What keeps me off the street
I am finding retirement to be as busy as working if not more. It's partly because we still have three teens at home and they are all in sports; we live out at the end of a mountain road and there is quite a bit of rough driving and keeping vehicles going.
I am still a writing tutor at Texas Tech and they would like me to keep up a professional front, perhaps studying and presenting at conferences online. But mostly what occupies my time is that, having written a novel and several other books, I've become obsessed with marketing them. And I do that by reading other books.
The setup is simple: I agree to read and/or review someone's book; someone else agrees to read and/or review mine. I choose carefully so that I read a wide variety of things I like. I'm retired, so I should be able to read, right? I'm reading a wide variety of mostly indie books. I'm surprised at what gramatically passes for publishable, but I also realize that not everyone can afford an editor at a decent wage. I could edit myself, having years of proofreading and grammar experience, but I still have books I want to write myself.
The current one that I'm writing revolves arund my great grandmother on my mother's side; she was an elocutionist, and was part of a movement around the turn of the nineteenth century, whereby women wanted to become elocutionists to have a voice in national debates. There was a National Association of Elocutionists, and they met and discussed matters of the day. Elocution was, in general, much more integrated into our education system than it is today. It was, in fact, in its heyday, since the organization had just recently sprung up, soon to be changed into Speech Com, Speech Path, and other fields. My great grandmother was at the cutting edge of the trends, in other words.
Meanwhile I'm reading all this fantasy kind of stuff that in short, makes writing harder. It makes me fall asleep late at night. I have to make a better effort to get the books in front of me more to my liking, less disruptive to my general life setup. Life is busy, what with kids to drive around and a home to maintain - the winter's coming, and the deer and elk all give me the big eyes as they stand by the side of the road wondering if I'm just another hunter.
Labels: personal, reading, writing
Neofunctionalism
I just had another experience which I would assume is common to ESL teachers: you teach an entire semester, and at the end of it, in that busy rush and exchange of e-mails with students, you realize that, as high level as they may be, and focused on whatever the class covered (in this case writing), they still don't know how to write a proper e-mail, or how to address a teacher properly. This infuriates me, because they are often highly competent in their own fields, if not others, and pretty good at English overall. But they can't address a teacher?
My idea is to reorganize all my teaching, all teaching, according to the functional value of things that they need to know. If I had done this, I would have made sure they sent 6-10 e-mails during the term, since being able to send an e-mail to a teacher is far more important than writing a good bibliography. I would have pounded it into them so that every student in that class knew how to write an e-mail. I would have made them address me so often that they would think twice before addressing me the wrong way.
In grammar, a good example is questions. Questions are hard, grammatically; we might put them late in a curriculum and I've seen them overlooked. But, from a functional standpoint, they're essential. I have high-level students who are uncomfortable asking for things. Why? Because they know their grammar may be wrong? Somebody should put questions first in the curriculum. Ram it down their throats. Make sure that, no matter what level they are (above 0), they know how to ask for a bathroom. Especially in an emergency.
In the old days, functionalism meant setting up lessons on ordering in a restaurant, or making a phone call. But I had some students who said, essentially, they never went to a restaurant, period. In a way I'm saying, take the things that are essential; rate them high; organize curricula around them; don't let anyone get far without knowing how to function in a basic way.
In a sense we can see the culture as a big blanket that covers the language. If you have no sense of the culture, the language to some degree won't get you very far. For example, if you don't know how to shake hands, or how to address someone, every interaction gets off to a bad start, and the subtle effects of being outside the culture or being inappropriate tend to overshadow all the good stuff or the human natural tendency to give you a break for being an outsider. In the same way, people who are trying to learn pronunciation are sometimes hampered by the fact that the very way you hold your mouth - its tension, its setting, etc., influences every sound - so that if you are too tense nobody can understand you
no matter how well you make the words...neofunctionalism is my way of saying, if people can't walk out my classroom door and address someone, or ask a question, then maybe I've failed them in a fundamental way and should rethink my priorities. It doesn't matter to me as much if they can't tip at the restaurant, that's further down the list, because my priorities start with the stuff that's most essential for their survival and which should be clear to them, life is
really easier for you if you learn this stuff.
Krashen used to say that basic social interaction, the oral kind, was the foundation of language skills and thus should be taught until it's mastered,
before one attempts reading and then, later, writing. This was what he was after too, the idea that once a student understood and could respond appropriately to the teacher, then serious class-learning of such things as reading could commence,
not before...Today's world is much more writing-oriented, with so much business happening by e-mail, etc. Sometimes I think the best thing I could do with these high-level students (powerhouse readers, adequate writers, clueless listeners) is to separate them into an immersion experience where, when it was over, they could at least ask for help in any area, they thought in English
often, they were used to addressing people; they spoke up
often to get what they need, etc. Concentration on immersion/needs/questions first. If they walk out of your classroom and know how to get stuff, they'll probably be ok.
Labels: krashen, learning theory, personal, reading, ttu, writing
Lost art of reading
As a teacher of American students now, I am in a different position than I used to be. I used to do any trick I could to get my internationals to actually read; we'd find interesting content, and I'd find interesting articles, and I'd test the articles carefully to ensure that they'd actually read them.
Now, however, my primary obligation is to the content itself. Forcing them to actually read the book is possible, but it's not the easiest option, or even the ideal one. Most of them, I suspect, know how to read, but consider it hard work that they'd rather not do. If my test were based entirely upon the reading, they would knuckle down, do it, then grumble at me, I suspect. In other words, they are veterans at getting their teacher to
tell them what they need to know so that they can use their time more effectively, and
not read. I feel to some degree like I've been tricked, or taken for a ride.
You wonder why students don't know the difference between you're/your or their/there/they're. Or seize/cease or a million others. I think it's because they don't
read enough, but they don't read enough because people like me let them back out of it. So why am I allowing it?
Because, in my present position, my obligation is to the content. I want them to
know the stuff. If I had to play games to force them to read it, they would forget it soon after, and we both would lose. Better to just
tell it to them, make it interesting, make it stick in their minds.
I find a direct correlation between the stuff I mention, and the stuff they get right on the tests. The more I mention it, the more they get it. If I leave it to reading, maybe one or two out of twenty gets it. That's a pitiful average. And these are high achievers, good students, generally high-ranking. The lower ones are getting even less. It could be that the good ones shoot for a
familiarity with the text so that when I mention something, they know where to find it. Thus, they develop selective reading skills, and save themselves a lot of work.
I figure this is going on in some form or another all over campus. I am not unique in this regard. Actual mastering a textbook-like big thing is quite difficult. Very few are actually doing it. Some are buying the book, though. Maybe they have plans for the distant future, when they have time.
Labels: reading, ttu
time and the toefl
It has been a while since I gathered my thoughts about this idea, and they have changed since a whole generation of Saudi students has risen up the ranks, struggling mightily with the issue of time. I almost feel like telling them, time is one of the skills, but it's the most important skill, since it is part of all the other three sections (I used to say that about vocabulary, but they can
learn vocabulary).
They've risen to the top of the program; they are fairly good writers, having finally mastered the spelling of five or six thousand words that they need the most, and picking up the western organizational habits by listening carefully and complying willingly to what their teacher says. So they have fairly good skills, and even their reading is not bad, if you give them enough
time to go left to right, pick up every word carefully, and put it together. But alas, this is where it falls apart. They are too slow, too deliberate. And they can't become
faster readers until they are
better readers in terms of pure quantity.
So the question is, when you have fifty questions in fifty five minutes, and a student gets 45, say, on the paper-based, turning into a 450 if all three skills are equal, and you wonder, if you gave him/her five more minutes, or ten, or fifteen, would it make a huge difference? I'm sure it would. I wonder about the other factors: how continuously rushed on the time can cause minds to slip in haste; how stress causes a freeze at crucial times, etc. I'd actually like to see this
tested out, live, with Saudi students. Maybe it has been! I'll do the research. A related question would be: how does this mirror their academic experience, or, in real life, do they actually
have that five or ten more minutes, if they choose to use it?
Labels: reading, toefl
Arequipa, Peru
Leverett, T. (2009, Oct.)
Reading strategies for teachers and students in the new millennium. Workshop, Oct. 5-10, Universidad Catolica de Santa Maria, Arequipa.
This workshop invited teachers from the Arequipa area and concentrated on methods of teaching reading, including ways of using new technology like weblogs and edmodo. We ended up discussing the Extensive Reading philosophy and how to incorporate its philosophy into various kinds of classes. For example, some teachers complained of having classes full of young teens, with very little motivation to read more than a sentence, or remember difficult vocabulary: what to do? Another problem: textbooks with exams lashed onto them, which students find boring or too dull. Can the teacher reach outside of those textbooks? Can the teacher support them and find material to feed into them, thus ensuring that their students do better on the crucial exams?
More on these topics later. If you wish, peruse the links or the edmodo that I set up; I would like to develop this later, soon in fact, but it may be the pinnacle of reading research that I accomplish for the time being.
Labels: bib, internet, personal, reading, twitter
text-to-speech
Lately I've been telling my writing students: If you have trouble reading, get the computer to read it to you. Actually I'm not sure exactly how this works, but I do know it's possible; the blind, for example, do it all the time. I believe that it is a very useful application of computers for several reasons. First, if you have good listening but poor reading, use your good listening to get used to hearing what you read; if you do them both, together, often enough, your reading will improve. Second, often we aren't testing reading alone (I as a writing teacher certainly am not), but it does make a difference, whether you just have a glancing awareness of the main points of an article, vs. whether you have a real understanding of all its main points. For one thing, you can get used to a more academic style of discourse, and you'll be more likely to be able to produce it eventually.
So, for those of you who are willing to give it a try, start here:
Gonzalez, D. (2007, September).
Text-to-Speech Applications Used in EFL Contexts to Enhance Pronunciation. TESL-EJ Online Journal. http://tesl-ej.org/ej42/int.html. Accessed 11-07.
This article is actually for teachers, specifically teachers who want to use text-to-speech with pronunciation classes, but it has a review of text-to-speech software, with links, that will surely get anyone started. Some text-to-speech applications are free, I believe, but I have not actually gotten in there to see how
any of them work.
Then, if you do, please let me know, which one works, which one is good; which is most accessible for students, etc. Somebody wrote in once, and commented, I thought on this very blog, about the subject, but I have been unable to find it.
Labels: cesl, internet, reading
vocabulary project
I thought I'd get down a record of my version of this, a project we in EAP1 did as part of a unit on stress, health, effects of stress on one's life, stress management, etc. We'd gotten to talking of the TOEFL and how stressful it was, and I'd mentioned to them that I'd noticed after years of giving vocabulary quizzes alongside oral presentations, that students' vocabulary scores dipped on days of their own oral presentations.
I was thinking in terms of the fact that whatever words I'd sent them home with, they had to brush up on them before the quiz; that, in many cases, their ability to use short-term memory was therefore upset to some degree by the high stress of the oral presentation. In EAP1 we weren't studying vocabulary discreetly; there was too much to do. Instead, we assumed that they had a high level of reading and were taking care of it themselves. Part of it is this assumption I carry along from my communicative days: that exposure is really enough; that students will figure it out, if given enough exposure and use. I will deal with this hypothesis below. One side of me never quite believed this. Nevertheless, EAP1 is very busy with reading reaction journals, unit exams, article presentations, and a number of other things, so I just hadn't overloaded them with vocabulary quizzes which, by the way, students invariably spend a lot of time studying for, and never complain about their inherent value. I figured it would be a good opportunity to discuss how (and if) they were actually acquiring these words; it would be a good review of the term's concepts; and, we could study if stress actually interfered with short-term memory.
I set up a simple system that turned out to be not quite as easy to explain as I'd hoped. I made two batches of 40 words, and divided them each into two. I divided the students into two groups- the Odds-Evens and the Evens-Odds. First, I gave the odds 1-40 to the Odds-evens on TUE.; the evens 1-40 to the Evens-Odds. On WED. I gave 41-80 odds to the Odds-evens and 41-80 evens to the Evens-odds. Notice that in the first two days I'm giving the Odds-evens ALL the odds and the Evens-odds ALL the evens. I used the results of these two days to take ALL the odds and make two equally difficult tests from them, and did the same with the evens. In other words, the Evens-odds group normalized the evens words, so that I could make two equally difficult tests for the Odds-evens, and the odds-evens did the same for the 40 odd words, so that I could make two equally difficult tests for the Evens-odds. Both groups took supposedly equally difficult quizzes on THU and FRI, the two days that counted; FRI would be a high-stress day, having a unit test, and supposedly the high stress of FRI would show up in scores being slightly lower on FRI, where stress had presumably interfered with their short-term memory.
The quizzes took place in week six, toward the end of unit 2, but most of the words came from unit 1 and the first part of the class, weeks 1-3, so for the most part were not part of what they were studying for the unit 2 exam that Friday. They were given lists of twenty words each night, MON, TUE, WED, & THUR. and told to study them for the following day. They were also told to study each list the same amount of time, and in the same way. They were also told that the scores would not count as part of their class grade, except as participation points, since their studying was being controlled. They were, however, told that the vocabulary was useful; that they should know it; and that, in general, their ability to pick up and hold the vocabulary was a crucial skill. The quizzes asked only for the meaning; it did not test grammatical knowledge or ability to use the words. The distractors were simple and were not intended to confuse anyone. The two groups of students also were intended to be equally divided, by reading score, with the intention of splitting up language groups as evenly as possible also, so that each group would have roughly equal numbers of each language group. With only fifteen students, one group had eight while the other had seven.
One clear variable among the 80 words was exposure; words were distributed also so that words from chapter one, for example, went into both even and odd words; and so that, in general, words that they had seen five weeks ago were equally distributed, as were words they had seen four weeks ago, and a few words they had never seen, to my knowledge. I knew that they had three other classes besides mine, and made no attempt to find out which words had been covered or even tested in those; at the same time, I figured that as a cohesive class each member of the class at least probably had roughly the same exposure to each word as each other member. There were words on there that were repeated frequently in my own class, like
risks and
likely; words that appeared in only one reading and were most likely never seen again, like
ergonomics. I tried to distribute these evenly between the even and odd lists.
So we took the quizzes, and noticed, in the process, that several things surprised us. Our scores came out like this:
Odds-Evens (first two scores are TUE/WED, then THU/FRI
A 17/17. 20/11
B 7/5, 9/10
C 11/13, 10/19
D 6/15, 9/9
E 3/3, 4/7
F 19/17, 18/19
G 16/16, 16/15
H 4/8, 5/9
Even-Odds
J 7/5, 12/12
K 11/13, 14/10
L 14/8, 5/3
M 18/19, 9/5
N 18/19, 15/20
O 16/17, 16/18
P 13/13, 11/16
In the process of taking the quiz we noticed that for a variety of unrelated reasons WED. was a very highly stressful day for the class also. The stressful days did not seem to lower their collective scores much, however, except in isolated cases like students A and L. One student, N, had maintained that stress would make scores go up, and it did make hers go up. One, G, got scores that I would have expected in an ideal trial, which showed a drop on the last day, due to an entirely new word or two being not learned well, because the stress of the unit exam interfered. We had concluded, from our reading, that stress could not make us unlearn something we had successfully committed to memory already; it could, however, interfere with the process of committing routine things to memory. And we had further learned that deep, traumatic, unexpected stress was far more likely to do this than the expected, normal stress of a difficult but normal reading exam. Looking closely at the numbers, however, we had to conclude that our hypothesis, that stress would interfere with memory, had not really panned out very well or very clearly.
Some students admitted to not studying equally all four nights. Others did so poorly on all tests that I had to question whether they had in fact ever read anything, much less study the four lists of words. How could you sit in this class for six weeks, I asked them in my mind, and not know words like
threaten or
exceed? They had no good reason to subvert the project, yet some students, most notably E, H, D and possibly L did so poorly as to make me question whether they were able to read or understand the distractors, let alone the words. It was, in fact, possible that they couldn't. More common, though, were students like F, G, N, O and P, who were fairly good at picking up words all along, and missed some for somewhat random reasons, unrelated to the stress of WED & FRI's papers and exams.
The students stared at their results in order to write quantitative analysis reports that included hypothesis, method, results and conclusion; we will never see these, since they didn't make it onto the weblogs. They did, however, comment a little on the process of studying vocabulary and on what happened during the project. Those comments I list below.
A related question that I reallly was curious about was to what degree certain amounts of exposure would ensure their knowing certain words, absent any kind of quizzes or recycling efforts on my part, short of a single list appearing a night before a quiz. Various practitioners have maintained that exposure alone is enough; if that were the case, I would not have to even give them the lists on the night before, and they should get reasonably good scores on a quiz that asks only to choose the word with the right meaning. I studied the scores for the words themselves and didn't find much of a pattern. They did well on words like
obesity and
aroused that seemed intensely personal; they did poorly on words like
stoic,
ergonomics and
posture, that very likely weren't seen much outside of the particular readings they were in. For a subculture of the class, exposure didn't matter; they clearly hadn't acquired much of anything, and their results, if anything, threw off the validity of any statistics I could have mustered.
It's ironic that you could get
exposure only to words, without ever enrolling in an intensive language program, and if this were enough, presumably you would then not need classes, because, having acquired everything directly, grammar, style, idioms etc. would fall into place. In other words our students
pay for the stress of regular well-made tests/quizzes and the feedback that comes with them, and thus are signing up for the voluntary stress of not only the unit exam, but the vocabulary quizzes or whatever other evaluative task I put in front of them. Overall, I did not see anything that would lend me to change my basic approach to vocabulary, which is as follows:
-Vocabulary is extremely important, as a base of all the skills; without vocabulary, for example, its pointless for a student to work on reading skills. Vocabulary is also the single best measurement of overall success. It is well borne out by experience, that students like F, N and O do better on the TOEFL than their counterparts who have simply not bothered to pick up the vocabulary from the units.
-Most students, though not all, need a system to actively commit words and their meanings to memory. Those systems in my experience are of several kinds (besides the student with essentially no system)- marking native language on the textbook, above the new word; putting the word and its translation on a separate piece of paper; putting the word, Eng. definition & Eng. sentence on paper (this is the system I recommend); and, marking up one's bilingual dictionary. There may be other systems that I am not aware of. Students whose TOEFL scores stagnate at about 420-450 (paper-based, institutional) very frequently have no system or a very rudimentary system. They also frequently translate every word, run out of time on the reading section, and trip up on word forms in the grammar section, due to living in their native language and not clearly having and English-use, English-sense of sentences. A student's vocabulary system should teach the student how NOT to translate, how to stay in English and use the word in its English environment.
-Exposure is crucial to learning, as our minds are inherently utilitarian, and each student is more likely to remember anything that he/she is convinced he/she will need repeatedly. One student one time told me that he learned vocabulary by looking up words in a bilingual dictionary, but marking the word every time he did; therefore, when a word got enough marks, he'd get mad and finally determine within himself to learn it. After years of stewing over that suggestion, I've noticed that it seems to have worked for several reasons, one being that a student has to build a personal relationship almost, with each word, determining to learn all parts of it, its grammar, its sound, its meaning, the environments one is likely to see it in. And that personal relationship can
start with its relationship to the corresponding word in one's native language; we all know that L1 and L2 words don't always correspond exactly, semantically or grammatically, and that's part of the problem. But for a student who already understands the world through L1, it's hard to avoid funnelling knowledge through it, at least at first. The trick is successful weaning oneself away from L1- I always ask the student: how are you doing that? Is it working? Are you mastering these words successfully, in terms of being able to
use them successfully when you need to?
Thus the book closes on Vocabulary project, 075, CESL EAP1.
Related posts (from EAP1 students, during 075):
Trouble with learning vocabulary (Corina)
This makes it difficult for you to remember (Renzhi)
Studying vocabulary (Herve)
Learning Vocabulary! (Patrick)
The best way to study vocabulary (Corina)
The best way to study vocabulary (Jasim)
The best way to study vocabulary (Renzhi)
Studying vocabulary from shows (Yalanda)
Fluency Ex. #4 (Tez)
Fluency Ex. #4 (Mohammed A.)
Fluency Ex. #4 (David)
Fluency Ex. #4 (Moon)
Fluency Ex. #4 (Mohammed R.)
Labels: cesl, learning theory, reading, vocabulary
vocab. project/vocab. study
What I need to do now is back off, and let my students actually write about this, because it was done for them, and done on the subject they chose. It stirred in me, though, the desire to both lay out what I consider standard fare- what I usually say about vocabulary- and, a challenge to discuss any of the various issues that the discussion raises.
These are the things I tell most students:
Vocabulary is the most important element of your language study. Your ability to pick up, retain, and use successfully and quickly a large number of words will be the key to your ability to solve grammatical problems, improve your listening, and read fast enough to survive a test situation. Nothing is more important than knowing the words, and knowing enough to make a difference.
Some teachers claim that exposure alone will do it for you- if you read it and hear it enough, you'll get it. I don't believe that. I think most learners need a system and need to commit new vocabulary to memory. Your system is up to you- and if you choose to go without one, that's up to you also. If your TOEFL score has plateaued out at about 460, though, you could have vocabulary issues. If your TOEFL has plateaued at 430, you have much more serious issues, but that's another post. If you feel like you are treading water, think about how you are learning vocabulary. Do you have a system? Does it work? Is it time to change it? The system that worked in the lower levels no longer does.
I believe your system should teach you to stay in English rather than always lead you back to your native language. Put your list entirely in English. Make sentences that use the words. Study by reading the sentences, covering up the words and their English definitions on the left. When in doubt, find the definition of the word, in English, on the left side of your list, and go back to reading the sentences. Sentences should be easy except for the words you are learning. Add words from everywhere; study the list often.
Finally, it's entirely your business. I never collect the list, though I avidly watch and question what my students do and how well it works for them. I also watch to see who passes and how well, how quickly. I actually wanted my students to study this but had to admit that the effects of stress on vocabulary was closer to the class topic.
Let's go back to the teacher that claims that exposure is enough. You know who you are- maybe 50-60% of the profession, I have no idea anymore. I freely admit that exposure is a crucial element of the picture. Our minds organize by how important we consider things to be- and we judge that by exposure. But, unless my tests, 80 questions for a high-level class of 15, were mistaken, exposure isn't enough. There's always the possibility that I'm an alligator of a vocab-test maker, but I don't think so. It may be a weakness of the communicative system that now a person with the first five out of the six communicative skills- listening, responding nonverbally, speaking, asking for help, test survival, and reading, have made it as far as they have, without reading. I gave them the words beforehand, words they'd seen and used, and they still had trouble with it. Some of the words, I said to myself, how could you sit in this class all term and not know this? Yet some could & did. Non-readers, maybe, or deliberate project saboteurs. More likely, just people who have trouble with words.
This is why I crank out those vocab. quizzes in every class, that the better students keep requesting. They aren't, in fact, alligator-tricky, they're pretty straightforward. There's one other thing I say: There's no way I could cover more than 10% of what you need. The best I can do is challenge you: bring it to your attention, that you may be learning in an inefficient way, you may want to reflect on how you hold the football when you run, as the Salukis might say. My goal is to use my time in the best way possible, so that, if enlightening you about your own methods is a possibility, I'll make that more likely. If it flushes out the non-readers, so be it. Overall vocabulary scores, over the years and terms, have been very very accurate when it comes to TOEFL scores. I heard this one time, long ago, in ESL- that vocab. mastery is the best predictor of overall language mastery- but haven't been able to find a source, or prove it.
More about exposure soon- I don't intend to let that one go. Mark my words- I
like exposure- the more the better. That's partially my rationale for the quizzes- if new, simple, relevant sentences can add to their exposure to a word- that alone is good, whether they get the answer right or not. This presumes that they can read the simple sentences the words appear in, and have no trouble with the four simple choices. I'm interested in how having seen the word or not, elsewhere or in an isolated situation, affected the score. A word that came right off a list, the day before a quiz, and a stressful day at that, might be harder to learn, one would think, than one that had been committed to memory previously, and only recalled later. More later, I promise.
Labels: cesl, learning theory, reading, toefl, vocabulary
the latest
Two things have set me back recently, and made me fall behind on posting, not to mention miss Saudi Day and other treats. First, we lost internet access at home over the weekend, for reasons unknown except to Verizon, then I got a little sick due to working the midnight shift one night with Corey, who for whatever reason chose to watch
Zaboomafoo from 2-3:30 am. But a bigger reason in the Vocabulary Project.
Briefly, my class decided to study effects of stress on memory and performance; specifically on performance in vocabulary quizzes which have been a staple of my teaching but which I hadn't really been using this term. My class knew how I felt; knew that I felt that it was very important how and how much they pick up vocabulary, and also knew that this would be a good way to study their own responses to stress especially with the upcoming TOEFL.
I set up a series of four vocabulary quizzes which I gave to two groups, the evens-odds and the odds-evens. The evens-odds took the evens ones first, so that I could make the last two evens quizzes of equal difficulty for the odds-evens. I did the same for the odds; the odds-evens took the odd numbers (1-79) first; I normalized them; and made the last two quizzes for the evens-odds equally difficult. Then, we added stress on the last day, a whopper of an exam, today. One that counted and counted big. Then we measured if they lost any ground on their vocabulary.
Results were mixed. Let's just say, they would have lost more ground, if they were put in a helicopter crash simulator, ducked under water, and forced to swim to the surface...as were
these people who actually were placed in this position to test the effects of stress on memory. Let's also say, the TOEFL is probably much worse than a Core Unit exam, particularly for some students. And, finally, there are some students who actually pick up so little vocabulary, that they tend to throw off the numbers.
All of these problems, I will address in the near future, if I have time. Look
here for student comments on related topics, though I don't know if their write up of this project will make it onto the blogs or not. It seemed to be a great way to tie together class subjects (stress, health, mind control over stress), class pressures, and my own interests (studying why, how, and how well they actually pick these words up)- and, most importantly, got them talking a lot about the process of learning.
Labels: cesl, learning theory, personal, reading
picking up the words off the page
Lately I've been discussing a certain problem with the Arabic speakers of my AE2 class. That is, they can look at a name like
Jin and say "John". I say that this is proof that their fundamental problem is one of transfer of
style of reading from Arabic to English. In Arabic, you grab at the consonants, and ignore the vowels (if they are there at all), as the vowels don't change the meaning of the word, but just give it grammatical nuance. All words related to
book, for example, are produced with
ktb, with some words being
kitaab, kiitab, kitabbi, katab, katib, etc. If you have enough information, you wouldn't need the vowels at all, because you'd already know that the speaker meant
bookseller instead of
library or
book.
This pattern has been ingrained in many of my AE2 students for a long time, and I often can't figure out if they
can read English, with its vowels changing meaning, its left-to-right pattern, but just
don't, because old habits die hard, or they forget momentarily. They'll read "Hollywood" as "Halloween", "probably" as "problem," etc. This happens especially when the word is in isolation, or as in the case of Jin and John, it's a name, and either would work.
It slows down one's reading considerably, when one is at war with one's own habits. It also brings up the question of
those who never got the vowel correspondences right- those who, in other words, need a good phonics program. I am working on finding one. My five-year-old has a great one, but it's directed at five-year-olds, and might be an insult to our adults.
More on this later.
Labels: reading
toefl reading strategies
A debate is raging in my classes on how to attack the TOEFL Reading section. In CESL we still have the Institutional TOEFL, which gives a Reading section, 50 questions, 55 minutes, questions divided into about 5-8 distinct passages, 6-10 questions each, more or less.
As far as I know, the difficulty is evenly and randomly distributed, both within each set of questions, and throughout the entire section, so that if passage one is statistically harder than passage two, it's only a coincidence, and may not hold up on every test. The questions are distributed in relative spatial order, that is, questions derived from line 4 will appear before questions derived from line 7, but questions from the entire passage could be placed anywhere, and are.
The three pertinent attack strategies are:
1. Read the entire passage once through, trying to get main idea and purpose of the paragraphs; if you are unable to, read again. THEN do the questions. (this is my favorite)
2. Read the questions first. Then you know what you're looking for as you read.
3. Read the first and last sentence of each paragraph before you start. That way you know what the main purpose of the passage is.
I have vocally chosen #1 but told my students, by all means, practice a lot; try all three; do whatever works best. It's my
impression that #2 and #3 were originally developed for native speakers (for use on tests like the SAT, ACT, GRE, etc.); because they have quicker and better inferencing and skimming skills, they can spot it more easily when the first sentence
doesn't match the rest of the paragraph, or when a question requires careful clue-digging. But I feel that for international students, particularly lower-level ones trying to improve from 420 to 480, #2 & #3 are not the best choices.
I am curious about what the TOEFL world says about this issue. I would like to do research. I would like to know more.
Here's another question: Is using CCCCC at the end, still better than BBBBB? or AAAAAA? I stuck my neck out and said no, TOEFL was onto that, long ago, and changed it to get the CCCCs & teach them a lesson. Besides, if you get to the end, and have to go CCCCCC, you've already lost. You're staying in AE2. You failed to follow the cardinal rule of TOEFL Reading, which is FINISH & GET THE EASY ONES. You're a poor gambler. You shouldn't even be asking that question!
More later. By the way, it's an open debate. Your comments are welcome. Any pertinent sources, etc. would also be appreciated.
Labels: reading, toefl
