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Summer vacation is about
three weeks away. My students are
starting to feel that tug of freedom.
I can see it in the way they glance out the window more often lately,
the way they bounce into the classroom, more energetically, but a few seconds
later each day. And I'd be lying
if I said I wasn't a little less focused myself. But I feel these last few weeks before the break are
crucial. If the students just sort
of fade off into vacation, it will be that much harder for them to bring
themselves to do their summer assignments. And what little English they are exposed to and take note of
now, will certainly get baked out of them as they play around at Universal
Studios Japan in the August sun.
So I've been using a few new
activities in both my listening and reading classes lately. These activities aren't novel or even
that much different from what we've been doing for most of the year. In fact, I think a big shift in class
structure right now would give the kids just the excuse they are looking for to
mentally cut out early for vacation.
So here are a few of the small changes I'm trying out to keep the
students engaged during reading exercises:
Instead of handing out a
plain text to students, I've been making use of a mirror font so the text reads
the way it would if held up to a mirror (sorry if that was the most superfluous
explanation ever). The first time
I passed out a mirror-fonted text, a few students shouted out things like,
"I can't read this!", "This is impossible!", and "This
isn't even English." But
after I read the passage out loud while students read along, their brains
adjusted and they were able to read it on their own. Still, by playing with the semantic visual patterning,
students had to work a little harder and it made the actual task (a summary
activity) a little more challenging.
All in all, there was a precipitous drop in window gazing.
I've written about it before,
but I'm not at all convinced about the benefits of comprehension check
questions. So I'm always trying
out activities which I think might get students interacting with a text and
also let's me gauge their comprehension of the text as well. Lately I've tried replacing key words
in every few sentences of a text with words that clearly don't fit. So a story about a pilot might end up
having the word 'flying' replaced with 'dancing'. One of the reasons I like this activity is that it can
work with both bottom-up and top-down skills. Students can scan the passage from beginning to end and then
look for words that don't seem to fit within their mental model of how the
entire text should read. But they
can also come at it from the sentence level, for example by looking for
mismatches between verbs and direct objects. And even better, this activity can be done in small groups
as well, which can help provide the scaffolding needed for the lower level
students to better comprehend the text.
Of course this activity requires a lot of typing on the part of the
teacher if they are using a course book. But I find that the to ability occasionally slip in a
truly bizarre substitute, such as "child" for "chicken",
"bubbly" for "dangerous", or the name of the school principle for a minor character will
usually get a few laughs and makes it worth the effort.
Instead of changing words in
the text, you can also insert extra words. Not only is it another way to make reading a little more
challenging, but during the first few read-throughs, if students can identify a
majority of the unnecessary words it serves as a pretty fair barometer that the
level of the text is appropriate for the students. And if students are able to provide a simple reason in
either their L1 or the L2 as to why the word doesn't belong, it’s a fair bet
that they had a pretty high level of comprehension around what they read.
Last Thursday I walked into
class and all of the windows were wide open. A warm wind was blowing into the room. One of the third year students had his
head on the desk in front of him. He was asleep,
a half eaten lunch box in front of him and chopsticks still held loosely in his
right hand. I felt a little pang
of jealousy. You know, I'm sure there's all
kinds of ways to keep students awake in class. But for me, I find that raising the difficulty of routine
activities, adding a small twist to basic tasks, is often enough. And the fact that these obstacles
result in a higher level of awareness and a greater depth of processing might
also lead to a host of other benefits such as greater vocabulary acquisition
and higher chance of reordering of interlanguage. But maybe that's claiming a bit too much. After all, at this point, it's really
just about making sure that the students are there, conscious in the class with me. And I'm willing to bet you an ice-cold
lemonade that if the that sleeping third year student had been trying to eat with his
left hand instead of his right, he would have been wide awake when I walked into class the other day.
