A Teacher's thoughts :
Teaching Reading in English

NOTE June 5, 2004: This page will soon be supplemented/updated by forthcoming pages detailing research about ESL Reading Pedagogy. The following informal thoughts, opinions and info about teaching reading in English (first posted in 1997) were culled from email correspondence with Deni Harding, an experienced community college ESL instructor. They are similar to the kind of chatting that takes place in teachers' lounges all over the world, and are intended to be useful but not authoritative. The topics of Silent Way and teaching reading flow seamlessly into one another, so the last paragraph of the Silent Way discussion is the first paragraph of the discussion on teaching reading.

I use a set of wall charts called Words in Color, developed by Caleb Gattegno, late founder of SW. He wanted to create a universal color code so that all languages could be read within the set of colors he assigned to sounds. (He did it, by the way. His Sound-Color charts exist for many of the world's languages. When you know that white is "ah" as in honest, you can read that sound in any language, regardless of the letters or pictograms that encode it.) I know this sounds complex. But the fact is, the letter A has eleven discreet sounds in American English, and the other vowels nearly as many. Seeing these sounds as eleven different colors actually helps students hear and then produce them. It doesn't take a class long to internalize this and thereafter read laugh or plaid, was, swamp, about, village, any, all, far, care, war, and late with those eleven distinctions. Broadly speaking, this part of SW is centered on phonics. Of course, learning to read a color, say white, for the A sounds in laugh and plaid, or a blue A for any or many may confuse students who are not going to meet colors in black-and-white print. Well,at least in the SW classroom they can make the connection. I find it easier to work on decoding skills this way.

Tim Nall wrote:
....my layman's untrained def of "decoding skills" would kinda involve more understanding the text, as opposed to being able to pronounce the text. Am I mistaken?

This is six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-the-other: He pares two pairs of pears, for example, is a decoding puzzle. In order to understand, the word has to be pronounced and then understood within a context which can change the meaning of the word. I think Chinese is similar to this, too, but not so bound up in word order determining meaning as English is.

Idea: Give your students scrambled sentences to return to logical order as a reading task. They can be sentences based on those in the book you are using. Start with short Subject-Verb-Object sentences, then add some prepositional phrases and article-adjective-noun phrases. Watch out for "embedded questions" : I don't know where the frying pan is.

Reading is much more than decoding, though. I use a lot of choral reading, no dictionaries allowed. We read in phrases, pronouncing new words many, many times. We make both Yes-No and Information questions for each other from the sentences in the stories or articles. We look at context clues, affixes (prefixes, suffixes), both prose and non-prose readings of many different lengths. An excellent book for this is Reader's Choice , second edition, Baudoin, et. al., University of Michigan Press.

Your students are still at the decoding stage, and they probably rely way too much on translation, natural in your environment. I suggest a book of simple folk tales, or just remembering the stories you know from childhood, typing them up double-spaced, and presenting them. They lend themselves to pantomime (shades of TPR!), which is a lot of fun and focuses the student on the here-and-now instead of on the dictionary. I just used such a story called "The Stingy Old Woman", for which I used 5" x 8" cue cards with one vocabulary word per card, written large and in color. (In addition to being pretty, color is actually an aid to memory, drawing both hemispheres of the brain together. ) As I told the story, I held up each card as I did the action it described, or I drew in stick figures what I needed them to understand. The SW part of this is that, by the time we reached the end of the story, they had picked up so many elements verbally that they were the ones who were actually telling the story (it was cumulative; most folk tales repeat things that way). Then, when I passed out the written version, they just gobbled it up, not a dictionary in sight. The advantage to having a class of students who all speak the same language is that you can anticipate the problems they are going to have. In our classes, we have to know what problems the Vietnamese speakers will have and how they are similar or different from those a Spanish speaker will have. So, we do a lot of work on non-linguistic, cognitive meta-skills: looking at the layout of a reading and determining things about it that do not focus on decoding. Inference is one skill that all languages have in common. Also, responding to a reading is useful to help master the content of what has been read. My colleague requires reading journals and outside reading from ESL-edited books that students check out of the library. The response journals ask for the students' opinions about the story or article. As journal entries accumulate, the teacher comments on the comprehensibility of the entries, asking questions like "Do you mean _______ or ______?" if there has been a confusion of terms, or "Why do you feel this way?" about a certain response. Also, the teacher adds vignettes of her own experience as she responds to the students' responses.

So, here are some titles:

http://www.delta-systems.com sells "Heinemann New Wave Readers" in five levels. "Heinemann Guided Readers", not an ESL series, uses audio-cassette read-along techniques. Personally, I think that's a valuable thing, but students tend to fall asleep unless the teacher or aide breaks into the listening and asks for the student to retell what they just heard in their own words.

Also from Delta: Here's something else that's interesting, and new: Word Patterning by Marcia Weinstein, Ph.D. The catalog description says: "The program consists of 15 tightly structured steps that lead to the mastery of more than 80% of the written language. The two concepts basic to this method are: the attack focuses on a prior determination of the vowel sounds, rather than attacking a word from its initial sound; and the need to determine that pattern will key the word." Of course, this might just not wash at all, since it looks like a resource rather than a textbook for a course. The "Write" Way to Read, also by Weinstein, PhD., looks good too. It's phonics based with sentence dictation included.

Longman (U.S., not England) has a series of graded readers, too. I don't know the web site, but here's our Longman rep's e-mail: Michael Miner I'm sure he'd be happy to refer you to where these graded readers can be found.

I'm using the term "reader" loosely. These are not anthologies, but small pamphlet-like books, paper-bound, that sell for under $5.00 each. It doesn't take much to build a small library: a couple of copies of several titles within the several levels. Then, students check one out for a week, write a response after they read a chapter (short chapters), then return the book and turn in their response to you for your response. Of course, you would have to read the books eventually, but you can rely on them to tell you the story as part of their response, sort of a summary thing. However, retelling the story should not be the only response they make. They should ask questions, tell what scenes or parts of the plot remind them of in their own lives, play with new words, tell what they think of the characters, stuff that they won't like to show you because it won't feel culturally right for them to do that. You're not asking them for rote responses -- GASP! -- but for thinking ones. While looking these resources up, I came across one I'd also like to try: The Multicultural Workshop Box ($223.00) by Linda Lonon Blanton and Linda Lee, Heinle & Heinle publisher. There's a Singapore office: itplowe@singnet.com.sg This looks like it will help students in our ESL and Reading Labs who need short, individualized readings -- it contains 2 copies each of 100 readings. I trust this author, having used one of her texts in a writing course.

Tim Nall wrote:
...I have a question...would it be useful for my limited English students to keypal with yours? Perhaps they'd just trade mistakes...I don't really know, what do you think?

I think keypals are good at any level. My students would be shy, of course, and would write just rudimentary messages at first. But we are in the business of enabling them to use the computer, so any responses they get from your students would be well worth their time. Also, students tend to be more careful about grammar etc. when they know they are going to be read by a stranger.

Check out publishers on the Net. They all have their own sites. Try Heinle & Heinle for a vast range of usable books. Oxford is good, too. Also Prentice-Hall, Longman, Newbury House.

Tim nall wrote:
I give frequent vocab. and prefix/suffix quizzes (including matching, multiple choice, and fill in the blank questions.

These are all good. Reading includes knowing how to follow different kinds of exercise and test directions.

Tim nall wrote:
... and sometimes I make them attempt to generate their own sentences, which is generally a disastrous practice.

This is where the term "verbatim translation" takes on new meaning.... Seriously, reading and writing go hand-in-hand. They can't really be separated -- the way speaking can be -- from each other in the language acquisiition process. They extend and reinforce one another. If you learn to write about what you read, it will encourage you to read more. If you write for a partner about what you read, or think, or do, it generates more thinking. This is one reason why I think E-mail is good at any level. A new "audience" motivates the writer to write for being read.

Textual content copyright 1997,2004 Deni Johnson Harding