In which I continue to enjoy teaching

some days you leave class with the unhappy thought that the students are no better off than they were before the lesson. And then some days, you leave class really feeling like the students actually learned something. Today is one of those days. 

I've been struggling with how to teach reading. While my students can recognize and write English words quite well, when it comes to actually understanding anything longer than a sentence, they struggle. Until today I'd been hitting a wall with how to help with this. I would have them read one paragraph at a time, and then ask them to tell me about what they read. The response was usually moderate confusion and, after some prompting, maybe one student would read me a random sentence from the paragraph or provide me with some irrelevant detail that for some reason stood out to them. 

student: Teacher, I need help. I don't understand. (points at text)

Me: so tell me about what you read

students: terrified stares of confusion

Me: What did you read here? (pointing at the first paragraph)

(A painful two minutes goes by during which I smile a lot and tell them not to be shy.) 

Brave student: jeans

Me: Okay, that's great! What about jeans?

students: blank stares

It usually ended with me explaining to them what the story was about or getting into detailed explanations of vocabulary, sometimes involving acting or makeshift props. It wasn't helping their reading skills at all and they still just didn't understand what I wanted them to do.

Today I encountered the same situation, and in an effort to elicit any response, I blurted out "who is it about?"  Well, that was a question they could answer. With vague memories of 4th grade I asked them to answer the questions who, what, when, where, why and how in relation to the text. I find it is helpful to review question words anyways as all too often I have asked something like "When do you eat lunch?" and gotten a reply like "At the canteen." 

so I had them answer who, what, when, where, why and how (when appropriate) for each paragraph in the text. I then wrote a sentence per paragraph based on their answers. Then I had them do the same thing with a new text, only this time they had to write the sentences themselves. It was amazing. I sat there and read for half an hour while feeling that there was far more learning going on than on the days I find myself dancing around trying to explain the meaning of "boundary" or some such word. There were a couple of questions about vocabulary, but the first time one of the other students knew the definition while the second time the word was "medic" and I was able to get them to figure out the meaning themselves. You cannot imagine how pleased I was about this.

 

I was a little afraid that I might be confusing them further. After all, not every paragraph of English will have the answers to all those questions and they would have to figure that out themselves. But at the end of the session I was pleasantly surprised with their summaries. They weren't perfect, but they weren't copied, they had gotten the general idea and they understood the text. I was so pleased, I just had to share the victory with you all. Unfortunately, by the time we finished it was pretty late (not my fault) and I think I tired the poor things out. As they left the building, I overheard one of the students exclaim the word "free!"