Fourth day of July class (How to teach reading and writing)

The second weekend on Sunday is the fourth day of class. When the class starts I give every student a paper with twelve squares on it and in each square is a symbol. I have the students draw a picture inside each square using the symbol in their picture. After they all finish I pair them up and have them talk about the picture they drew. As they are doing that I write on the board what each of the squares represent.

explanation of what each means

I then stop them from talking and explain that this is a psychology test and have them write the squares meaning in the square and then I put them in groups of 4 to discuss what they drew more. After a few minutes I talk about how I use this in an ESL classroom and it stimulates conversation. I emphasize that a conversation classroom should have a lot of conversation. Everyone enjoys this exercise and then we are ready to talk about how to teach reading, writing, idioms, pronunciation, and how to give tests. I then joke that I sometimes have the girl I date do this exercise, which isn't really true. This exercise comes from a fun book called Recipes for Tired Teachers.

After the class does this they are excited to learn more about how to use games and activities to teach English as a Second Language. On this day we start with looking at how to teach reading to ESL students. During my college days I took a class on teaching reading. One of the things I remember about that class was when the teacher talked about oral reading. He asked the question of why we have oral reading, one student reading to the rest of the class while the rest of the class follows along in their book. We looked at each other, we had never thought about it before because that is the way we always did things in class. We do oral reading so we know the students are paying attention and really reading.

We do oral reading so we can assess if the students can read the book. The teacher reminded us about how we feel if we struggle with the reading. He reminded us how when one person is reading some of us read ahead, some of us day dream, and some of us joke about the person reading. He said we shouldn't have oral reading in Elementary school. I teach my students that are future ESL teachers not to have their students do oral reading. I have them read a paragraph as we usually do in classrooms one person at a time. I then point out the things that my college teacher told us. I then have them read in the classroom in a different way.

I have them read the same paragraph in pairs. One person reading one sentence and the other reading the next. Then alternating through the whole paragraph. If this is a conversation ESL class I want to maximize the amount of speaking each student does in the classroom. This way of reading helps each student speak as much as possible in class. As the students read to each other the teacher goes around and helps each one as they read with pronunciation and comprehension. Then we talk about using newspapers in the classroom. I ask people who have lived in other countries if they have seen newspapers that are written in English in those countries. Most countries have English language newspapers and I always recommend to use that as reading material because it is more relative to student's lives.

My daughter teaching a class

Then we move onto writing. I have all my students listen very closely to me, I make it very dramatic. I tell them, as I look into all their eyes, NEVER TEACH A WRITING CLASS! I say it again and explain that when you teach a writing class you do more work outside the class than inside the class because you have to grade all the papers. Remember the high school English teachers would always have stacks of papers to grade behind their desk? Why would you submit yourself to such torture? Now that I have that out of the way I teach how to teach writing since we all have to do it even if we don't want to. It is hard to correct ESL writing because we don't know what they want to say. We don't know the tense they want to use when they are using several tenses in once sentence and one paragraph.

I introduce a book I ran across many years ago called 26 Steps. I have used it for over 20 years, but have never met another teacher that has even heard of it. I like using this book because it guides the students into making the changes in their writing step by step. It starts easy where they change a to an, then more difficult where they are changing genders, then it gets more difficult until the last step they are rewriting the entire passage. This is a way where the students can improve their writing and I can work with each one of them individually. I tell them I also have my students write a journal, but not more than 3 sentences a day and I correct it at the end of each week.

I also go over idioms and different ways to introduce them. I tell my students they need to have their students memorize idioms just like they memorize vocabulary words. Then we talk about how to teach pronunciation and it is often done with a mirror more than a recorder. ESL students need to see what they are doing wrong, because they can't always hear a difference between the sounds.
In the afternoon students teach their own 15 minute lesson and today they presented games they learned.