Material presentation: a constant challenge for teachers

 

I have discovered in my long years of teaching that simple tweaks to the way you present or combine material can make such a big difference. And you won’t know unless you experiment. What I am saying is that there have been times when I was really hard at it to make my input stimulating for the students but it certainly wasn’t worth the investment in time and effort while other times some minor readjustment did the trick. Teaching like learning is highly associative, and the right choice of association(s) is sometimes a matter of coincidence or good timing.  

An example will help illustrate my point. I had recently come across a news story on BBC about the SGA strike and how it affected film or series production, filming and releases. The challenge with teenagers is getting them interested in a topic that could leave them indifferent or making them see an issue from a different perspective.

After having dutifully prepared the text and some exercises to go with it – as usual – I stumbled upon a short video about why going to the cinema is good for you, and it totally transformed the way I was going to introduce the news story. To begin with, the video should precede the news story as it would definitely engage my students’ attention enough to want to consider the fairness or even the relevance of the actors’ demands and grievances.

Accordingly I had the students watch the video and write down or make a mental note of the aspects of the video that they found most exciting or they could relate to and then share their takes on the video. Some were impressed by how far cinema theatres have come since the appearance of the first cinemas. Others noted how much stronger the cinema audience reactions were compared to those who watched alone. I don’t suppose they were surprised by how much more focused the cinema audience was since by now they are well aware of the distracting effect mobiles have on literally any kind of activity.

However, having a scientific confirmation of the social role of cinema going and its contribution to fostering the spirit of community did strike a chord.

Here are my teacher's and student's copy for anyone who would care to use them and the video link.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-qew27vBam1i_jSHBYu20yE1kTE3OUbgCt_PeovlpE/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iAkj3QLynXStunUDKytn_FghgIN9GHxZdQuWBYZxcLI/edit?usp=sharing

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/why-going-to-the-cinema-is-good-for-you/p0f722xz

Teaching and philosophy

 

Time to say hello to all those who read my blog and who I will never know. Please do not mind me if I become overly philosophical or sentimental.  

I am from a small place even in this small country, Greece. When I was young and green, I dreamed of ways of getting away from this “confinement”. I needed to see the world. And in a way I did see the world. I gained a place at a Scottish University and met and mixed with people from all around the world. Somehow the world came to me. Even after my return to my humble roots and establishing my own school of English, where I have consistently tried to combine theory amassed in my years of study -- graduate and postgraduate as well as seminar and conference attendance -- with the knowledge I have gained working with and carefully observing children and adults in the process of learning, I never gave up travelling or getting to know the big wide world—at least for the first two decades. However, passions grow thin with time and so did mine. I decided that I can now draw from my microcosm as much wisdom as from the macrocosm if only I keep my eyes open and my heart unadulterated. And I have been at it ever since.

One of the main sources of happiness for me, second only to having and raising my own children, is the interaction with people in class.

Have you ever noticed how dyslectic people especially children concoct stories with their perceived version of the content of utterances they hear or of texts they read? To my eyes (ears) it is an admirable endeavour which often results in much more intricate tales than the bland insipid statements teachers or other people come up with.

Imagine:

How much more interesting would “well done” be if it was “well bone” or “wall done”? Or  what if instead of “sick”  it was “sock” and rather than "everybody" "every baby"!?  There are of course the hybrids such as “wir”, a mix-up on a semantic level, as in “wind”+”air” or “mouniment“ as in mountain and “monument”. *

Some students, the bold ones, go beyond the lexical level and apply their perception of what was said to the whole sentence. Only the other day I had to hear out a student who had misinterpreted “fine” as “find” citing a story about finding whatever it was rather than taking my word for it that the word was “fine” and not “find”. Their tactic of ignoring endings or grammar rules apparently in order to get to the core of what is said or written before losing the thread partly contributes  to this attitude. However, it hasn’t escaped my attention that it is those who refuse to have their bubble burst that insist on their version. Perhaps I am stretching it a bit, but could it reveal something about their personality? “I won’t have reality spoil my universe. I have toiled too much to have it crumbled by anyone”

I can go along with that. We all have our ways of making reality less intolerable than it is or looks.

 

*I have cross-checked the mix-ups and had them confirmed by the students.

 

 

Dyslexic learners and writing: some suggestions

 

Over the years I have been amassing hands-on experience on the challenges dyslexic people are faced with when trying to compose a piece of writing which could at least satisfy the requirements of English language qualification exams.

I have tried some techniques which can help learners become more aware of the problems in their writing and provide some clues as to how to deal with them. I will go into those types of activities after I explain the premise on which I have built them.

For a long time now I’ve had the chance to observe and record dyslexic learners’ behaviour in class – especially their method of getting round the painful task of ploughing through a long sentence to make sense of it. My theory is that dyslexics go for the whole rather than the parts. In other words, they will try to decode a word based on the first few letters/sounds and test and retest their reading of it in the given context. At the sentence level, they rely more on key words rather than a word-to-word approach. This saves them the time and pain of a rigorous reading and potentially secures a better result. The same applies to the comprehension of a whole text.

However, in order to write, you normally have to follow the reverse process, in other words to think of which ideas to include, sequence them somehow and go on to flesh them out into sentences and ideally into a flowing script. And this is where the problems start since they have to follow a way of thinking and organisation which they are not familiar with and, if anything, they have meticulously struggled to circumvent.

Here are some suggestions about how to approach the task at hand. At the sentence level I choose a paragraph from a text that corresponds to the learner’s level of English and break down every sentence to single words which I then mix. I proceed to explain that they have to find the verb or verbs and potential subjects if there are more nouns or pronouns than the number of verbs, which is often the case (objects, adjuncts etc). I ask them to write down the verb(s) and the noun(s) and/or pronoun(s) that go with them on different lines of their notebook so that they can test another noun or pronoun if they don’t make sense. Then I get them to ask “what” or “who” in order to locate the object if there is one. Once they have sorted out those clusters of meaning they can get started on finding the adjectives qualifying the nouns of the sentence –again if there are any, and after doing so they can move on to the determiners (a/n, some, the, this etc) and put them before the right noun. I realise that this may leave out adjuncts or misplace determiners but at this stage I decide that they needn’t worry about small details as those aspects of grammar need to be looked at separately – perhaps once the learner has made some progress in untangling the basic clusters of meaning in a sentence.

Concerning the organisation of their ideas, I vary my methods. Some learners may be able to think of and arrange their ideas in an acceptable way. Others may have trouble doing so. In the latter case, I interfere by asking questions which will elicit some kind of continuity in their writing. Everything depends on the format of their writing and the topic. There are no hard-and-fast rules. Indeed each dyslexic learner is unique and so are the problems they come up against.

However, one tested method, which yields satisfactory results is to ask the learner to write down everything that comes to mind on the topic and then pick out what is strictly relevant to the topic and arrange the bits into paragraphs.

There are more aspects of writing that I work on separately such as punctuation, coordination and subordination. Those deserve a detailed analysis in their own right so I will elaborate on them in the immediate future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dyslexic students: challenges they face and how they can be circumvented

 

I have already discussed issues dyslexic students have with learning a foreign language. My experience tells me that all the special provisions various course writers claim they make in their books are not always to the point or, to put it in a different way, they do not deal with some serious difficulties dyslexic students face. An example is the inclusion of exercises in most workbooks where the students are required to underline the correct answer between two or three. Normally the two answers are italicised presumably to highlight them. I am not sure whether dyslexia experts or course writers or anyone in the ESL world are aware of the fact that some dyslexic students cannot tell italics from upright. When I first realised this, I was truly shocked. Imagine how many times a teacher (myself included) has asked students to do the impossible or has assessed them on the basis of their choices when really they had no inkling of what they had to choose between. One of my young dyslexic students pretended not to understand what was required of her in the exercise as she knew I would read out the sentences so she would know what the words in italics were. Another student of mine keeps asking me in disbelief whether I can see the italics apparently hoping for an answer in the negative!

Let me come to the issue of language exams. I will focus on what allowances the Cambridge exam makers for officially diagnosed dyslexic candidates. The main concession Cambridge makes is allowing extra time (25%). I will contest the effectiveness of this by dwelling on the difficulties inherent in dyslexia. Cambridge exams, like most other language exams, have a duration of about 4 or 5 hours depending on the level. Extending the exam time for dyslexic students is pointless for two main reasons. To begin with, dyslexic students become cloudy-headed if they have spent a long time trying to concentrate on a task. Therefore, extended time is not going to prove useful or yield any better results. Secondly, dyslexic people are not slow thinkers. On the contrary, in my experience their problem is trying and testing an amazing number of possible readings of a word they stumble upon without always getting it right. They fast forward several times per second considering and reconsidering plausible interpretations of the exam input.  This is exactly what eventually leads to fatigue or the inability to complete a test.

My suggestion is that dyslexic students should be given a shorter version of paper 1 and paper 3 (Use of English and Reading Comprehension) as well as Part 4 (Listening Test). You can still assess people’s ability if you test them on two shorter texts rather than three long ones – this is simply a suggestion, exam makers can figure out a reasonable length of input and number of questions. The same goes for listening comprehension. Again it is the volume of what they have to process that they find intimidating.

Regarding the writing paper, I feel that writing a paragraph rather than a longer text would allow them to focus on the essence and would dramatically minimise mistakes and inaccuracies resulting from trying to pull together all different strands into a harmonious composition. Dyslexic students have enough challenges on their plate as it is. What I mean is that organisation is one major stumbling block so demanding them to produce a minimum number of words when they can still communicate their thoughts and ideas in less space does not sound fair to me.

In a nutshell, adapt the exam content and format to dyslexic students’ needs rather than extending time on a test which is not planned around their needs.

 

Paintings and their stimulating role in teaching and learning: An Afterthought

 

In previous posts I have illustrated how we can use paintings – famous or lesser known – to build lessons around them. This time I will use two paintings of the same artist to show what we can make of each one of them.

The artist is Guy Rose, an American impressionist born in the late nineteenth century.

The first painting we will be looking at is called The Difficult Reply.

We can begin by asking the students to describe their immediate reaction to the image. What do they find striking? Is there a detail that caught their eye at a first glance? What is it?

It could be the flowery patterns on the young woman’s dress, the curtains and the carpet or the way the colours of the carpet blend in with the green fields outside. Or it could be the meditative mood of the girl. Or what about the bow on her thick ebony hair? Whatever it is, ask them to write a couple of sentences to explain why they noticed this detail first.

Following that, draw the students’ attention to the title of the painting and get them to write down some questions regarding the letter she is writing and her living circumstances.

• ·       Who is she writing to?
• ·       What question was she asked that she finds hard to reply to?
• ·       What is the content of the letter?
• ·       Does she live alone?
• ·       If not, where is the rest of the family?

Whatever the recipient of the letter they came up with, get half of the students to write the letter she received, which prompted the title of the difficult reply. Allow them to work in pairs. The rest of them will write her reply to the letters written by their classmates.

 

The second painting is a landscape, and I am aware that landscapes do not offer much scope for use of language except at higher levels. However, using a painting doesn’t necessarily involve a sophisticated use of descriptive language.

After a brief reference to the poppy field and the wood behind, challenge the students to add one or two items to the image, which will somehow create a dramatic effect. Again working in pairs or groups will allow them to compare notes and come up with a bolder suggestion. They can let their imagination run wild as long as they can justify their answer.

 

 

Reaching out to students' minds

 

As life is drawing to an end, one grows desperate about all the facts one has missed and all the fields of research that one will leave unexplored. But one perforce also grows aware of how unequal one is to the task of reaching definitive answers to fundamental questions which have preoccupied one perhaps for as long as one’s lifetime.

If you search on the internet about how much we understand of the human brain, you will find all kinds of answers which actually fail to get to grips with the real point at issue.

As I have pointed out in an earlier post, my feeling is that we teachers are not invited or encouraged to feed our discoveries to the body of research being conducted into how learners approach learning a foreign language. If science is not empirical, it is nothing. No matter how scientists would interpret teachers’ observations, the fact remains that they should capitalise on those very observations.

I will cite a few examples of observations I have kept a record of and my interpretation of the mistakes. Note the mistakes were mostly made by dyslexic children and they involve a mix-up on several levels—phonological, morphological, semantic.

·       A student was asked to explain the meaning of “I miss you” and he came up with the equivalent of “I hate you” in his mother tongue (Greek).

My interpretation of his answer:

In Greek the word “miss” sounds like the verb μισώ (hate) if you take away the ending (-ω) for first person singular Present Tense. He kept the meaning of “you” which was familiar to him and that’s how he came up with this translation. This is an example of a mother-tongue-interfering mistake and an ingenious deployment of all means available to him.

·       Another dyslexic student was asked what “olives” means and he replied with the equivalent of “we all live” in Greek (όλοι ζούμε). Apparently he broke down the word to two constituent parts “all” and “live”. It is worth noting that in Greek you don’t normally use the pronoun (“we”) before the verb as the verb ending indicates the person and the number, and, needless to say, many students do not bother with the ending –s for the third person singular of Present Simple.

·       Dyslexic students literally hang on the teacher’s words so that they will make sense of what would be an impossible task on paper. This means that some misunderstandings depend on how they break down an utterance into distinct words. Here is an example to illustrate the point:

I asked a student “Is it raining?”, and his perceived hearing was “Is it training?” The sentence made no sense in the context but it never crossed the student’s mind that a neutral “it” could not possibly be training. This didn’t matter to the student as long as he could provide an answer to the question.

Learners, especially young children, have a way of making of words they hear what they will—or should I say, what sounds familiar from their exposure to the foreign language till the encounter with a new word. This time there were several junior students who contributed to the guessing game – with only one being dyslexic.   They had come across the word “imagine” before but none of them seemed to remember it. So the responses I got varied from “magic” to “emoji” and they were based on the hearing of the word. 

 

My conclusion

Although teachers in our majority do not credit dyslexic students with abstract thinking or organising the input of foreign language, we are wrong. They have an amazing ability to structure and restructure the input in order to decode the message, and they hardly ever give up trying till they (or the teacher) have the problem satisfactorily resolved.

Here is one more example of highly abstract thinking by another dyslexic student. He was having trouble understanding a sentence so I asked what “something” means. His answer was the Greek word for “often”. I racked my brains to see the relevance  and eventually all I could gather was that this time the student found some hidden semantic similarity between the two words (“often” and “something”). Let me put it this way absurd as it may sound: “something” is not “everything” while “often” is not “always”. On a high level of abstraction the words are comparable.

 

 

Creative activities out of nothing: Big Heart

 

Students, especially young ones, find it difficult to cope with writing tasks for some very significant reasons. For one, the topic is far too abstract for their age and interests; writing is not their forte in their first language; they can’t relate to the topic; there are no cues to follow. Concretising writing is an indispensable step not just in order to help students along with their writing but more importantly perhaps in order to motivate them.

It doesn’t always require too much preparation or effort on the part of the teacher to achieve the goal of stimulating students’ minds so they can compose a text that will answer the question and fulfil its communicative purpose.

Here is a task to try with your younger students:

Draw a big heart on the board and label it “big heart”. Following this, explain to the children in their mother tongue that they are to draw a heart in their notebooks and put five items in it; the items can be animate or inanimate. After they have done so, ask “why”. So now the children have to form clauses beginning with “because”.

Let us assume that someone has drawn  a silk shawl, a straw hat, a balloon, a dead leaf and their best friend.

Why a balloon?

because I can go places in it/because I can see the earth from high up

An extension of this would be to challenge the children to link as many items in the heart as possible in a story.  If we keep the items we chose above, their text could read:

My friend put on her beautiful silk shawl and I picked my wide-brim straw hat and got into a balloon which lifted into the blue sky and floated over the green and yellow fields. We started drifting down and just before we touched the earth softly a breath of air blew a dead leaf over our heads.