Teaching Writing - Week 7 - Nuts and Bolts

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 7 of the course Teaching Writing for the Bachelor's in English Teaching at ULACIT in term IIC 2023. In this class we will talk about the building blocks of writing, mechanical aspects such as handwriting, spelling, and punctuation. We will also review your first lesson planning assignment and preview your sixth creation.

Today's Goals:

• Present your first lesson plan and explain your design choices.
• Explore the importance of mechanics in L2 writing.
• Review a number of strategies for teaching handwriting and spelling.

Guiding Questions:

• How can I provide effective writing instruction for young learners?
• What strategies can I use to teach the mechanical aspects of writing?
• How can I develop students' understanding of handwriting, spelling, and basic punctuation?

Task 1: Lesson Plan Walkthrough - Young Learners Reading and Writing Lesson

This week you were asked to write your first lesson plan. Let's take a moment to review what you created.

• Example: Walk us through your plan.
• Strengths: Tell us what you think are the strengths of combining reading and writing in the lesson plan template you used.
• Challenges: Tell us the challenges you faced while creating the plan or potential challenges you foresee for teacher or students who will follow the plan.

• Additional Considerations: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Project Check-in

Remember, you should already be thinking about your final Learner Needs and Context Analysis project. A few weeks back we talked about some strategies to gather useful information about your students' writing needs and preferences. Have you had the chance to think about the design of your data collection instruments?

• Your Course Project: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Reading Exploration - Nuts and Bolts

Let's discuss the following questions regarding the assigned reading for this week, "Nuts and Bolts".

• The Handwriting Challenge: Click the link below and complete the dictation you teacher says. Now complete the dictation backwards!

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

• What was challenging about this?
• What insight does it give us about the handwriting and spelling challenge faced by young learners of English?
• What do you remember about the process of learning to write in Spanish?

• Teaching Handwriting: Hand writing is a challenge for children and for adult English learners whose native language uses a non-Latin script. They need to learn which direction the letters go (left to right in English) and how to form the individual letters. For very early learners, it is helpful to give them tracing activities or to use arrow diagrams to help them see the direction to move their pencils. 

• It's also important to bring their attention to issues of height and depth. Special three-lined writing paper is very useful for this purpose.

• Recognition and Production: The author of the chapter suggests a two stage approach for helping early learners with handwriting. 

• Notice: Work on practice exercises that have students notice the shape of letters and words. For example, a simple word search task where student need to find all the examples of the letter G. You can also show them a list of words using similar letters and have them find all the examples of a particular word. What are some additional recognition tasks you might do?

• Write: There are many writing tasks the go from extremely controlled to less controlled. What are some additional recognition tasks you might do?

• Tracing
• Copying
• Fill in the blanks with the missing letter
• Fill in the blanks with the missing word
• Classify words and copy them into a chart

• The Spelling Challenge: Read the poem below. What is the poem about? What is the author's message? How does it relate to the topic of learning to write?

• Eye have a spelling checker
  
  It came with my pea sea
  It clearly marks four my review
  Miss steaks eye can knot sea
  
  Eye strike a key and type a word
  And weight four it to say
  Weather eye am wrong oar write
  It shows me strait a weigh
  
  As soon as a mist ache is maid
  It nose bee for two long
  And eye can put the error write
  It's rarely ever wrong
  
  Eye have run this poem threw it
  I am shore your pleased two no
  It's letter perfect all the weigh
  My checker told me sew

• Teaching Spelling: Read the quote below. What do you know about the term comprehensible input?
• Quote: "The best way of helping students to learn how to spell is to have them read as much as possible. Extensive reading (reading longer texts, such as simplified readers, for pleasure) helps students to remember English spelling rules and their exceptions, although many students may need some encouragment to do this kind of reading (p. 47)."

• Traditional Practice: You can look for or create your own practice worksheets that review common spelling rules (i before e except after c, double consonsants, etc.) but that is not the only thing you can do to practice spelling. 

• Dictation Variations: There are a lot of dictation exercises that can be fun for learners.
• Standard Dictation and Group Recreation
• Running Dictation
• Back to Back Dictation
• Contextualized Dictation (cocktail party)

• Games: Many games can also be used to elicit correct spelling of words from students.
• Wheel of Fortune
• Crossword Puzzles
• Word Search
• Broken Telephone Spelling Rally
• Bananagrams: CLICK HERE

• Teaching Punctuation: The author gave several strategies to work on punctuation. In your study guide you were asked to complete the exercises yourself. What do you remember about these?

• Noticing Punctuation
• Adding Punctuation
• Noticing and Adding Punctuation

Task 4: Handwriting and Spelling - Building Blocks

Let's finish today's class by previewing your sixth creation task. 

• Assignment Guidelines: CLICK HERE

References: 

Harmer, J. (2004). How to Teach Writing. Longman.

 Culture and SLA - Week 7 -  Culture Learning Outcomes

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 7 of the course Culture and Second Language Acquisition for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIIC0 2023. This week we will identify culture learning outcomes, how they are achieved, and contexts in which they are appropriate.

Today's Goals:

• Discuss appropriate culture learning goals for different contexts.
• Articulate several core beliefs about how you see yourself as a cultural educator.
• Explore aspects of community life, organization, and identity in the assigned text.

Guiding Questions: 

• How can I articulate and classify the aims of culture learning?
• How do I view myself as a cultural educator?
• What role do institutions play in cultural identity formation?

Task 1: My Community Memberships

Read the two quotes below from Moran's chapter on Cultural Communities. Then click the group link and follow your teacher's instructions to explore some of your community memberships.

• Discourses:"Linguist James Gee calls these communities Discourses as a way of emphasizing the social practices they carry out: ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing. Gee contentds that individuals are members of many Discourses and that each one calls for a distinct set of practices for membership, what he calls an identity kit (p. 93)."

• Interpersonal Relationships: “Communities, therefore, in physical settings and social circumstances, form a basis for relationships in the culture. The kinds of relationships that members of the culture establish and maintain are connected to the kinds of communities in which members participate. Communities exist for a wide variety of purposes and they use certain practices to achieve their respective ends, which in turn affect the kinds of relationships that are possible or expected.”

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

Theory Break: Cultural Persons - Our Identity(ies) as Cultural Beings

• "Culture resides in persons, in individuals. Each member of a culture, like a miniscule twist in a kaleidoscope, refracts and reflects the common colored lights of their culture in a unique display, recognizably similar yet unquestionably different (Moran, p. 98).”

• "When we enter another culture and participate in its practices, we do this through our interactions with individuals, with the people of the culture."

• "As outsiders, our initial tendency is to see similarities among personas and to assume that they are representative of their culture, that they are 'typically' Japanese, Chinese, or Spanish. Yet as we get to know these persons, we begin to discern the differences, the idiosynchracies, the quirks, the personalities, the special characteristics that set them off from others in their culture."

• “Like other aspects of culture, identity is both explicit and tacit. There are aspects of ourselves that we can describe or put into words and there are others that we cannot express, or that are simply outside of our awareness. Not until we find ourselves in situations where our sense of self – our values, beliefs, practices – is called into question do we perceive the tacit dimensions of our identity (Moran, p. 99).”

• Exploring our avowed and ascribed identities: CLICK HERE

•  “When students whose first language is not English first encounter the learning of English as an additional language, they cannot really avoid the issue of learner identity (be it imposed, assumed, and/or negotiated) because they must participate in a community different than what they are used to (Farrell, p. 33).”

• “Throughout their careers teachers construct and reconstruct (usually tacitly) a conceptual sense of who they are (their self-image), and this is manifested through what they do (their professional role identity) (Farrell, p. 34).”

Task 2: Reading Response Exploration - Culture Learning Outcomes

Let's take a moment to discuss some questions related to your assigned reading for this week.

• Reasons Why: Why do you think a course like this one, Culture and Second Language Acquisition, is a required component of your univeristy curriculum? What's the purpose? Is it just to fill in the plan de estudio? What connection does it have with the more general learning goals of the whole degree program? 

• Learning Contexts: In what circumstances in the real world is it important for people to consciously learn about another culture or to become aware of asepcts of their own culture? Try to list some specific examples.

• Learning Goals: Think about the following contexts. What kind of cultural knowledge would benefit the person? Why?

• A university student from Spain preparing for a 6 month study exchange program at a university in Texas.

• An adult immigrant from Afghanistan who recently relocated to Australia with a refugee visa who is starting a new life in a country he does not know.

• A German corporate executive of an international company who was sent to Costa Rica to mange the operations of a medical devices factory. The staff of the factory are mostly Costa Ricans.

• A Chistian missionary from Mexico is preparing to move to a rural area of Angola in Africa to help lead a church there.

• A Costa Rican tourist in Italy who signed up for a tour of different historical, artistic, and architectural sites of the counry for two weeks.

• A group of recent university graduates from different places in the United States are in Costa Rica receiving training and cultural education lessons in San José before being sent to work as volunteer English teaching assistants in public schools in rural areas of the country for two years as part of the US Peace Corps program.

• Culture Learning Outcomes: Read the chart below carefully. It lists six possible outcomes of the culture learning process. The chart is a little confusing because it is not sequential. It starts by stating the final result of the learning process. Then it lists the general focus of the learning process as well examples of the kind of content included in the learning process. 

Click to View Full Sized Image

• Turning it Around: Let's consider this information in a different order. Click the group link below and go to your section of the document. 

• Group Document: CLICK HERE

Theory Break: Culture Learning Outcomes

• “To generalize … across all these culture learning outcomes, I would say that all intend that learners confront, comprehend, accept, and overcome cultural differences. This process involves an interplay of mind, body, heart, and self - or, in technical terms, cognition, behavior, affect, and identity. As part of mastering the language, learners need to change the way they think, act, feel, and perceive themselves and their roles if they are to function effectively and appropriately in the other culture (p. 119).”

• The particular culture learning outcomes you seek for your students will inform the focus you give your lessons and the model of culture teaching you develop. Moran says, “the key distinction among [culture teaching]... models lies with differing notions of ‘overcoming’ cultural differences. These range from simply changing one’s mind or feelings about a given culture (culture-specific understanding) through recognizing how one’s own culture affects acceptance of other cultures (culture-general understanding), learning to communicate appropriately in a second language/culture (competence), integrating oneself into another language and culture (adaptation), developing a distinct sense of self (identity), to taking action to transform a culture based on one’s own beliefs (social change). Ultimately, the individual learner decides how to respond and develops skills as a culture learner (personal competence) (p. 119)."
  

Task 3: Culture Learning Outcomes

Your reading this week focuses on the topic of culture learning outcomes; the different possible results of the culture learning process. Moran provides us with a useful way of classifying these outcomes which can help us choose a particular way of focusing our teaching efforts depending on our context. Click the group link below to explore the what, how, and why of the six culture learning outcomes.

• Group Link: CLICK HERE

• Answer Key: CLICK HERE

• Which of these outcomes resonate with you and the way you view yourself as a cultural educator?

• What beliefs about culture form part of your learning philosophy that guides your approach to teaching? CLICK HERE to add to the culture teaching manifesto!

Task 4: Community Life and Organization in Limón 1915-1948

The Cultural Analysis assignment for this week asked you to read a chapter from What Happen: A Folk-History of Costa Rica's Talamanca Coast by Paula Palmer. This chapter highlights some of the unique cultural practices of the Afro-Costa Rica Community of the southern Atlantic coast at a time of transition when the region was experiencing an increased presence of government institutions from the broader national culture. Read the information below and respond to the prompts in blue.

• Background Information: English speaking black communities formed on the Carribean coast of the country beginning in the early and mid-1800's The first settlers were fishermen, turtle hunters, and farmers from other Anglophone communities in the regions of Bocas del Toro, Panamá; San Andrés, Colombia; and Bluefields, Nicaragua. These initial settlers were followed by a large wave of immigrants in the late 1800's from Jamaica and other Carribbean countries during the construction of the railroad and transnational banana plantations. Because the area was so far from the Central Valley, the government of Costa Rica had very little presence in the region for many decades and the Afrocaribbean community lived in relative isolation from mainstream Costa Rican culture which allowed their culture, language, and traditions as well as their own community organizations to become well established. 

• Schools - English and Spanish: The author describes both the privately financed English schools organized by the local community and government run Spanish schools established by the state. Both kinds of schools faced logistical and financial challenges. What did you write about this section of the text? How do you think the interplay of English and Spanish schools influenced the sense of community and cultural identity? 

• The Universal Negro Improvement Association: UNIA was an international organization started by Jamaican Marcus Garvey that spread his Pan-Africanist and Black Nationalist philosophy (referred to as Garveyism in the text), the idea that all black people in the Americas, dispite their country or language are one people and the that improvement of their economic and social situation would come as a result of transnational cooperation and self-determinism through the establishment of their own country in Africa. UNIA established branches throughout the continent including ones in Limón, Cahuita, and Puerto Viejo. What did you write about this section? What role did UNIA play in the local communities? How do you think this organization contributed to sense of community membership and cultural identity?

• The Problem of Citizenship: The chapter also contained a rather long section that looked at the problems that black residents of Limón had in becoming recognized as Costa Rican citizens. 

• Judges: The text said that the government begain sending "judges" to the region in the 1920's. One of their jobs was to record the births of children. What were some of the problems the local community faced when interacting with the judges? What did the author say about the practice of naming babies? How did this make the locals feel?

• Citizenship: The text says that it wasn't until the 1940's that black children born in Limón were granted citizenship by birth. Before that, babies of foreign parents would keep the citizenship of their parents. That means that it took three generations of of living in Costa Rican territory before the first black Limonenses were recognized as citizens "por nacimiento". When the "by birth" law came into effect, that did not automatically include all of the people born before that. Anyone born in Costa Rica before that law had to go through a complicated and expensive legal process of applying for citizenship "por opción". How do you think these facts impacted the community's sense of identity?

• Employment Descrimination: The author also discusses some of the legal descrimination against black residents that occured in the early 1900's. What were some of the examples mentioned in the text?

• Final Quote: "It would not be until after the 1948 Revolution that the color ban on employment in the Pacific would be lifted, and blacks would be fully integrated into the political life of the nation. By that time, three generations of Afrocaribbean families had been born and raised on the Talamanca Coast, most of them retaining the nationality of their pioneer ancestors. The prevailing attitude among them was expressed by Albert Guthrie, of Old Harbour: 'I know where I was born, so why I want to worry with lawyers and papers? They only take your money. Stay away from those problems, because it's only problems, you know. Just live good and don't worry with it (p. 190)."

• Other Cultural Aspects: The other sections of the chapter describe holidays and celebrations, sports, music, literature, folk medicine, and other cultural practices and perspectives. Did you read any of these sections? If so, what stood out to you?

References:

Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture: Perspectices in Practice. Heinle, Cengage Learning. 

Palmer, P. (1993). What Happen: A Folk-History of Costa Rica's Talamanca Coast. Publications in English S.A.

 Culture and SLA - Week 6 -  Cultural Communities and Persons

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 6 of the course Culture and Second Language Acquisition for the master's in English teaching at ULACIT term IIC0 2023. This week we will consider the final two components of Moran's Dimensions, cultural communities and cultural persons, but first we will wrap up our exploration of cultural perspecives by considering the work of the researchers conducting the World Values Survey. 

Today's Goals:

• Discuss the role of schools as acculturation institutions for transmitting dominant cultural values.
• Identify our broad and narrow cultural community affiliations and requirements for membership.
• Discuss how our avowed and ascribed identitites inform the ways we present ourselves to others.

Guiding Questions: 

• What roles do institutions play in transmitting cultural values?
• How does the consideration of cultural communities add complexity to the analysis of regional or national culture?
• Do I consider myself to be a "typical" representative of my culture?

Warm Up: Contrasting Values

Last week we studied Hofstede's 6 Dimensions of Culture that allow us to explore contrasting value orientations at a national level. Click your group link below and classify the values of Costa Rica in general and match them with their contrasting value pairs. When you finish, go on to pages two and discuss the prompts.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE
• Group 3: CLICK HERE

Theory Break: Cultural Values

• Moran identifies four categories of cultural perspectives (perceptions, beliefs, values, and attitudes) which he organizes in a continuum from tacit to explict. The most explicit category of perspectives are attitudes which are "visibly manifested in practices (p. 77)." On the far end of the spectrum are perceptions, the least visible category of perspectives.

• Perceptions: What we perceive, what we ignore; what we notice or disregard

• Beliefs: What we hold to be true or untrue

• Values: What we hold to be right/wrong, good/evil, desirable/undesirable, proper/improper, normal/abnormal, appropriate

• Attitudes: Our mental and affective dispositions - our frame of mind, our outlook - charged with feeling or emotion

Task 1: World Values Survey

The World Values Survey is a massive international research project that began in 1981. It consists of an extensive survey of the value orientations of individuals around the world in order to produce country level results. The survey seeks to contrast countries on two separate value dimensions or scales.

• Traditional Values vs Rational-Secular Values (y axis)
• Survival Values vs Self-Expression Values (x axis)

This allows the researchers to place countries in a coordinate system which creates a visual way to easily compare, contrast, and group different countries. Also, by comparing survey results of different years, researchers can chart how the values of a specific country change over time.

Click your assigned link below. Read the information with your partners and discussion the questions at the end. Be prepared to share your ideas when you return to the main room. 

• Exploring Traditional vs Rational Values Axis 
• CLICK HERE

• Exploring Survival vs Self-Expression Values
• CLICK HERE

Inglehart-Welzel World Culture Map

Task 2: Culture Map Analysis

Click the picture to view the full resolution image and discuss the questions below.

• Explore the map, which countries can you find at the extremes of each value dimension (axis)?
• What catches your attention about the way the countries cluster by geographic and socio-historical cultural regions?
• Where do you think Costa Rica would fall on this map? (WVS plans to include CR in the next value survey.)

Now watch the video that shows how these cultural areas have shifted over the last 40 years through different maps that have been created based on the survey results since it began in 1981. Discuss the questions below the video.

• Do you notice any general trends among the countries in the Latin American region?
• Watch the video again. This time focus your attention on France. How does this country's values orientation shift through the decades?
• Watch the video again. This time focus your attention on Mexico. How does this country's values orientation shift through the decades? What might explain this variation?

• Insights and Hypotheses: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Schools as Acculturation Institutions

Institutions like school are cultural products. However, they are very special products because they serve the purpose of promoting cultural practices and perspectives and they help to create a shared sense of national cultural identity. Watch this video clip documenting some of the daily routines in a typical elementary school in Japan and answer the questions below.

• What were some of the routines?
• What was similar and different to your own elementary school experience?
• How do these practices give you insight into Japanese cultural perspecitves (perceptions, beliefs, values, attitudes)?
• How do practices in Costa Rican elementary schools promote cultural perspectives and contribute to a shared sense of national identity?

Morning Routine in the US

Variations by School and Region

Task 4: Reading Response Discussion - Cultural Communities and Persons

Let's transition into a new topic by reviewing the contents and sharing some of your responses from this week's study guide. Read the information below and respond to the prompts.

• What are Communities?: "Communities consist of the specific groups of the culture in which members, through different kinds of interpersonal relationships, carry out practices in specific social and physical settings (p. 90)."

• Broad: Communities can be large and general.
• Nation
• Language
• Gender
• Race
• Religion
• Socioeconomic Class
• Region
• Generation

• Narrow: Communities can be much more specific.
• Workplace
• Neighborhood
• School Association
• Local Political Party
• Religious Social Club
• Sports Team
• Charity Organization
• Co-workers
• Family

• Prompt: What community memberships do you have that immediately come to mind? What defines your membership to that community? What shared practices, perspectives, etc. do you have?

• What's the Relationship between Communities and Social Institutions?: "At the broadest level, the social institutions of the culture define communities and accompanying practices for everyone within the borders of the national culture. Economic, political, educational, health, and other institutions exist for members of the national culture as a whole. Accordingly, these institutions establish and maintain many practices that members of the culture need to enact in order to go about a large part of their daily lives (p. 91)."

• Community Dominance: "The social institutions of the culture and its systems tend to reflect the dominant cultural communities, that is, those groups that have the most influence (p. 91)."

• Prompt: In your study guide you were asked to think of a social institution in Costa Rica and say how it determines certain cultural practices for members of the national culture. What example did you write?

• How do Communities Interact?: "Co-existing communities, in other words, are in relationship with one another in the national culture. They may be physically isolated from one another, or they may exist next to one another but be separate, with no interaction between them. They may have a harmonious collaborative relationship or they may oppose one another, possibly in open conflict (p. 93)."

• Terminology: The relationship between different cultural communites has been described using these terms: 

• Microcultures inside a Macroculture
• Co-Cultures inside a Dominant Culture

• The Macroculture or Dominant Culture can also be referred to as:

• Mainstream Culture
• Umbrella Culture
• Core Culture

• Prompt: One of the challenges for teachers of culture is to avoid generalizations when teaching about cultural perspectives. If national cultures are composed of multiple independent, co-existing, competing, and conflicting communities with a range of cultural perspectives, we can't express anything meaningful about perspectives without presenting multiple, often contradictory points of view. Can you think of any conflicting perspectives or practices held by different communities in Costa Rica?

• What is a Discourse Community?:"Linguist James Gee calls these communities Discourses as a way of emphasizing the social practices they carry out: ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing. Gee contentds that individuals are members of many Discourses and that each one calls for a distinct set of practices for membership, what he calls an identity kit (p. 93)."

• Interpersonal Relationships: "The important point here is that relationships are practiced according to the cultural perspectives that underlie practices in these communities. Strangers, acquaintances, friends, romantic partners, rivals, enemies, family members, and group based relationships are all defined accordingly. In simple terms, you relate to people according to the norms, the unwritten rules, of that particular community (p. 93)."

• Prompt: Click the link below. On the first page list some of your community memberships then move to the second page and discuss the questions regarding membership. Remember Gee's quote about discourses and the identity tool kit.
  
  

  • Group Link: CLICK HERE

Theory Break: Cultural Persons - Our Identity(ies) as Cultural Beings

• "Culture resides in persons, in individuals. Each member of a culture, like a miniscule twist in a kaleidoscope, refracts and reflects the common colored lights of their culture in a unique display, recognizably similar yet unquestionably different (Moran, p. 98).”

• "When we enter another culture and participate in its practices, we do this through our interactions with individuals, with the people of the culture."

• "As outsiders, our initial tendency is to see similarities among personas and to assume that they are representative of their culture, that they are 'typically' Japanese, Chinese, or Spanish. Yet as we get to know these persons, we begin to discern the differences, the idiosynchracies, the quirks, the personalities, the special characteristics that set them off from others in their culture."

• “Like other aspects of culture, identity is both explicit and tacit. There are aspects of ourselves that we can describe or put into words and there are others that we cannot express, or that are simply outside of our awareness. Not until we find ourselves in situations where our sense of self – our values, beliefs, practices – is called into question do we perceive the tacit dimensions of our identity (Moran, p. 99).”

• Exploring our avowed and ascribed identities: CLICK HERE

•  “When students whose first language is not English first encounter the learning of English as an additional language, they cannot really avoid the issue of learner identity (be it imposed, assumed, and/or negotiated) because they must participate in a community different than what they are used to (Farrell, p. 33).”

• “Throughout their careers teachers construct and reconstruct (usually tacitly) a conceptual sense of who they are (their self-image), and this is manifested through what they do (their professional role identity) (Farrell, p. 34).”

References:

Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture: Perspectices in Practice. Heinle, Cengage Learning. 

  Teaching Writing - Week 6 - Teaching Writing to Young Learners

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 6 of the course Teaching Writing for the Bachelor's in English Teaching at ULACIT in term IIC 2023. In this class we will talk about the characteristics of young learners and explore relevant techniques for teaching writing to this unique population. We will also take time to review your fifth creation and preview the instructions for your first lesson planning assignment.

Today's Goals:

• Review your fifth writing activity creation.
• Explore the defining characteristics of young learners and relevant strategies for teaching them writing.
• Clarify the instructions for your first lesson planning assignment.

Guiding Questions:

• How can micro-journaling provide options for student writing development.
• How can I provide effective writing instruction for young learners?
• How can I organize a reading and writing lesson for children?

Task 1: Activity Type Demo - Micro-Jounraling Activity

Nearly every week of this course you will submit a unit writing activity creation in order to build a portfolio of writing activity types. 

• Characteristics: What are the features of micro-journaling tasks?
• Example: What activity did you create?
• Strengths: In what ways are micro-journaling tasks potentially beneficial?
• Challenges: What potential limitations or challenges are associated with them?

• Additional Considerations: CLICK HERE

Task 2: Project Check-in

Remember, you should already be thinking about your final Learner Needs and Context Analysis project. Last week we talked about some strategies to gather useful information about your students' writing needs and preferences. Have you had the chance to think about the design of your data collection instruments?

• Your Course Project: CLICK HERE

Task 3: Reading Exploration - Teaching Reading and Writing (to YL's)

Let's discuss the following questions regarding the assigned reading for this week, "Teaching Reading and Writing".

• What are YLs like?: Click the link below to do a matching activity that describes characteristics of young learners and what teachers should do to support them. 

• Group Worksheet: CLICK HERE

• Why Focus on Reading and Writing?: In this week's reading the authors described some of the challenges and benefits of including reading and writing in the young learner classroom. 

• Why do most English for YL classrooms tend to focus more on listening and speaking than reading and writing?
• Why is it important to make the effort to include reading and writing anyway?
• What does it mean to have a print-rich classroom?

• English has a deep orthography.
• Children are developing literacy skills in two languages at once.
• Reading complements writing and vice versa.
• Reading and writing complement listening and reading and vice versa.

• What's the Purpose?: The authors emphasize the importance of context and purpose in designing writing tasks. 

• Quote: "When we write outside of the classroom, we werite because we have something we want to communicate, a purpose for our writing, and a real audience we want to communicate with. But we sometimes forget that when we assign writing in language classes. A way to help us remember to assign authentic writing assignmets is to use FAT-P in explaining those assignments (p. 186)."

• FAT-P

• How can we Guide Learners?: The authors spent several pages describing two categories of writing activities. Read the quote and then discuss the questions.

• Quote: "Even very young children have ideas about how texts are written, and they attempt to create texts based on those ideas; over time, as their understanding of these texts changes, so does their writing (p. 186)."

• What is the difference between controlled and guilded writing activities?
• Why are they both important? 
• What are some examples of each?

• What now?: Read the final quotes from the end of the chapter. 

• Quote: "In a young learner classroom, children can read and then write about what they read (in a range of activities) and they can read what they or other children have written. Reading can be thought of as preparation for writing and writing as producing something for others to read (p. 204)."

• Quote: "As much as possible, in each new unit or lesson plan, a meaningful context for reading and writing should be established before children focus on the smaller elements of written language (p. 205)."

Task 4: Young Learners Reading and Writing Plan

Let's finish today's class by previewing your first lesson planning assignment.

• Assignment Guidelines: CLICK HERE

References: 

Shin, J.K. & Crandall, J. (2014). Teaching English to Young Learners: From Theory to Practice. National Geographic Learning.