Sessions / Reading
Cancelled Library Use : Promoting Students’ Learning #3724
This research examines how libraries are utilized in Nepalese community and institutional schools and how this affects student learning attitudes and behaviors. Despite libraries providing several educational resources, there has been little research into their use in Nepal. The study focused on how schools use libraries to promote learning, given that students typically only study during class time and exam preparation. The data was collected through field notes and interviews with eight participants, including one teacher and one student from two community and two institutional schools.
The study found that teachers in community schools infrequently visit libraries and provide little encouragement for their students to use them. However, some students did borrow books from the library. On the other hand, institutional schools have a weekly designated library period, which motivates students to engage in library activities. The study emphasizes the importance of effective library practices and recommends better administration, management, and student encouragement to maximize library usage.
The study's conclusions can assist policymakers, educators, teachers, and readers who wish to enhance library practices and promote better learning outcomes. This research highlights the importance of libraries as an essential educational resource, and schools must use them effectively to enhance student learning experiences.
Project TRANSLATE: A Pedagogical Translation Approach in Improving English Language and Literacy Skills to Emergent Bilinguals #3541
This presentation will delve into how EFL teachers can leverage the home languages of their emergent bilingual students to develop English language and literacy skills through collaborative translation. This presentation will include developed materials, anecdotes, and professional learnings from the experience of bringing this pedagogy to life, along with highlighted student work that was produced. Affordances and constraints of collaborative translation for different contexts and settings will be discussed. As part of this discussion, common questions will be addressed, such as how to use TRANSLATE when an EFL teacher does not share the same home language as their students. It is our hope that conference participants come away from this demonstration with tangible strategies for leveraging bi/multilingual students’ home languages in all content areas including EFL instruction. Similarly, we hope this presentation encourages conference participants to generate additional pedagogical strategies that leverage students’ complete linguistic and cultural repertoires.
Reading Out Loud: A Communicative Approach to a Reading Skills #3655
In contrast to the Japanese high school EFL context which tends to be passive and teacher-centered, this presentation introduces a learner-centered, communicative approach to university EFL reading. Here, comprehension is developed through a collaborative process where learners negotiate the meaning of text, with teacher input as necessary. In small groups or pairs, learners infer the meaning of new words from context, discuss the meaning of texts, and focus on discourse markers. This approach also employs extensive reading, where learners write reports and explain what they were able to grasp from graded readers, all in English. The presenter will show results from comprehension tests, actual student-written examples of ‘book reports,’ and survey results which show increased motivation towards reading and English lessons generally. The approach is a ‘strong’ version of task-based learning (Ellis, 2018), rooted in the principle of “using English to learn it (Howatt, 1984:279),” applied to a reading class.
What Makes Reading Hard Besides Vocabulary and Grammar? Parsing Long Sentences #3659
In classrooms a fair amount of time is given towards top-down activities: i.e. activating schema. Yet as Swan and Walter point out (2017), comprehension difficulties are likely the result of bottom-up deficiencies. One of which, needed for the Korean College Entrance Exam (SAT), is parsing long sentences with multiple clauses and/or multiple verbs and nouns. Sentence Diagramming is a rather old-fashioned method of teaching grammar to native speakers. It is sometimes used in Korea today. A search on https://academic.naver.com/ reveals nothing specific to learners in Korea. This makes one wonder: is sentence diagramming a waste of time?
In my experience, diagramming helps students but as with any method, there are limitations. This pecha-kucha discusses how diagramming can help students, which students it can help, and what skills it can help improve. This pecha-kucha also discusses its pedagogical limitations as a method.