German diary: some exciting findings!

Following Sandy’s  suggestion I started using Menrise as well. It is basically similar to Duolingo in many ways, especially because it uses a translation approach to learning.

I reckon that using Duolingo and Menrise to learn vocabulary won’t hurt and it has been proven useful. I started recognizing more words I encounter, but not as quick as I wished for. The translation approach doesn’t bug me at all but I don’t believe  that one learns to communicate without using the language in real and meaningful interactions. So far, the apps serve to help me notice aspects of grammar and learn vocabulary. I’m not able though to use them productively except for some formulaic language like Sehr gut! Das it gut! or sentences like Ich bin glücklich. Ich heiße Rose. Few of them comes to mind but not without giving some thought.

STORIES

One of the things I like doing is reading or listening to audiobooks. I think stories are powerful to aid language learning and I’d love to be able to read stories in German like I do in English. By learning vocabulary with the apps above and reading children’s story, I believe that grammar will fall into place.

Today, I discovered two wonderful authors. Philipp Winterberg writes children’s book, bilingual editions of English-German and André Klein wrote a great series of books called Learn German through storytelling. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks like a wonderful approach.

Wow! I wish this kind of material was available in English for my learners. Is there any out there? I better delve into storytelling. My skills in that area is still a bit timid.

By Philipp Winterberg

 

 

Here is the link to the book Café in Berlin.

I found this post really useful: How to get the German-English dictionary in your Kindle app.

I ❤ internet! This is amazing channel! There are videos with English and German subtitles – Bilingual edition.

And this is how I found this channel! 😉 🙂

I ❤ ❤ ❤ how close we can get to authors and follow their publications through Twitter, Facebook and their websites.

Choosing, Reading, Sharing! ER so to speak!

Week 1: Introducing graded readers and how to choose them

Evaluating level: focus on comprehension

The text I chose for this diagnostic stage was a comic story (9 pages long with 610 running words – nice version of a famous comic book for older children/young teens in Brazil. Using Lextutor I checked the frequency of vocabulary. I selected the NGSL. As this comic is not graded, we will find a variety of grammar points present in the syllabus and formulaic language.

The first 1000 most frequent vocabulary makes up 85.57% of the text, then the second and third count for the other 7.54%. More than 90% of the text are among the 2,8001 most used words. Only 2 words are from the New Academic Word List and 15 are not found in any of the previous list.

The instruction was pretty simple: Time it! While you are reading it, do not stop to look up the words in a dictionary and please do mark the words that you don’t know or don’t remember. And carry on reading! The aim is to read and focus on the story.

After everyone had marked the time and the words. I asked them to put the text away and write on their notebooks what they remembered from the story. For higher levels, they had to do it in English and for lower levels in Portuguese. The aim was to write down as much as they could about what they remembered and therefore, how much they had really understood of it. It was retelling the story time.

As they finished writting down the story from memory, they came to my desk, one by one, and we discussed how long they took to read it and what words they marked (I took notes of everything). This time was a great time because we discussed vocabulary and what they found most difficult in the text and also possible reasons why. As we reflected together, they became more conscious of what they knew already and what they still needed to learn in order to fully enjoy texts like that. For higher levels, I asked questions and raised their awareness of clues from the pictures and context that could help them make sense of the very few words they didn’t know. And for lower levels, we discussed dictionary and tools, and reading to learn as opposing to reading for pleasure. One can ignore what one doesn’t know, but if there are many words not known, one won’t be able to enjoy it or get the meaning without support.

I roughly knew the results from each one of them (time and number of words), but LEARNERS need to see that for themselves, so I never assume that they will know what to do. That is why dialogue is so important. We get to hear and discuss their assumptions, difficulties and so on. They usually don’t know how many estrategies there are out there, and the teacher as a more competent learner and user of the language becomes the mediator between them and their goal in order for them to progress towards a more autonomous attitude. They learn how to become better learners.

With a better sense of what they knew and what they didn’t, off we went to choose the readers.

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Week 2: Reading and Sharing

It is normal for teachers to feel apprehensive and become control freaks especially because school adms and parents will want some sort of proof of the learners language learning progress. Even if we want to hand over to students the responsabilities for their own learning, especially when they are teens, there is still the need to have some sort of instrument that will guide them to success. The tasks I chose to assign was not a form of controlling them, but to hand over the responsability as they needed to complete each stage of the project, they needed something to look forward to. So from knowing what a graded reader was, to choosing a story that they felt they would enjoy reading considering the linguistic aspect and having the choice to put down and change to a new one if they didn’t like the story were all part of the view I have that students as less competent readers should be guided as well as given enough space to make their own decisions. Because life is made up of tasks that we have to accomplish and goals we have to meet. Whether we choose those goals for ourselves or not, they are still part of our lives. And as such, they should know what is expected of them as co-participants of this process so they can be responsible for the accompliment as well.

Instruction they received with the book:

Divide the story into four parts as you think it is best. Each week read one part (Enjoy it!), and as you did in class with the Uncontrollable Angel, close the book, write down as much as you can remember, then read it again and compare. It’s up to you how many times you wish to read the story. Next week, you will share your story with the group. Instead of reading one book, we all have a chance to read as many stories as the number of students we have in class. If you are a beginner student, you will be allowed to read aloud what you have written. Others can use the book and pictures within the book to help them activate their memory.

As far as I understand about ER, that is the opposite what pure ER preaches. So what I proposed might not be pure ER, but the main core principles are still there: EASY and ENJOYABLE.

http://erfoundation.org/ERF_Guide.pdf

Writing down and retelling the story to the group were just supplementaring the reading experience. The focus was still on the story all the way through. The goal was experimenting reading in a language other than their own. Writing down served as a supporting tool for the oral stage. The sharing time which was mandatory for 4 weeks in a row was not an end in itself as I could acknowledge by what students responded in the questionnaires a week after the reading project had ended. My overall feeling was that writing and sharing made the act of reading meaningful as they were reading in order to share the story and their reactions to it. Everyone had a different story to share, so it was also something unexpected every week. And each one of them became a central part in each meeting as everyone’s presence mattered.

The fact that I was the one to say what was expected of them in the first week did not make their participation less important in any way. As planned, we sat in the following week in our multimedia room comfortably in our cushions and I took the lead as everyone seemed shy to do it for the first time, and shared part of my story. In each group, the first meeting to share was basically the same. Once everyone shared their stories, they reflected on the experience and suggestions were made as well as problems raised.

Looking at Extensive Reading through TALO and TAVI lenses

For a definition of TALO AND TAVI, read Geoff Jordan’s post.

For those interested in learning more about Extensive Reading, I recommend reading A Community of Readers: Interviews with Extensive Reading Scholars and Practioners.

I had the wonderful opportunity to join ELT Reading Materials Design course last September with Marcos Benevides and iTDi community. Actually I had been in contact with Marcos since the beginning of 2014. I used Attama-ii multiple path stories to improve learners’ vocabulary knowledge and introduce multiple-path stories to them, so I had pretty much a good idea of what the course would be like and it was: amazing!

Looking from the perspective of learning, we often think of what to focus on when preparing lessons that involve texts by considering primarily vocabulary and grammar. It is true though that whatever text we choose to use with our learners, there will be words/chunks or grammar that they will struggle with. Prepare a lesson that takes everyone’s knowledge into account in a group and predict their needs would be very difficult, so I guess usually classes tend to favor top-down process instead of bottom-up. That is, using strategies to overcome what they don’t know by focusing on what they know.

“Bottom-up processing is not thought to be a very efficient way to approach a text initially, and is often contrasted with top-down processing, which is thought to be more efficient.” Teaching English Website

 However, using top-down approach alone is not efficient either if the text has more than 95% unknown words. Read Unknown Vocabulary Density and Comprehension (Marcella Hu Hsueh-Chao and Paulo Nation, 2000)

Buying the idea that reading for pleasure, at the right level and allowing learners to choose the reader would be much more beneficial for my learners than working with texts I choose in class, I decided to give extensive reading a try. Before I reflect on the positive impact it had on my learners and how I introduced it to them, I’ll use Geoff’s post on TAVI and TALO: Reading and ELT to take a closer look at the reading project but from a different lens. I actually have already done it in the comments.

Point 1. The principles underlying the selection of texts

Texts are usually chosen as a pretext for learning grammar and vocabulary. I believe this is done that way because it is hard to find a text that suits everyone or even a subject that everyone is willing to talk about. Because of that, I tried last semester with my groups that were not using coursebooks a different approach to reading: extensive reading.
Students chose their own books according to their interests and levels.

Point 2: Preparatory activities for the reading of text

There was no need to prepare activities. Apart from preparing them to chose their own readers using a comic book, we measured the number of words they did not know and I talk to each learner about the results and checked how much they really comprehended the story.

Point 3: Work with text

Learners were responsible for reading and understanding the text. They were advised to change the reader if they found that reading was not really enjoyable, of if they didn’t like the story or if they found more than 2/3 words they didn’t know per page. No one actually felt the need to change the stories they were reading. Even though some had to do more of bottom-up than others. They had the choice but liked their stories so much that didn’t mind walking the extra mile.

Point 4: The type of teaching/learning interaction involved

Although some advocate that all they need is reading, my learners and I sat and decided together what kind of things we could do in other for everyone to share their stories with the group in the following week. We also took the time to assess the interactions and the skills involved, never the language. They did most of the work. I just mediated the sessions or stepped in to provoke them to think about something further or to give positive and negative reasons and weigh them.

Point 5: Follow-up activities to the reading of the text

I totally agree that TAVI is more beneficial at this point. Sharing stories is something that we do on daily basis. So my learners shared their stories and instead of each one reading one book, we came in contact with many stories in 5 weeks of reading and sharing.