ENG 345 - Methods and Materials Week 9

Topic: Teaching of Reading and Writing

SUMMARY

Brown Chapter 20

This chapter was about the teaching of reading. In it Brown opens with some research that has been conducted on reading in a second language. He discusses schema theory and background knowledge. This section made me think about how much we bring to a text to help ourselves understand that text. A reader brings a wealth of experience to a text upon reading, and I think as a native speaker I take that for granted, or rather, didn't see how much content and formal schemata I actually have and bring to each text. Brown then presents a list of different genres of written language, and then discusses some general characteristics of written language, such as permanence, processing time, distance, orthography, complexity, vocabulary, and formality. Brown then provides strategies for reading comprehension, types of classroom reading performance, and then the following principles for teaching reading skills:

-Don't overlook a specific focus on reading skills
-use techniques that are intrinsically motivating
-balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts
-encourage the development of reading strategies
-include both bottom-up and top-down techniques
-follow the 'survey, question, read, recite, review' technique
-plan on pre-reading, during-reading, and after-reading phases
-build an assessment aspect into your techniques

Brown Chapter 21

This chapter was about the teaching of writing. Brown opens this chapter with a section of research in second language writing. He points out a lot of things I had not really considered before in this section. This chapter in particular made me reflect on my own writing practices as a student. Brown pushes for more process writing rather than product writing. The early focus, he argues, should be on how to write and revise and self-edit, rather than reaching some ideal error-free product of a paper, but hopes that this process will help students work toward that ideal. Brown also talks about Kaplan's contrastive rhetoric, and I like how he dealt with this: "you would be more prudent to adopt a 'weak' position in which you would consider a student's cultural/literacy schemata as only one possible source of difficulty." (394). Brown then discusses types of classroom writing performance, and then gives the following principles for teaching writing skills:

-incorporate practices of 'good' writers
-balance process and product
-account for cultural/literary backgrounds
-connect reading and writing
-provide as much authentic writing as possible
-frame your techniques in terms of prewriting, drafting, and revising stages
-strive to offer techniques that are as interactive as possible
-sensitively apply methods of responding to and correcting your students' writing
-clearly instruct students on the rhetorical, formal conventions of writing

Article: "Myth 5: Students Must Learn to Correct All Their Writing Errors" by Dana Ferris (2008)

This article aims to debunk the myth that ELLs NEED to learn to correct all errors in their writing. Ferris discusses her own experiences with teaching writing in the ESL classroom and then discusses what the research has shown regarding writing and the ELL. There are three observations she makes: (1) SLA takes time, (2) second-language writers' are different from native speakers', (3) even diligent correction and student editing does not lead to error-free production. She then goes on to talk about her experiences with altering the writing program she teaches, and how moving from a more display-writing oriented process to a more process-writing oriented process has dramatically improved the success rate of students in the program. She provides a number of tips and strategies that will be helpful when teaching writing in a classroom. I really enjoyed the idea of portfolio assessment (both as a student and as a future teacher) rather than an in-class writing essay.