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.
4 comments:
I'm not quite sure what you meant by "the same word will have the exact same spelling every time (not counting the endings of course)." Could you give me an example? Thank you.
Lilian, imagine that you refer to straight-backed piece of furniture that you sit on. It is called "chair" and every time you write it, you will write the same five-letter sequence c-h-a-i-r. For them this is not obvious. It will be chair once, cher another time, chari the third etc.
I think that the difficulties of teaching people who are not literate in their first language is not one that is addressed adequately in any of our texts. Perhaps this is because this a problem that we as a profession need to study and experience more before we can write about proven ways to tackle this difficult situation.
It is a problem that I have thought about. Many of the Somali students at East High fall into this category.
I agree with you. I think has not been long enough that the ESL community had encountered this problem in current span.
I didn't know that you were doing your observations in East High school. Then you probably know my tutees, actually.
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