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[Glenski]

Many of us realize that in junior high school, the aim is to pass tests to get into high school, and that the aim of high school is to prepare students to pass the dreaded college entrance exams.

Teaching English grammar is usually restricted to the Japanese teachers, and classes to supplement such lessons are what the native English teachers usually get, often only in the form of oral communication.

Sometimes, students will have writing classes. In my HS, that is usually devoted to the 3rd year students only. The same holds for reading (betcha were wondering how long I'd take to get to the point).

However, the reading follows pretty much the same model as the grammar/OC classes in that reading is taught only to dissect and analyze the grammar in fairly complex sentences all for the purpose of passing TOEFL or STEP or college entrance exams. It is NOT meant for improving reading skills (such as using skimming or scanning, context, imagery, etc.). These CAN be helpful for passing the above tests, but they can also be used just for general reading enjoyment, whether in English or ANY other language.

I have some higher level 1st and 2nd year students in a reading class. The curriculum simply says to read a couple of full-length novels in the year, build some reading speed with extensive reading, and otherwise just improve their reading skills. This was a loosely prepared class that is going on its third season with no noticeable signs of achieving its goals.

My point is this. For those rare cases when you teach the improvement of reading skills, how do you go about it?

(I am willing to share my lesson plan ideas, but I'd like to hear what others do first. My problems entail boredom and students' lack of time. I also have classes that are only 45 minutes long, meeting twice a week.)

[guest of Japan]

Hi Glenski.

I'll say right off the bat that I have very little experience teaching reading, and never to high level students. I suppose I'm responding simply because I find it ludicrous that your school is asking students to complete two full length novels. This can be a challenge for many native English speaking students.

As far as advice goes I only have a little. Teach them to be able to give a theme or basic plot to every chapter they read. Teach them to dissect a paragraph into topic sentence and supporting sentences. These ideas seem incredibly stupidly simple, but I've found many students at even incredibly advanced levels stumbled on they ideas at least when it comes to writing. Also I'd recommend lost of comprehension questions and cooperative learning activities. I'd ditch the two novel approach. In fact I'd ditch novels all together and concentrate on short stories and essays.

Good luck. I hoe somebody who specializes in reading chimes in.

[madeira]

Can you choose the novels?

If yes, I'd get some graded readers that have also been made into movies. They have lots of comprehension and conversation-starting questions, and you can choose the level.


Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a good one.

[Glenski]

madeira,
Yes and no about choosing the novels. I am fighting to have some sane choice in the matter. To date, I have met only with limited success. That means the students are faced with novels like The Alchemist, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Animal Farm, all of which are too difficult for them.

As for graded readers, it's interesting that you mention them. One-fourth of the class grade is based on work with the novels. One fourth is based on reading skill lessons I create. One half is based on outside reading to attain a certain number of pages (with book reports on each book). This outside reading is usually done with graded readers. Using them as classroom texts might actually be too easy.

Guest of Japan. I am already doing everything you suggested. Thanks for the advice.

White on Rye,
What are you on?

[randerso]

It's too bad that you are locked in to a set of books. I have had some great success with reading lessons, but only beacuse I've gone way out of the box. I used to teach a large-ish class of 14 year old girls, and while I was home for Xmas vacation I bought each of them a Babysitters Club book (used books stores rock). For those of you who were not pre-teen girls in the 80's, BSC books are a fairly simple series of books based around a group of girls who have a babysitters club. They are not complicated story lines, mostly about boys, family, morals, etc - but they are formulaic. In a good way. The 1st chapter of every book is almost exactly the same, an intro. You read that together and talk about the characters (who never change or age) and then each student reads a chapter (for homework or in class, as the chapters are short) and either does a chapter report (in written form) with a self researched vocab list or they present the chapter to the class. I got some great discussions out of the girls about what the girls in the story should do.

Now, obviously, this idea is very specific (don't think it would work very well with boys or adults), but the premise is good. Even though the story lines are simple, I find it still makes a good book for HS kids in Japan, it's interesting and is full of idioms. For boys (or if BSC is not your style) I'd recommened some 'Choose Your Own Adventure books'. They let the reader choose the plot line. Good to have the students defend the choices they made.

Anyway, if graded readers is what you are after, Oxford has a great selection and Penguin is good too.

[madeira]

You can find playscripts and movie versions of two of the books, anyways. (Sorry, I didn't check the Alchemist.)

If you google 'to kill a mockingbird' and 'webquest' you'll find some lesson ideas. Good ones, I thought...

If the graded readers are too easy... you can use them for lesson planning ideas while they work with the authentic material. They're all very well done, in my opinion. They make the students use all the different types of reading skills. (I'm sure you're aware of this..)

I think the hardest part about using those novels is the setting (too far in the past)... and the background information that Japanese students may not bring to the table. How interested are they in that stuff, anyways? It has to be made interesting... the character of Boo is fascinating to me, but maybe not to your students...

Anyways, rambling.... but I wish I had classes like that to work with! Interesting problems with the planning, interesting material if presented well...

I'm stuck in secretary's English for the next while... and there ain't a lot you can do with "Can I take a message".... at least, not compared to reading literature.

[Celeste]

I have taught reading to higher level university students before, and one thing that I found helpful was to bring in movies of the novels that we were reading. Read a bit of the novel, watch a bit of the movie. It worked very well for these particular students. Before we saw a character on screen I would get them to write character descriptions with evidence from the book and from their own imaginations as well. THen we would compare to the movie. I also had them tell me what bits were left out of the movie or changed. They seemed to like it. Getting all of the students to do their homework reading was the biggest challenge.

[Glenski]

Everyone's responses to date have been very informative, and I thank you for them.

However, none seem to address how to improve reading skills. Any ideas? I have created lessons on imagery, context, skimming, scanning, and a couple more last year, but I have the same students this year, so I can't use the same lessons, and I'm struggling against the clock every week just to keep up with lessons, so although I intend to polish those older lessons, I'm hard-pressed for time and ideas.

randerso,
No, I'm not out to look for graded readers. Our library has almost every one published by Penguin, Oxford, and Cambridge. My students seem sick of them, and with the classic titles, I don't blame them.

madeira,
I will reread some of the material presented in the graded readers to see what additional teaching ideas I can get out of them. One thing I would like to mention is this. I am totally against choosing books that I would like to read. I think teachers should avoid that sort of thinking. So, no offense to you liking Boo (or any other character), but my feeling is that teenagers should read books not just at their level of English fluency, but with topics that they are interested in and/or can relate to (much like randerso described). I just don't have any used bookstores with English titles.

[wintersweet]

I'm a TA in a high-intermediate R/W class right now. The teacher is using the Northstar series of books, which teach things like skimming, reading comprehension, etc. It has nice simple activities like looking over a table of contents and then writing down what you think the article is going to be about. The readings included are OK, if not great. Topics on the level we're doing include famous people who overcame difficulties, ecocities, and the slow food movement. It's fairly contemporary/up-to-date.

You can buy them used via AddAll.com ; probably some of the bookstores searched there will ship to Japan. I imagine you can't use them in class, but just using the teacher's guide might be really useful for you.

[taikibansei]

[Glenski]

Any other contributions to this thread?

[JimDunlop2]

As you know, I'm a Jr. High School teacher and you're in the world of Sr. High.... So I don't get to delve into this area of education too much. Most of my time is spent teaching the most basic of skills.

Nevertheless, how about using a textbook such as, Active Reading by Charles Cushman (EFL Press)? It is from the same folks that publish the Talk -A-Lot series, which I use quite often with my classes, and the students seem to enjoy the materials fairly well.

[Iwantmyrightsnow]

From about second year junior high school I would recommend extensive reading. It really helps students read without dictionaries. Google it and you should find a site easily about it. I had quite a few students jump 50 points and 2 levels in Toefl in about 5 months. There are really good materials put out by the University of Edinburgh.

[Glenski]

[taikibansei]