Sunday, September 14, 2008

SomeTips For Telling/Reading stories

Some tips for telling/reading stories

1. Be prepared so that you can tell stories smoothly
* practice telling it out-loud to yourself
* know what happens in the right order
2. Be prepared with materials and facilities
3. Make sure that everyone is comfortable, and that they can see you
4. Begin the story by welcoming the listeners, using a carefully controlled voice, neither too high
nor too low
5. Engage the children as you tell the story
* Use facial expressions and gestures as well as your voice
* Meet your audience in the eyes: don’t be shy
6. Be playful with your language
* repeat words or phrases, use rhythm and rhyme or alliteration
* be clean and clear
*tease kids a bit when only you know what is going to happen next.
7. Try telling the same story -but swap over to make sure you don’t retell the same bits
8. Ask children if they do not understand the story- raise your hands
9. Assign comprehension jobs such as author, illustrator, predictor, main ideas, nouns,
verbs, word detective (Amber, 2008)
10. Use puppets, stuffed animals, paper cutouts, and flannel board to illustrate stories that
you tell without reading
11. Combine songs, body movement, and fingerplays in story telling time

Credits for
*Amber Swedenborg
* Vickie Dworkin

References
Some tips for telling stories adapted from

http://library.thinkquest.org/J001779/telling.htm
http://www.storyquest.org.uk/families/tips-for-telling-stories/

Critical Thinking

For most people, the importance of vocabulary seems very clear. We can communicate together by using incorrect grammatical patterns or imperfect pronunciation, but people will encounter difficulty in understanding what the interlocutors are saying and the communication may break down because they do not use the correct words. My students in Vietnam were also in the same situation. They did not use correct words in writing and speaking to express their ideas. The problem is that in English, there are many words whose meanings are related closely each other. The students at that time did not how to choose the words suitably in particular situation. To avoid this, in my teaching, I usually teach new words in contexts and recycle new vocabularies very often in different types of exercises. In production stage, I let the students talk to their peers freely but I finally corrected the use of word choice that the students made mistakes in front of the class and noticed them the meanings of the words when they occurred in a new context. This method has brought positive effect in my teaching. It helps my students improve the situation better.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Storytelling

In AL 6760 Teaching EFL/ESL to children, there was a variety of choices of personal projects such as attending storytelling sessions, writing a book review, writing a term-paper, or attending the children’s literature HI conference. I chose the first one storytelling because I am interested in telling stories to children. I participated in five storytelling sessions in the State library which offered me many useful lessons for my future teaching when I go back home.

I have got many useful tips for a good preparation for story-telling. Careful preparation helps me tell stories smoothly. There are several ways for me to prepare for telling stories such as telling it out loud to myself, going for a walk and talk to a tree, or telling it to a friend or someone in my family. Also, in order to prepare for stories, I should learn the basic plot of the story I am telling or reading. This happens first before I add more details about the story. Additionally, preparation for materials and facilities such as books, puppets, paper-cut outs, chairs, etc is necessary for storytelling. Besides, materials and facilities, in order to begin telling stories, I also notice that whether children are comfortable and that they can see me. When children are too young, I should ask their parents to help them participate in activities after the storyteller and show the connection between pictures and words to illustrate the stories because young children cannot read yet. I also learned that in order to create interests for children, I should give them choices of what should be read and done and ask them questions to let them focus on the stories.

I have also learned useful techniques during storytelling. The first one is that I should engage the children when telling stories. Using facial expressions and gestures as well as voice is very necessary to catch the children’s attention on the page. Moreover, when telling or reading stories, I should be playful with my language. It means that the language used for telling/reading stories should be clean and clear enough for the children. I can repeat words or phrases, use rhyme and rhythm or alliteration. I also tease the children a little when I know what is going to happen next. Besides that in order to check children’s understanding, I should ask questions by asking them raise their hands if they do not understand the stories. Additionally, using puppets, stuffed animals, paper cutouts, and flannel board to illustrate stories that I tell without reading is very interesting way to raise children’s excitement on stories. Lastly, I should combine songs, body movement, and fingerplays in story telling time because the children cannot pay attention to the page long like adults. However, five times of observing storytelling sessions are not enough for me. If I had time, I would participate in more variety of storytelling sessions such as storytelling aged from 6 to 10 because I would like to learn more about different techniques for telling stories to children including more post reading tips.

In conclusion, I realize that although young children cannot read yet, what they see and hear will be helpful for their studying language in the next stage of development. This personal project has brought me valuable knowledge of how to become a confident storyteller, techniques of telling stories, and experiences of how children and their parents respond to stories.

Teaching Philosophy

Teaching Philosophy

In Vietnam, I taught English in an environment where traditional teaching methods mostly focused on grammar and vocabulary. After many years of studying English, my students were good at doing grammar and vocabulary exercises, but they could not communicate in English well. They have trouble understanding native English speakers. As a teacher of English, I would like to help my students realize that the ultimate goal of learning a language is to use the language in communicating with others. Although the classroom customs do not focus on communication, I assert that I can teach them to communicate well if my focus is on providing students with motivation, comprehensible input, and error treatment.

Learners with good motivation tend to do better than those without it. Groccia (1992) defined motivation as “what stimulates students to acquire, transform and use knowledge” (p. 62). Since motivation arouses students’ interest in learning, it plays an important part in second language acquisition. Lightbrown and Spada (2006) argued that “the best predictor of success in second language acquisition is motivation” (p. 185). Richard-Amato (2003) also concluded that “motivation is an extremely important affective factor. Without it, learning any language, first or second, would be difficult, and perhaps impossible” (p. 115). If learners have good attitudes toward native speakers of the language, they will desire contact with them. This type of motivation is often termed integrative motivation (Lightbown &Spada, 2006). Others have instrumental motivation as “a desire to use language to obtain practical goals such as studying in a technical field or getting a job” (as cited in Richard-Amato, 2003, pp. 114-115). In addition to instrumental and integrative motivation, students are also motivated by other factors. They may come to a classroom from different backgrounds and life experiences, all of which contribute to their degree of motivation for learning a target language.

One of the other forms of motivation for language learning is called pedagogical motivation (Watson & Smelter, 1984). Pedagogical motivation is a way that teachers use can make their classroom activities inherently motivating through task design such as warm-ups, task variety and cooperative learning. Research has shown that the best way for teachers to motivate students is to create a supportive environment where the students are stimulated and engaged in activities appropriate to their age, interest, and culture (Lightbown & Spada, 2006, p. 65).

Crooks and Schmidt (1991) suggested three ways to motivate students in the classroom: (1) motivating students into the lesson, (2) varying the activities, tasks, and materials, and (3) using cooperative rather than competitive goals. One example of getting students involved in the lesson is to have interesting warm-up activities, which are very important in teaching. They can “lead to higher levels of interest on the part of the students” (as cited in Lightbown & Spada, 2006, p. 65). A variety of tasks, activities, and materials will help avoid boredom. Cooperative learning also helps the students increase self-confidence, and active participation within a small group not only increases interest among the students but also promotes critical thinking. Thus consideration of pedagogical motivation as well as integrative and instrumental motivation will play a significant role in my teaching; if students are not sufficiently motivated during class activities, they will not take the tasks seriously and will learn little.

Although motivation puts students in good position to learn, language learning is best effected through comprehensible input.  “Comprehensible input” refers to students understanding the message that is presented or said to them. Many studies into comprehensible input in ESL/ EFL have been undertaken. Researchers typically agree comprehensible input is an important factor in second language acquisition (Ellis, 1990; Gass, 1997; Krashen, 1985). Krashen (1985) argued that learners acquire language by understanding messages in linguistic elements at a slightly higher level of difficulty (p. 2). He called this i+1. The i stands for learner’s interlanguage or current level of competence. Therefore, we say i+1 is the optimal level that will move students from their current level to the next level along the natural order, by understanding input containing i+1 (Krashen, 1985, p. 2). Krashen believes that if students read or hear language at this optimal level of competence, they will automatically acquire the new +1 forms.  Contrary to Krahen (1985), Ellis (1990) stated students need to pay attention to the language (word or structure) in the input that they receive. Another issue is how we measure the level ‘i’ of our students’ language competence precisely, and how we give them ‘i+1’ input so that their language output is affected desirably. Taking both Krashen (1985) and Ellis’ (1990) concerns into account when teaching a grammar point like conditional sentences, for example, I would design some listening and reading activities containing conditional structures. Students who need to learn the conditionals should be required to do a lot of meaningful listening and reading that contains a lot of conditionals. When students have a chance to see and hear conditionals being used at a greater frequency than in normal text or speech, they have a better chance to acquire this grammar point. Martha Trahey and Lydia White (1993) (as cited in Lightbown & Spada, 2006, p. 147) called this method input flood. In their study, there was no teaching of conditionals, nor was any error correction provided. Students improved in their understanding of the grammar point they were exposed to (p. 147).

 Because Krashen (1985) only focused on input, teachers have to look elsewhere for ideas on output. Swain provides this in her Output Hypothesis in which she claims “that among other functions, output is a significant way [for learners] to test out hypotheses about the target language” (Richard-Amato, 2003, p. 65). It is important for teachers to let students know if the hypothesis is correct by identifying and analyzing, and when necessary, correcting students’ errors. It is important for teachers to do error analysis, which means identifying sources of errors, analyze why errors are made, and suggest that language learners are doing something wrong or they are in process of acquiring a language (p. 37). Error analysis is a very necessary step in the teaching and learning process because it helps “understand how learners process second language data” (Lightbown & Spada, 2006, p. 80) and “determine in what ways the students are progressing in the developmental process” (Richard-Amato, 2003, p. 37). Additionally, through error analysis, teachers will know how well they are performing and whether they should either change or keep the same materials or teaching methods. Teachers then must give appropriate feedback towards the students’ errors.

After teachers do error analysis and decide which error needs to be corrected, they need to be careful about how they correct students. Many studies on teachers’ attitudes toward students’ errors have been carried out (Budden, 2002; Carroll & Swain, 1993; Havrenek & Cesnick, 2001; Lightbown, 1998; Ur, 1996; Winitz, 1996, etc). These researchers have indicated some possible advantages in providing correction in context. They typically agree that the attitude of teachers toward students’ errors plays a significant role in language acquisition, but they do not always agree on how much or when teachers should correct students’ mistakes. Havrenek & Cesnick (2001) claimed that corrective feedback could benefit both a person, teacher or student who gives feedback to a peer (p. 104). The important point is when teachers should correct students’ performance. Ur (1996) and Budden (2002) agree not to correct mistakes in oral production. Ur argued that it is tricky to know exactly “where the emphasis is on getting the language corrected” (Ur, 1996, p. 247). Budden (2002) stated that students may lose their motivation if we give them too much correction. Therefore, depending on the situation, students’ levels, and stages, teachers need to give different types of error correction. Many other factors should be considered in giving error correction such as motivation, attitude, anxiety levels, willingness to take risks, age, and cultural expectations related to the language situation (Richard-Amato, 2003). In my teaching situation, error analysis will be tricky and time-consuming because teachers are not trained well in analysis techniques, and more importantly, the curriculum does not encourage teachers to do error analysis in their teaching. Though error correction is generally difficult, I do not plan to correct my students’ mistakes at the production stage, if the mistakes are minor.

In conclusion, motivation, comprehensible input, and error treatment are three important factors in second language acquisition. They play a crucial part in encouraging students to use language actively in and out of the classroom. Therefore, I need to be selective with the input. Moreover, my attitude toward students’ mistakes will lead to their feeling safe in a learning environment where they will be more comfortable taking risks. Without the fear of being interrupted, my students will not feel embarrassed, even if they are criticized when they make mistakes. Finally, my students’ motivation will improve if I relate the points they are learning to real life. I hope my students will benefit from my much more learner-centered philosophy.


References

Budden, J. (2002). Error correction. Retrieved November 15, 2007, from http://www.British council.org/languageassistant-tips-error-correction.htm

Carroll, S., & Swain, M. (1993). Explicit and implicit negative feedback: An empirical study of the learning of linguistic generalizations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15(3), 357-386.

Ellis, R. (1990). Instructed second language acquisition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Gass, S. (1997). Input, interaction and the second language learner. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Groccia, J. E. (1992). The college success book: A whole-student approach to academic excellence. Lakewood, CO: Glenbridge Publishing Ltd.

Havrenek, G., & Cesnick, H. (2001). Factors affecting the success of corrective feedback. In S. Foster-Cohen & A. Nizegorodcew (Eds.) EUROSLA Yearbook (pp. 99-122). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Krashen, S. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implication. London: Longman.

Lightbown, P. (1998). The importance of timing in focus on form. In C. Doughty and J. Williams, (Eds). Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. NY: Cambridge University Press.

Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (2006). How languages are learned (3rd ed.). Oxford, N.Y:      Oxford University Press.

Richard-Amato, A. P. (2003). Making it happen: From interactive to participatory language learning: Theory to practice (3rd ed.). White Plains. NY: Pearson Education.

Ur, P. (1996). A course in language teaching: Practice and theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Watson, K., & Smelter, L. (1984). Barriers to listening: Comparison between students and practitioners. Communication research reports, 1, 82-87.

Winitz, H, (1996). Grammaticality judgment as a function of explicit and implicit instruction in Spanish. The Modern Language Journal, 80(1), 32-46.