October 12, 2006

When we are reading to ELL students, remember the following points...

* Choose texts with a strong picture/print relationshipà story with good picture
* Choose texts slightly over their English proficiency level
* Set a purpose for reading
* Use gestures and voice changes to support meaning
* Read slowly to allow students to digest
* Point to the pictures to support meaning while reading
* Spent time discussing vocabulary in the context of the story
* Spend time discussing cultural features of the story holidays, foods, ceremonies, roles of parents and children etc.
* Focus on multiple meaning words
* Focus on idioms
* Allow student questions and encourage student comments
* Encourage retelling, focusing on personal experience
* Writing is a good time to review letter sounds
* Determine reading level: often lower than grade level
* Allow students time to connect personally to the text topic
* Take time to do a picture walk of the text talking about all the vocabulary and preparing the student for particular phrases and patterns that will appear in the text

When we are going through these points (above), it brought memories of my own experience of learning Norwegian when I was high school student. I moved to Norway and lived there for about 2 years. Though majority of Norwegian speak English fluently, Norwegian is their official language that is widely spoken. So it was a must for me to acquire Norwegian to go to school and live in the community. One of many challenges I had in acquiring Norwegian language was building vocabularies and learning sentence structures. I went to a language school, which was provided by the Norwegian government for free for foreigners, three times a week for nearly six months. For the first two months or so, they introduced Norwegian languages through reading children’s books, which aimed to help us build Norwegian vocabularies and sentence structures. First I thought it was so childish to read those books to learn a new language, but I came to appreciate children’s books in building up Norwegian vocabularies and sentence structures through matching pictures and words together. What I took out from my experience of learning a new language was that it is perfectly ok to make mistakes as long as we persistently make efforts to learn.

October 11, 2006

A Quick Way to Assess Accuracy
(Tow Handed Running Record)
1) Mark 100 words in a level text
2) As the child reads put your finger down each time the child makes an error
3) If you use 5 fingers—5 errors in 100, the text is easy (95-100% accuracy)
4) If you use your other five fingers—10 errors in 100, (the text is instructional 90-95% accuracy)
5) If you run out of fingers, the text is too difficult (below 90% accuracy)

Self-Reflection:
What did I notice? Did the errors make sense? Did the error begin with the right letter, but make no sense?

Can the child tell you what the story was about?

Did the reader read fluently? This means smoothly and fairly quickly, so the reading sounded like talk. Did the reader attend to punctuation and use inflection that suggests that he or she was making sense? After reading, ask students some comprehension questions.

Example from the handout:
What did Cam do instead of copying her homework?
Why did Cam smile when Jason said, “You didn’t copy the homework”?
Why did Cam tell Jason how many polka dots were on his shirt pocket?


Next Step: Considering the child’s use of Meaning Semantic, Structure Syntax and Visual Graphophonic in light of the reading process, which requires using just enough of each source of information to accurately interpret the author’s message.

Final Step: Making teaching decisions based upon the reader’s needs as determined by analysis.

Retelling of story: ask student to retell what the story is about without seeing the book.

***Don’t teach kids “skip and go on” reading skill.***
Skipping Words from (http://homepage.mac.com/yukishj/.Public/GR-STRAT%20Reunion/Skipping%20words.doc)
A strategy encouraged by teachers.

Some teachers try to train children to miss out problem words in their reading and go to the end of the line or sentence in order to complete the meaning and so solve the word. Yet research (and day-to-day observation) shows that despite this training, young children at the acquisition stage spontaneously return to the beginning of a line or sentence to solve their problem. One can guess at the reason. The syntax or structure of the sentence, which establishes the relationships between words, is frequently destroyed or changed if words are omitted. Syntax, as we saw in the error analysis above, is one source of information, which supports early reading behavior. Teachers often demand that children try to read ahead lo~ before they have the competence to benefit from this tactic; it works well with competent readers, and it could work when children are reading familiar words in new stories. However, if the child's inclination is to return to line or sentence beginning and catch up some more information to solve' the troublesome word, it is doubtful whether we should insist that he adopt the more artificial strategy of reading on.
Clay, M. (1991). Becoming Literate:The Construction of Inner Control. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, p. 302

October 5th, 2006

(1)Think back to your earliest memory of reading in school, and describe it. How old were you? Was it a happy experience, an anxious one, an upsetting one? Did you already know your alphabet, how to sound out letters, how to read words and sentences.

I started learning Japanese alphabets at the age four at a kindergarten I attended. I remember vividly how intense it was to learn Japanese alphabets. Modern Japanese is written with a mixture of hiragana and katakana, plus kanji. Modern Japanese texts may also include rōmaji, (Roman letters), the standard way of writing Japanese with the Latin alphabet, eimoji (English script), non-Japanese words written in their own script and various symbols known as kigō. (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_romaji.htm)
For Japanese to learn alphabets is much more complex than learning English. By the age six, all students are expected to know hiragana & katakana alphabets (90 alhpabets) and some kanji characters. My reading experiences were always to do with memoriazing as much aplhabets as possible before entering elementray school. I had reratively happy experiences learning alphabets because it was incorporated through reading books. Knowing alphabets in Japan is a must have skill in order to survive thus there were certain pressure to perform well in process of learning and expectation by teachers. At elementary school, we were required to learn at least 40 kanji characters (Chinese chracters) each week and we were tested on them every week. Come to think of what kept me lerning despite all the expectations that were set by teachers and schools, was encouragements and acknowledgements on my progress by my parents.


(2)Have you ever felt like just giving up on learning something? What was it? What made you feel like giving up?

English is not my first language and there were countless times that I felt like giving up on learning English. I cannot recall what exactly made me feel so, though sometimes I wonder to myself “why am I studying all these things in English, not in Japanese?” or “If I studied this in Japanese, it would make a lot more sense.”, etc.

(3) When you were a young child, what made you feel smart, and why?
When I was child, complements on my progress by my parents (both my mom and dad) made me feel so smart and always happy. They just acknowledge everything I did; regardless it was not directly to do with school study. I participated anything and everything I was interested in doing, such as student government, student club activities, community activities, sports, music, etc, and my parents acknowledge my curiosity. On top of that, I felt so good learning and studying. I think learning led me to raise self-confidence in myself and my own learning ability.
My goal in learning was not mainly on performance, but how much efforts I put into in learning.

October 4, 2006

We need to assess each child whether they can identify and pronounce SH, TH, CH sounds. So, how do we do this? Look for opportunity to look for these SH, TH, CH sounds.
We also need to set goals for each child which may be different depending on levels of literacy. This explains why we need to have awareness of development of phonology.

We discussed how we pick a book to read for children/students. How do we prepare for any book? Is there any specific guideline that we need to take into consideration when we choose which books to read? Beside all the detail guidelines such as readability, age appropriateness, content, relevance to child’s life, comprehension levels, the key is to bring child back to books.
Also, we got to hear some reflections form one of the reading buddies and her experiences with being six students. Some of the stories were eye-opening that gave me more insights on how my experience may going to be.

September 27, 2006 (Tuesday)

Well, according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I'm "ENFJ" which breaks down to as follows:

E (Extraversion): people who prefer Extraversion tend to focus on the outer world & things
N (Intuition): people who prefer intuition tend to focus on the future, with a view toward patterns and possibilities
F (Feeling): prefer feeling tend to base their decisions primarily on values and on subjective evaluation of person-centered concerns
J (Judging): tend to like a planned and organized approach to life and prefer to have things settled.

So the whole description of "ENFJ" is as follows:
"Warm, empathetic, responsive, and responsible. Highly attuned to the emotions, needs, & motivations of others. Find potential in everyone, want to help others fulfill their potential. May act as catalysts for individual and group growth. Loyal, responsible to praise and criticism. Sociable, facilitate others in a group, and provide inspiring leadership."

Well, I am not necessarily agree with all of these description. Somewhat true and fit into my personality while other may not be ‘me’. For instance, one of the goals in participating in this TCEdZone was to be able to “see potential in every child that I encounter.” So of course, when I saw the description above, it kind of convinced me that this might be completely and absolutely correct. But then again, I am not so “extravert” person; in fact I thought I was more of “introvert”. But I guess as the result indicates E (14) I (7) that I am definitely an extravert personality. Very interesting!!

9/26/2006 Teachers College EdZone-Reading Buddy 2nd Day

Yesterday was our first day for TCEdZone Reading Zone.
I am very excited being a part of Reading Buddy, Teachers College EdZone.
I learned that I am “ENFJ” by taking the MBTI test yesterday. According to the Multiple Intelligence Assessment, I am “Word & Music & Self-smart & people-smart”.