Express Publishing ELT » Reading

Learning by Heart

admin — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:27:23 +0000

Learning by heart – a plea for poetry.
A strange expression that. What it usually means is memorization – sticking things in your head and keeping them there, ready to reproduce when required. Download, save, open.
Amo, amas, amat, amatis, amantis, amant.
Two twos are four, three twos are six, four twos are eight.

We might be asked to learn a passage from a textbook for a dictation or a list of words to spell. And how else do you remember irregular verbs other than by committing them to memory?

What I’m interested in here though is the heart part – the seat of the emotions.
While we can all to a greater or lesser extent remember information, if there is an affective as well as a cognitive element –if what you are reading touches your feelings together with your understanding, if the meaning is more important than the mechanics, then you may interact with the material and make it yours (possibly for life).

When mentally or orally reciting the Latin and Maths examples above, do you notice that you tend to give them a rhythm – the Greek word for flow, by the way? (The syllables in bold are the stressed ones).

Amo, amas, amat
Amatis, amantis, amant.

This, like the maths chant, has three beats to the line so is known in poetry as a trimeter.

Here’s a tetrameter:
I wander’d lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills         – Wordsworth

And a pentameter:
To be or not to be: That is the question.       -Shakespeare (Not from a poem, but all his plays as well as his sonnets were written in iambic pentameter.)

Here’s a ballad with alternating four and three line stresses:
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.                            – Wilde

We are exposed to rhyme and rhythm at an early age through nursery rhymes:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

It’s strange that poetry is often thought of as “difficult”. In pre-literate societies, balladeers and bards would travel around communities; folk tales, myths, legends and songs were passed down orally.
Rhythm and rhyme helped in both the telling and the remembrance of news and ideas. Rock and rap are just poetry put to music. Nothing particularly highbrow about these forms of cultural expression.
In many cultures poets have had their work put to popular music and everybody knows them.

My point is this:
If we want our students to remember language which is compact, rhythmic, varied, engaging, personally meaningful and memorable, we could do worse than encourage them to learn poems or just lines or verses by heart.

A number of our students probably do this already with contemporary popular music lyrics.

What you can advise them to do is to print out or write out the poem / verse and keep it with them in a bag or pocket. During the day at solitary moments while walking, using public transport, in the bathroom or before going to sleep they can look at and say the poem to themselves, trying each time to commit more lines to memory. It helps to say the words out loud or at least mouth them (at the risk of being thought slightly mad by anyone overhearing). Poems are meant to be read aloud as a song is meant to be sung.

Poems can be found all over the net – www.poemhunter.com is useful as it also provides a glossary. Students can choose their own poems, but will probably need guidance from you, in which case choose poems that are your favourites.
Here’s the beginning of what has been voted the most popular poem in English; If by Rudyard Kipling:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

Learning lines or full verses by heart gives students the power of having authentic material at hand; writing that can touch them and provide models of grammar and introduce new lexis.

– that you can be enthusiastic about. If you’re not familiar with much poetry in English, why not start with what has been voted the most popular poem in the English language: If, by Rudyard Kipling, which begins thus:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

We’re not in the business of literary criticism, but we do need something to talk about with our students and one of the powers of poetry lies in its ability to connect to the consciousness of individuals in different ways. Responses to a poem will always vary.
Learning a poem by heart means it is always with you. You may like the sounds of the words, the idea behind it, the way it deals with a subject, but you cannot be unaffected by it. It might even change your life.

So, go through the above and highlight what advantages I mention to do with learning a poem by heart.
Can you think of any disadvantages?

For more Nursery Rhymes check out Express Publishing’s Happy Rhymes series!

Top 20 Shakespeare quotes

admin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:14:11 +0000

Match the halves and feel cultured (you can then attempt to slip them into casual conversations you have in English. Extra points if your interlocutor can name the play). Use these in advanced classes and ask them if they agree with the sentiments.

1. There is nothing either good or bad…
2. When sorrows come, they come not single spies…
3. What’s gone and what’s past help…
4. Tell me where is fancy bred…
5. Life is as tedious…
6. I am a man…
7. I have very poor and unhappy brains…
8. The first thing we do…
9. The worst is not…
10. Parting is such sweet sorrow…
11. Condemn the fault…
12. To be wise and love…
13. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools…
14. Away with him…
15. One that loved not wisely…
16. Few love to hear…
17. Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more…
18. The prince of darkness…
19. O brave new world…
20. To be or not to be…

a) … should be past grief.
b) … for drinking.
c) … Let’s kill all the lawyers.
d) … but in battalions.
e) … the sins they act.
f) … but thinking makes it so.
g) … as a twice told tale.
h) … men were deceivers ever.
i) … more sinned against than sinning.
j) … In the heart or in the head?
k) … is a gentleman.
l) … but not the actor for it?
m) … so long as we can say “This is the worst.”
n) … He speaks Latin!
o) … that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.
p) … but too well.
q) … that has such people in it.
r) … exceeds man’s might.
s) … that is the question.
t) … the way to dusty death.

Answers: 1-f, 2-d, 3-a, 4-j, 5-g, 6-i, 7-b, 8-c, 9-m, 10-o, 11-l, 12-r, 13-t, 14-n, 15-p, 16-e, 17-h, 18-k, 19-q, 20-s.

We have converted the exercise above into a pdf in-class exercise ready for you to use with your students which you will find HERE!

Adobe by clicking here

You will need Adobe Reader to open the files downloaded. In case you don’t have it installed, visit Adobe by clicking on the icon to the right:

Simplified Readers

admin — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 10:22:47 +0000

This heading doesn’t, though it could, refer to students, but to the graded booklets or books they read. Either original stories or more usually classics retold with limited vocabulary and structure, these are a great way to open the world of the imagination, encounter and relate to ideas and involve learners in both intensive and extensive reading. They usually come with pre, while and post reading tasks and focus more on comprehension than specific grammar or vocabulary and a glossary, possibly translated, may be provided. Illustrations help keep attention and provide talking points, and many are accompanied by audio or animated DVDs.

Here are some ideas on how readers can be used.

Get your school to order class sets from your publisher. These can form part of a school or class library. Students can sign for and take out and read in their own time whichever they choose. At the start provide a time for students to mingle and flick through the books on offer before making their decision. Put up a list of books on the wall with students’ names running across the top. Provide boxes of different coloured adhesive stars. When a student has read a book, they rate the book by sticking a star next to the book under their name – gold for excellent, silver for very good and so on. You might decide that every student has to read a book a week, a certain number per term, or a minimum number over a specified period.

Check students have actually read the book by setting aside class time for students to present a short review / recommendation either to the whole class or in groups. Reviews can be written on postcards and kept in a folder kept on a shelf or hung next to the wall list for students to access. All the books are reused and can be kept for following classes, so stress that students are to take care of the books and not write or draw in them. Their life can be extended by covering them in sticky-backed plastic. (Get the students to do this.)

Give everyone the same graded readers. This can be as part of the package with their textbook. When using the same reader you can read or play the beginning and have students predict the type of story. They can also predict from the cover.

If you can show the DVD or listen to the CD and have the interactive software, you can at the same time have students follow the text on the board, create gap fills they can complete, get them to predict the next response and draw attention to text features such as lexis and structure. For each chapter as well as towards the end, students can write what they imagine will happen next. When they’ve finished the book, they can write alternative endings.

Other activities students might do are to order a jumbled version of the story, write the story from the perspective of another character, act out scenes from the story, read around the class out loud with an emphasis on exaggerating intonation – this will involve thinking about how the characters feel when they speak, and talking about any issues raised in the story, for example why a character was good or bad or what makes a good friendship. In most stories there is a problem to overcome or a challenge to meet and choices to be made. Students might discuss what they would have done in such situations. With readers for younger levels and ages, you can read to the students and they can chorally repeat parts.

Michael Rosen, a famous writer of children books and British Children’s Laureate recently helped revolutionise one primary school in Wales by creating “a buzz about books”. The school had lots of computers but no library and there was no policy on reading for pleasure. He found most pupils didn’t read books at home and had little interest in doing so. He asked why, when they all loved listening to stories when younger, they didn’t read stories later. A BBC team followed him for ten weeks as he worked with staff and children and by the end the children were enthusiastically devouring storybooks, even those with reading problems.

If we don’t learn to love books, we don’t read; and if we don’t read widely, we don’t think deeply.

We have the ELT Graded Readers available for you in pdf format which you will find HERE!

Adobe by clicking here

You will need Adobe Reader to open the files downloaded. In case you don’t have it installed, visit Adobe by clicking on the icon to the right:

Basic Reading

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:30:06 +0000

Reading in a foreign language is hard work, especially for younger children. The teacher will have to decide which skills to focus on and devise activities which actively support learners’ understanding and guide attention to the chosen skill.

The following guide-lines may be useful when planning how to develop students’ reading ability at an early age.

- Do not place too many reading demands on younger learners, who are at an early stage of reading development.
- Give the students confidence. Students should be told that they cannot always be expected to understand every word. The use of support materials (e.g. pictures, drawings and charts) will help them feel confident and show them what it is important to concentrate on.
- Help the children to develop strategies for reading. Some of the most important reading strategies include:
a. Recognizing sound/letter correspondences.
b. Predicting – it is useful to encourage children to predict what they think might come next in a text. This means that they can then read on to check whether their expectation is true or not.
c. Working out the meaning from context. Although the teacher might like to teach “words” before the children read something, he / she also needs to encourage them to use pictures and their general knowledge about a topic to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words.
d. Recognizing discourse patterns and markers. Words such as “and”, “then”, “but” give important signals about what is coming next in a text. This is especially important when reading a story or a set of instructions.

Here are some activities which aim to develop these strategies.

1. Dominoes
Students learn to match words with the sound, words and pictures, upper and lower case letters. For example you give groups cards with pictures and cards with words. These are divided up so each student has the same number of cards. They hold the cards in their hands or place them on the table in front of them. One student starts by putting down a card (e.g. a picture of a dog). The student who has the card with the word dog puts that card down next to the first card. The student to the right then plays their card. If one student has both the picture and word card for the same object, they can lay down both cards (Lucky them!). The winner is the first to put down all their cards.
You can use the flashcards which come with course books or are downloadable. You don’t need to prepare your own.

2. Rearranging Sentences
Students put sentences into the correct order from a text you’ve cut up.

3. Spot the Difference
Students identify differences between words / identify the word which does not belong to the group E.G. Which is the odd one out? dog, cat, horse, pen

4. Rearranging Words
Words are rearranged to produce a meaningful sentence. E.G. eat cake like I to

5. Using the Title
Students look at the title and say what they think the text will be about / make a list of words they think will occur in the text.

6. Matching Two Halves of a Sentence
Students produce a meaningful sentence by matching two halves of a sentence / two clauses.

7. Sound Snap
Students play the well-known card game – saying “Snap” when the words on each card rhyme.

8. Matching Pictures and Captions
As the students read, they match what they read to the correct picture.

9. First Lines
The students read the first line(s) of a text and then say what they think comes next.

10. Picture Talk
The use of picture prompts to encourage students to speculate about what they are going to read.

Reading

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:05:55 +0000

Read the passage and answer the questions which follow:

This gro I folled in the bion. I sok a trisy vene drog. The grask was trisy lirkening. I did not dring it. A jovind Kar and a jovind Kari were pristing deree me. They were gribbling alty. I sorb trisy forban. I possi not vree the skadis. I vridi trun. I grokki ta the Kar and the Kari forbenly. They did not gof nol drinkleton. Wi the hin I possi not wilk it. I vridi trun ves. “I possi not vree a palav!” I lind forbanly.

“It’s none of your rankipon” the jovind Kar lind tungly. “This is an upton spraktak”.

1. Where did the writer foll this gro?

2. Did he dring the grask or not?

3. Who was pristing deree me?

4. Were they gribbling alty or were they gribbling sappy?

5. Possi the writer vree the skadis or not?

6. Did he vidi trun or not?

7. What did he lin?

8. Did the jovind Kar lin “The grask was lirkinning” or did he lin “This is an upto spraktak”?

We can answer these questions correctly, even though we have very little idea of the meaning of the text as many words are nonsense words. What does this show us?

- For one thing, a text is more than vocabulary. You can guess the general meaning from context and the word type from its form.
- You can also ask questions about texts which do not actually test comprehension of meaning. The questions above merely asked you to locate information in the text and use your knowledge of grammar.

What about the words?
Some words appear more than once. What do you think trisy means? How about lind? Are foll and dring verbs? Are all the words ending in ly adverbs? Is rankipon a noun? What do you think is the difference between a Kar and a Kari?

What do you think vree might mean?
You can read the words in the sense of decoding – you can translate the written symbols into corresponding sounds, without reading and understanding the meaning.

What about the text as a whole?
Because we come to a text with prior knowledge of text types, we can look at it as an item and realise that despite the unknown lexis, we can guess that this is a story / anecdote as it uses past forms and is written in the first person.

The writer is in a place and doesn’t feel happy about something two people are doing. The writer says something to them and they do not respond in the way the reader would like.
I don’t know who made up this text or what the nonsense words might mean, but I can guess from what we’ve thought about above that maybe the writer was in a cinema and two people were spoiling his enjoyment of the film by talking. What do you think?

Texts are
-written for a particular reason
- addressed to a certain audience
- use rhetorical devices to get the message across
- Readers have expectations and purposes when they come to a text.
- They may skim (read to get the general idea) or scan (look for particular information). You would probably skim through a newspaper to find an article you would be interested in reading. When you get to the weather forecast on the back page you would scan for the information relevant to where you are or are going to and disregard the rest.

And just remember that twas brillig and the slivey toves did gyre and gimble in the waves.

Doubt me not.

What on Earth are you talking about?

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:11:50 +0000

This is an intensive reading activity at sentence level. You can dictate the sentences one by one, or give out the list and get students in pairs of groups to answer the questions. There is no “correct” answer. Students have to use their imagination.
“You are an external expression and not at all what you appear to be.”
- Epictetus 1st cent BC.

Can you work out a meaning for each sentence? Find a context for these sentences so that they might make sense? Who might be speaking to whom about what? Are any of them complete nonsense? Most of these are real quotes. (Which do you think were said by George Bush and Paris Hilton?)
For example: 1 A child might be a child looking at a peacock’s tail.

1. Them things that look like eyes, are they their real eyes?
2. I’ll be three months on July the 8th.
3. Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
4. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.
5. Dear Ingrid – speaks five languages and can’t act in any of them.
6. If the eyes follow you round the room, it’s a good one. If not, it isn’t.
7. My dog can lick anyone.
8. I’m sorry I’m not here.
9. I need to go shopping for clothes to shop in.
10. They have just so many things of each thing.
11. The trouble with you, son, is your brains are all in your head.
12. The only time he opens his mouth is to change feet.
13. He always rushes to the back of the field.
14. Do you have blacks too?
15. I don’t even know some of my friends’ names.
16. Can you recall how fast your vehicle was going when you parked?
17. If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.
18. It takes a long time to become young.
19. Do you realize there are people who are alive here in Minneapolis who are already dead in Tokyo?
20. Most of her is new.
21. Did you that I was me?
22. Stop making sense.
23. If you remember it, you weren’t there.
24. Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
25. You can’t dig a hole.

Newspaper Headlines

admin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:47:47 +0000

Newspapers often use short, idiomatic and dramatic words. There may be abbreviations, omissions and puns. Sometimes this can lead to ambiguity.
Students can try to find the two possible meanings of these headlines and write a likely first sentence for the article following each headline.

For example: POLICE HELP DOG BITE VICTIM

Meaning 1: The police have helped the victim of a dog-bite attack.
Meaning 2: The police helped a dog to bite someone. Meaning 2 is the likely story.

1. FOUR SHEEP FOR EVERY WELSHMAN

2. GRANDMOTHER OF EIGHT MAKES HOLE IN ONE

3. LOCAL HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUTS CUT IN HALF

4. IRAQI HEAD SEEKS ARMS

5. MINERS REFUSE TO WORK AFTER DEATH

6. DRUNK GETS NINE YEARS IN VIOLIN CASE

7. POLICE FOUND SAFE UNDER BLANKET

8. TWO RUSSIAN SHIPS COLLIDE: ONE DIES

9. INCLUDE YOUR CHILDREN WHEN BAKING COOKIES

10. DR RUTH TO TALK ABOUT SEX WITH NEWSPAPER EDITORS

11. HOSPITAL SUED BT 7 FOOT DOCTORS

12. PASSENGERS HIT BY CANCELLED TRAINS

13. THUGS EAT THEN ROB PROPRIETOR

14. RED TAPE HOLDS UP NEW BRIDGE

15. MILK DRINKERS ARE TURNING TO POWDER