Tag / language learning

by Cila Warncke

Seven Lessons from the School Year

My full-time teaching year has just wrapped for the summer. After the hectic, emotional final weeks and days, it is time to pause and take stock.

This was my second year as World Literature and English Language teacher at Le Sallay Academy. In my previous life, as a music journalist, we bandied the phrase ‘difficult second album’. Nobody mentioned there would be a ‘difficult second year’ in teaching. Now I know.

We should embrace the difficult, Rilke advised. He is right.

Part of the difficulty of the year was my egotistical/oblivious assumption that everything would run on tracks — after all, I’d done it before. That made some things easier, sure. But nowhere near everything.

Each year, each class, each assignment, each student is a new opportunity and learning curve. Rather than expect (naively) to rewind and press play, it is better to figure out what works in broad terms, and use that as a springboard for the next fresh start.

Because I’m a geek and like mnemonics, I boiled down seven key lessons from the past school year into the word ACCLAIM — something all teachers want (right?). And all students deserve.

Adapt

I like planning, making lists, ticking things off. When preparing lessons, I get a kick out of an orderly progression. What feels like orderly progression to me, though, can seem incomprehensible or plain boring to my students. One of the important things I learned this year was that to be effective meant to adapt. Sometimes, this meant tossing out a whole assignment; sometimes it meant an in-class pivot when an activity sank like undercooked souffle; sometimes it meant adding materials or exercises to ensure an individual student had what they needed to succeed.

One example of an individual adaptation that benefited the whole class was when student said they were struggling to follow the plot of All Quiet on the Western Front. This alerted me that the dense, gun-smoke swirl of memories that carry the reader from the battlefield to the intimate reaches of Paul’s life were a lot for a less-experienced reader to follow, so I created a chapter by chapter summary/study guide that included plot points, key characters and vocabulary lists. By reading the summary in advance of the chapter, students were able to track the main events of the novel, learn vocab and better understand the narrative arc.

Challenge

Adapt works both ways: sometimes it is appropriate to summarize and simplify; sometimes, students need to be challenged. Doing this right, means they should be at the edge of — or just beyond — their comfort zone, but in a situation where they have tools to address the task.

For example, my sixth grade students learned what Shakespearean sonnets are, then wrote them. This challenge worked because we defined everything: iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme, volta, etc. Once they understood how a sonnet was constructed, we read humorous contemporary examples that showed how the form, however strict, could be applied to any topic. Then we worked through each student draft together, line by line, counting syllables, testing rhymes, reinforcing by repetition while also having fun.

Co-create

Students are only going to be participants in their learning if they are allowed to participate. For me, this means letting go of my ideas about perfectly formatted assignments and visually pleasing presentations and letting students co-create with me, and with each other.

Midway through the year we trialled collaborative Google Slides presentations, where students contributed their efforts to a single presentation. Initially, I created the presentation and turned them loose on it. By the end of the year, they were setting up the joint presentations themselves.

For final writing projects, there was a co-creation element, as students were given the option of choosing a set question or pitching their own big idea. Most students choose to come up with their own topics, with me as a consultant to ensure their ideas were appropriate to the scope of work.

Link

One of the things I love best about teaching literature is tracking ideas, themes and debates across epochs and regions. Without this connectivity, literature would just be words on a page — who cares? Only by helping students identify and explore the links can they truly appreciate the scope and magic of the written word. This is critically important at the ages I teach: 11-15. Kids are teetering towards independence, trying to understand the world they find themselves a part of; they haven’t yet claimed their literary heritage. So it is imperative to make explicit connections they might not see otherwise: historical, economic, social, topical.

For instance, when studying Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, my students read Jeanette Winterson’s essay, ‘Love(lace) Actually’ which links Shelley with pioneering machine-maker Ada Lovelace with Alan Turing, and Frankenstein’s monster with modern technology. We also dipped into The Heart of Darkness for another example of a frame narrative, establishing thematic and stylistic links to anchor the text in broader conversations. Also, I introduced Romanticism by showing them Meatloaf’s ‘I Would Do Anything for Love’ video. Let’s just say, there were no new Meatloaf fans after that. Maybe you have to be a child of the 80s to dig that OTT?

Aim

Have a target. Make sure students know what it is and how to hit it.

This is a work in progress for me, but I can confidently say that classes run more smoothly when everyone knows what we’re doing and why. Sometimes the why might sound arbitrary, e.g. we’re reading this book because it is a great example of X (notwithstanding all the other perfectly good literary examples) but even so, it is worthwhile to articulate the class aims and repeat as needed.

As a student, I hated fuzzy assignments or vague grading standards. How do you know what you’re supposed to be doing if the aim is undefined?

As a teacher, I want to protect my students from that frustration, and myself from their excuses (‘but I didn’t understand…’). Clear, concise goal setting, including deadlines, frees up everyone’s brain space to focus on what matters. For example, each classes final writing project was scheduled, broken down into steps with individual deadlines and students were given the rubric and grading standards in advance. (This might sound over-prescriptive, but middle school is where structure needs to happen so students can break free of it in secondary and further education.) Obviously, how (and to what extent) students hit the aims varied, but they had a clear, fair, impartial structure to work within.

Iterate

My expectation that year two would be easy was based, in part, on the assumption that I could wholesale reuse materials and texts from the previous year. That was lazy thinking.

This year was better was when I rejigged, or even started from scratch. Though working with the same broad themes and literary time periods, there was massive opportunity to iterate and improve. For example, instead of using Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling as a main text, I selected a handful of stories and wove them into reading Grace Lin’s stunning novel When the Sea Turned to Silver, which weaves Chinese folklore into a zesty YA adventure story. My students were far more immersed in the novel than the would have been in the stories alone, and they were able to see the link between Songling’s 18th century work and contemporary Chinese writing and traditions.

Model

This year, I’ve been more open about my geekiness, quicker to say how crazy in love I am with an author or text. Do my students think I’m weird, or maybe should get out more? Possibly. But they also seem to respect my passion for literature and language, even if they don’t understand or share it.

To me, this is what modelling is all about. How can I persuade students to love words, or to push themselves on an assignment, if my example is meh?

If I want students to be excited about books, I need to be excited about books. If I want them to take risks, I have to take risks. If I want them to make and learn from mistakes, I need to make and learn from mistakes. If I want them to discover joy, I need to embody the joy that awaits discovery.

The vast importance of modelling hit me when I realized that I remember a mere handful of books I read prior to high school graduation: To Kill a Mockingbird in 9th grade, The Odyssey and something by Shakespeare in 12th grade. That is it. And I love literature and lived for those classes. So, realistically, even my most engaged students will remember between one and zero of the books they are assigned.

What I do remember about literature classes? My teachers and how damn much they cared about words and writing, and how those models encouraged me to believe these were things to cherish and celebrate.

That’s what I want for my students. Any year I succeed in communicating that will be a good year.

What are some of the key things you learned this year, as a teacher? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

On Reading Aloud to Older Students

Reading aloud is like breast feeding: everyone agrees it is vital for the very young, but past a certain age it gets side-eye.

There is ample research on how reading aloud supports early literacy (Wiseman, 2010; Lennox, 2013, etc.).

What about reading to older students though?

Should story-time, like nursing, be confined to the earliest stages of life, or should it continue beyond the point kids can autonomously digest texts?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

If primary function of reading aloud is to support literacy, research shows that reading to older learners “boosts their reading comprehension, increases their vocabularies, and helps them become better writers. In fact, students who are read to are more motivated to read themselves” (Blessing, 2005).

Zehr (2010) reported that, “teachers found by trial and error that reading aloud worked for adding interesting content or making literature come alive for students. And some educators say they read to their classes to model good reading, such as by asking comprehension questions as they go along.”

It is always gratifying when research supports my predilections, but I’ve been reading to older students — including adult learners — for as long as I’ve been teaching. Partly, it’s a failure of imagination: I loved being read to, cannot imagine anyone disliking it.

To be clear: my childhood pleasure in hearing books aloud had nothing to do with lack of independent reading skills. I could read by age four and would compete with myself to see how many pages I could read in a day. My record was 1,000. It was a 1,000 pages of the Paddington Bear series — not War and Peace — but the point is I read like a my life depended on it.

The pleasure of being read to was something else. Books I could (and did) read myself were still a joy to hear being read by my older sister, or one of my parents. We also tuned in to read-aloud radio programs, memorably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Jeeves and Wooster.

***

What makes reading aloud so marvelous? And why should it be part of every literature and language teacher’s repertoire?

To get another perspective, I interviewed Andie Yellott, a lifetime English teacher, former Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Writing Program supervisor and parent of a child with dyslexia.

  1. Should reading aloud be continued beyond reading competence?
    Yes. Absolutely. When my son was in fourth grade, I would go in for one hour during lunchtime and read to his class. It was the highlight of the week, they told me. They loved it. They always wanted one more chapter.
  2. How did reading aloud support your son with dyslexia?
    He could not have gotten through school without me reading to him. I read everything, even the godawful high school health book. One of the advantages to reading aloud is you can stop and springboard off into other paths, other conversations, which you wouldn’t do if the kid was reading alone. And if you want a kid to do well on a standardized test, read, read, read.
  3. How did reading to your dyslexic son facilitate his communicative abilities?
    He’s got a huge vocabulary. I’d read to him, stop, ask what a word meant, try to figure it out contextually. Reading aloud to him made a difference. He thought he couldn’t write; now, he’s one of the best writers I know.

Like Yellott, I’ve had lots of student enthusiasm for reading aloud. It is more than just fun, though. Reading aloud supports specific skills, depending on whether the teacher or learner is reading aloud. Here are six benefits observed in my classrooms.

Photo by Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Teacher-led Reading

Improve pronunciation

Native and non-native speakers alike struggle with the whimsy of English pronunciation. In extreme cases, this can lead to students understanding spoken words but not being able to identify them in print, or vice versa. Reading aloud while students follow along in a text is a straightforward way to ensure that kids are matching the right groupings of letters to the sounds they hear. This is especially important for those who struggle with reading and/or are learning English as an additional language.

Build vocabulary

When students are reading independently it is difficult to gauge how well they comprehend individual words. Students may grasp the main idea of a text but miss important vocabulary. As Yellott said, reading aloud is an opportunity to identify and define unfamiliar words in context. While reading to my students, I pause frequently to check comprehension. If they don’t know a word, we search for context clues, then look up the definition to verify our deduction. This is also a great opportunity to reinforce knowledge of parts of speech, e.g. ‘this is the noun fly; what does it mean when we use it as a verb?’

Create community

Reading is too often solitary and functional, the vegetable kids have to eat before dessert. We need to remember: independently reading printed texts is a novelty. For most of homo sapiens‘ time on the planet, stories were oral. People gathered around fires, or beneath fearfully and wonderfully made cathedral ceilings, to listen to a bard/priest/storyteller. Being read to was the only way most people could experience books until the advent of mass public education, which wasn’t all that long ago.

Reading aloud in the classroom reclaims the power of the story to articulate fears, hopes and desires; to delve and reveal. Students who have a chance to respond verbally to a book: express how they feel, ask clarification questions and debate it with their peers, are axiomatically more engaged than those who skim it in lonely silence.

Learner-led Reading

Correct decoding errors

Even competent readers often make decoding errors such as ‘stared’ for ‘started’. If a student is reading silently, there is no chance to identify and correct these slips that, as they accumulate, affect comprehension. Younger and/or less able readers are more likely to make these mistakes, so reading aloud is an ideal tool to support their literacy.

Understand punctuation

If Emily Dickenson was right and “a word is dead./When it is said” then spare a thought for punctuation. Students can learn the function of commas, colons, etc. through direct instruction but that doesn’t automatically translate to competent — much less creative — usage in their writing. One of the best (only?) ways to understand the delicious possibilities of punctuation is to read aloud. By treating the punctuation as a kind of score — lift the voice here, pause, slow down, shout! — students develop the ear for punctuation that every good writer must have.

Improve verbal fluency and confidence

We tend to think of fluency in the context of learning an additional language, but it isn’t just language learners who need to practice this skill. Learning difficulties, lack of a richly verbal home life and shyness are a few of the reasons native speakers may struggle to express themselves fluently in their language. For students who struggle to articulate, whether because they are acquiring the language or for some other reason, reading aloud takes the pressure off of deciding what to say, and allows them to focus on how to say. Reading well-written texts gives students a chance to see how successful communication sounds; they can practice pronunciation, enunciation and tone without the risk of error. Ideally, they can inhabit the voice of the text and, in bringing it to life, experience the possibilities of their own voice.

Parting thought

In Sense and Sensibility the ‘sensible’ (i.e. sensitive) sister Marianne falls in love with Willoughby in part because “he read with all the sensibility and spirit” his rival lacked. In Jane Austen’s time, to read aloud well and fluently was a mark of refinement and good taste. As our world becomes more digitized, text-driven and fragmented, reading aloud is due a renaissance. Anyone can jab out a text; to read a book with eloquence and feeling, though? That’s magic.

How do you feel about reading aloud to older students? What benefits/challenges have you observed? Share in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke