for three sentences. They would bring them up to the board. Once again, doing group corrections, I would write corrections on the whiteboard so that all the students could see them and correct their own papers.

ART AS DOWN TIME: I used  art as a ‘wind-down’ activity which related to the reading, I had a bench with lots and lots of colored construction paper. I also used scissors, glue, markers, etc. and would have the students design castles (like in the story) or stained glass windows with paper. Students could get extremely creative with their designs and came up with some really good stuff. I just wish I had saved some of their pictures for myself. We would post the pictures up on the bulletin boards and they were able to see their own art posted up and know everyone else could see it too. I played various classic music pieces which they did this and it was a very happy activity. They mostly loved it!

HIGH SCHOOL AGAIN

http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Cimcoz-Writing.html Internet site, 9/2014.)

Wow! This article made me feel a whole lot better. Most students hate writing! It’s not just me!

Teaching ESL/EFL Students to Write Better

Yesim Cimcoz
hcimcoz [at] iris.com.tr

A majority of students dislike writing. When faced with a writing task, most students will react with comments like, “oh no not again” or “this is so boring”. A teacher who does not try to see the real message behind these comments could easily become discouraged. Eventually, both the teacher and the students will ‘hate writing’. To prevent this from happening the teacher should consider what students actually mean when they say “boring”, and the possibility that students are actually expressing their insecurity and lack of confidence in completing the task. Writing is a skill that has not been accorded the attention it deserves in high school education. Students have not been taught to make their ideas flow on paper. They don’t know how to write, feel stupid when they can’t find the right words, fear criticism and want to avoid the emotional turmoil experienced when faced with a topic and a blank piece of paper. Teachers who want to help their students gain confidence in writing should try to follow a writing process that takes the student from insecurity to success.

Coming to Terms with Reality

The first stage that students must go through is that of ‘coming to terms with reality’. It is very important that students be made aware of what their actual level of writing is at present. It is also crucial that at this stage teachers must not tell students what they believe their level to be but must provide the right feedback to enable students to see for themselves. Students who do not write well should not be fooled into believing that they do. At this stage, commenting only on the positive aspects of a student paper will only create a false sense of confidence in the student. Comments on how to improve poor areas in writing both on paper and in person can help students understand just what their writing is in need of. Once this stage has been satisfactorily completed then the teacher must move on to reassure students that it will be possible to improve their writing.

MORE TIPS FOR ESL STUDENTS AND THEIR WRITING

http://writingcenter.unc.edu/faculty-resources/tips-on-teaching-esl-students/tips-on-teaching-esl-students/

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Writing Center

• Home
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Students who speak English as a second language might present unusual challenges to their instructors, but certainly none that can’t be overcome with knowledge and thoughtfulness. This page will introduce a few important considerations and a few strategies for working effectively with ESL students, along with resources for further information.

International ESL students

Language learning:

• Often called “eye learners” because their knowledge of English has come primarily through textbook study.
• May never have been fully immersed in an English-speaking environment.
• May be overwhelmed by the cognitive, psychological, and emotional demands of immersion.

Grammar knowledge:

• May know many formal rules of grammar.
• May be very skilled at taking language tests.
• May not be able to consistently apply the rules correctly.
• Will probably make frequent mistakes.

Listening/speaking:

• May have had limited exposure to rapid speech, southern accents, and contemporary slang.
• Listening comprehension may be limited at first.
• Newcomers in particular may take a bit of time to find the right English words and structures to express their thoughts.

Writing/reading:

• May have been taught very different patterns of organization and development, so their texts may seem incoherent or incomplete.
• May be unfamiliar with typical US forms of writing (e.g., explicit thesis-driven argument).
• Composing process may be laborious as they struggle to use complex grammar and vocabulary to make their writing more sophisticated.
• Reading slowed tremendously by repeated use of the dictionary and by processing complex language of university-level texts.

Educational culture:

• May come from a culture in which students memorize and reproduce knowledge of experts, where students’ critical contributions are unusual or even frowned upon.
• Relationships with instructors may have been very formal and hierarchical, and asking questions seen as rude or embarrassing.
• May come from culture similar to US, with interactive discussion, critical analysis, and emphasis on individual achievement.

Language learning:

• Often called “ear learners” because much of their language is learned through immersion in English-speaking environments.
• Recent arrivals are likely to have had ESL instruction in school.
• May speak only their first language at home with family.
• May be fully bilingual or may still be acquiring various aspects of English.

Grammar knowledge:

• May not have knowledge of formal rules of grammar.
• May have a more intuitive sense of “what sounds right.”
• May be better able to generate alternative phrasings than their international counterparts.

Listening/speaking:

• Usually able to interact with ease, understanding formal and informal spoken language at natural speed.
• May occasionally have trouble understanding or producing spoken language, but are able to quickly overcome the barrier.

Writing/reading:

• Will be familiar with typical American essay conventions.
• Will likely produce texts with expected organizational patterns.
• May still struggle to write essays that are free of grammatical errors.
• Reading may also be labored because of new vocabulary.

Educational culture:

Issues you may see as a teacher:

• Limited lecture comprehension
• Limited class participation
• Reluctance to use office hours
• Saying they understand something when it’s clear they don’t
• Writing that doesn’t meet expectations (strangely organized, lacking expected elements, etc.)
• Odd vocabulary usage
• Grammatical errors (either minor or serious)
• Potential plagiarism
• Poor test performance

How to help students:

Lecture comprehension

Allow students to record lectures.

• They can listen as often as necessary to fill in their notes, or they can be free to concentrate solely on understanding what you are saying at the moment, knowing that they can make notes later from the recording.

Provide an outline of your lecture.

• Provide during class and refer to it when you move to a new topic. This helps students stay on track if they get a bit lost.

Emphasize key points.

• Stressing key words, writing on the board, repeating yourself with emphasis, etc.

Use visuals.

• Graphs, charts, diagrams, images can all support students’ comprehension of the lecture.

Write down critical vocabulary.

• Especially helpful for names students need for future reference.

Post lecture notes.

• Make notes available on the class website. Students can compare and revise their own notes for accuracy.

Class Participation

Post discussion questions or topics in advance.

• This allows students to consider and formulate initial contributions to group discussions.

Ask questions clearly.

• Speak in a way that students can understand. Try to avoid the stereotypical “foreigner talk”—excessively slow and loud speech. Just be aware that it can be difficult to understand rapid, idiomatic speech. Slow down a little and try to avoid slang.

Be patient.

• It may take a moment for the student to formulate a response.

Be understanding.

• Some students will be very self-conscious about their imperfect English. They may be frustrated by not being able to freely articulate their complex thoughts. They may be concerned that their native-English speaking peers will think they’re less intelligent if they don’t speak perfect English.

Be supportive.

• Provide a word here and there if you can see the student is groping for a particular expression. If the response is slightly off, try to do something positive with it. You might rephrase the response if it’s just a bit ungrammatical. You might ask clarifying questions. You might elaborate on their response. In any case, your positive reaction is positive reinforcement of their participation.Submit a Draft Online
• Writing performance

Provide detailed assignments with clear expectations.

• Some students have never written a paper in the American style. Some educational cultures value long, meandering introductions. Others value placing the thesis in the conclusion. Others value having only an implicit thesis. Generally, students will write the way they’ve been taught to write. If you have particular expectations, help students by being specific and clear.

Provide examples.

• Share successful papers if possible, and explain what made them successful. Being guided through examples will help them produce what you’re hoping for.

Discuss your students’ ideas.

• Guide students before they begin to write and at various points in the writing process. Help them focus the topic and stay on track.

Require a draft.

• Seeing one or more drafts allows you to provide feedback and direction at the intermediate stage.

Respond thoughtfully.

• Respond to the content with specific suggestions for improvement (not generic comments like “awkward” or “clarify”).

Expect written accents.

• You may notice quite a few insignificant errors, like a missing “the” or the wrong preposition or an unnaturally worded expression. Try to ignore these, just as you would ignore a speaker’s accent as you focused on the ideas they were expressing.

Correct serious errors.

• If there are errors that truly-really and truly-significantly interfere with your understanding of the sentence, help the student by identifying them. You can write one or two possible corrections. You can identify the error and let the student generate the corrections that they can check with you later. You can ask the student to say more about that idea and help find the correct expression.

Teach citation very carefully.

• Many international students have been taught to reproduce well-respected texts verbatim, with no citation. These texts were easily recognizable to educated readers, and the skillful writer could weave them into their own work. The American emphasis on intellectual property is truly a foreign concept for many students. In most cases, they do not want to violate our sense of academic integrity, but they genuinely do not know how to incorporate sources skillfully with citations. Help them develop this skill with feedback during the drafting stage.

This article goes over several things I have already mentioned; it  did appear that when I was teaching this summer, these students  had never been instructed in the use of citations or that they could not pull directly from the Internet without giving credit to the writer. All this seemed to be a big surprise. Also, students are ‘shy’ in general and are afraid to speak in their ‘imperfect’ English regardless of how long they have been studying. So, when I say something like “Do you understand what I just said?” They will nod in the affirmative regardless of whether they have any clue as to what was just said.

Therefore, it is important to have clear expectations, clear deadlines and clear examples of what is needed. In reflection, we would have all been better off if I had found a simple research paper example (even one of my own,) that showed referencing and sites for students to use as a sample.

Because I was told they were ‘higher’ students I was unprepared for what happened in class and did not expect what they handed in. In the future, I need to get a simple example of what I want their papers to look like (one to two pages,) give this to them before they start doing ‘research’ and go over citations and referencing first. I finally found a simple reference sheet on citations which I gave them. Mostly, I was teaching them to cut and paste the site line at the top of the Internet page and attach it to their papers.  It’s not much but better than nothing.

HOW ABOUT PEER REVIEWS?

 

http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/peer-review-how-to.aspx

This site is from Washington University in St. Louis, The Teaching Center and is titled: How to Plan and Guide an in-Class Peer Review Session. Apparently, there need to be some ground rules in class before attempting to utilize peer-reviews.

• JalIncorporating peer review into your course can help your students become better writers, readers, and collaborators. However, peer review must be planned and guided carefully.

The following suggestions for planning and guiding peer review are based on an approach to peer review that is discussed in the handout, “Using Peer Review to Help Students Improve their Writing.” This approach implements four key strategies:

1. Identify and teach the skills required for peer review.
2. Teach peer review as an essential part of the writing process.
3. Present peer review as an opportunity for students to learn how to write for an audience.
4. Define the role of the peer-reviewer as that of a reader, not an evaluator.

1. Decide which writing assignments will include a peer-review session.
   Given the time that is required to conduct peer-review sessions successfully (see below), in undergraduate courses, peer review will work best with papers of 5 pages or less. Instructors who want to incorporate peer-review sessions for longer papers will have to ask students to complete part of the work outside of class (e.g. reading peers’ papers and preparing written comments); such an approach is likely to be more successful if students first practice peer review during class, with the guidance of the instructor.
2. Decide when peer-review sessions will occur.
   The ideal time for peer review is after students have written a complete draft of a paper, but while there is still time for substantial revision. .

Each peer-review session will require at least one class period. While it is possible to complete a session in one hour, a one-and-one-half hour class period is preferable (see below for a detailed discussion of how to structure peer-review sessions).

Instructors should schedule the first peer-review session early in the semester to give students time to get to know one another and to develop peer-review skills. The atmosphere of trust and mutual respect that is necessary for the success of peer-review sessions does not develop instantaneously. Ideally, the first peer-review session should focus on a short piece of writing, such as a paragraph or two, so that students develop comfort with giving and receiving feedback before taking on the task of reading longer papers.

2. Design peer-review worksheets that students will complete during each peer-review session.

These worksheets should include specific tasks that reviewers should complete during the session. The guidance you provide on the worksheets should help students stay “on task” during the session and should help them discern theamount of commenting that is desirable.

The role of the peer-reviewer should be that of a reader, not an evaluator or grader. Do not replicate the grading criteria when designing these worksheets. Your students will not necessarily be qualified to apply these criteria effectively, and they may feel uncomfortable if they are given the responsibility to pronounce an overall judgment on their peers’ work.

Peer-review worksheets should ask the reviewer to begin by offering a positive comment about the paper. After that point, the peer-reviewer role in commenting should be descriptive: each reviewer should describe his response to the paper. For example, a peer-reviewer might write: “I found this description very clear” or “I do not understand how this point relates to your thesis.” The worksheet should give students specific tasks to complete when recording their response to a paper (Nilson 2003). Where evaluation is required, it should be based on the reviewer’s impressions as a reader. Examples of specific tasks include

• indicate which parts of the paper the reader finds most or least effective, and why
• identify or rephrase the thesis
• list the major points of support or evidence
• indicate sentences or paragraphs that seem out of order, incompletely explained, or otherwise in need of revision

Performing these tasks should enable each peer-reviewer to provide the writer with a written response that will help the writer determine which parts of the paper are effective as is, and which are unclear, incomplete, or unconvincing.

Do not require students to tell the writer how to revise the paper. Advanced under-graduates, students who have been meeting in peer-review groups for an extended time, and graduate students may be able to handle adding more directive responses (e.g. suggesting that the writer make specific changes).

Okay, as I see it, the article contains three important points: 1) the role of the peer reviewer is not to grade or judge the paper, they are giving a ‘reader’s reaction.’ 2) They should not attempt to tell the other person how to rewrite the paper. 3) They should try to make a positive comment and avoid harsh judgments and criticisms.

My Asian students will not have had experience with peer reviews because, as far as I can tell, no one does that kind of thing here. Secondly, students can be extremely hard and harsh on each other and that is common. I will have to emphasize that their role is not of judge and jury, or are they responsible to ‘tell’ the other student what to do. Rather, just give their reactions to the piece and tell whether they understood what was being said or not. Was it clear? Did you understand it? Is it okay the way it is or do you think it should be redone? Any ‘nice’ comments?

Koreans really do tend to live in a ‘bubble’ a lot of the time where they are extremely self-focused. This exercise will help them to see themselves as someone else sees them. A really important point.    CW

Elaine Garan – Smart Answer to Tough Questions, (2007,) Scholastic, Inc., NY, NY.

Regie Routman – Writing Essentials, (2005,) Heinemann, Portsmouth, New Jersey.

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/1/  – excerpt from Purdue Online Writing Lab, Purdue University, Internet site, 2014.

http://writingcenter.unc.edu/faculty-resources/tips-on-teaching-esl-students/tips-on-teaching-esl-students. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Internet site, 2014.

http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/peer-review-how-to.aspx, Washington University in St. Louis, Internet site, 2014.

READING BLOG     LEE213

Starting with the experts: http://marvin.ibeu.org.br/ibeudigital/images/d/d9/The-Power-of-Reading.pdf; This is a Internet site article discussing the theories of Stephen Krashen, Phd, teacher and lecturer at USC and expert on reading. The article is The Power of Reading: Insights from Research 10/04 and discusses Free Voluntary Reading programs:

• is effective in increasing and improving reading
• is pleasurable
• results in superior general knowledge
• improves spelling, writing, grammar
• helps ELL learners dramatically
• Improves scores on reading tests and other subject matter tests
• Results in better reading comprehension, writing style, and increased vocabulary
• Develops better thinkers
• Works when students truly have choice, when the program is consistent and continued, and when teachers are also reading when students are reading

What we can do:

• School-wide SSR (Silent sustained reading)
• Individual classroom SSR
• Have a variety of books available for low-level readers—comics, series books, etc.
• Publicize suggested reading lists
• Survey kids about their reading interests
• Librarian put out list of kids’ favorite books and their interests
• Encourage teachers to develop in-class libraries
• Solicit books through newsletter, civic groups
• Establish a reading-as-reward system
• Encourage reading aloud in class
• Read aloud to Special Ed and ELL students
• Talk about reading with colleagues and students
• Extend library hours—talk to Kiwanis and other groups about providing funding or volunteers.

So, what’s not to love about free-reading programs, nothing! Now, how do we get these programs started? Ah, that is a horse of an entirely different color.  Teaching in Korea, the students have libraries but highly limited access to books in English. The major book stores do sell books in English and often at a  high price. A few months ago, one of the new JK Rowling books came out in hardback and was sold at Koyobo Bookstore. The price was 42,00 Won which is the equivalent to $40! I had to think long and hard if I wanted the book that badly. It was about that time that all the eBook readers were coming on the market and I was able to get the same book on eBooks for a much reduced price.

Most of my students don’t have the money for a lot of expensive books and their parents don’t want to pay for them either.  It is important to establish a low cost alternative. All of my students  have cell phones and most have smart phones. For high school/college I am moving to promoting eBook readers. I just got The Maze Runner online for $6.00, a very reasonable price. I will be promoting these readers to my students in an effort to get them to read.

 

ROUND-ROBIN READING : In Elaine Garan’s book Smart Answer to Tough Questions, 2007, Scholastic, Inc., NY, NY,  she addresses the issue of Round-Robin or popcorn reading.

Quoting from The Voice of Evidence to Reading Research and The Report of the National Reading Panel their findings are:

Round robin is counterproductive and not a good use of class time.

Only one student pays attention at a time and that is the one who is reading. Faster students are racing ahead to read and the slower students can’t keep up.

Round robin forces struggling readers to perform in front of their peers and to get laughed at.

Basically, it is boring.

The workbooks that I use in class are the Oxford University Press Smart Choice series. The workbooks do not have extensive text reading in them. However, there is a page or two of reading in each chapter and a list of questions that follow. Since I don’t want to do the Round Robin anymore in class; what I will probably do is to have the students read these pages as homework and then answer the questions for reading comprehension.

Most of the passages in the workbook come with a CD component that can be played either before doing the exercise or after. I think I will assign the passage as homework; then, when we get back to class, play  the CD track. Thereafter, I will call on the students to read their answers and I will work around the room and read a couple of their written responses. Of course, a certain number of students will never do the homework or will just copy the answers off someone else. I have to accept that this will happen and their motivation to do the work will depend on how much they really want to learn English, or not.

Lastly, as non-native speakers, I have to evaluate each student at the mid-term and final spots in the semester on their speaking abilities. I have been using Round robin to allow me to hear them reading and speaking. You may say, just ask them some questions and make the evaluation based on that. The problem is that any number of low level students answer all questions with “yes” or “no” or other monosyllabic answers that make it difficult to judge their actual fluency.

For example the question in the book is ‘Which movie did Victoria see? Who also saw it?’ The answers will be uniformally “Avatar,” and “Dan”. Students rarely if ever answer in complete sentences. Since they would rather mop the floor than write, the effort to get them to do that is pretty great.

 

GETTING STUDENTS TO READ: I liked what Regie Routman (Writing Essentials, 2005, Heinemann, Portsmouth, New Jersey.)had to say about making students accountable for their own comprehension and having them writing in small spiral notebooks and answer questions posed for their silent reading time. As indicated before, my class is highly divergent meaning that the levels go from very low to very high. My low students struggle every week to keep up and the high students are bored silly. Students meet two times per week for the semester. How can I, during this really short time period, effectively help both groups? Stephan Krashen, Phd and expert in the field of language learning has said time and again that reading is key to learning the language. That means learning the language to both speak it and to write it. On our campus we work out of workbooks each week, we teach to the test and there is exactly one English Literature class at the school. So, what can I do to create a bridge to reading which is key to life-long learning of the language and their becoming better readers and more fluent? I think putting responsibility into their hands is really key; there is just so much I can do. This week I will start to show the Good Reads Listopia of Young Adult Reading books. Three of the books on the list are actually coming out in movies very soon. Those are Mockingjay (of the Hunger Games series,) The Hobbit and the Maze Runner. I can show a trailer from the movie (isn’t that interesting?) and then show the book on the Good Reads list. These books can be got from eBook reader sources like Amazon.com, ITunes and others. Also, Koyobo book will usually stock books when a movie is coming out. Well known books are often translated into Korean and then also sold in English. I want them to read the books in English but if they have to start in Korean to ‘get the plot’ maybe they will eventually move into English readers.  ///I may ‘showcase’ a book a week and then go backwards to Harry Potter and The Lightning Thief which came out a few years ago. The Giver, Divergent and Twilight are all sold here too. I am not that hot on Divergent or Twilight series but if it gets them to read, it’s all good!

PUBLISHER MATERIALS: HIGH SCHOOL/COLLEGE LEVEL: My current school is using Oxford University Press textbooks (Smart Choice, 2^nd Edition, Ken Wilson, 2011, New York, NY) and they are pretty good as they cover a lot of basic material and have many ‘interactive tools’ that come along with the book. For example, they have created a site that is all the lesson plans that the students can access from their home computer and hear the lessons again in audio. In the back of the book Oxford has created a whole series of tests that can be used at mid-term and at finals. Also, there is a complete ‘teacher’s copy’ that comes along with the program so that I can put up all the answers to homework on the board for students to check it. The problem with the book really isn’t a problem with the book. The admin here is in lockstep to teach to the test and is hysterical about students not doing well on the midterms and final exams. Apparently they have had experience with bad teachers in the past.  This leads to a whole lot of regimentation in the classroom and situations occurring up to and including teachers feeding test questions or answers to students prior to the big exams just to get the high scores.

 ELEMENTARY LEVELS: I taught 5th grade Korean students and really liked Oxford University Press books. We did read aloud with Princess and the Pea. I created crowns for the King, the Queen, the Princess and the Prince. Volunteer readers (sometimes I picked the volunteers) got to wear the crowns and then read their part of the script. They really liked doing that and many times the kids would really get into the roles. I have sometimes had the whole class read out loud together, but I am not so sure how effective that is. Reading out loud in front of class is not very effective for low level readers as they tend to get embarrassed and other kids make fun of them. What seemed to work best for them seemed to be read aloud with easier material in groups of their own level.

Also, Oxford publishes a workbook to go with each of their level readers. Within the workbook, worksheets are organized into low, medium and high levels. They are not clearly marked that way, but that is okay, I would rather the publisher Not put words like that on the materials. I can figure it out myself. Then, knowing my classes and their levels, I would have copies of each of the worksheets and would pick the one appropriate to that group.

 

DEALING WITH STUDENT PSYCHOLOGY: Many Korean students  feel like complete failures in learning English and have lost all confidence. Therefore, I also concentrate on macro skills and try hard to make a point to not focus excessively on the low-end students. I have done read-aloud in class with my students and find that many of them make the same mistakes over and over. I can usually hear these mistakes after several readings. For example, students will mix up the words Place and Palace and call everything Place because that word is the most familiar. So, then, when I see that several people do it, I go to the board and tell everyone the difference in the two words. So, correcting the group as opposed to the individual seems to help most particularly with low students. Also, I match low to high students and have them work together as much as possible to allow the higher students to help the lower ones. 

I teach at a University in Daegu, South Korea. Most of my students are about 20 to 21 years old. They can be as young as 19 and as old at 27 or 28, but they are mostly sophomores.  This University is not the lowest in the region nor is it the highest. I teach all Engineering students and their abilities range from very high to as low as developmentally disabled.

One of the quixotic and frustrating things about teaching in Korea (for Western teachers) is the lack of levels for different students. In other words, low, intermediate and high students are all mixed together. My explanation of this is that Korea has a shame based culture. In Western societies, if a person does something wrong and he has to fix that thing. Here if, a person does something wrong and he has to fix himself.

These differences are subtle yet produce significant differences in the society and then the schools.  To place a student in a ‘remedial’ group would be so publically shaming  as to be completely unbearable. So, they just don’t do it. As a result, students who need remedial help, mostly don’t get it and frequently do badly.  I can’t really help a low student when I have 20 students in class and we have to march to the beat of an incessant curriculum.

So, giving these basic difficulties, what can I as a teacher do to ‘help’ the top and the bottom? Comparing the two groups, (A students and F students,) there is a huge difference between the average A student and the F student. However, there is much less difference between the various A students. Frequently,  F students either bail out of class and stop coming because it is ‘too hard’ and A students are bored senseless.

IMPROVING ON VOCABULARY

I am really enjoying the Nancy Akhavan book on ‘Accelerated Vocabulary,’ 2007, Scholastic, Inc., NY, NY.  Since my students are non-native speakers, many things that apply to American elementary students apply in the same way to English learners. The majority of Korean students read at about the 2nd grade American level.

Akhavan indicates that a student has to have exposure to a word 12 different times to actually ‘own’ the word or really ‘know’ it. That is an interesting fact I didn’t know. She talks about limiting the amount of content words and focusing only on the most important words. I had learned that previously in my ESL studies. However; she goes on to discuss the importance of expanded vocabulary to allow students to develop into advanced readers and more advanced speakers.

She recommends engaging the class in brain-storming to come up with more meanings for a single word and also, similar words that link to the original word. Then, students can take 3×5 cards and write the word and the expanded meaning of the word. I really like that. It allows the student to create his or her own card catalogue  they can take with them anywhere and practice whenever they want.

As I said, in many classes, the A students are bored silly and the F students give up. However, when scratching a little deeper below the surface, many A students get their grades because of years of repetitive grammar drills in schools and after-school academies. These students can do grammar drills blindfolded. However, instruction that actually focuses on expanding the vocabulary and increasing reading and speaking ability is often absent.

What I plan to do, is to expand on the vocabulary exercise that we do in the book. Instead of handling it as a rote drill exercise, I will try a) brainstorming to develop expanded meanings of the words. b) looking for words with similar meanings to the ones on the list c) getting students to buy a pack of ‘Easy to Memorize Words’ to write down the words. These are 3×5 cards with a little hole punched in the corner that are bound with a metal ring. Students can then easily shuffle through the cards and practice their vocabulary words.

This practice has significance for both the A’s and the F’s. For the F’s, it allows them to carry around the basic vocabulary and to look at it over and over again and get the repetition they need. For the A’s, it allows them to go beyond the basic text and to grab hold of new words,  thereby expanding their vocabulary and stretching them.

 

Courtney Webb

9/14