Teaching Reading in ESL Classrooms

 I love reading, and the love of reading is something that I have also instilled in my children.  They were only babies when we started to read to them, and it was an enjoyable family experience.  However, our ESL learners may have very different experiences of reading.  The classroom which I volunteer in is a beginner literacy class.  Most of the learners did not go beyond grade 6 in the first language education, and for many, reading for pleasure has not been a part of their life.  So, teaching students to read must have a very practical application.  Task-based learning, as opposed to skills-based learning is much more engaging, and gives them useful skills to apply in their day to day living.  This can be everything from reading restaurant menus and grocery bills, to reading reports for a job. 

So, how do we proceed?  Obviously along with reading goes the teaching of vocabulary, so each lesson plan must have a vocabulary focused activity to allow the learners to understand what they are reading.  But teaching vocabulary does not mean just giving students the definitions of words. There are a variety of methods to teach vocabulary (BBC Learning English 2017). Trying to stimulate their prior knowledge and allow guessing from the context of the word will connect and engage the students and make meaningful connections with the words. Using pictures or realia for beginner students is often a must, and allows for quicker learning, especially for visual learners. Miming of words and scenarios are also useful methods.  Games for engaging students are great activities, such as bingo, matching games, story games or anything that helps them learn and apply the words (Salah, 2018).  

Students need to be able to use reading strategies to be efficient readers, and it important to teach these strategies and skills (Brown and Lee 2015, pp. 400-413; Pesce, C., n.d.).  Help students to recognize patterns in reading, and looks for chunks of words.  Teach students to look for word families which will help them to decipher new words from root words that they know, with a little bit of guessing, and looking at the context of the word. Ensure students use grammar knowledge to help understand what the word does in the sentence. Teach students to look for discourse markers to define relationships. Use semantic mapping for learners to make sense of the reading. Teach skimming and scanning techniques for students to get an overall sense of what’s in the text.  Using both bottom up (the fine details of reading) and top down (the overall picture) approaches help students to really grasp all aspects of reading, and leads to better reading comprehension.  It’s also very important for learners to see the purpose of reading the text.  This can be exposed through pre-reading discussion, and engaging the students prior knowledge.  Using their prior knowledge, allows them to build on that knowledge, which is a very important aspect of adult learning.  

Post reading strategies help students to apply their new vocabulary, and test their reading comprehension.  These can be many things from games, to paraphrasing, to writing and summarizing the reading, or just discussions of the reading. 

What do learners want to read?  This is an important question.  As mentioned task-based learning is very important to allow immediate application of their reading skills, but learners must also be engaged.  This requires that we know our learners.  What are their backgrounds? What do they need to know? What do they want to know? Needs assessments will give us some clues.  In beginner classes, there are so many relevant topics, it’s often hard to pick one.  In a class of 20-something English for academic purposes (EAL) the topics will be very different than in a class of literacy students.  

Just as we teach or children to associate reading with a fun and useful experience, we must also instill this in our learners.  It’s important not just for them, but also for their children! 

References: 

BBC Learning English (2017) The Teachers' Room: Introducing new vocabulary. Retrieved from:      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iKfb5nDgdU

Pesce, C. (n.d.)  7 Reading Strategies Your ESL Students Must Know. Busy Teacher. Retrieved from https://busyteacher.org/15985-7-must-know-reading-strategies-esl-students.html

Salah, T. (2018) Top 5 Games! How to teach vocabulary to kids & adults.  Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH7FR4Qx1Ec

Adapting an email for reading in several classroom contexts

Adapting reading material for classrooms is often much better than starting from scratch as it can save time and resources.  There are three main things to consider when selecting material: suitability (ensuring it fits the context of the class you are teaching in interest and appropriateness), exploitability (can it be used alongside other teaching and integrated with other concepts), and readability (does it fit with the level of reading in your class) (Brown and Lee 2015, p. 441).  If all of these criteria are not met, we have to consider adapting the text.  

Consider the text from “Reading Skills Practice: Foreign Exchange Emails – Exercises” (Reading Skills Practice, 2015).  This text seems like around a CLB 6/7 from my estimation.  It is an email exchange between young exchange students (assuming high school level).  How might we adapt this text for different class levels and contexts? 

1)    A LINC level 4 class with mature students? 

Adaptation requires changing both the reading level to make it easier for this high beginner level from the intermediate level.  The sentences need to be simplified by changing the more complex sentences to smaller sentences. The vocabulary needs to be simplified to more common words (eg. ‘nationalities’ to ‘other countries’, ‘ancient’ to ‘old’), and change some of the slang words like ‘loads of’ to ‘many’.  The reading could also be shortened a bit. 

Adaptation also requires changing the situation of the people to make it more relatable to mature ESL students.  Instead of having teenagers in an exchange program, it could be a letter to a friend from a mature person on an extended holiday in Canada taking private English lessons. Or an ESL student in Canada writing to a former ESL classmate who has moved to a different part of Canada.  It’s relatively easy to change the name of places, and situations, and some experiences.

LINC level 4 Adaptation: 

Hi Fran, 

How are you doing? How is Toronto? Are you having fun on your holiday? How are your English lessons? 

Simon

Hi Simon,

Sorry I haven’t written. I am doing fine.  I am very busy with new friends and learning English.  I speak English all the time with some friends I have met. They are teaching me about their own languages and countries too. 

I am staying with my son and daughter-in-law.   They are Susan and Paul.  Their children are Lewis and Amy, and they go to primary school. I watched the movie Frozen with them many times. I know all the songs from the movie now. It is helping my English.

We live very near to my English teacher and I can walk there.  I can take the bus to many shops and cafes in the city center.  Next week we have a trip to the zoo.  There is a festival on now.  It is so much fun for the children. 

I will send some photos of my family next time.  Tell me how you are doing. 

Fran

2)    A group of international students in an EAP setting? 

This group of learners have a higher reading level (possible CLB 8/9 equivalent), and therefore would require more complex language and grammar.  At this level, more slang and idioms could be incorporated into the text.  Different verb tenses could also be incorporated. Most of the text is in the present tense, so more past and future tenses could be used. 

Although this group of learners may easily relate to the context of the email (foreign student exchange), there may also be some older learners in the group.  A more general context of a friend emailing another friend about an extended holiday or about a business trip to a conference would also be a scenario that might appeal to a broader spectrum of learners.  

3)    Teaching in a school that uses a learning management system (LMS)? 

It would be useful to place the text on the LMS, especially if it is a distance course.  Copyright laws in Canada for education fall under the Fair Dealing Guidelines (CMEC 2016) and allow ‘single copy of a short excerpt from a copyright- protected work’ and must properly reference the source of the material and the author.  For online materials ‘copyright law permits teachers and students to access publicly available Internet materials in the process of teaching and learning’.  Also under this law, online material can be used but not if it has been prohibited for use in educational material by the owner. 

Some material shared using Creative Commons licenses (Creative Commons, n.d.) will have different levels of use, with some allowing use with modifications, others not allowing modifications, others not allowing commercial use.  So if you want to modify or adapt the text, you may have to get permission to do so.  

4)    If this text were too difficult for your learners, but is mandatory reading in the curriculum? 

When the text is considered too difficult for learners, there are some steps that could be taken to make it easier.  Preparation of the learners prior to reading (pre-reading) becomes much more important.  There may be much vocabulary that needs to be taught in a few different sessions to allow the learners to become more comfortable with the words. This would include the slang words and idioms.  A series of pictures could be used to accompany the vocabulary. Different exercises would be created to scaffold the learning using vocabulary, phrases and shorter sentences taken from the reading so that it has been seen by the learners already.  Instead of reading the whole text, learners could just read one paragraph at a time, to ensure they are comfortable with it before going on to the next one.  

Summary:

This exercise has used an email as a very useful reading tool that can be easily adapted for a variety of contexts and levels.  There are many more very useful and authentic materials that can be used in the classroom and adapted for reading exercises.  Just think about what we read each day: grocery receipts, store flyers, newspapers (online of off), food labels, forms, manuals, recipes, etc.  The list is endless.  All of these materials are very useful and adaptable for teaching, and often very relatable to our learners.  But we must ensure that they are well integrated into our lessons and relevant to our learners.  

References: 

British Council. (2015). Foreign exchange emails-exercises. British Council. Retrieved 

from http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/skills/reading-skills-practice/foreign-exchange-emails

Brown, D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language 

pedagogy (Rev. 4th Ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Creative Commons (n.d.) Creative Commons Licenses. Retrieved from 

https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/cc-licenses/

 CMEC (2016) Copyright, Fair Dealing, and the Classroom: 

What Teachers Can and Cannot Do. Council of Ministers of Education Canada. Retrieved from https://cmec.ca/docs/copyright/CopyrightFairDealingClassroom_EN.pdf

Reading: Breaking it down for ESL

Here are some aspects of reading that must be considered in an ESL classroom:

Reading skills have two major components: linguistic knowledge (formal schema) and knowledge of the world (content schema) (Brown and Lee 2015). The linguistic knowledge is more obvious, but our own knowledge that we bring to our reading is just as or even more important.  So everyone's perspective when they read something is very different.  There is a literal interpretation, but our own interpretation will depend on our own background knowledge.  Something to really keep in mind when teaching.  People from different cultures may have very different knowledge sets.  

Language also has a 'distance' characteristic, meaning it can move through time and through distance (Brown and Lee 2015).  Something else that I was aware of, but I never really thought about much.  We can read what was written centuries ago, and we can send the writing almost anywhere in our digital world.  But the context when we read it will change.  Reading something written centuries ago, has a very different meaning for the reader now, than it did when written. Someone reading a text in Britain may take a different meaning from it than in Canada. 

The written word is often very different from the spoken.  The written word is often more formal, and uses longer clauses and more subordination.  Whereas the spoken word has shorter clauses and uses the conjunctive more often (Brown and Lee 2015).  Our receptive vocabulary (reading and listening) is often much smaller than our productive vocabulary (writing and speaking) (TalkingEnglish.com 2005).  There are also a huge range of types of written genres that we can use in the ESL classroom such as memos, signs, maps, fictional stories, menus and the list goes on and on.  Just think of how many written things you read each day.  Authentic materials are best for learning such as music, poetry, ads, magazines (ONTESOL 2013), and there’s so much variety to choose from.  We just have to make sure it’s at the appropriate level.  

Comprehension must be considered when choosing material for reading.  The difference between 80% and 98% is huge, even though the numbers aren’t.  At 80% a reader at best can get the gist of what is being said, compared to 98% where only a few words are unknown and can be predicted from the context (McCulloch 2016).  So if your students don’t know the vocabulary before they read, comprehension can be limited. But don’t teach all the vocabulary before reading (ONTESOL 2013).  Students must learn to think critically while reading, and predict and infer and decipher meaning from the context.  

Having students read aloud in class may seem like a good thing, but it can distract the students from actually reading for comprehension, because they are focusing more on pronunciation (ONTESOL 2013). This may be particularly true from beginner level learners where they are learning correct pronunciation. For good reading comprehension, it’s best to introduce the theme, garner some interest in the topic, and set the mood for positive reading time.  

All these and many more are important for a good reading experience for our ESL learners. 

Brown, D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by Principles. Chapter 17, pp. 389-400

McCullough, G. (2016). What 80% Comprehension Feels Like. Retrieved from https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/155043761501/what-80-comprehension-feels-like

ONTESOL (2013) TESOL Teaching Reading Skills.  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBslJMq4LAg

Talking English.com (2005) English Vocabulary. Retrieved from https://www.talkenglish.com/vocabulary/english-vocabulary.aspx

The True Assessment of Listening and Speaking

Assessment is a dreaded word in many English classes.  Many students fear they will not do well, and it will reflect badly on them.  But as teachers we must recognize that assessment is a necessary process to help students recognize what they have learned and the progress they are making, but also for us to learn what the needs of our students are.  Listening and speaking assessments are as important as reading and writing assessments. 

Listening (Berry 2016) and speaking (O’Sullivan 2017) skills should reflect real life situations, so students become competent in those not-so-perfect situations.  Listening the real world often has background noise, different accents and may be fairly fast. Speaking requires the learner to quickly adapt to the context and content.  We must have a balance between a fair assessment and ensuring students are prepared for real world listening and speaking.

There are a wide variety of settings and tasks that we can use for speaking assessments such as giving personal information, telling a story, comparing things, and all of these can be adapted for different levels of learning (Berry 2016).  Similarly, there are a wide variety of listening tasks that can be evaluated such as identifying main ideas, summarizing, inferring and deducing, and these can be applied in various ways such as audio recordings, live, or video (Sullivan 2017). 

As teachers we must always keep in the back of our minds that we are preparing our students for the real English world, and sometimes this can be overwhelming.  The true ‘assessment’ is whether or not the learner can apply their listening and speaking outside the classroom. How often do we just ‘tune out’ our listening every day?  Do you think it would be much easier if it was a different language?  Of course!  We must encourage our learners to practice their listening and speaking skills all the time!  In the grocery store, listening to the car radio, watching videos and commercials, and speaking to people they meet every day.  Exposure to English outside the classroom and how well the students can listen and speak in everyday life is really the best assessment. Whether they can carry on a conversation with their neighbor, or as for directions to an address will tell them how much they have learned and how much they still have to go.  Learners must understand that when they exit the classroom door, their learning doesn’t stop, but really begins!

Berry, V. (2016) Assessing Listening. British Council.  Retrieved from https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/transcript_assessing_listening.pdf

O’Sullivan, B. (2017).  Assessing speaking. British Council. Retrieved from https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/transcript_assessing_speaking.pdf

Making Listening Count

I recently had my hearing checked because I was worried that it was going a bit as I have become older.  In fact it's fine, and I'll chalk it up to my husband not speaking clearly (although I know it's not always true!).  But it has made me realize how important it is to listen and hear what is being said.  It is so easy to 'hear' something else. So when our ESL learners are listening, what are they actually hearing? Wilson (2008) tells us that listening is an active skill.  This is not really a surprise to me.  I have found that more and more I must be more active in listening.  Otherwise I tend to 'fill in' with predictions too much and get it very wrong!  Prediction is a very necessary part of learning a language.  We learn to fill in what might be expected.  However, for beginner learners who's prediction skills are much lower, active listening is very important.  

The practicality of active listening is that its' sometimes very difficult in a classroom.  Often many distractions can occur and sometimes learners have other issues which detract from active listening in classrooms.  Some are talking to their neighbour, some are reading, some are even sleeping.  And we must also consider that some may have hearing problems.  So active listening can be a challenge! 

One of the points that Wilson (2008) makes is that 'listening then, is an activity that takes place on many levels simultaneously, from recognition of individual phonemes to recognition of patterns of intonation that alert us to irony, sarcasm, anger, delight'.   I think this is very important to think about when we teach.  The student is not just hearing sounds, but is listening to and learning the whole language. Therefore, as teachers it’s very important that we ensure our students listen to all these aspects of language and teach to these points.  Our speaking must sometimes be exaggerated (especially with beginner listeners) so they hear the differences in phonemes, intonation, word stress and pitch.   As a person who is not particularly animated when I speak, it’s important for me to ensure that I try and bring out more intonation and emotion is my speech so students hear and emulate this in their speech. 

Listening strategies and skills are of fundamental importance to ensure that students learn to speak well.  I have a friend who had a basic knowledge of English, but essentially taught herself very advanced English (well enough to teach at a university) by listening to movies and videos and transcribing what she heard.  So we cannot underestimate the importance of good listening skills.  

In ‘How can teachers teach listening’ (TESOL n.d.) the author suggests that learners need to be taught various strategies of proper listening.  These should be a combination of top down (focused on meaning and information) and bottom up (focused on the parts of the sentences, intonation, sounds, etc).  The author also suggests that the students take an active role in their listening learning strategies, and work at applying them, instead of relying on the teacher.  By involving the students in looking for strategies, they are more likely to remember them.  The teacher acts as a facilitator in their learning. Peer learning becomes more important. 

The focus on the importance of the relationship between listening and speaking has helped me to gain an understanding of what students needs are in the classroom, and how to intertwine these skills in the activities in the classroom. 

References: 

TESOL. (n.d.). How can Teachers Teach Listening. Retrieved from http://www.tesol.org/docs/books/bk_ELTD_Listening_004

Wilson, J. J. (2008). How to teach listening (pp. 21-24)