This is a picture of my Portuguese homework, which I'm showing to you as a cautionary tale. If you give a text to your students and it has as much highlighted text in it as mine does, the chances are that they are not really reading the story. They are more likely to have their heads in the dictionary than they will be getting involved in the narrative, questioning the characters motivation or attempting to understand the author's point of view, all things that fiction is supposed to provoke.
When reading becomes solely about vocabulary acquisition, so many opportunities for debate, discussion, engagement and real intellectual stimulation are missed. So do your students a favour and give them texts they will actually enjoy reading. Trust me, I'm telling you this from a student's point of view.
When reading becomes solely about vocabulary acquisition, so many opportunities for debate, discussion, engagement and real intellectual stimulation are missed. So do your students a favour and give them texts they will actually enjoy reading. Trust me, I'm telling you this from a student's point of view.
This certainly is another point in favour of Jez Uden's idea of input -1 for more extensive reading (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/seminars/bc-seminars-jez-uden). Thanks for sharing, James. How many pages was the homework in total?
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you, James, especially because much of what you have highlighted in this text really affects the understanding of it. What's the point? Better to give you a word list, if vocabulary acquisition was the goal - which I'm guessing it wasn't.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading a teacher speaking from a student's perspective. Studying languages sure makes us see some things differently, doesn't it?
Beijo!
Nice article, thanks for the information.
ReplyDeleteHi Gordon, thanks for the comment. The story was 6 pages in total, but I only read the first three before I lost patience and ran out of time. I'm definitely in agreement with the input -1 idea, even if it's difficult to achieve in reality as most students want to read input +3 in my experience. As for me, if I want to actually read and enjoy the story, it's got to be -1.
ReplyDeleteHi Ceci, thanks for your feedback. As you guessed from my highlighted vocabulary, I really didn't have much idea of what was going on and I might as well have had a word list, which of course would have been incredibly dull.
ReplyDeleteI can't tell you how helpful I find it as a teacher to study another language, it's so informative. I'll have to do a few more posts like this!
Hi,
ReplyDeleteHow are you. I am glad to discover your blog through freeeslmaterials.com.
I run englishteachingdaily.com, a portal that offers a summary of latest ELT blog posts from the blogosphere, event updates, articles and more.
This site has been launched on October 7 and in the first 20 days of its launch it received 5500 views,
We would like to reprint your articles on my site. We will give appropriate credit to you for your works and link to your profile and the website.
Kindly have a look at my website at englishteachingdaily.com and let me know if we could work out together.
Thanks,
Tarun Patel
email: tarunjpatel@gmail.com
skype: tarunjpatel
I agree completely. Memories of French homework are the same, struggling to understand, rather than enjoying the text.
ReplyDelete