For One Picture (Short Fiction for ELLs)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

The girl’s mother didn’t say anything when the girl bought a motorcycle.  She didn’t say anything when the girl passed her driving test.  She didn’t even say anything as the girl packed.  She just watched as her daughter put a few shirts into an old cloth bag and set a camera on top.  But the next morning, as the girl was about to drive away, the mother finally said, “You are making a mistake.  You should go to university.” 

The girl closed her eyes.  She looked as if she was counting to ten.  Then she opened her eyes and smiled and said, “I’ll be back as soon as I find one perfect picture.”  She was wearing a leather jacket.  She kicked the bike’s engine into life and raced away along Ginko Road.  She raced away under the shade of the trees, getting smaller and smaller. 

After few weeks a letter arrived for the girl’s mother.  The ink was blotted where rain drops had fallen on the paper.  The girl wrote, “My bike is in great shape.  It is the fastest thing I have ever known.  The air here is different.  It smells green and fresh, like someone has brushed everything clean.”  There was a picture.  It was of a boy with no front teeth about to bite into an ear of corn.  The girl’s mother pinned it to the wall of her bedroom and looked at it before she went to sleep.  She wondered how the boy could eat the corn with no teeth.

The girl’s mother went to the crowded Thursday market to buy cheap fruits and vegetables.  She listened to her favorite radio program on Sunday afternoons.  She played cards with her friends.  And she waited for another letter.  It came when the leaves were turning from red to brown.  There was no note in the envelope, just a photograph.  It was a picture of a man smoking a cigarette.  He was standing in a shop window and hanging a yellow dress on a manikin.  The picture made the girl’s mother laugh.  But she didn’t know why.  She hung it next to the first picture. 

When the snow fell, the girl sent a picture of one of the fishing woman from the north islands.  The fishing woman was holding a heavy net full of shells.  The fishing woman looked strong and young, but she was probably older than the girl’s mother.  More pictures arrived.  A mountain of old bicycles reflecting the afternoon sun.  A little girl with only one leg jumping rope in the street.  The mother pinned each picture to the wall.  She took them down and looked at them every night.  She thought the pictures were beautiful.  She thought that maybe they were perfect.  But she began to hope that maybe they were not.  She began to hope that maybe there were so many more beautiful things in the world.  She began to wonder how her own daughter had become the kind of person who might be able to find them. 

   

Text Information:

First 1000 most frequently used words (GSW): 89.6%

Second 1000 most frequently used words (GSW): 7.9%

Outside lists: 2.5%

Total Word Count: 499

Flesch Reading Ease score: 94.8

Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Leve: 3

Target level: intermediate

I wrote this story for my third year students who are thinking about what to do after they graduate.  I haven't used it in class, but am planning to use it to discuss narrative tense.  I'm hoping it might be useful in both generating discussion around their immediate future as well as provide some ideas for students who have to write a personal essay as part of their university application. 

Summer Theory Flood (listening and speaking edition)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

So I was at school today, cleaning the building with some students and having a great time.  I got to change light bulbs.  100 light bulbs.  I have to say that my ladder climbing skills improved considerably.  And I got to hear about my students’ summer vacations.  One of them cycled 200 kilometers around the Kansai area.  Another went to Kyushu and helped on his grandfather’s farm.  Now the students have headed home and I’m back at my desk about to read a few more articles and prep for classes. 

Aside from vacation and prepping for classes, I read a lot of articles and books on English teaching.  I’m pretty interested in improving how I teach speaking and listening, so most of what I read was around these issues.  Here is what I learned:

-          According to Cutler and Carter (1987) 90% of words in a 190,000 word corpus of spontaneous British English conversation begin with a strong syllable.  So when it comes to teaching listening, building students skills around segmentation (separating words on-line/during listening) based on recognizing stress as the potential start of a word is going to have major benefits.  Basically, tuning students in early to stress is a very good thing.  Cutler (1997) did a further comparative study of languages and found that while other language do make more use of various aspects of prosody, this information isn’t necessary for lexical activation, or recognizing words in English.  While it wasn’t clearly stated in the paper, this implies to me that students might be paying too much attention to non-determining factors when listening in English as a second language.  So especially for beginning learners, sticking with basic activities such as listening activities which encourage students to circle stressed words, or even placing dots above each syllable of a text and having them circle the stressed syllables, is probably crucial in helping them develop the listening strategies they are going to need to segment English while listening.

-          While other aspects of prosody aren’t crucial to segmentation, they are important to being understood.  Derwing and Rossiter (2003) had a great paper showing that students who took lessons focusing on global speaking strategies such as stress, rhythm and intonation are rated much higher on comprehensibility and fluency than students who were trained in segmental aspects of speaking such as the production of individual phonemes, identification and discrimination of individual sounds, and minimal pairs exercises.  In fact, students who were in the segmental group of learners actually showed a reduction in fluency.  So when it comes to speaking, stress alone isn’t going to be enough.  I do a lot of hand clapping during dialogue practice, both while listening and speaking to help students get used to the rhythm of English and I guess this is a good idea.  I think I will spend a bit more time making sure my students are doing some intonation work as well during the next semester.  During listening activities, I could just have students listen and draw a waveform of what they hear, an upward arcing wave for higher pitch, a downward one for lower pitch.  It might also be useful to have them use their smart-phones to record themselves and then do a similar waveform exercise while listening to the recording.

-          John Field (2003, p. 331) points out that assimilation, or the way in which the ends of words are altered in anticipation of the sound that follows, not only makes listening more difficult, but that the sounds most commonly affected by assimilation are /t/,/d/, and /s/, which are the sounds for most of the inflections in English.  Basically, if our students are listening for cues as to tense or plurality, those auditory cues might very well just not be there.  Which might explain why students end up leaving out the third-person ‘s’ and plurals during dictation exercises.  They are just writing what they hear. Which makes me think that for many students, we need to include think time during dictation exercises to allow them to process meaning and insert inflections that might have been lost due to assimilation.  It also makes me think that teaching grammar has an important role when it comes to listening.  Grammar knowledge can serve as the schema which allows learners to hear what is not there.  Just as topic knowledge allows learners to understand implied messages in a text, knowledge of grammatical forms might help our learners center an oral text in both temporal and psychological space. 

(guilty admission: the John Field article is actually on the need to provide micro-training  so our students can develop their bottom-up listening skills and get better at hearing what is actually said.  The focus is definitely not on what I have written here in this blog post.  This is much more of a riff on what I read.  Anyway, just wanted to make sure I wasn't coming off as the kind of guy who deliberately misrepresents articles to back up their own ideas.) 

I also read a lot of other stuff as well.  And when I write ‘stuff’, I pretty much mean ‘stuff’.  As summer vacation has stretched on and on, my ability to translate theory into the language of the classroom has gotten weaker and weaker.  It’s ironic that the summer months, when the classrooms are empty and I have time to catch up on my reading, is the time when that reading ends up being the least helpful to how I actually teach my classes.  Probably the only reason I had enough energy to put together this blog post is because I spent the first half of the day hearing about my students’ summer vacations while changing light bulbs.  But that’s OK.  I’ll take my illumination where I can get it. 

 

References:

Cuttler, A. & Carter, D. (1987). “The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary.” Computer Speech and Language 2: 133-142

Cuttler, A. (1997). “The comparative perspective on spoken-language processing.” Speech Communication 21: 3-15.

Derwing, T. & Rossiter, M. (2003). “The effects of pronunciation instruction on the accuracy, fluency, and complexity of L2 accented speech.” Applied Language Learning 13 (1): 1-17.

Field, J. (2003). “Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in L2 listening.” ELT Journal 57 (4): 325-333.

Praise for an in-service and big comfy chairs

Right before summer vacation, my school network held a three day in-service for teachers.  It was nice.  We got to sit in big, soft leather chairs which spun around when you pushed off from the desk.  The air-conditioning was on and the room was cool.  And everyone was willing to toss around some of the ideas they had been trying out in their classrooms.  So when I wasn’t spinning around in my chair, I was taking notes and wanted to post a few of the gems I picked up.  Here they are, along with a big shout out to the teachers who gave me their gracious permission to post their ideas here. 

Shadowing dialogues: At our school we never let students read off a page.  Instead, students are encouraged to always read, think, look up, and speak.  Basically, as Michael West has said, the point is to make a connection of language, “not from book to mouth, but from book to brain, and then from brain to mouth.” (Michael West in Nation, P. 2009. pp. 66-67)  The process also lets students gain a greater awareness of sense groups and natural breaks within sentences.  But Antonio, one of the teachers at our Tokyo campus, noticed that his students were getting a little bored with the same old same old read/think/look up/speak process, so he added a shadowing component.  Students would form groups of four.  While two of the students were practicing the dialogue, the other two students would try and shadow what was being said.  After practicing the dialogue a few times, all the students would change roles.  Often students are so focused on what they are supposed to say during a dialogue practice that they aren’t really listening to what their partner is saying.  Throwing in a shadowing component to dialogue practice helped make sure that students were engaged in a reading/speaking/listening 3-skill activity.

Error Correction for written work: After a student has completed a written assignment, give them time to underline anything that they feel is off or might be a mistake.  When correcting the paper, only correct those parts of the text which the student has identified as a possible error.  If there are any other errors, you can underline them, but do not correct them.  This was an idea from Joel, a teacher in our Yokohama Campus.  He uses this style of error correction as a type of awareness raising activity.  If the students are aware of a problem within their own writing, Joel feels that they will have a better chance of making a connection between what they wrote and the target form and there’s a better chance that they would be able learn the form.  And by underlining other errors, he primes them to notice similar errors during the next writing assignment.

Story Jigsaw (Sadistic Version): This is an activity which should only be used after students have worked with a text for a while and gotten pretty familiar with it.  Students form groups of three or four.  They pick one paragraph from the text and using lined paper, write one sentence per line.  Then they cut up the paragraph, shuffle the sentences, and give it to another group.  At this point it is just a simple jigsaw activity and each group must put the paragraph they received in the right order. But once they have put the paragraph in the right order, they are then allowed to pick up the strips of paper, mix them up, and lay them at various angles over each other, obscuring a number of words in the process.  The original group then has to try, without moving the strips of paper, to say the entire paragraph. 

I’m a reporter.  I have to ask questions: We use a text called “Stories for Young Readers” (Kinney, R. and Kinney, D. 2003) It’s filled with very short (~100 word), very basic stories of teenagers talking about their lives.  Trent, the teacher at Nagoya Campus, has students rewrite every sentence in the story in question form.  Then one student plays the role of a reporter while another student takes the role of the person from the story.  The reporter asks the questions while the other student answers.  This activity can be done in a 3/2/1 style where the interview has to be done in decreasing amounts of time. 

Bingo Storyboards: If you have a story with pictures, instead of the normal activity of having students put the pictures in the correct order, you can have students lay the pictures out on their desk as a kind of make-shift bingo board.  As students listen to the story, they just flip a picture over if it matches what they hear.  If they get a row of pictures flipped over, they call out bingo.  To turn this into a speaking activity, you can ask the student who got the bingo to use the pictures to aid them as they try to summarize the portion of the story which they just heard.

Oral Cloze: This is another activity from Trent in Nagoya and one that works best after you’ve worked with a text a few times.  It’s just like a regular cloze test, in which every n-th word is omitted, only you do it orally.  Read the story and stop after saying every 5^th word and don’t continue until a student from the class shouts out the next word of the story. 

Ok, that’s roughly half of the ideas I picked up at the in-service.  We also did a bunch of in-servicy things as well and those were all quite good.  But the fact that the program director believed in what we were all doing in our individual classrooms and wanted to give us time to just put our ideas out there was very refreshing.  I am not a big believer in just throwing up a bunch of ideas onto my blog.  I usually try and have a little more structure to my posts.  But maybe structure isn’t always such a good idea.  Maybe having a clear purpose and neatly partitioned blog posts and in-service sessions cuts us off from an important source of creativity.  So I’m wondering, do other teachers’ in-services and trainings usually have time set aside for just sharing ideas?  Do you have any ideas for less structured in-services?  Because while I also dig listening to the expert at the front of the room, I’m really feeling like the person sitting next to me at any training, conference, in-service might have just the idea I didn’t even know I was looking for.           

References:

Nation, I.S.P. and Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. Routledge: New York.

Have I got a story for you…and a favor, a big one

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

(There is now a page on this blog dedicated to this project.  It even has a name, "Your Voice: short stories by teachers for learners."  Thanks for the feedback and helping push things to the next level.)


I wrote my first story for English language learners in March of this year.  I had about 30 minutes of time to kill before my day ended and was complaining about the lack of suitable short fiction for my English classes.  I’ve been using literature in my classes for a while now, but I wanted something different.  I was looking for a story of under 500 words, something that my students and I could work through in one class, and after some meaning based exercises, that would still have a good chunk of text, maybe 50 words of so, which we could work with in-depth.  I had searched through some flash fiction collections sitting on my bookshelf, but none of the stories was quite right.  The problem with really short fiction is that most of them work by drawing on a reader’s knowledge of fiction itself.  Flash fiction works because it is often written to a reader’s expectations, and the target audience is usually people who read and love literary fiction.  The vocabulary is dense and filled with low frequency words.  The themes can be highly abstract one side or incredibly specific on the other.  The amount of time it would take to explain the background information to make the stories accessible to my students made them unusable in the classroom. 

As I was wasting the last 15 minutes of my day complaining, Michael Griffin of ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections fame, suggested I write my own.  So I did.  I knew I wanted students to get a bit more practice using, “there is…” and “there are…” as well as exposure to the simple past tense.  I sat down and a few hours later (15 minutes was way passed at this point) I wrote, “How to Float.”  But I wasn’t finished yet.  I ran the story through Joyce Maeda’s Vocabulary Frequency Checker and swapped out lower frequency words for higher frequency words until I thought, at least vocabulary-wise, my students would be able to understand about 98% of the story.  Then I checked the story’s Flesch-Kincaid grade level and Flesch-Kinkaid reading ease score.  You can do this in Microsoft Word, but there are also a number of sites which provide a similar service.  Some, like this one at Online-Utility.org even provides suggestions for improving the readability score of the text.

When I used the story in class, I was pleasantly surprised that students were not reaching for their dictionaries.  Instead, they simply read the story from start to finish.  And instead of the usual comprehension questions, I was able to ask the kind of questions I had always wanted to ask in my English class.  Questions like, “Why do you think this character felt this way?” and “How did the story make you feel?” and “Does the town in the story remind you of your own town?”  I wasn’t checking to see if students understood the story, rather I was exploring with my students how they had understood the story.

Lately, some of the members of my PLN have been writing short stories for English Language Learners.  Josette LeBlanc at Throwing Back Tokens has a short story about matchmaking and Michael Griffin has put posted one about summer love at ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections.  Their stories, like mine, were written to meet the needs of a particular group of learners.  And each of their stories provides a window into a particular learning situation, a particular teaching style, and even an underlying belief on how language might work.  When I read Josette’s story, I realize how fiction could be used to help train teachers on various ways to explore and teach vocabulary in the classroom.  When I read Mike’s story, I see that fiction can be used as a tool of personalization and the main driver in a conversation based class.  But I think that both stories could be used in a wide variety of classroom. 

Which got me thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to put together a collection of short stories for language learners.  I’m not talking about literature with a capital “L”.  I’m talking about short stories of under 500 words with a beginning, middle and end, that meet the needs of our particular students.  And along with each story, a detailed description of who the story was written for and how it will be used.  The collection of stories could be used as is by any teacher who was looking for fiction better suited to the language classroom.  But it could also be used as a kind of how-to book on writing stories for ELLs.  And, it would be filled with activities which could be used with any stories a teacher might want to use in their class. 

So here is the favor I want to ask: would you write a short story for your learners and let it be part of my dream.  Because that’s what I realized this is.  This is my dream.  I love a good story and love to share it even more.  Mike and Josette’s stories have convinced me that there’s a bunch of teachers out there who feel the same way I do.  And if we could get all those stories together in one place and share them with our students, we would might find that our students feel the same way as well.  You can send the story to me by email kevchanwow[at]gmail.com.  Eventually, we will have a book, a book of stories by teachers for all kinds of learners.  And at the start of class, we would be able to start our lessons with the kind of smile that comes from being able to say, “Hey, have I got a story for you…”