This week's reading is all about teaching writing, which is especially relevant to me since I am teaching a composition class.
Teaching ESl writing and writing in general has several big debates in it. One of the debates is product vs. process.
What is more important - focusing on a good product (traditional), or focusing on how to write and revise (Elbow and further on)? It's a many folded argument, process writing allows students to grasp the essentials of writing steps, necessity of the revision process, the need to draft etc. However, in real world it is mostly product people are concerned with. In my teaching I focus on writing process that would lead to a good product.
Another thing that every writing teacher has to consider is the first language influence (contrastive rhetoric theory of Kaplan). I notice how in my bi-language career I am switching from the Russian paradigm to the English one.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
03/23 Reflection
The best part of the class was definitely the small group teaching presentations. I love the whole process, from wandering around the library, picking up books, games, and whatnot to teaching a small activity. I think we also had a great time in our group pretending to be adults, kindergarten kids and elementary schoolers. I also felt nostalgic reciting "Betty Botter".
It was also interesting to do some more video tape analysis, as I mentioned in class we did oral speech analysis of the same girl, Barbara. After hearing her read I am starting to think that, maybe, I was too generous in the other assignment and overestimated her skills, which speaks again for the need to look at all skills before making a conclusion.
It was also interesting to do some more video tape analysis, as I mentioned in class we did oral speech analysis of the same girl, Barbara. After hearing her read I am starting to think that, maybe, I was too generous in the other assignment and overestimated her skills, which speaks again for the need to look at all skills before making a conclusion.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Reading 03/23
The MCM chapter talked about methods that could be used for teaching reading to children and adults. I think that it is best to try a variety of methods, hoping that at least something would work.
The brown Brown book was about motivation and I have a feeling that we have read this chapter last semester. Either that or I read the wrong chapter at one time or another. Anyway, I know that sounds blasphemous in a way, but I want to say, that I don't believe the Maslow pyramid to be absolutely correct. History knows many examples of hungry, cold, sick people caring about freedom, dignity and intellectual needs more than about food, clothes, and medicines. My greatgrandfather went to school when Russia was still an Empire and getting education meant all kinds of troubles for someone Jewish. He practically starved for a number of years, when he was tutoring kids, and trying to pass high school exams. His university years funnily coincided with the civil war. My grandparents and parents used to buy books and pay tutors instead of investing in better clothes or newer appliances. That's why I speak English fluently - my parents preferred to pay for my education all through the hardest post-perestroika years, when my mom would take translations to make ends meet and dad had up 10 5 jobs. My point is - lack of met basic needs does not necessarily mean that the person will not care about something else. French and Russian revolutions speak to that :)
Since I come from this knowledge prioritizing environment, which has been a part of our tradition for several thousand years, I have a problem with people, who are not motivated. I am not talking about little kids here - they are a different story and it's their parents responsibility to create and maintain their motivation. I think that it's my job as a teacher to teach a subject, and teach it in a way as interesting, engaging and challenging as possible. It is also my job to explain how different parts of the course work together, and how something can be useful in the long run. However, if the students are not interested/don't care there is not much I can do. If an adult (and I do consider 18-year olds adults, I know it's not a popular point of view), so if an adult has no motivation to succeed in a class and is bored by the thought of it - what exactly are they doing in it? If the student's motivation evaporates at the thought of a reading to be completed or an essay written - why are they getting a college education again?
Basically, I choose to work with adults in a hope that they know what and why they are doing in my class. I can take it from here, not before.
P.S. I am an idiot, who is unable to read the assigned chapter. Talk about reading skills. Ironic, isn't it? Need to catch up.
The brown Brown book was about motivation and I have a feeling that we have read this chapter last semester. Either that or I read the wrong chapter at one time or another. Anyway, I know that sounds blasphemous in a way, but I want to say, that I don't believe the Maslow pyramid to be absolutely correct. History knows many examples of hungry, cold, sick people caring about freedom, dignity and intellectual needs more than about food, clothes, and medicines. My greatgrandfather went to school when Russia was still an Empire and getting education meant all kinds of troubles for someone Jewish. He practically starved for a number of years, when he was tutoring kids, and trying to pass high school exams. His university years funnily coincided with the civil war. My grandparents and parents used to buy books and pay tutors instead of investing in better clothes or newer appliances. That's why I speak English fluently - my parents preferred to pay for my education all through the hardest post-perestroika years, when my mom would take translations to make ends meet and dad had up 10 5 jobs. My point is - lack of met basic needs does not necessarily mean that the person will not care about something else. French and Russian revolutions speak to that :)
Since I come from this knowledge prioritizing environment, which has been a part of our tradition for several thousand years, I have a problem with people, who are not motivated. I am not talking about little kids here - they are a different story and it's their parents responsibility to create and maintain their motivation. I think that it's my job as a teacher to teach a subject, and teach it in a way as interesting, engaging and challenging as possible. It is also my job to explain how different parts of the course work together, and how something can be useful in the long run. However, if the students are not interested/don't care there is not much I can do. If an adult (and I do consider 18-year olds adults, I know it's not a popular point of view), so if an adult has no motivation to succeed in a class and is bored by the thought of it - what exactly are they doing in it? If the student's motivation evaporates at the thought of a reading to be completed or an essay written - why are they getting a college education again?
Basically, I choose to work with adults in a hope that they know what and why they are doing in my class. I can take it from here, not before.
P.S. I am an idiot, who is unable to read the assigned chapter. Talk about reading skills. Ironic, isn't it? Need to catch up.
03-15 Reflection
I really enjoyed the book analysis assignment, although it was funny that two groups had almost opposite conclusions of the College Reading 4.
It was interesting to analyze the video tape, since it is what we are supposed to be doing soon. However, the group analysis made me want to not record myself. I am very apprehensive to the idea of being on tape in general (I have very few photos, too) and the kind of analysis I saw was way more than I would be able to handle without quitting the school.
It was interesting to analyze the video tape, since it is what we are supposed to be doing soon. However, the group analysis made me want to not record myself. I am very apprehensive to the idea of being on tape in general (I have very few photos, too) and the kind of analysis I saw was way more than I would be able to handle without quitting the school.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Reading 03/16
This week's reading focused on teaching reading skills and developing literacy. There are several points that I would like to touch on.
It seems to me, that one of the things that are extremely important to teach is recognizing and interpreting discourse markers. Several weeks ago my composition students were making an annotated bibliography, as one of the practice activities I offered them several articles and asked to look at the abstracts and write out the information necessary for an annotated bibliography. They could not complete the task without reading the entire piece, and they had trouble reading it because of the new words.
Brown briefly talks about the adults, who are illiterate in their first language and the trouble they have with acquiring literacy skills in the second language. I am now tutoring two Somali teenagers and this is the problem I face twice a week. They have incredible trouble believing that the same word will have the exact same spelling every time (not counting the endings of course), I think it's the correlation between the funny marks on paper and the sounds that we acquire at a very early age and almost subconsciously that they lack. I have seen examples of people acquiring reading skills and progressing beautifully, but unfortunately, they were very few compared to the opposite. I know that many ABE/GED/ESL programs complain of lack of staff, who are trained to work with people having such problems.
Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about the adapted texts. It is my firm belief that it is possible to find original texts at any level of complexity. In ENG 583 we analyzed the lexical density and linguistic features of a 5-th grade textbook and an adapted 12-th grade textbook with the latter being oversimplified and lacking in content and linguistic features.
It seems to me, that one of the things that are extremely important to teach is recognizing and interpreting discourse markers. Several weeks ago my composition students were making an annotated bibliography, as one of the practice activities I offered them several articles and asked to look at the abstracts and write out the information necessary for an annotated bibliography. They could not complete the task without reading the entire piece, and they had trouble reading it because of the new words.
Brown briefly talks about the adults, who are illiterate in their first language and the trouble they have with acquiring literacy skills in the second language. I am now tutoring two Somali teenagers and this is the problem I face twice a week. They have incredible trouble believing that the same word will have the exact same spelling every time (not counting the endings of course), I think it's the correlation between the funny marks on paper and the sounds that we acquire at a very early age and almost subconsciously that they lack. I have seen examples of people acquiring reading skills and progressing beautifully, but unfortunately, they were very few compared to the opposite. I know that many ABE/GED/ESL programs complain of lack of staff, who are trained to work with people having such problems.
Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about the adapted texts. It is my firm belief that it is possible to find original texts at any level of complexity. In ENG 583 we analyzed the lexical density and linguistic features of a 5-th grade textbook and an adapted 12-th grade textbook with the latter being oversimplified and lacking in content and linguistic features.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Presentation Reflection
I spent a lot of time choosing the format and content of the presentation, originally I planned to do an activity that I could offer to upper-intermediate students as a demonstration of task-based/role-playing speaking activity. It is called "The people of our neighborhood" and I really like both administering and taking part in it. The storyline goes like this: there are several families in the neighborhood, so the students are split in 3-4-5-6-10 groups with same number of people in each group. Then the roles are distributed: mother, father, son, cousin etc. Each family also has a secret, so the groups receive a sheet describing their mystery. Maybe, one family sold a fake Chinese vase to another, and the third family accidentally killed the dog of the first family, you get the picture. Anyway, the family gets together, reads their secret and decides on one person, who will tell the real secret. The rest come up with cover ups. Then members of different families meet to talk about the secrets, like all fathers get together and all aunts, and all uncles. After everyone had an opportunity to talk to everyone the families reconvene and try to decide what is the secret of other families. Then it moves to an all-class discussion. It is a fun activity to do, and it also gives opportunities to talk about question techniques, answer evasion and other discourse problems.
And now to something completely different like things that I have actually included in my presentation. After I did some time calculations, I realized that "The people of our neighborhood" are not going to happen, so I decided to do a small warm-up discussion and then do two application activities. I probably should have done some more time calculations, but I always over plan.
For the discussion I chose two questions that seem most controversial to me, fluency vs. accuracy and pronunciation. I was thinking about including feedback instead of pronunciation, since pronunciation is a huge topic, I mean, we spent half a semester on it alone, but then I remembered that we have already talked about feedback, so I went with those two. For the activities I had the teaching scenarios, and for the second activity I was going to split everyone into pairs and have each pair design one activity that would enforce one of Brown's principles. But we didn't have time for that.
Overall, I felt that the presentation went pretty well, although the discussion part took longer than I expected, but I decided not to break it up, since we were having a really valuable conversation about really important topics. The scenario activity also went pretty well and it was, I thought, a nice change from the discussion format.
Teaching speaking is a huge topic and there is no way to touch, even briefly all of its issues, but I hope we got a chance to talk and think about at least some things tonight.
And now to something completely different like things that I have actually included in my presentation. After I did some time calculations, I realized that "The people of our neighborhood" are not going to happen, so I decided to do a small warm-up discussion and then do two application activities. I probably should have done some more time calculations, but I always over plan.
For the discussion I chose two questions that seem most controversial to me, fluency vs. accuracy and pronunciation. I was thinking about including feedback instead of pronunciation, since pronunciation is a huge topic, I mean, we spent half a semester on it alone, but then I remembered that we have already talked about feedback, so I went with those two. For the activities I had the teaching scenarios, and for the second activity I was going to split everyone into pairs and have each pair design one activity that would enforce one of Brown's principles. But we didn't have time for that.
Overall, I felt that the presentation went pretty well, although the discussion part took longer than I expected, but I decided not to break it up, since we were having a really valuable conversation about really important topics. The scenario activity also went pretty well and it was, I thought, a nice change from the discussion format.
Teaching speaking is a huge topic and there is no way to touch, even briefly all of its issues, but I hope we got a chance to talk and think about at least some things tonight.
03-02 Reading
Speaking is our main way of showcasing our knowledge of the English. The opportunity to proudly reply "Yes, I do" to "Do you speak English?" is priceless. The better we speak English, the more coquettish our responses tend to be, I know a couple of professional English-Russian simultaneous interpreters, who say "Well, I can manage English conversations if need be".
Teaching conversational English is one of the most intricate and complex parts in our difficult trade. One of the reasons why I am such a strong advocate of early learning is that a three-year old child is never self-conscious. They don't go thinking "Oh, what will the teacher/cute classmate from the next row think about me if I make this horrible and embarrassing mistake", they just talk, and by the moment self-consciousness arrives at the scene they are fluent and accurate enough to keep discussing new subjects without protective giggling and blushing.
Teaching speaking to adults is a challenge beyond challenge. Unlike children and teens they know the influence of language as a tool of power, they are aware of what can be done with these funny words and sounds, so they prefer not to speak or say the bare minimum. The way I targeted this problem was by creating a positive and encouraging atmosphere. I laughed at myself, and encouraged my students to join in and then even if they made a mistake, it was no big deal. An ideal teacher is, of course, able to keep their face straight at all circumstances, but there were occasions when I could not help laughing, so we laughed together.
Teaching conversational English is one of the most intricate and complex parts in our difficult trade. One of the reasons why I am such a strong advocate of early learning is that a three-year old child is never self-conscious. They don't go thinking "Oh, what will the teacher/cute classmate from the next row think about me if I make this horrible and embarrassing mistake", they just talk, and by the moment self-consciousness arrives at the scene they are fluent and accurate enough to keep discussing new subjects without protective giggling and blushing.
Teaching speaking to adults is a challenge beyond challenge. Unlike children and teens they know the influence of language as a tool of power, they are aware of what can be done with these funny words and sounds, so they prefer not to speak or say the bare minimum. The way I targeted this problem was by creating a positive and encouraging atmosphere. I laughed at myself, and encouraged my students to join in and then even if they made a mistake, it was no big deal. An ideal teacher is, of course, able to keep their face straight at all circumstances, but there were occasions when I could not help laughing, so we laughed together.
02/23-Reflection
The highlight of last class was definitely the technology breakdown. I don't remember another occasion, when I would be so happy that something did not work. Since we were not able to watch the video and analyze the ELL's speech, we ended up ransacking the library shelves and finding props to use in all kinds of activities. I never knew that we had access to all these board games, toys and whatnot, so the opportunity to discover these was really valuable.
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