Day: January 3, 2016

Teaching Consonant Blends, Digraphs, and Trigraphs

Posted on | by Pearson

John_Caine
Professor John Caine
SUNY, Suffolk Community College

More than any other request, my students ask me to help them with pronunciation and vocabulary. After my first few semesters, I realized that a key factor in helping them was to start with consonant blends.

A consonant blend (also called a consonant cluster) is a group of two or three consonants in words that makes a distinct consonant sound, such as bl, br, cl, cr, dr, fl, fr, gl, gr, pl, pr, qu, sc, sk, sl, sm, sn, sp, st, sw, tr, and tw, We can group these into “l” and “r” blends, which are the most frequent and convenient to categorize.

A digraph is a single sound, or phoneme, that is represented by two letters. A trigraph is a phoneme that consists of three letters.

Consonant digraphs include ch, ck, gh, kn, mb, ng, ph, sh, th, wh, and wr. Some of these create a new sound, as in ch, sh, and th. Some, however, are just different spellings for already familiar sounds. Some consonants have “silent partners”: for example gh is a different spelling for “f” and mb is “m” while wr is still the “r” sound.

Sometimes reframing the concept in familiar terms lowers the affective filter encouraging self-scaffolding. Our goal is to encourage students to use the language they’re learning, and making the language fun to use is a great way to do that. Blends are fairly straightforward because they keep their phonemic structure. But sometimes helping students to vocalize these blends can be daunting. Teaching decoding helps them recognize and form new words.

But, there are so many blends and digraphs in English. Where to begin? Ah, the one reliable go-to connection for teaching—food. This is something familiar, something students can relate to, and something they can practice using since they come in contact with these items every day. Continue reading →

I is for Intensive Reading

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Ken Beatty 1Dr. Ken Beatty

Many teachers cringe at their early memories of learning a language through the teacher-centered grammar-translation method. Rule driven, with a focus on accuracy over fluency, it’s the oldest formal methodology, dating back to the teaching of Latin in the 1500s. Over the centuries, other languages were taught in the same way, and when the first modern language textbooks appeared in the 19th century, they tended to use the grammar translation method as well. Internationally, it continues to be popular in many countries, in part because teachers, unless trained otherwise, tend to teach the way they were taught.

In the 20th century, dissatisfaction with the grammar-translation method saw the rise of many competing approaches through the 1960s. Since then, teachers have increasingly embraced variations of the learner-centered communicative approach or use a mixed methods approach, distilling the best ideas and features of different approaches and methods to find those that best meet their learners’ needs. One aspect of the grammar-translation method that lives on in modern classrooms is intensive reading.

Intensive reading is contrasted with extensive reading. In intensive reading, the focus is on a deep understanding of the text, which is usually pitched at a level that is slightly challenging for the learner. The intensive reading passage might be challenging in one or more ways. The vocabulary might be new, and/or the sentence structures and grammar might be advanced for the learners’ level. The subtleties of the text might be such that the learner needs to use considerable inference skills to decode what a paragraph, article, or story is about. The focus might be on genre, for example, understanding how a lab report differs from an essay or a short story.

Intensive reading focuses on shorter passages and is teacher-centered in the sense that teachers, for pedagogical purposes, select what they feel the learners should read. The teacher (or sometimes the textbook) carefully chooses a text that narrows the focus of what learners should be acquiring in terms of vocabulary, comprehension, or even strategies that will make it easier to read similar texts in future.

Assuming you are not fluent in Latin, look at the following paragraph and reflect on how much you understand.

Eodem die ab exploratoribus certior factus hostes sub monte consedisse milia passuum ab ipsius castris octo, qualis esset natura montis et qualis in circuitu ascensus qui cognoscerent misit. Renuntiatum est facilem esse. De tertia vigilia T. Labienum, legatum pro praetore, cum duabus legionibus et iis ducibus qui iter cognoverant summum iugum montis ascendere iubet; quid sui consilii sit ostendit. Ipse de quarta vigilia eodem itinere quo hostes ierant ad eos contendit equitatumque omnem ante se mittit.

No, really. Read it. I know you just skimmed it or skipped it altogether. Seriously, go back and have a careful look at the paragraph, reading it aloud. Even if you don’t read or speak Latin, there should still be several things that you understand.

Eodem die abexploratoribus certior factus hostes sub monte consedisse milia passuum ab ipsius castris octo, qualis esset natura montis et qualis in circuitu ascensus qui cognoscerent misit. Renuntiatum est facilem esse. De tertia vigilia T. Labienum, legatum pro praetore, cum duabus legionibus et iis ducibus qui iter cognoverant summum iugum montis ascendere iubet; quid sui consilii sit ostendit. Ipse de quarta vigilia eodem itinere quo hostes ierant ad eos contendit equitatumque omnem ante se mittit. Continue reading →

Drawing in the Classroom: It’s Easier than You Think

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2013_Heyer_SandraSandra Heyer

When I first began teaching beginning-level English, I was surprised at how many times I found myself at the board, trying to draw a picture for my students. The key word here is trying. I am one of those unfortunate people who literally can’t draw a straight line.

But while I had the misfortune of being an inept artist, I had the good fortune of being a contemporary of the late Norma Shapiro, a gifted teacher who made it her mission to help teachers like me enhance their lessons with passable drawings. At a TESOL conference many years ago, Norma gave a presentation billed as a crash course in drawing for teachers who can’t draw. I came early for a front-row seat and took away drawing tips that have served me well over the course of my career. With the help of Norma’s tips, you might discover, as I did, that drawing for your students is easier than you think. Here are six quick tips:

1. To represent people, don’t draw stick figures — draw figures Norma called “blobs.” Most of the time, you’re just trying to get across the idea that your drawing is a human being and not, say, a fish or a can of soda. So it is usually not necessary to draw ears, arms, or legs. A basic blob has only a head and shoulders:

Drawing in the classroom images 1a

Continue reading →