Building the Writing Habit

Harmer Jeremy pointed out a number of engaging and effective activities focused on building the writing habit. Here, I’d like to list the ideas I will definitely use with my EAL learners and I also want to add a few more activities I find interesting for this purpose (they are in cursive).

a. Sentence-Writing

- Dictating sentence for completion, this activity is also called Half Dictation: the teacher starts a sentence and learners are supposed to complete it.

- A Postcard from Somewhere: first learners fill in a small questionnaire (they name a country, an animal, a place, an adjective and so on) and after that their answers are pasted into the prepared in advance text of the letter. As a result, learners have a lot of fun (“I went to the zoo to see the rare and round Chinese cat. It was tasty!”)

- Creative writing prompts (the weirdest dream you've had; imagine you're a chef... what type of restaurant would you open and why?)

b. Using Music

- Words (write word associations while listening to music)

- Film scores (describe a film scene while listening to music)

c. Using Pictures

- Describing pictures/photos

- Suspect and objects (each learner describes a random picture, than all pictures are mixed and peers are to guess a picture by reading descriptions)

- Write the postcard (based on the picture)

- Portraits (write a letter to the person on the portrait, write day in life)

- Stories (write a story about the picture)

d. Writing Poems

- Acrostic poems (first letters of each line form a word)

- Model poems (using the same poetic forms, models)

- Poems with rhymes (each learner makes sentences ending with a certain word; these words rhyme with each other)

e. Collaborative Writing

- Writing a story sentence by sentence

- Dictogloss (write the text after listening to it)

- First lines, last lines (story writing is provoked by giving first line/last line)

- Story circle (each learner writes a sentence on the top of a sheet of paper, than folds it so that the next writer can’t read it and passes it to the next learner, who writes the second sentence of the story. )

- The story circle may be combined with “Dictating sentence for completion”. For example, the teacher may start each sentence and learners are to finish it with their ideas (Last Thursday…; But suddenly …; It turned out that …)

f. Writing in Groups and Pairs

- Pen pals, emails, live chats (interacting with native speakers or English learners all over the world)

- Learners may also choose some forums (interesting for the) or social network groups and participate in discussions there.

Teaching Reading: What, Why and How

We all know that “reading plays an important role in life. So what stands behind this phrase for adult EAL learners? Reading skills give EAL learners access to endless information encoded in written English texts and documents. And the master of the information is the master of the situation. So for adult EAL learners reading is not just one of four language modalities to be improved, it is the way to survive and to integrate successfully into Canadian society.

In order to make a reading lesson effective and meaningful the teacher should answer the following questions: what to read? why to read this? and how to read this?

What… The process of selecting reading texts should be focused on learners needs. The teacher should think about types of texts learners might need to read outside the classroom; learners’ language level and prior knowledge; learners’ interests, etc.

Why… There are dozens of reasons for reading in our life: from getting information to interacting with others, from reading for knowledge to reading for pleasure. In the EAL classroom the teacher should always know the answer to the question “Why do learners need to read this text?”, because it is a key to arousing learners’ motivation. In other words, adult learner will do only those things they find meaningful and applicable. For example, a class of newcomers will prefer reading job postings, while EAP learners will choose scientific articles.

How… Reading skills should not be limited by bottom-up reading. The teacher’s task is to show learners various ways of getting main ideas of texts. Learners should be taught not just to read, but to read fluently and to comprehend. For this purpose the EAL instructor should integrate pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading activities into reading lessons.

Pre-reading activities activate learners’ prior knowledge and allow to pre-teach vocabulary and concepts. Among pre-reading activities I’d like to point out brain-storming and mind-mapping. I think this stage must be active and noisy and somehow engage all learners. A lot of EAL games can be used to pre-teach vocabulary or to revise grammatical structures. Students in small groups can make presentations of “movie trailers”. The teacher can even organize “suggestions auction” and learners can “bid” this or that hypothesis related to the text.

While-reading activities allow learners to practice top-down reading strategies and improve their comprehending skills. By the way, the majority of tasks in the Reading section of IELTS test are based on while-reading strategies. Examples of while-reading activities may include: choosing a title for each passage, completing various charts and diagrams while reading, deciding whether the statement is true or false, filling in various forms and questionnaires, etc.

During post-reading activities learners can apply their critical thinking skills and analyze the information they have just received. The teacher can organize debates, can invite a guest speaker related to topics discussed in the text, learners may recollect main facts as a group, learners may reproduce the text from somebody’s point of view (for example, if the text was a medication specification, learners my act a role play between a pharmacist and a customer), etc.

Types of knowledge that learners use to make sense of a text

According to Hedge there are 6 types of knowledge that allow readers to guess the meanings of unknown words in the text. I find this idea quite interesting, so I have decided to check if it is really so and if it is applicable to the real life. 

In the lesson notes to Module 4 we were suggested to have a look at 2 websites in foreign languages (Czech (www.zvedavec.org) and Greek (www.agelioforos.gr). And it was really amazing to see yourself what complete beginners feel when they are asked to read a text.

I know neither Greek nor Czech. I am not familiar with the Greek alphabet, so it is impossible for me even to read a text. Czech is a Slavic language, so as a Russian-speaker I can understand meanings of a few words. Besides grammar rules of the Czech language are a bit similar to Russian, so sometimes I can identify syntactic functions of unknown words. That is why to maintain the experimental integrity I decided to add one more language: Finnish (www.hs.fi). I do not know it either and it is not close to any language I know, but at least its script is familiar to me.

So let’s have a look at Czech, Finnish and Greek news websites in the light of Hedge’s theory of 6 types of knowledge.

Type of knowledge	Definition	Czech (script is familiar, some prior knowledge of grammar and vocabulary)	Finnish (script is familiar, no prior knowledge of grammar and vocabulary)	Greek (script is not familiar, no prior knowledge of grammar and vocabulary)
Syntactic knowledge	The knowledge of grammatical relations of words within a sentence that allows a reader to guess a possible part of speech of the unknown word	“Láska k národu” Noun (subject) + preposition + noun (object)	-	-
Morphological knowledge	The knowledge of morphological rules and laws of morphological parsing that allows to identify a semantic field.	“a pomocí” “ na pomoc” Different grammatical cases of 1 word	-	-
General world knowledge	Extralinguistic knowledge that allows a reader to guess the meaning relying on his personal experience and intuition	My general knowledge of news websites structure allows me to understand, that “sobota” is Saturday and “únor” is February	My general knowledge of news websites structure allows me to understand, that “uutiset” is news	My general knowledge of news websites structure allows me to understand, that “Σάββατο” is Saturday and “Φεβρουαρίου” is February
Sociocultural knowledge	Knowledge of social and cultural peculiarities	The section “Zábava” contains the following subsections: Anekdoty, Humor, Kultura. Relying on my sociocultural knowledge I may assume that “Zábava” means entertainment.	-	-
Topic knowledge	The knowledge of a text theme may allow a reader to make suggestions concerning unknown words	-	-	-
Genre knowledge	The knowledge of a text genre may allow a reader to make suggestions concerning general ideas of what the text is about	Top texts on news websites are usually about political or economic issues	Top texts on news websites are usually about political or economic issues	Top texts on news websites are usually about political or economic issues

So, these 6 types of knowledge really work when you have some prior knowledge of a foreign language. In this case you can apply both systemic knowledge (# 1, 2) and schematic knowledge (# 3, 4, 5, 6). But when you are not familiar with a foreign language at all (and it doesn’t actually matter if you know its script or not), these 6 types of knowledge will not help you to read and understand texts. May be to some degree you can rely on the schematic knowledge, but just to identify some single elements, but not the general idea of the text.