Blog #4

I have been fortunate enough to have had wonderful reading and writing experiences. Whether it was my instructors who taught using the process-oriented approach or my grandmother who forced me to read during the summer break; I pay them tribute. I was encouraged to keep journals, write short stories and create various personas for writing activities in primary school. In addition, I’d stay with my grandmother in the summers, who required that I read at least 5 books over summer break. At the end of the summer I had to summarize each book to her and tell her why I liked it and what I learned from it. Although at the time I despised summer reading assignments, I can fondly acknowledge that these experiences have greatly aided in the development of my writing skills. For instance, my grandmother always told me to reread as so did my instructors, but it was grandmother who really enforced it. I reread and reread and reread until the meaning of the text is clear and I am able to provide examples as well as explain in my own words. When I write I reread what I have written to see if I should restate or add and subtract information. In my L2, I often find myself rereading the text in order to break down the sentences in order to gain a better or more accurate understanding of the text.

Likewise, L2 learners can apply some the skills or practices that they’ve acquired during their L1 primary schooling to their L2. It’s especially important for multilingual students to read to visualize the various formats and writing patterns as well as grammatical structure. Not only that, students will add new words based on context to their lexicon. If spelling is an issue for multilingual students, when they read they will recognize words and self-correct their misspelling of words. Reading and writing are essentially a family and you can’t have one without the other.

As an academic reader I encounter research text, essays, textbooks and instructional guides. Research is specifically focused on one topic addressing an issue and providing possible solutions. It contains statistics, data, theories and applications. Whereas, essays have various patterns and purposes. They require a particular formatting and layout. For example, essays typically have 5 paragraphs an introduction, 3 body paragraphs and a conclusion. Even more so, textbooks, which are used to study a specific subject can all be categorized as academic works. There overall purpose is for students to comprehend information pertaining to a learning objective and execute that in an output activity.

As a nonacademic reader I encounter daily news articles, blogs, community boards and novels. Daily news articles cover a range of current events and topics. Blogs are personal journals that are displayed on the web and contain opinion and personal narratives. Community boards are where people within the community or even outside the community can go to discuss issues and possible solutions as well as concerns. Similarly, these nonacademic genres are meant for personal fulfillment. From each of these genres I’ve learned that reading can be a pleasurable experience in that there exist a multitude of various materials that has been tailored to personal interest and needs. All I have to do is open up the doorway for my students to venture in and explore.

From my teaching experience, I seek out teaching materials that utilize communicative activities. This way my students may be focused on one particular aspect of their L2, but are utilizing all their L knowledge base to help strengthen that one aspect. This includes handouts for my students to work on individually and as a group. If it provides supplemental activities, games and other learning resources to give the students to reinforce what they have learned it makes my job easier and my lessons more cohesive. It has been my experience that a good textbook contains the things mentioned above, whereas a bad textbook contains none of these. In addition to not providing students with enough context or tools to better aid them in the L2 learning journey. One particular textbook that I used in a community-based settings assumed that beginner students knew the letters of alphabet and the corresponding sounds. Too no one’s surprise many of them didn’t and that meant I had to put together additional learning materials for them to study and use. It was precious time that could have been used elsewhere.

In terms of the criteria, L2 textbooks attempt to cater to a wide range of L2 learners. These books tend to be more repetitive, use less extravagant grammatical structure so that the material is a tad easier for students to understand. Additionally, one textbook cannot address the needs of each student. Conversely, other types of textbooks expect students to have an extensive amount of background knowledge to build on. This means that these textbooks don’t repeat material as often. Textbooks may contain lengthier sentences with extensive grammatical structure. In some cases, new vocabulary is strictly to be interpreted in context without a definition. It’s because L1 and L2 learning takes place at different stages in a person’s life. L2 learning takes place after the L1 background knowledge, skills and strategies have already taken shape. Transferring these things can be easy or difficult depending on the student’s background.

Augmentation of a textbook should only occur if the material is significantly lacking in regards to the amount of information provided, application activities and supplemental resources. In the case the bad textbook that I encountered, the very first activity asked students to write their name and answer the questions: Where are you from? Why are you here? This was a beginner’s class in a community-based setting. I recall that only two students were able to complete the activity. While I was given permission to augment the textbook as needed. I found myself simple completely recreating lessons. I also had to attempt to accommodate the needs of individual students.

The most productive activities that I believe inexperienced writers can do in-class are generate their own prompts and respond to it. They can also brainstorm ideas with other students writing down suggestions and commentary. These activities need to be cultural relevant and interesting for students. Out-of-class activities for inexperienced writers can journal, blog, join an online community and even do research related to personal interest. Journaling can be completed anywhere on any topic. Blogging allows students to narrate daily events, be opinionated and rant to the world. Even experienced writers can enjoy these activities, because they enable both inexperienced and experienced writers to access various parts of their lexicon and utilize their schemata.