Monday, August 3, 2009
Literacy Narrative
Write a paragraph about your reading and writing (literacy) experiences in English. How were your first experiences like when you were learning English literacy skills? What types of strategies do you employ while reading and writing in English (academic genre)? Do you use the same or similar strategies while reading in Korean? Please share with us a few strategies that work best for you.
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ReplyDeleteWhen I was learning English reading, sentence to sentence translation was all. I didn't tell anything special of English writing because I had no experience in class except for just sentence composition. I learned a few strategies of reading and writing from the past second course ' TESOL theories and perspectives'. As for reading I think they are good ones: knowing about the writer's autobiography and reading the contents of the writing and thinking over the title or the subtitle. As for writing they are good ones: selecting the interesting and real experienced materials and planning in advance what I will write before starting by using Venn Diagrams, time lines, etc. to organize what I write. and revising by getting feedback from others who read my work and using many short sentences as possible.
ReplyDeleteActually, I never have had any class for writing because I and those who were born in 1980s, I think haven't been taught English writing but we used to labour over every word and grammar because learning English is one of the tools of a coming exam for entering a university. Therefore, I don't have any good strategies to employ. In terms of reading, I have a word for you. On what we've learned from the previous professor, I used to take strategies that lowed affective filter like prediction of what happens next and guess of how chracters look like from the introduction. I put lots of meaning on having interesting. Everybody could love reading with knowing what they are interested in.
ReplyDeleteSame as other English learners, first I learned how to write the English alphabets. After I was used writing all the alphabets, I tried to take dictation after listening English tapes. And then I can create my own writing. So I wrote diary in English. (Actually it was my assignment for summer and winter vacation) It seems bottom-up style.
ReplyDeleteHowever when I read, I use the opposite style, Top-down style. Reading is knowing and understanding the meaning of the articles. So first we have to understand the purpose and meaning of writing then get informations.
I started learning English literacy through corresponding with foreign pen pals when I was in the 5th grade of elementary school. At first, when I was reading their letters with an English-Korean dictionary, it was so hard that it seems like decoding. As time went by, I could understand the whole message of letters without a dictionary.
ReplyDeleteWriting was similar to the reading. However, fortunately I had the book full of example sentences for writing letters in English. I just copied them without any knowledge for grammar. I think it involved both two activities-reading & writing. It was very useful for learning the patterns of English sentences.
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ReplyDeleteI also started to learn English from Alphabet as others did. I think that it was a kind of trend for learning Alphabet through phonics when I was a child. So, I had learned English from A to Z with cassette tape and some books. And then I could read how to read the English words. However, it was a private way for learning English. After entering middle school, the method which I learned English went to the GTM (Grammar Translation Method). I should memorize all vocabularies and sentences in the text for good scores for English exam. Therefore, learning reading was bottom-up style and intensive reading. It was less effective and not interesting. I think it was affected to my English ability seriously. I could not read English writing well until now. So I recommand that reading for plesure could be a good method to learn reading English writing. There is no bad method for reading under pressure.
ReplyDeleteI wrote each alphabet repeatedly when I began to studty English in my junior schooldays. I memorized many words and idioms. I had a lot of dictation test. As the result of that, I could fill appropriate words in the blanks of the exams and I could translate well in the exams.
ReplyDeleteBut I am sorry that I had never written my essay in English and I didn't any chance to think critically after reading English books or English articles.
Actually such way to read and write English(memorization) is different from way of Korean studying. I could write a my diary in Korean by myself even though I began to study Korean in 7 or 8 years old. And I could understand the meaning while reading fairy tales which written in Korean.
My strategies for reading and writing in English were memorization and translation of many paragraphs.I still wonder those are useful or unuseful for reading and writing in English.
I'd like to share some strategies I used when reading and writing in English. While I was reading, I had two different strategies which seem to be incompatible. Sometimes I wrote unfamiliar vocabularies during reading and found them on a dictionary, whereas sometimes I skipped finding those words on a dictionary to keep the flow of reading. Using different strategies corresponding to the reading purpose and context was useful for me.
ReplyDeleteFor writing, I think it is good to learn the structure based on the assumption that your vocabularies were build up to some extent. Knowing about structure helped me to make a logical writing. It is important because there is slight difference in writing style between English and Korean. I think it reflects culture in some aspects.
Remembering my past English learning, I don't know whether I had real English literacy skills. If the "literacy skill" means just ability to read and write without considering text construction, I can say I learned from my teachers how to read and write in English. However, if it means understanding true meaning of a text which contains cohesive devices and coherence such as critical reading Dr.Seloni mentioned in the class, it may be hard to say "yes". Learning English in the secondary schools in Korea was like U.S soldiers participating in the second World war learned English for survival in a way of so-called "Audio-Lingual Method", though their purposes were different. However one thing that I could get through preparing for the uniersity entrance exam was systematic reading, because reading and grammar were extremely emphasized in the exam. In case questions in the exam ask finding the gist of a text, I usually focused on the initial part, the last part, and the part after some particular transitions such as "However". On the other hand, in case questions ask finding specific information, I focused on the relevant vocabularies. Applying these to what I have learned in this program, I think I used "top-down processing", and "bottom-up processing". In writing, school teachers didn't teach us how to write, and we did n't want to learn this skill since university entrance exam didn't deal with writing. So, regarding the articles appearing in the exam as good texts, I tried to imitate the formation, and apply the knowleadge in Korean writing to English writing.
ReplyDeleteMy experience of reading in English started from middle school. The textbook contained some dialogues about daily life such as greeting, requesting and refusing and some pieces of easy writing. My teacher read the script and we had to answer the questions that the teacher asked to class in Korean. At high school, I learned longer sentences that is composed complex structure. We also had an exercise book that the English teacher chose to prepare for the university entrance exam. When we read a text, the English teacher analyzed the structure and asked to find the subject or the verb. And then we had to translate English into Korean. After that we had to select the right answers among the five examples in following questions about comprehension of the text. I think it was not a real reading. The purpose of reading was not for getting information or pleasure but for studying on grammatical rules. But through these drills, I discovered that I could save time to analyze the structure when I encountered a long sentence and deduce the meaning of new vocabulary from context. Because I was able to focus on the sentences that were related to the questions and find the right answer quickly. I utilized often these reading strategies.
ReplyDeleteIn writing in English, the useful writing strategies didn't come across my mind. I learned controlled writing such as dictation, filling in the banks, and tracing the sentences at school. Because the university entrance exam has consisted of listening part and reading part, besides almost all universities in Korea have asked the entrance exam essay in Korean. So writing in English was less important when I was a student. I hope that we can learn the various strategies in here.
Actually, I had no experience of writing such as an essay and journal when I was in school. We did a lot of reading practice based on GTM for working the examination papers but English learning was not focusing on writing at that time. There were certain Korean writing classes for entrance exam essay question. Also for reading, it was concentrated on knowing of meaning of words and grammatical order of sentences, so we could get information but it did not mean that we could find out fun through reading text and we were able to relate to culture background things. Therefore, generally Korean students used to be strong with reading and listening but not with speaking and writing in English. I have written couple of essays about myself and cover letter for resume in English, but I cannot say it was an academic writing.
ReplyDeleteI see writing English academic essay is required by some universities nowadays some students who would like to apply for those universities take an English writing class in public school or a private lesson for it. I am not sure that this writing and reading practice for essay question would work in real world but I think this opportunity of practicing and learning skills could help students be familiar with time consuming tasks for academic, the exams and business matters in some day, get to know about English cultural background and bring the creative power to them as like L1’s writing activities. It is quite similar strategy like Korean writing class, but in terms of the general idea of writing, teacher needs to make them expose to well-written and well-constructed sample essays to improve their writing. For reading, teacher needs to help them developing their reading techniques about scanning and skimming. Of course these activities should be comprehensible by students.
In case of writing, I never learned how to write an essay in English until high school. But when I started to write something, I initiated other's text. When I heard something useful, I memorized and repeated to use that in next time. And I also read some articles and underlined sentences which are important. In school, teachers also forced us to remember some dialogues and useful texts. I hated that but I could find out those ways are handy.
ReplyDeleteAnd in case of reading, I usually didn't use dictionaries to find out meanings of difficult vocabularies except the case that I really want to know the meaning. But I could guess the meaning through the sentences to some extent. Maybe I can say I skimmed texts for main ideas. But I usually use different method when I read Korean literature.
When I read a text that is in Korean, I usually use Top-down reading strategy to understand the meaning of it. But in case of the text in English, I use Botton-up strategy. At first, when I read text that is in English, I understand the meaning of the vocabularies, then compose the meaning of whole sentence. Of caurse, if I have a difficult vocabularies, I would find the meaning of them in the vocabulary, or I would guess the meaning from the context. By concentrating each meaing of vocabularies and sentences, sometimes I don't catch the whole meaning of the text.
ReplyDeleteThe case of writing, I had bo experience to learn to write something in English. Just by reading various text that is in English and learning English based on GTM, I could write some short sentences in English naturally. I have no special method or strategy to write. Just, I try to think what I write in Korea, and then, I translate it into English.
It has been more than 25 years - as the time was about when I was in middle school. More I was to stand backside of classroom for punishment after I have poor test score or could not answer of teacher’s question after reading the textbook, I came to start thinking that I have some problems on my brain. I had been thinking that I could be not smart enough to be normal. Yes maybe ‘a stupid’, what other might think of.
ReplyDeleteAfter being called ‘naughty black sheep’, ‘attention deficit’ and even ‘a crazy kid’ from my own homeroom teacher, I put myself into the idea: ‘Yes, I am stupid. so, that is why I cannot finish one book or even an article on the test.’
Two decades after, I learned of learning disability, which still makes me hard to read books and concentrate on readings, was a type of acquired dyslexia which could be medically treated well, if the symptom found in early stage. If there was proper observation from teacher with awareness of young children’s physiological development not only teaching by the school given textbook, I might have different academic context.
However, by the time I was curious of my problem and went to clinic to have clear diagnosis, I had to face a cruel reality that I might not be able finish a book within the normal speed, understand academic article and even will not be able to read storybook for my children if the symptom goes worse. The bad news was, I may not be able to cure my nerve problems, as it has been like that for too long without any medical attention. But the good news was, I heard hopeful comment from doctor that I can reduce the chance of losing attention unconsciously or reading without understanding if I can develop my own strategy to read effectively.
With some helps from doctors, medical & health resources, and trying every possible way to send visual data to brain without buffering, I was able to follow the normal speed of understanding what most of other student could.
So these are the strategies that I used for my effective reading under special help needed circumstances and I believe that these can work also well with regular student.
Reading with voice.
As my visual nerve was weak to transfer the data to my brain, I had to find additional help from other part of body to get brain’s attention. Using auditory nerve was the one of option while I was reading to get better understand and prevent losing attention. However, it couldn’t work well on test time or the situation that I need to read them quietly.
Highlighting
This helped me to find the substance of the writing. While I was reading, when I lost my attention, I could check the high lightened main point and follow the reading after that without reading all over again.
Stimulating the jaw
Though I tried hard to explain to teachers and professors, some of teachers did not allow me to have this exceptional privilege as per the matter of general etiquette and lack of supportive information to understand. So I used this mostly when I study by myself.
Body language
By using gesture, nodding, hand waving, and facial expression I maximized my understanding and tried to have them long and strong in my brain.
Make it short
If there’s no time limit concerned, I tried to divide the writing and read only as much as my nerve can take well and that worked well on reading books though it takes longer than others.
Though this was a story of me, I believe there’s good number of student who needs early attention by family and teachers. When the children’s learning disabilities can be observed as early as possible, the chance for recovery or improvement is remarkably high, by the medical research. It is great to guide children to have good reading, writing, listening and speaking skill. However, with those great teaching methods we gained by training or study, endless attention, deep observation and full devotion will be the vital elements of the good educator.
As I discussed with my team members, I was not a person who seriously enjoy reading and writing. Those two parts were my weakest points. However, I have two remarkable experience of improving my reading and writing skills. It would be nice to say being able to enjoy reading and writing instead of saying that improving skills.
ReplyDeleteAbove all, I have taken examination courses such like IELTS and CAE. In that exams, there are writing parts and I practiced timed writing almost everyday. In terms of IELTS, it was extremely intensive to deal with questions due to its academic feature. I did not know what I had to write about the topic and how to organise my ideas. Even though I came up with some opinions in Korean, I could not transfer information into English because of the lack of my academic vocabularies. After the task, I was frustrated with my writing skill. Then my teacher always gave me chances to revise and generate the essay again with some error corret and feedback. I ended up to overcome fear of writing academic essay.
Taking CAE course, I experienced more variety of writing styles; applications, formal letters, complains, proposals, reports and leaflets and so on. Surprisingly, it influenced on my reading ability. Because I knew what I had written, it was not that difficult to find certain informations.
Finally, flash writing at TESOL course made me be interested in writing and using words from articles that I had read before. I am not afraid of writing and reading.
As Amy mentioned above, IELTS academic writing was very useful course to improve my writing and reading skills.
ReplyDeleteIt was easy to catch on and understand the structure of writing, but when I tried to write an essay based on specific topics. (usually academic topics - education, culture, environment, human and animal right and so on) That was a hard job!!!
I was not brought up to discuss cultural-society. Therefore I did not have any idea about the topics at all.
It took so long time to built up my background knowledge and critical thinking through reading of a range of articles. Reading articles with different opinions was not only very helpful for developing my critical thinking skills, but also to help me pick up useful vocabulary in the academic genre. As a result, now I know how to write an essay with balanced opinions even though, I still struggle with minor mistakes (spelling and grammar errors).
I learned how to read English alphabet from the TV program in a classroom at elementary school.
ReplyDeleteBut I couldn't get a writing experience of English before I get into middle school.
I remember how hard it was that practicing the handwriting type of alphabet letters over and over again until memorizing every lowercase and capital letters.
It was a period of an introducion of English education to Korea, and I wasn't learning English but studying it in school.
As I learned more about English, I found out that I should go backward over the English sentence if I want to get a nice Korean translation.
However, now I try to get a meaning of English sentenses just by reading it straightly like the native does because it's faster and keeps me informed of the sense of reading English.
During the reading, I try not to focus on every words or small idioms but to get a picture of what the author says.
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ReplyDeleteIn reading, first I had to learn how to read sentence-level language. I usually analyzed sentence structure and words order that is different from Korean language ,translating sentence by sentence and memorizing necessary vocabulary. Once I became familiar with sentence-level reading, I expanded my skills to a paragraph reading and had a lot of practice to apply various reading skills such as skimming and scanning to paragraph reading, finding out topic, topic sentence, main idea and supporting details. And later I could apply the same techniques to longer reading and easily figure out key words and main points of the author and specific details, even in a relatively long article.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to reading literature, I needed a little different strategies to apply. Literary works are hard to understand because of many literary words and expressions, and different conventions of description and style. So I just focus on figuring out important events in the work and following main characters' emotions and thoughts, just feeling the stream of the story, without referring to dictionary. It's really useful to maintain my interest in the literary works.
In terms of writing, one of my weakest skill, I can say I'm becoming familiar with it through this course. I find myself applying what I found while reading to writing, such as writing topic sentence and supporting details, and organizing a writing according to a pattern like introduction, body and conclusion. Also, I try to concentrate on meaning I want to communicate, not grammatical correctness, which makes writing easier and comfortable for me.
When I learned English for the first time, I was a middle school student. At that time, I don't remember that I learned writing skiils.I learned reading from the textbook and some grammar. I sometime leaned how to write eaasay or journals or diaries, but it was originally based on ordering words. So, my weakest component of English is writing. I tried to practice and learn writing, but I couldn't find improvement and I didn't like writing.
ReplyDeleteBut I did practice shortly and without intention of improvement, I knew that my writing has improved. (Even though I'm not good at writing now).And when it comes to Korean reading, I'm a slow reader. I can't read fast enough as a Korean. And I always want to thorough every sentences and try to remember or remind every sentences. So I sometimes use highlighter for Korean books.
And when I read English,I tend to scan some sentences that I couldn't understand. So I'm not trying to understan every words or grammars because I can't understand all anyway. And I try to find the unknown words from the conexts.So it is easier and comfortable for me.
I think that my first experiences for learning English literacy skills would be same as others.
ReplyDelete'NNEST teach English literacy through GTM.'
First, in reading part, most English learners in Korea are good at reading because they usually practice reading English during the class. It's one of the school subjects.
In writing, what I did in class was filling blanks and answering questions.
Those methods didn't help me to learn English.
All the English classes focused on sentence structures and grammar based instruction.
Through these courses I think that the most important part of learning English is Writing...
The best one that I've experienced is flash writing.
In first class, it was very difficult to write for 15 minutes without stopping.
But I'm getting better than before even though not perfect.
For me, writing has been the most difficult part to learn in English as well as in korean. Since I haven't got much competence in writing, I have been trying to avoid any tasks that related to writing. However more and more I tried to avoid, more and more I realized that I cannot keep ignore writing.
ReplyDeleteThen one day From Dr Newman's class, I have encountered 'flash writing', which provided me a comfortable atmosphere to write whatever I want. After several practice with flash writing, I gained confidence in writing little by littel and I think it is a great way to improve one's writing skill.
As for reading, I have built my reading skills through so called 'extensive reading'. I love to read English books particularly novels. When I read an English novel such as 'Twilight', I try to read through even though I have some uncertain words in it. I try to figure out those words as I read through and it helps me to realize what those mean in the context. Also by reading lots of books that I like, my reading speed has gotten fast too.
When I was a high school student, I took TOEFL for applying for the university I want to enter. At that time I was really concerned about how to write essays and how to easily read reading articles on the exam. So I took a TOEFL course at one of the famous English institutions in Korea. There is one instructor who taught me TOEFL. He was not only an instructor but also an interpreter, so he had many background knowledge from writing essays and academic reading passages. While I struggled with writing and speaking, he recommended me to brainstorm many phrases and words related with the exam and encouraged me to memorize academic words . Moreover, he taught me some important grammar tips and structures which were very useful but many learner could not easily know. I practiced reading and writing a lot using methods and skills he gave me. After a few month, I found myself who improve English skills a lot compared to the past. So still I use the ways he taught me and they are still helpful for keeping my English proficiency.
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