Photo by Omri Epstein

Yesterday I gave a talk to 37 itinerant teachers. Most of the time these teachers work alone. The travel from school to school, tutoring hard of hearing or deaf children who study in regular schools. They are expected to be able to teach all subjects, whatever is needed (elementary or junior high school). They have supervisors. they have periodical meetings, but basically, they work on little islands, guests at every school they work at.

They are not trained English teachers.

Some of them keep on trying to “reinvent the wheel”.

Of course I presented all kinds of techniques and strategies to use, with and without technology (you can see some of them in the LiveBinder I created for the talk) but with every topic I brought up the issue of the benefits of cooperation. I began by discussing activities with a white board and a piece of paper. Then moved onto useful sites that are either good for working directly with the students or make a teachers life easier (see LiveBinder).If someone remarked – “Oh, I sometimes do this/ or that related activity” I immediately asked where that teacher worked. Then I wondered aloud how teachers from other areas would know and benefit from this useful activity or website that she uses.

Then I waIked them through my counseling blog (in Hebrew). I had opened  a counseling blog  a few months before I began this blog but it had very little impact. I’ve learned a lot over the past 11 months in blogosphere and revamped the counseling blog completely. I now title each post as a response to a question I am asked by email. I also stopped waiting for people to subscribe and send out a group mail whenever there is a new post. I showed them that there is an area for comments, arguments and related questions. We looked at the search function and the division into categories. The impression I had before the talk grew stronger during the talk – many teachers think of blogs as something either related to the news (read the blog of someone living in Japan after the Tsunami) or a maybe a place to get recipes. They treat it as a site, not as a live thing upon which they can influence the content.

In addition, I showed them my class wiki. I stressed that all they had to do is send me an email with a link to a website they find useful, along with the level of the student they found it useful for and I would post it on a wiki for them. The same would go for worksheets they may prepare, though here I retain the right of veto (these are not trained English teachers). They would have a place to look for suggestions from their peers, who understand their teaching situation.

The talk was for the 37 teachers who are attending this professional development course. There are many more itinerant teachers, I’m not sure how many. I forward the blog posts to their supervisors. I don’t know if I will get any emails beyond the usual counseling questions from them. In any case, investing in answering counseling questions on the blog is not wasted time for me – more often than not I am asked the same old questions. Now I can save some of my own time by easily locating the question and linking to the reply.

This was round one. Not sure how to set about initiating round two…

    

Epstein Family Photos

 

I was reminded of the topic of utilizing nonsense words when reading Tyson Seburnt’s excellent post Comprehension is often not what it appears . In his post he uses nonsense words to show students that copying from a text doesn’t mean you comprehend the text. He even offers a ready made exercise for us to use!

I had never thought of that.

I’ve been using nonsense words for years (think late 1980’s) but only when working with teachers, not students.  The topic is always “teaching students who have a poor vocabulary”. It is difficult to tell teachers “Pretend you don’t know some words in this reading passage”. With nonsense words they really don’t know the words!

My first source was also the first book on education I ever owned: “Teaching Reading to Deaf Children” by Beatrice Ostern Hart from 1963! The author used nonsense words to indicate words a deaf child wouldn’t know. I began by using her example to highlight something else.

Here is the title and the first paragraph of Hart’s text:

John and His Drum

John had a drum.

It was a flid big drum.

It made a big shole when he krinned it.

John liked the drum.

 

You can tell that “flid” is an adjective, “shole” is a noun and “krinned” is a verb. You know that because you know basic syntax. I claim that weak pupils who have trouble remembering vocabulary, ESPECIALLY these pupils, need to work on syntax as a tool for building reading comprehension skills and dictionary skills. If they know that “flid” is an adjective they don’t necessarily have to know any more than that. And if they decide to look up the noun “shole” in the dictionary, the fact that they know it is a noun in advance will enable them to choose the right definition of the word (so many words in English have different meanings as verbs or nouns). When you know that “krinned” is a verb it is actually pretty easy to guess what it means here (or, like before, that information will allow you to be a competent dictionary user). Students with learning disabilities (and with hearing problems) are allowed to use an electronic dictionary – that doesn’t help them as much if they don’t have any idea of the type of word they are looking up.

 

My second exposure to the use of nonsense words speaks for itself. Richard Lavoie is a powerful speaker and he also uses nonsense words for training. Except this time he’s trying to train all the adults who come in contact with the learning disabled child. Here is the relevant part of the film “FAT City – How Hard Can it Be”, which I found on YouTube:

I really recommend getting a hold of the whole film. All of his films are extremely powerful stuff, by the way.

I’ve tried to imitate Lavoie with the nonsense text to hammer in my point that remembering vocabulary items (or not remembering them) is not the only measure of reading comprehension. Reading is about more than strings of words!

Overall the nonsense words have worked well. However, each time this was the topic of a teachers training session, there was always one teacher who would ask why on earth I wanted to spend time teaching nonsense words to students…. I guess there is always room for improving my talks!