The act of reading is a mysterious one. It goes way beyond decoding words and symbols and attaching meaning to them. It is an act of creation where the individual´s background gets into action and plays a fundamental role while meaning is ascribed. Both the text and the reader become one and so meaning comes into existence.
The act of teaching and learning, in addition, is exactly the same: it happens everywhere and all the time and in different ways according to each person´s background. Therefore, a teacher has to learn to read his or her student´s needs so his or her class can be successful and, most important, productive; consequently, developing reading skills is a wonderful opportunity to achieve this.
This week´s class moves around the usage of technology as tool to enhance reading and writing skills which matched perfectly with what I am doing with my students in the pre-intermediate 3 Social Sciences class. We, as a group, are reading The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. This book moves around Charlie, a fifteen year old high school kid who is considered as a "wallflower" and who is very lonely and quiet. If you want to know more about this great book, please go here: Book Review
Mei-Ya Liang in his article "Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books" published in the internet journal explains three different ways on how to take a literary text (an ebook in this case) -- Read the article here: Liang´s Extensive Reading Activities . Miss Liang goes from how to choose a book for the class, and reading and sharing books to evaluating books. In our case, the selection of the book was done in a different and more direct way, basically based on the fact that I had already chosen the movie to be seen and analyzed in class. Then, one of the students said that she had just finished reading it and that it was a good book so by general consensus, the whole class agreed on reading the book first and then watching the movie to be ready for a graded oral presentation. Going back to Mei-Ya Liang´s article, she provides a link to how to create story maps, which definitely I am going to use.
So putting into practice what we have learned so far, I created this ABCD Objective for a class lesson based on both activities: (Condition) After reading the book and having watched the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower, (Audience) the students from ESP Pre-Intermediate 3 Social Sciences (Background)are going to deliver an oral report based on the field of study (law, psychology, Spanish philology, sociology, social work, and music)(Degree)from 5 to 8 minutes with 85-90 percent accuracy in pronunciation and subject-verb agreement as well as verb tense usage without reading from flashcards or notes.
Finally, in order to develop writing skills, the students are going to write a letter addressed to the rest of the members of the class as if they were Charlie, the main character from the book. To do this, I decided to create a page for that purpose by using Zunal WebQuest. There is no need to mention that I am very excited about this whole project.
Regards from paradise,
Dear Hector,
ReplyDeleteYour posts are so inspiring and have literary value in them. I loved reading all the four. Loved how you used the journey metaphor.
I actually got interested about your class when you mentioned in Nicenet discussion about your plan of making students write a letter being Charlie, and replied to your thread by sharing my experience of making students write letter to Sara being Coleridge.
All the best for the project!
Tahsina
Thank you very much, Tahsina. It is nice and exciting to see that you have done a very similar activity in one of you classes.
DeleteI read your reply to my thread in nicenet and found it very useful and motivating.
Kind regards from paradise,
Héctor.
Dear Hector,
ReplyDeleteYour post is so innteresting and I was really happy to see that we thought of the same thing this week. I also thought of film as a basis for one of my lessons, I imagined that by making a film-based class would attract students more. And I think it is higly true. Once you mentioned it to them, you get a positive feedback from them. I chose to work on Man in Black with my ninth graders. What do you think? Would it work, to go from text to film? I really hope so.
Best wishes,
Alina
Hi dear Alina,
DeleteI am very sure it would work because, in this case, it is a text that has a little bit of everything: humor, action, and.. extraterrestrials! Besides, it is very contemporary to your students plus the actors, Will Smith in this case, are of a great impact on the younger generations. Finally, since some of them are either familiar to the movies or have already watched the movies, they might feel interested in reading the text. I think it is a very wise decision the one you made here.
So, which Men in Black movie are you going to watch in class? 1, 2, or 3?
Kind regards from paradise,
Héctor.
Dear Ventana,
ReplyDeleteIt’s great to go through your post on week 4. Good to know about the ways you are using readings from The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I have not gone through the book but thanks for the link provided on a review of the book. I hope I’ll be b ale to read it soon.
I agree with your appreciation of Mei-Ya Liang’s article and do stress on the point that extensive reading needs to be encouraged at our schools to enhance the overall reading ability of our students. We sometimes tend to limit our students’ reading abilities within the so called reading comprehension exercise of some typical texts. One the other hand extensive reading can provide students with the real charm and pleasure of reading and it can be done is a stress free and informal way. I Bangladesh we have a book reading project run by the World Literature Center (Biswa Shahuttya Kendro) where students are asked to borrow books of their choice and read them in their own pace and time. This program is contributing a lot to the reading habit formation of our young children.
I have also liked the ABCD objectives that you have created for your reading lesson. I think this type of objectives are clear, focused and measurable. However, some ideas of how the objectives are going to be measured would have made this discussion even more informative.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, ideas and practices and I hope I will be benefitted from this wonderful post.
Thanking you.
Md Zulfeqar Haider
Hi Zulfeqar... thanks for stopping by and reading my ideas. I really liked your comment "we sometimes tend to limit our students´reading abilities within the so called reading comprehension exercise of some typical texts. On the other hand, extensive reading can provide students with the real charm and pleasure of reading and it can be done is a stress free and informal way." In fact, I am very interested on that reading project sponsored, I think, by the World Literature Center. Is it only in Bangladesh or is it all over the world? I would like to start doing something like that here at the university where I work.
DeleteKind regards,
Héctor.
Dear Ventana,
ReplyDeleteWarm Greetings!
I have gone through your blog and found it is very informative too. I like very much "All Learners have different intelligence i.e. Multiple Intelligence. If we able to recognize our student intelligence and teach them accordingly, it will be very effective learning and teaching.
Thank you!
With Regards,
Mukti
Hi Mukti,
DeleteThanks for stopping by and reading my blog. I completely agree with you when you say that "it will be very effective learning and teaching" if we, as educators, could be able to recognize our students´ intelligence in order to teach them accordingly. That, my friend, would be the perfect educational scenario.
Kind regards from paradise,
Héctor.