Strategies for Developing Reading Skills
Using Reading Strategies
Language instructors are often frustrated by the fact that students do not automatically transfer the strategies they use when reading in their native language to reading in a language they are learning. Instead, they seem to think reading means starting at the beginning and going word by word, stopping to look up every unknown vocabulary item, until they reach the end. When they do this, students are relying exclusively on their linguistic knowledge, a bottom-up strategy. One of the most important functions of the language instructor, then, is to help students move past this idea and use top-down strategies as they do in their native language.
Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their reading behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and reading purposes. They help students develop a set of reading strategies and match appropriate strategies to each reading situation.
Strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively include
* Previewing: reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get a sense of the structure and content of a reading selection
* Predicting: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the text type and purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and content
* Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions
* Guessing from context: using prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up
* Paraphrasing: stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating the information and ideas in the text
Instructors can help students learn when and how to use reading strategies in several ways.
* By modeling the strategies aloud, talking through the processes of previewing, predicting, skimming and scanning, and paraphrasing. This shows students how the strategies work and how much they can know about a text before they begin to read word by word.
* By allowing time in class for group and individual previewing and predicting activities as preparation for in-class or out-of-class reading. Allocating class time to these activities indicates their importance and value.
* By using cloze (fill in the blank) exercises to review vocabulary items. This helps students learn to guess meaning from context.
* By encouraging students to talk about what strategies they think will help them approach a reading assignment, and then talking after reading about what strategies they actually used. This helps students develop flexibility in their choice of strategies.
When language learners use reading strategies, they find that they can control the reading experience, and they gain confidence in their ability to read the language.
Reading to Learn
Reading is an essential part of language instruction at every level because it supports learning in multiple ways.
* Reading to learn the language: Reading material is language input. By giving students a variety of materials to read, instructors provide multiple opportunities for students to absorb vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and discourse structure as they occur in authentic contexts. Students thus gain a more complete picture of the ways in which the elements of the language work together to convey meaning.
* Reading for content information: Students' purpose for reading in their native language is often to obtain information about a subject they are studying, and this purpose can be useful in the language learning classroom as well. Reading for content information in the language classroom gives students both authentic reading material and an authentic purpose for reading.
* Reading for cultural knowledge and awareness: Reading everyday materials that are designed for native speakers can give students insight into the lifestyles and worldviews of the people whose language they are studying. When students have access to newspapers, magazines, and Web sites, they are exposed to culture in all its variety, and monolithic cultural stereotypes begin to break down.
When reading to learn, students need to follow four basic steps:
1.
Figure out the purpose for reading. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate reading strategies.
2.
Attend to the parts of the text that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest. This selectivity enables students to focus on specific items in the input and reduces the amount of information they have to hold in short-term memory.
3.
Select strategies that are appropriate to the reading task and use them flexibly and interactively. Students' comprehension improves and their confidence increases when they use top-down and bottom-up skills simultaneously to construct meaning.
4.
Check comprehension while reading and when the reading task is completed. Monitoring comprehension helps students detect inconsistencies and comprehension failures, helping them learn to use alternate strategies.
Goals and Techniques for Teaching Reading
Instructors want to produce students who, even if they do not have complete control of the grammar or an extensive lexicon, can fend for themselves in communication situations. In the case of reading, this means producing students who can use reading strategies to maximize their comprehension of text, identify relevant and non-relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.
Focus: The Reading Process
To accomplish this goal, instructors focus on the process of reading rather than on its product.
* They develop students' awareness of the reading process and reading strategies by asking students to think and talk about how they read in their native language.
* They allow students to practice the full repertoire of reading strategies by using authentic reading tasks. They encourage students to read to learn (and have an authentic purpose for reading) by giving students some choice of reading material.
* When working with reading tasks in class, they show students the strategies that will work best for the reading purpose and the type of text. They explain how and why students should use the strategies.
* They have students practice reading strategies in class and ask them to practice outside of class in their reading assignments. They encourage students to be conscious of what they're doing while they complete reading assignments.
* They encourage students to evaluate their comprehension and self-report their use of strategies. They build comprehension checks into in-class and out-of-class reading assignments, and periodically review how and when to use particular strategies.
* They encourage the development of reading skills and the use of reading strategies by using the target language to convey instructions and course-related information in written form: office hours, homework assignments, test content.
* They do not assume that students will transfer strategy use from one task to another. They explicitly mention how a particular strategy can be used in a different type of reading task or with another skill.
By raising students' awareness of reading as a skill that requires active engagement, and by explicitly teaching reading strategies, instructors help their students develop both the ability and the confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom. In this way they give their students the foundation for communicative competence in the new language.
Integrating Reading Strategies
Instruction in reading strategies is not an add-on, but rather an integral part of the use of reading activities in the language classroom. Instructors can help their students become effective readers by teaching them how to use strategies before, during, and after reading.
Before reading: Plan for the reading task
* Set a purpose or decide in advance what to read for
* Decide if more linguistic or background knowledge is needed
* Determine whether to enter the text from the top down (attend to the overall meaning) or from the bottom up (focus on the words and phrases)
During and after reading: Monitor comprehension
* Verify predictions and check for inaccurate guesses
* Decide what is and is not important to understand
* Reread to check comprehension
* Ask for help
After reading: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use
* Evaluate comprehension in a particular task or area
* Evaluate overall progress in reading and in particular types of reading tasks
* Decide if the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task
* Modify strategies if necessary
Using Authentic Materials and Approaches
For students to develop communicative competence in reading, classroom and homework reading activities must resemble (or be) real-life reading tasks that involve meaningful communication. They must therefore be authentic in three ways.
1. The reading material must be authentic: It must be the kind of material that students will need and want to be able to read when traveling, studying abroad, or using the language in other contexts outside the classroom.
When selecting texts for student assignments, remember that the difficulty of a reading text is less a function of the language, and more a function of the conceptual difficulty and the task(s) that students are expected to complete. Simplifying a text by changing the language often removes natural redundancy and makes the organization somewhat difficult for students to predict. This actually makes a text more difficult to read than if the original were used.
Rather than simplifying a text by changing its language, make it more approachable by eliciting students' existing knowledge in pre-reading discussion, reviewing new vocabulary before reading, and asking students to perform tasks that are within their competence, such as skimming to get the main idea or scanning for specific information, before they begin intensive reading.
2. The reading purpose must be authentic: Students must be reading for reasons that make sense and have relevance to them. "Because the teacher assigned it" is not an authentic reason for reading a text.
To identify relevant reading purposes, ask students how they plan to use the language they are learning and what topics they are interested in reading and learning about. Give them opportunities to choose their reading assignments, and encourage them to use the library, the Internet, and foreign language newsstands and bookstores to find other things they would like to read.
3. The reading approach must be authentic: Students should read the text in a way that matches the reading purpose, the type of text, and the way people normally read. This means that reading aloud will take place only in situations where it would take place outside the classroom, such as reading for pleasure. The majority of students' reading should be done silently.
Reading Aloud in the Classroom
Students do not learn to read by reading aloud. A person who reads aloud and comprehends the meaning of the text is coordinating word recognition with comprehension and speaking and pronunciation ability in highly complex ways. Students whose language skills are limited are not able to process at this level, and end up having to drop one or more of the elements. Usually the dropped element is comprehension, and reading aloud becomes word calling: simply pronouncing a series of words without regard for the meaning they carry individually and together. Word calling is not productive for the student who is doing it, and it is boring for other students to listen to.
* There are two ways to use reading aloud productively in the language classroom. Read aloud to your students as they follow along silently. You have the ability to use inflection and tone to help them hear what the text is saying. Following along as you read will help students move from word-by-word reading to reading in phrases and thought units, as they do in their first language.
* Use the "read and look up" technique. With this technique, a student reads a phrase or sentence silently as many times as necessary, then looks up (away from the text) and tells you what the phrase or sentence says. This encourages students to read for ideas, rather than for word recognition.
Minggu, 18 April 2010
HOW TO TEACH LISTENING
Principles of teaching listening comprehension
a. Let students understand how foreigners speak English and build students’ sensitivities.
b. All we can do is give them some guidelines, provide an opportunity for meaningful practice and trust they will learn these things for themselves. (Buck, 1995)
Listening skills are vital for your learners. Of the 'four skills,' listening is by far the most frequently used. Listening and speaking are often taught together, but beginners, especially non-literate ones, should be given more listening than speaking practice. It's important to speak as close to natural speed as possible, although with beginners some slowing is usually necessary. Without reducing your speaking speed, you can make your language easier to comprehend by simplifying your vocabulary, using shorter sentences, and increasing the number and length of pauses in your speech.
There are many types of listening activities. Those that don't require learners to produce language in response are easier than those that do. Learners can be asked to physically respond to a command (for example, "please open the door"), select an appropriate picture or object, circle the correct letter or word on a worksheet, draw a route on a map, or fill in a chart as they listen. It's more difficult to repeat back what was heard, translate into the native language, take notes, make an outline, or answer comprehension questions. To add more challenge, learners can continue a story text, solve a problem, perform a similar task with a classmate after listening to a model (for example, order a cake from a bakery), or participate in real-time conversation.
Good listening lessons go beyond the listening task itself with related activities before and after the listening. Here is the basic structure:
* Before Listening
Prepare your learners by introducing the topic and finding out what they already know about it. A good way to do this is to have a brainstorming session and some discussion questions related to the topic. Then provide any necessary background information and new vocabulary they will need for the listening activity.
* During Listening
Be specific about what students need to listen for. They can listen for selective details or general content, or for an emotional tone such as happy, surprised, or angry. If they are not marking answers or otherwise responding while listening, tell them ahead of time what will be required afterward.
* After Listening
Finish with an activity to extend the topic and help students remember new vocabulary. This could be a discussion group, craft project, writing task, game, etc.
The following ideas will help make your listening activities successful.
* Noise
Reduce distractions and noise during the listening segment. You may need to close doors or windows or ask children in the room to be quiet for a few minutes.
* Equipment
If you are using a cassette player, make sure it produces acceptable sound quality. A counter on the machine will aid tremendously in cueing up tapes. Bring extra batteries or an extension cord with you.
* Repetition
Read or play the text a total of 2-3 times. Tell students in advance you will repeat it. This will reduce their anxiety about not catching it all the first time. You can also ask them to listen for different information each time through.
* Content
Unless your text is merely a list of items, talk about the content as well as specific language used. The material should be interesting and appropriate for your class level in topic, speed, and vocabulary. You may need to explain reductions (like 'gonna' for 'going to') and fillers (like 'um' or 'uh-huh').
* Recording Your Own Tape
Write appropriate text (or use something from your textbook) and have another English speaker read it onto tape. Copy the recording three times so you don't need to rewind. The reader should not simply read three times, because students want to hear exact repetition of the pronunciation, intonation, and pace, not just the words.
* Video
You can play a video clip with the sound off and ask students to make predictions about what dialog is taking place. Then play it again with sound and discuss why they were right or wrong in their predictions. You can also play the sound without the video first, and show the video after students have guessed what is going on.
* Homework
Give students a listening task to do between classes. Encourage them to listen to public announcements in airports, bus stations, supermarkets, etc. and try to write down what they heard. Tell them the telephone number of a cinema and ask them to write down the playing times of a specific movie. Give them a tape recording of yourself with questions, dictation, or a worksheet to complete.
Look for listening activities in the Activities and Lesson Materials sections of this guide. If your learners can use a computer with internet access and headphones or speakers, you may direct them toward the following listening practice sites. You could also assign specific activities from these sites as homework. Teach new vocabulary ahead of time if necessary.
* Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab
Around 140 listening clips and quizzes for students to access online; categorized into four difficulty levels, but activities marked 'easy' may be too difficult for beginners due to unfamiliar vocabulary; many include pre- and post-listening exercises; requires audio software such as RealPlayer (free) or optional interactive software like Divace.
* The English Listening Lounge
Thirty free listening clips categorized into three difficulty levels for students to access online; more available with membership; requires audio software such as RealPlayer (free).
HOW TO TEAC
a. Let students understand how foreigners speak English and build students’ sensitivities.
b. All we can do is give them some guidelines, provide an opportunity for meaningful practice and trust they will learn these things for themselves. (Buck, 1995)
Listening skills are vital for your learners. Of the 'four skills,' listening is by far the most frequently used. Listening and speaking are often taught together, but beginners, especially non-literate ones, should be given more listening than speaking practice. It's important to speak as close to natural speed as possible, although with beginners some slowing is usually necessary. Without reducing your speaking speed, you can make your language easier to comprehend by simplifying your vocabulary, using shorter sentences, and increasing the number and length of pauses in your speech.
There are many types of listening activities. Those that don't require learners to produce language in response are easier than those that do. Learners can be asked to physically respond to a command (for example, "please open the door"), select an appropriate picture or object, circle the correct letter or word on a worksheet, draw a route on a map, or fill in a chart as they listen. It's more difficult to repeat back what was heard, translate into the native language, take notes, make an outline, or answer comprehension questions. To add more challenge, learners can continue a story text, solve a problem, perform a similar task with a classmate after listening to a model (for example, order a cake from a bakery), or participate in real-time conversation.
Good listening lessons go beyond the listening task itself with related activities before and after the listening. Here is the basic structure:
* Before Listening
Prepare your learners by introducing the topic and finding out what they already know about it. A good way to do this is to have a brainstorming session and some discussion questions related to the topic. Then provide any necessary background information and new vocabulary they will need for the listening activity.
* During Listening
Be specific about what students need to listen for. They can listen for selective details or general content, or for an emotional tone such as happy, surprised, or angry. If they are not marking answers or otherwise responding while listening, tell them ahead of time what will be required afterward.
* After Listening
Finish with an activity to extend the topic and help students remember new vocabulary. This could be a discussion group, craft project, writing task, game, etc.
The following ideas will help make your listening activities successful.
* Noise
Reduce distractions and noise during the listening segment. You may need to close doors or windows or ask children in the room to be quiet for a few minutes.
* Equipment
If you are using a cassette player, make sure it produces acceptable sound quality. A counter on the machine will aid tremendously in cueing up tapes. Bring extra batteries or an extension cord with you.
* Repetition
Read or play the text a total of 2-3 times. Tell students in advance you will repeat it. This will reduce their anxiety about not catching it all the first time. You can also ask them to listen for different information each time through.
* Content
Unless your text is merely a list of items, talk about the content as well as specific language used. The material should be interesting and appropriate for your class level in topic, speed, and vocabulary. You may need to explain reductions (like 'gonna' for 'going to') and fillers (like 'um' or 'uh-huh').
* Recording Your Own Tape
Write appropriate text (or use something from your textbook) and have another English speaker read it onto tape. Copy the recording three times so you don't need to rewind. The reader should not simply read three times, because students want to hear exact repetition of the pronunciation, intonation, and pace, not just the words.
* Video
You can play a video clip with the sound off and ask students to make predictions about what dialog is taking place. Then play it again with sound and discuss why they were right or wrong in their predictions. You can also play the sound without the video first, and show the video after students have guessed what is going on.
* Homework
Give students a listening task to do between classes. Encourage them to listen to public announcements in airports, bus stations, supermarkets, etc. and try to write down what they heard. Tell them the telephone number of a cinema and ask them to write down the playing times of a specific movie. Give them a tape recording of yourself with questions, dictation, or a worksheet to complete.
Look for listening activities in the Activities and Lesson Materials sections of this guide. If your learners can use a computer with internet access and headphones or speakers, you may direct them toward the following listening practice sites. You could also assign specific activities from these sites as homework. Teach new vocabulary ahead of time if necessary.
* Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab
Around 140 listening clips and quizzes for students to access online; categorized into four difficulty levels, but activities marked 'easy' may be too difficult for beginners due to unfamiliar vocabulary; many include pre- and post-listening exercises; requires audio software such as RealPlayer (free) or optional interactive software like Divace.
* The English Listening Lounge
Thirty free listening clips categorized into three difficulty levels for students to access online; more available with membership; requires audio software such as RealPlayer (free).
HOW TO TEAC
HOW TO TEACH SPEAKING
Outside the context of any classroom, all children who are repeatedly exposed to language, in
normal circumstances will learn it unconsciously. Most adults can learn a language without
studying it. Though they may have more trouble with pronunciation and grammar than
younger learners, they may still be able to communicate fluently. Children and adults who
learn language successfully outside a classroom context seem to share certain similarities.
First of all, they are usually exposed to language which they more or less understand even if,
sometimes, they can't produce the same language spontaneously themselves. Secondly, they
are motivated to learn the language in order to be able to communicate. And communication is
mainly an oral business. And finally they have opportunities to use the language they are
learning, thus checking their own progress and abilities.
All these features of natural language acquisition can be difficult to replicate in the classroom,
but there are elements which are no doubt worth imitating. Obviously enough within the
classroom environment students don't get the same kind of exposure as those who are
"picking up" the language. But we should try to work on motivation, language exposure,
maximised talking time and we should offer chances to use the language.
This module will deal with communicative (or conversational) skills, that is those skills a
speaker must possess when he or she wants to communicate something orally.
Communicative (conversational) skills
When we think about speaking, we mean when the students use any and all the language at
their command to perform some kind of oral task. The important thing is that there should be
a task to complete and that the students should want to complete it.
The reasons why it is a good idea to give students speaking tasks which provoke them to use
all and any language at their command are mainly three:
1) Rehearsal: when students have free discussions or conversations inside the classroom
they have a chance to rehearse having discussions or conversations outside the classroom.
Simply enough, when they meet a new friend from abroad the first conversation will be
about introducing oneself, one's own family etc. Having them take part in a role-play at the
lost property office allows them to rehearse such a real-life event in the safety of the
classroom. It is a way for students to "get the feel" of what communicating in the foreign
language really feels like.
2) Feedback: engagement in a speaking task which demands for the use of all and any
language at the students' command provides feedback for both teacher and students.
3) Engagement: completing a speaking task can be really motivating and give real
satisfaction. Many speaking tasks (role-play, discussions, debate, problem-solving etc.) are
intrinsically enjoyable in themselves and if planned carefully (by the teacher) and
completed successfully (by the students) contribute to increasing their self-esteem.
What is conversation?
Teachers often tend to assume that conversation in the language classroom involves nothing
more than putting into practice the grammar and vocabulary skills taught elsewhere in the
course. But if we want to teach conversation well, we need to know something about what
native speakers do when they have conversations. We have chosen to deal with conversation
here, because conversation is what normally occurs in everyday life, in the contacts students
will have with foreign friends or foreign people in general. With the term "conversation" we
refer to a spoken interaction between two or more people who don't follow a fixed schedule.
The purposes of conversation include the exchange of information, the creation and
maintenance of social relationships, the negotiation of status and social roles as well as
deciding on joint actions.
The basic unit of a conversation is an exchange. An exchange consists of two moves (an
initiating move and a response):
A. Would you like a cup of coffee?
B. Yes, please.
We can give a function to each move. In the case above we have offering (A) and accepting
(B). To do so we need to take account of factors such as who the speakers are and where and
when the conversation occurs.
An exchange or a series of exchanges are not necessarily the same thing as a conversation:
A. Excuse me?
B. Yes?
A. How do I get to the railway station from here?
B. Go straight on, then take the first turning on the right. The railway station is at the end of the street.
Step 1
Make periodic lists. Encourage students to make a list of situations or opportunities in which they may believe it might be a good idea to speak English. Gather up these initial lists and refer to them later. The idea here is to see if students take advantage of potential opportunities when they present themselves.
Step 2
Get them listening. If you want to effectively teach someone to speak English, try to improve their listening skills. Introduce them to the concept of active listening by performing "paying attention" exercises. It may sound a little silly, but speaking English is a lot more than just understanding words, too. Learning context is a large portion of effectively communication.
Step 3
Get them talking. Have a student speak aloud as often as possible and be sure to let them know it is fine if they feel the need to repeat things over and over, as well.
Step 4
Teach them how to guess. In some circumstances, native English speakers might have to guess or infer what another person has said to them. One such example is when people have to guess at a word they do not know or recognize. Native English speakers are able to do this because they learn certain non-verbal cues from parents or caregivers as children. Someone can learn to speak English by being taught certain relational cues between speakers, as well.
Step 5
Invent new words or phrases, if necessary. Often times when a non-native English speaker finds they are engaged in a conversation that is unfamiliar to them, they will refuse to speak entirely for fear of humiliation or embarrassment. Rather than have them simply be at a loss for words, have them practice describing scenarios in English, even invent new phrases. If they cannot remember the word for "elevator," have them remember to say "moving box, up and down." If they cannot remember the word for "lolipop," have them say "candy on a stick," for example.
normal circumstances will learn it unconsciously. Most adults can learn a language without
studying it. Though they may have more trouble with pronunciation and grammar than
younger learners, they may still be able to communicate fluently. Children and adults who
learn language successfully outside a classroom context seem to share certain similarities.
First of all, they are usually exposed to language which they more or less understand even if,
sometimes, they can't produce the same language spontaneously themselves. Secondly, they
are motivated to learn the language in order to be able to communicate. And communication is
mainly an oral business. And finally they have opportunities to use the language they are
learning, thus checking their own progress and abilities.
All these features of natural language acquisition can be difficult to replicate in the classroom,
but there are elements which are no doubt worth imitating. Obviously enough within the
classroom environment students don't get the same kind of exposure as those who are
"picking up" the language. But we should try to work on motivation, language exposure,
maximised talking time and we should offer chances to use the language.
This module will deal with communicative (or conversational) skills, that is those skills a
speaker must possess when he or she wants to communicate something orally.
Communicative (conversational) skills
When we think about speaking, we mean when the students use any and all the language at
their command to perform some kind of oral task. The important thing is that there should be
a task to complete and that the students should want to complete it.
The reasons why it is a good idea to give students speaking tasks which provoke them to use
all and any language at their command are mainly three:
1) Rehearsal: when students have free discussions or conversations inside the classroom
they have a chance to rehearse having discussions or conversations outside the classroom.
Simply enough, when they meet a new friend from abroad the first conversation will be
about introducing oneself, one's own family etc. Having them take part in a role-play at the
lost property office allows them to rehearse such a real-life event in the safety of the
classroom. It is a way for students to "get the feel" of what communicating in the foreign
language really feels like.
2) Feedback: engagement in a speaking task which demands for the use of all and any
language at the students' command provides feedback for both teacher and students.
3) Engagement: completing a speaking task can be really motivating and give real
satisfaction. Many speaking tasks (role-play, discussions, debate, problem-solving etc.) are
intrinsically enjoyable in themselves and if planned carefully (by the teacher) and
completed successfully (by the students) contribute to increasing their self-esteem.
What is conversation?
Teachers often tend to assume that conversation in the language classroom involves nothing
more than putting into practice the grammar and vocabulary skills taught elsewhere in the
course. But if we want to teach conversation well, we need to know something about what
native speakers do when they have conversations. We have chosen to deal with conversation
here, because conversation is what normally occurs in everyday life, in the contacts students
will have with foreign friends or foreign people in general. With the term "conversation" we
refer to a spoken interaction between two or more people who don't follow a fixed schedule.
The purposes of conversation include the exchange of information, the creation and
maintenance of social relationships, the negotiation of status and social roles as well as
deciding on joint actions.
The basic unit of a conversation is an exchange. An exchange consists of two moves (an
initiating move and a response):
A. Would you like a cup of coffee?
B. Yes, please.
We can give a function to each move. In the case above we have offering (A) and accepting
(B). To do so we need to take account of factors such as who the speakers are and where and
when the conversation occurs.
An exchange or a series of exchanges are not necessarily the same thing as a conversation:
A. Excuse me?
B. Yes?
A. How do I get to the railway station from here?
B. Go straight on, then take the first turning on the right. The railway station is at the end of the street.
Step 1
Make periodic lists. Encourage students to make a list of situations or opportunities in which they may believe it might be a good idea to speak English. Gather up these initial lists and refer to them later. The idea here is to see if students take advantage of potential opportunities when they present themselves.
Step 2
Get them listening. If you want to effectively teach someone to speak English, try to improve their listening skills. Introduce them to the concept of active listening by performing "paying attention" exercises. It may sound a little silly, but speaking English is a lot more than just understanding words, too. Learning context is a large portion of effectively communication.
Step 3
Get them talking. Have a student speak aloud as often as possible and be sure to let them know it is fine if they feel the need to repeat things over and over, as well.
Step 4
Teach them how to guess. In some circumstances, native English speakers might have to guess or infer what another person has said to them. One such example is when people have to guess at a word they do not know or recognize. Native English speakers are able to do this because they learn certain non-verbal cues from parents or caregivers as children. Someone can learn to speak English by being taught certain relational cues between speakers, as well.
Step 5
Invent new words or phrases, if necessary. Often times when a non-native English speaker finds they are engaged in a conversation that is unfamiliar to them, they will refuse to speak entirely for fear of humiliation or embarrassment. Rather than have them simply be at a loss for words, have them practice describing scenarios in English, even invent new phrases. If they cannot remember the word for "elevator," have them remember to say "moving box, up and down." If they cannot remember the word for "lolipop," have them say "candy on a stick," for example.
30 Ideas for Teaching Writing
1. Use the shared events of students' lives to inspire writing.
Debbie Rotkow, a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith's words, is "natural and purposeful."
When a child comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag, these events can inspire a poem. When Michael rode his bike without training wheels for the first time, this occasion provided a worthwhile topic to write about. A new baby in a family, a lost tooth, and the death of one student's father were the playful or serious inspirations for student writing.
Says Rotkow: "Our classroom reverberated with the stories of our lives as we wrote, talked, and reflected about who we were, what we did, what we thought, and how we thought about it. We became a community."
2. Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.
When high school teacher Karen Murar and college instructor Elaine Ware, teacher-consultants with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, discovered students were scheduled to read the August Wilson play Fences at the same time, they set up email communication between students to allow some "teacherless talk" about the text.
Rather than typical teacher-led discussion, the project fostered independent conversation between students. Formal classroom discussion of the play did not occur until students had completed all email correspondence. Though teachers were not involved in student online dialogues, the conversations evidenced the same reading strategies promoted in teacher-led discussion, including predication, clarification, interpretation, and others.
3. Use writing to improve relations among students.
Diane Waff, co-director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, taught in an urban school where boys outnumbered girls four to one in her classroom. The situation left girls feeling overwhelmed, according to Waff, and their "voices faded into the background, overpowered by more aggressive male voices."
Determined not to ignore this unhealthy situation, Waff urged students to face the problem head-on, asking them to write about gender-based problems in their journals. She then introduced literature that considered relationships between the sexes, focusing on themes of romance, love, and marriage. Students wrote in response to works as diverse as de Maupassant's "The Necklace" and Dean Myers's Motown and DiDi.
In the beginning there was a great dissonance between male and female responses. According to Waff, "Girls focused on feelings; boys focused on sex, money, and the fleeting nature of romantic attachment." But as the students continued to write about and discuss their honest feelings, they began to notice that they had similar ideas on many issues. "By confronting these gender-based problems directly," says Waff, "the effect was to improve the lives of individual students and the social well-being of the wider school community."
4. Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.
Jan Matsuoka, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), describes a revision conference she held with a third grade English language learner named Sandee, who had written about a recent trip to Los Angeles.
"I told her I wanted her story to have more focus," writes Matsuoka. "I could tell she was confused so I made rough sketches representing the events of her trip. I made a small frame out of a piece of paper and placed it down on one of her drawings-a sketch she had made of a visit with her grandmother."
"Focus, I told her, means writing about the memorable details of the visit with your grandmother, not everything else you did on the trip."
5. Work with words relevant to students' lives to help them build vocabulary.
Eileen Simmons, a teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma State University Writing Project, knows that the more relevant new words are to students' lives, the more likely they are to take hold.
In her high school classroom, she uses a form of the children's ABC book as a community-building project. For each letter of the alphabet, the students find an appropriately descriptive word for themselves. Students elaborate on the word by writing sentences and creating an illustration. In the process, they make extensive use of the dictionary and thesaurus.
One student describes her personality as sometimes 'caustic,' illustrating the word with a photograph of a burning car in a war zone. Her caption explains that she understands the hurt her 'burning' sarcastic remarks can generate.
6. Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.
John Levine, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), helps his college freshmen integrate the ideas of several writers into a single analytical essay by asking them to create a dialogue among those writers.
He tells his students, for instance, "imagine you are the moderator of a panel discussion on the topic these writers are discussing. Consider the three writers and construct a dialogue among the four 'voices' (the three essayists plus you)."
Levine tells students to format the dialogue as though it were a script. The essay follows from this preparation.
7. Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry.
The following is a group poem created by second grade students of Michelle Fleer, a teacher-consultant with the Dakota Writing Project (South Dakota).
Underwater
Crabs crawl patiently along the ocean floor
searching for prey.
Fish soundlessly weave their way through
slippery seaweed
Whales whisper to others as they slide
through the salty water.
And silent waves wash into a dark cave
where an octopus is sleeping.
Fleer helped her students get started by finding a familiar topic. (In this case her students had been studying sea life.) She asked them to brainstorm language related to the sea, allowing them time to list appropriate nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The students then used these words to create phrases and used the phrases to produce the poem itself.
As a group, students put together words in ways Fleer didn't believe many of them could have done if they were working on their own, and after creating several group poems, some students felt confident enough to work alone.
8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.
Douglas James Joyce, a teacher-consultant with the Denver Writing Project, makes use of what he calls "metawriting" in his college writing classes. He sees metawriting (writing about writing) as a way to help students reduce errors in their academic prose.
Joyce explains one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects one error that occurs frequently in a student's work and points out each instance in which the error is made. He instructs the student to write a one page essay, comparing and contrasting three sources that provide guidance on the established use of that particular convention, making sure a variety of sources are available.
"I want the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away with a thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to understand any debate that may surround the particular usage."
9. Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.
Glorianne Bradshaw, a teacher-consultant with the Red River Valley Writing Project (North Dakota), decided to make use of experiences from her own life when teaching her first-graders how to write.
For example, on an overhead transparency she shows a sketch of herself stirring cookie batter while on vacation. She writes the phrase 'made cookies' under the sketch. Then she asks students to help her write a sentence about this. She writes the words who, where, and when. Using these words as prompts, she and the students construct the sentence, "I made cookies in the kitchen in the morning."
Next, each student returns to the sketch he or she has made of a summer vacation activity and, with her help, answers the same questions answered for Bradshaw's drawing. Then she asks them, "Tell me more. Do the cookies have chocolate chips? Does the pizza have pepperoni?" These facts lead to other sentences.
Rather than taking away creativity, Bradshaw believes this kind of structure gives students a helpful format for creativity.
10. Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.
Stephanie Wilder found that the grades she gave her high school students were getting in the way of their progress. The weaker students stopped trying. Other students relied on grades as the only standard by which they judged their own work.
"I decided to postpone my grading until the portfolios, which contained a selection of student work, were complete," Wilder says. She continued to comment on papers, encourage revision, and urge students to meet with her for conferences. But she waited to grade the papers.
It took a while for students to stop leafing to the ends of their papers in search of a grade, and there was some grumbling from students who had always received excellent grades. But she believes that because she was less quick to judge their work, students were better able to evaluate their efforts themselves.
11. Use casual talk about students' lives to generate writing.
Erin (Pirnot) Ciccone, teacher-consultant with the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project, found a way to make more productive the "Monday morning gab fest" she used as a warm-up with her fifth grade students. She conceived of "Headline News." As students entered the classroom on Monday mornings, they wrote personal headlines about their weekends and posted them on the bulletin board. A headline might read "Fifth-Grader Stranded at Movie Theatre" or "Girl Takes on Responsibility as Mother's Helper."
After the headlines had been posted, students had a chance to guess the stories behind them. The writers then told the stories behind their headlines. As each student had only three minutes to talk, they needed to make decisions about what was important and to clarify details as they proceeded. They began to rely on suspense and "purposeful ambiguity" to hold listeners' interest.
12. Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.
Patricia A. Slagle, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), understands the difference between writing for a hypothetical purpose and writing to an audience for real purpose. She illustrates the difference by contrasting two assignments.
She began with: "Imagine you are the drama critic for your local newspaper. Write a review of an imaginary production of the play we have just finished studying in class." This prompt asks students to assume the contrived role of a professional writer and drama critic. They must adapt to a voice that is not theirs and pretend to have knowledge they do not have.
Slagle developed a more effective alternative: "Write a letter to the director of your local theater company in which you present arguments for producing the play that we have just finished studying in class." This prompt, Slagle says, allows the writer her own voice, building into her argument concrete references to personal experience. "Of course," adds Slagle, "this prompt would constitute authentic writing only for those students who, in fact, would like to see the play produced."
13. Practice and play with revision techniques.
Mark Farrington, college instructor and teacher-consultant with the Northern Virginia Writing Project, believes teaching revision sometimes means practicing techniques of revision. An exercise like 'find a place other than the first sentence where this essay might begin' is valuable because it shows student writers the possibilities that exist in writing.
For Farrington's students, practice can sometime turn to play with directions to:
* add five colors
* add four action verbs
* add one metaphor
* add five sensory details.
In his college fiction writing class, Farrington asks students to choose a spot in the story where the main character does something that is crucial to the rest of the story. At that moment, Farrington says, they must make the character do the exact opposite.
14. Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.
Bernadette Lambert, teacher-consultant with the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project (Georgia), wondered what would happen if she had her sixth-grade students pair with an adult family member to read a book. She asked the students about the kinds of books they wanted to read (mysteries, adventure, ghost stories) and the adults about the kinds of books they wanted to read with the young people (character-building values, multiculturalism, no ghost stories). Using these suggestions for direction, Lambert developed a list of 30 books. From this list, each student-adult pair chose one. They committed themselves to read and discuss the book and write separate reviews.
Most of the students, says Lambert, were proud to share a piece of writing done by their adult reading buddy. Several admitted that they had never before had this level of intellectual conversation with an adult family member.
15. Teach "tension" to move students beyond fluency.
Suzanne Linebarger, a co-director of the Northern California Writing Project, recognized that one element lacking from many of her students' stories was tension. One day, in front of the class, she demonstrated tension with a rubber band. Looped over her finger, the rubber band merely dangled. "However," she told the students, "when I stretch it out and point it (not at a student), the rubber band suddenly becomes more interesting. It's the tension, the potential energy, that rivets your attention. It's the same in writing."
Linebarger revised a generic writing prompt to add an element of tension. The initial prompt read, "Think of a friend who is special to you. Write about something your friend has done for you, you have done for your friend, or you have done together."
Linebarger didn't want responses that settled for "my best friend was really good to me," so "during the rewrite session we talked about how hard it is to stay friends when met with a challenge. Students talked about times they had let their friends down or times their friends had let them down, and how they had managed to stay friends in spite of their problems. In other words, we talked about some tense situations that found their way into their writing."
16. Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.
Ray Skjelbred, middle school teacher at Marin Country Day School, wants his seventh grade students to listen to language. He wants to begin to train their ears by asking them to make lists of wonderful sounding words. "This is strictly a listening game," says Skjelbred. "They shouldn't write lunch just because they're hungry." When the collective list is assembled, Skjelbred asks students to make sentences from some of the words they've collected. They may use their own words, borrow from other contributors, add other words as necessary, and change word forms.
Among the words on one student's list: tumble, detergent, sift, bubble, syllable, creep, erupt, and volcano. The student writes:
* A man loads his laundry into the tumbling washer, the detergent sifting through the bubbling water.
* The syllables creep through her teeth.
* The fog erupts like a volcano in the dust.
"Unexpected words can go together, creating amazing images," says Skjelbred.
17. Require written response to peers' writing.
Kathleen O'Shaughnessy, co-director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana (Louisiana), asks her middle school students to respond to each others' writing on Post-it Notes. Students attach their comments to a piece of writing under consideration.
"I've found that when I require a written response on a Post-it instead of merely allowing students to respond verbally, the responders take their duties more seriously and, with practice, the quality of their remarks improves."
One student wrote:
While I was reading your piece, I felt like I was riding a roller coaster. It started out kinda slow, but you could tell there was something exciting coming up. But then it moved real fast and stopped all of a sudden. I almost needed to read it again the way you ride a roller coaster over again because it goes too fast.
Says O'Shaughnessy, "This response is certainly more useful to the writer than the usual 'I think you could, like, add some more details, you know?' that I often overheard in response meetings."
18. Make writing reflection tangible.
Anna Collins Trest, director of the South Mississippi Writing Project, finds she can lead upper elementary school students to better understand the concept of "reflection" if she anchors the discussion in the concrete and helps students establish categories for their reflective responses.
She decided to use mirrors to teach the reflective process. Each student had one. As the students gazed at their own reflections, she asked this question: "What can you think about while looking in the mirror at your own reflection?" As they answered, she categorized each response:
I think I'm a queen - pretending/imagining
I look at my cavities - examining/observing
I think I'm having a bad hair day - forming opinions
What will I look like when I am old? - questioning
My hair is parted in the middle - describing
I'm thinking about when I broke my nose - remembering
I think I look better than my brother - comparing
Everything on my face looks sad today - expressing emotion.
Trest talked with students about the categories and invited them to give personal examples of each. Then she asked them to look in the mirrors again, reflect on their images, and write.
"Elementary students are literal in their thinking," Trest says, "but that doesn't mean they can't be creative."
19. Make grammar instruction dynamic.
Philip Ireland, teacher-consultant with the San Marcos Writing Project (California), believes in active learning. One of his strategies has been to take his seventh-graders on a "preposition walk" around the school campus. Walking in pairs, they tell each other what they are doing:
I'm stepping off the grass.
I'm talking to my friend.
"Students soon discover that everything they do contains prepositional phrases. I walk among my students prompting answers," Ireland explains.
"I'm crawling under the tennis net," Amanda proclaims from her hands and knees. "The prepositional phrase is under the net."
20. Ask students to experiment with sentence length.
Kim Stafford, director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark College, wants his students to discard old notions that sentences should be a certain length. He explains to his students that a writer's command of long and short sentences makes for a "more pliable" writing repertoire. He describes the exercise he uses to help students experiment with sentence length.
"I invite writers to compose a sentence that goes on for at least a page - and no fair cheating with a semicolon. Just use 'and' when you have to, or a dash, or make a list, and keep it going." After years of being told not to, they take pleasure in writing the greatest run-on sentences they can.
"Then we shake out our writing hands, take a blank page, and write from the upper left to the lower right corner again, but this time letting no sentence be longer than four words, but every sentence must have a subject and a verb."
Stafford compares the first style of sentence construction to a river and the second to a drum. "Writers need both," he says. "Rivers have long rhythms. Drums roll."
21. Help students ask questions about their writing.
Joni Chancer, teacher-consultant of the South Coast Writing Project (California), has paid a lot of attention to the type of questions she wants her upper elementary students to consider as they re-examine their writing, reflecting on pieces they may make part of their portfolios. Here are some of the questions:
Why did I write this piece? Where did I get my ideas?
Who is the audience and how did it affect this piece?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
Was this piece easy or difficult to write? Why?
What parts did I rework? What were my revisions?
Did I try something new?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
What elements of writer's craft enhanced my story?
What might I change?
Did something I read influence my writing?
What did I learn or what did I expect the reader to learn?
Where will I go from here? Will I publish it? Share it?
Expand it? Toss it? File it?
Chancer cautions that these questions should not be considered a "reflection checklist," rather they are questions that seem to be addressed frequently when writers tell the story of a particular piece.
CHANCER, JONI. 2001. "The Teacher's Role in Portfolio Assessment." In The Whole Story: Teachers Talk About Portfolios, edited by Mary Ann Smith and Jane Juska. Berkeley, California: National Writing Project.
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22. Challenge students to find active verbs.
Nancy Lilly, co-director of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project, wanted her fourth and fifth grade students to breathe life into their nonfiction writing. She thought the student who wrote this paragraph could do better:
The jaguar is the biggest and strongest cat in the rainforest. The jaguar's jaw is strong enough to crush a turtle's shell. Jaguars also have very powerful legs for leaping from branch to branch to chase prey.
Building on an idea from Stephanie Harvey (Nonfiction Matters, Stenhouse, 1998) Lilly introduced the concept of "nouns as stuff" and verbs as "what stuff does."
In a brainstorming session related to the students' study of the rain forest, the class supplied the following assistance to the writer:
Stuff/Nouns : What Stuff Does/Verbs
jaguar : leaps, pounces
jaguar's : legs pump
jaguar's : teeth crush
jaguar's : mouth devours
This was just the help the writer needed to create the following revised paragraph:
As the sun disappears from the heart of the forest, the jaguar leaps through the underbrush, pumping its powerful legs. It spies a gharial gliding down the river. The jungle cat pounces, crushing the turtle with his teeth, devouring the reptile with pleasure.
23. Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.
For a final exam, Sarah Lorenz, a teacher-consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, asks her high school students to make a written argument for the grade they think they should receive. Drawing on work they have done over the semester, students make a case for how much they have learned in the writing class.
"The key to convincing me," says Lorenz, "is the use of detail. They can't simply say they have improved as writers-they have to give examples and even quote their own writing...They can't just say something was helpful- they have to tell me why they thought it was important, how their thinking changed, or how they applied this learning to everyday life."
24. Ground writing in social issues important to students.
Jean Hicks, director, and Tim Johnson, a co-director, both of the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), have developed a way to help high school students create brief, effective dramas about issues in their lives. The class, working in groups, decides on a theme such as jealousy, sibling rivalry, competition, or teen drinking. Each group develops a scene illustrating an aspect of this chosen theme.
Considering the theme of sibling rivalry, for instance, students identify possible scenes with topics such as "I Had It First" (competing for family resources) and "Calling in the Troops" (tattling). Students then set up the circumstances and characters.
Hicks and Johnson give each of the "characters" a different color packet of Post-it Notes. Each student develops and posts dialogue for his or her character. As the scene emerges, Post-its can be added, moved, and deleted. They remind students of the conventions of drama such as conflict and resolution. Scenes, when acted out, are limited to 10 minutes.
"It's not so much about the genre or the product as it is about creating a culture that supports the thinking and learning of writers," write Hicks and Johnson.
25. Encourage the "framing device" as an aid to cohesion in writing.
Romana Hillebrand, a teacher-consultant with the Northwest Inland Writing Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find a literary or historical reference or a personal narrative that can provide a fresh way into and out of their writing, surrounding it much like a window frame surrounds a glass pane.
Hillebrand provides this example:
A student in her research class wrote a paper on the relationship between humans and plants, beginning with a reference to the nursery rhyme, 'Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies...' She explained the rhymes as originating with the practice of masking the stench of death with flowers during the Black Plague. The student finished the paper with the sentence, "Without plants, life on Earth would cease to exist as we know it; ashes, ashes we all fall down."
26. Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.
Suzanne Cherry, director of the Swamp Fox Writing Project (South Carolina), has her own way of dramatizing the comma splice error. She brings to class two pieces of wire, the last inch of each exposed. She tells her college students "We need to join these pieces of wire together right now if we are to be able to watch our favorite TV show. What can we do? We could use some tape, but that would probably be a mistake as the puppy could easily eat through the connection. By splicing the wires in this way, we are creating a fire hazard."
A better connection, the students usually suggest, would be to use one of those electrical connectors that look like pen caps.
"Now," Cherry says (often to the accompaniment of multiple groans), "let's turn these wires into sentences. If we simply splice them together with a comma, the equivalent of a piece of tape, we create a weak connection, or a comma splice error. What then would be the grammatical equivalent of the electrical connector? Think conjunction - and, but, or. Or try a semicolon. All of these show relationships between sentences in a way that the comma, a device for taping clauses together in a slapdash manner, does not."
"I've been teaching writing for many years," Cherry says. "And I now realize the more able we are to relate the concepts of writing to 'real world' experience, the more successful we will be."
27. Think like a football coach.
In addition to his work as a high school teacher of writing, Dan Holt, a co-director with the Third Coast Writing Project (Michigan), spent 20 years coaching football. While doing the latter, he learned quite a bit about doing the former. Here is some of what he found out:
The writing teacher can't stay on the sidelines. "When I modeled for my players, they knew what I wanted them to do." The same involvement, he says, is required to successfully teach writing.
Like the coach, the writing teacher should praise strong performance rather than focus on the negative. Statements such as "Wow, that was a killer block," or "That paragraph was tight" will turn "butterball" ninth-grade boys into varsity linemen and insecure adolescents into aspiring poets.
The writing teacher should apply the KISS theory: Keep it simple stupid. Holt explains for a freshman quarterback, audibles (on-field commands) are best used with care until a player has reached a higher skill level. In writing class, a student who has never written a poem needs to start with small verse forms such as a chinquapin or haiku.
Practice and routine are important both for football players and for writing students, but football players and writers also need the "adrenaline rush" of the big game and the final draft.
28. Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.
High school teacher Jon Appleby noticed that when yearbooks fell into students' hands "my curriculum got dropped in a heartbeat for spirited words scribbled over photos." Appleby wondered, "How can I make my classroom as fascinating and consuming as the yearbook?"
Here are some ideas that yearbook writing inspired:
Take pictures, put them on the bulletin boards, and have students write captions for them. Then design small descriptive writing assignments using the photographs of events such as the prom and homecoming. Afterwards, ask students to choose quotes from things they have read that represent what they feel and think and put them on the walls.
Check in about students' lives. Recognize achievements and individuals the way that yearbook writers direct attention to each other. Ask students to write down memories and simply, joyfully share them. As yearbook writing usually does, insist on a sense of tomorrow.
29. Use home language on the road to Standard English.
Eileen Kennedy, special education teacher at Medger Evers College, works with native speakers of Caribbean Creole who are preparing to teach in New York City. Sometimes she encourages these students to draft writing in their native Creole. The additional challenge becomes to re-draft this writing, rendered in patois, into Standard English.
She finds that narratives involving immigrant Caribbean natives in unfamiliar situations - buying a refrigerator, for instance - lead to inspired writing. In addition, some students expressed their thoughts more proficiently in Standard English after drafting in their vernaculars.
30. Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.
Jim Wilcox, teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma Writing Project, requires his college students to volunteer at a local facility that serves the community, any place from the Special Olympics to a burn unit. Over the course of their tenure with the organization, students write in a number of genres: an objective report that describes the appearance and activity of the facility, a personal interview/profile, an evaluation essay that requires students to set up criteria by which to assess this kind of organization, an investigative report that includes information from a second source, and a letter to the editor of a campus newspaper or other publication.
Debbie Rotkow, a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith's words, is "natural and purposeful."
When a child comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag, these events can inspire a poem. When Michael rode his bike without training wheels for the first time, this occasion provided a worthwhile topic to write about. A new baby in a family, a lost tooth, and the death of one student's father were the playful or serious inspirations for student writing.
Says Rotkow: "Our classroom reverberated with the stories of our lives as we wrote, talked, and reflected about who we were, what we did, what we thought, and how we thought about it. We became a community."
2. Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.
When high school teacher Karen Murar and college instructor Elaine Ware, teacher-consultants with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, discovered students were scheduled to read the August Wilson play Fences at the same time, they set up email communication between students to allow some "teacherless talk" about the text.
Rather than typical teacher-led discussion, the project fostered independent conversation between students. Formal classroom discussion of the play did not occur until students had completed all email correspondence. Though teachers were not involved in student online dialogues, the conversations evidenced the same reading strategies promoted in teacher-led discussion, including predication, clarification, interpretation, and others.
3. Use writing to improve relations among students.
Diane Waff, co-director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, taught in an urban school where boys outnumbered girls four to one in her classroom. The situation left girls feeling overwhelmed, according to Waff, and their "voices faded into the background, overpowered by more aggressive male voices."
Determined not to ignore this unhealthy situation, Waff urged students to face the problem head-on, asking them to write about gender-based problems in their journals. She then introduced literature that considered relationships between the sexes, focusing on themes of romance, love, and marriage. Students wrote in response to works as diverse as de Maupassant's "The Necklace" and Dean Myers's Motown and DiDi.
In the beginning there was a great dissonance between male and female responses. According to Waff, "Girls focused on feelings; boys focused on sex, money, and the fleeting nature of romantic attachment." But as the students continued to write about and discuss their honest feelings, they began to notice that they had similar ideas on many issues. "By confronting these gender-based problems directly," says Waff, "the effect was to improve the lives of individual students and the social well-being of the wider school community."
4. Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.
Jan Matsuoka, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), describes a revision conference she held with a third grade English language learner named Sandee, who had written about a recent trip to Los Angeles.
"I told her I wanted her story to have more focus," writes Matsuoka. "I could tell she was confused so I made rough sketches representing the events of her trip. I made a small frame out of a piece of paper and placed it down on one of her drawings-a sketch she had made of a visit with her grandmother."
"Focus, I told her, means writing about the memorable details of the visit with your grandmother, not everything else you did on the trip."
5. Work with words relevant to students' lives to help them build vocabulary.
Eileen Simmons, a teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma State University Writing Project, knows that the more relevant new words are to students' lives, the more likely they are to take hold.
In her high school classroom, she uses a form of the children's ABC book as a community-building project. For each letter of the alphabet, the students find an appropriately descriptive word for themselves. Students elaborate on the word by writing sentences and creating an illustration. In the process, they make extensive use of the dictionary and thesaurus.
One student describes her personality as sometimes 'caustic,' illustrating the word with a photograph of a burning car in a war zone. Her caption explains that she understands the hurt her 'burning' sarcastic remarks can generate.
6. Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.
John Levine, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), helps his college freshmen integrate the ideas of several writers into a single analytical essay by asking them to create a dialogue among those writers.
He tells his students, for instance, "imagine you are the moderator of a panel discussion on the topic these writers are discussing. Consider the three writers and construct a dialogue among the four 'voices' (the three essayists plus you)."
Levine tells students to format the dialogue as though it were a script. The essay follows from this preparation.
7. Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry.
The following is a group poem created by second grade students of Michelle Fleer, a teacher-consultant with the Dakota Writing Project (South Dakota).
Underwater
Crabs crawl patiently along the ocean floor
searching for prey.
Fish soundlessly weave their way through
slippery seaweed
Whales whisper to others as they slide
through the salty water.
And silent waves wash into a dark cave
where an octopus is sleeping.
Fleer helped her students get started by finding a familiar topic. (In this case her students had been studying sea life.) She asked them to brainstorm language related to the sea, allowing them time to list appropriate nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The students then used these words to create phrases and used the phrases to produce the poem itself.
As a group, students put together words in ways Fleer didn't believe many of them could have done if they were working on their own, and after creating several group poems, some students felt confident enough to work alone.
8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.
Douglas James Joyce, a teacher-consultant with the Denver Writing Project, makes use of what he calls "metawriting" in his college writing classes. He sees metawriting (writing about writing) as a way to help students reduce errors in their academic prose.
Joyce explains one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects one error that occurs frequently in a student's work and points out each instance in which the error is made. He instructs the student to write a one page essay, comparing and contrasting three sources that provide guidance on the established use of that particular convention, making sure a variety of sources are available.
"I want the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away with a thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to understand any debate that may surround the particular usage."
9. Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.
Glorianne Bradshaw, a teacher-consultant with the Red River Valley Writing Project (North Dakota), decided to make use of experiences from her own life when teaching her first-graders how to write.
For example, on an overhead transparency she shows a sketch of herself stirring cookie batter while on vacation. She writes the phrase 'made cookies' under the sketch. Then she asks students to help her write a sentence about this. She writes the words who, where, and when. Using these words as prompts, she and the students construct the sentence, "I made cookies in the kitchen in the morning."
Next, each student returns to the sketch he or she has made of a summer vacation activity and, with her help, answers the same questions answered for Bradshaw's drawing. Then she asks them, "Tell me more. Do the cookies have chocolate chips? Does the pizza have pepperoni?" These facts lead to other sentences.
Rather than taking away creativity, Bradshaw believes this kind of structure gives students a helpful format for creativity.
10. Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.
Stephanie Wilder found that the grades she gave her high school students were getting in the way of their progress. The weaker students stopped trying. Other students relied on grades as the only standard by which they judged their own work.
"I decided to postpone my grading until the portfolios, which contained a selection of student work, were complete," Wilder says. She continued to comment on papers, encourage revision, and urge students to meet with her for conferences. But she waited to grade the papers.
It took a while for students to stop leafing to the ends of their papers in search of a grade, and there was some grumbling from students who had always received excellent grades. But she believes that because she was less quick to judge their work, students were better able to evaluate their efforts themselves.
11. Use casual talk about students' lives to generate writing.
Erin (Pirnot) Ciccone, teacher-consultant with the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project, found a way to make more productive the "Monday morning gab fest" she used as a warm-up with her fifth grade students. She conceived of "Headline News." As students entered the classroom on Monday mornings, they wrote personal headlines about their weekends and posted them on the bulletin board. A headline might read "Fifth-Grader Stranded at Movie Theatre" or "Girl Takes on Responsibility as Mother's Helper."
After the headlines had been posted, students had a chance to guess the stories behind them. The writers then told the stories behind their headlines. As each student had only three minutes to talk, they needed to make decisions about what was important and to clarify details as they proceeded. They began to rely on suspense and "purposeful ambiguity" to hold listeners' interest.
12. Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.
Patricia A. Slagle, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), understands the difference between writing for a hypothetical purpose and writing to an audience for real purpose. She illustrates the difference by contrasting two assignments.
She began with: "Imagine you are the drama critic for your local newspaper. Write a review of an imaginary production of the play we have just finished studying in class." This prompt asks students to assume the contrived role of a professional writer and drama critic. They must adapt to a voice that is not theirs and pretend to have knowledge they do not have.
Slagle developed a more effective alternative: "Write a letter to the director of your local theater company in which you present arguments for producing the play that we have just finished studying in class." This prompt, Slagle says, allows the writer her own voice, building into her argument concrete references to personal experience. "Of course," adds Slagle, "this prompt would constitute authentic writing only for those students who, in fact, would like to see the play produced."
13. Practice and play with revision techniques.
Mark Farrington, college instructor and teacher-consultant with the Northern Virginia Writing Project, believes teaching revision sometimes means practicing techniques of revision. An exercise like 'find a place other than the first sentence where this essay might begin' is valuable because it shows student writers the possibilities that exist in writing.
For Farrington's students, practice can sometime turn to play with directions to:
* add five colors
* add four action verbs
* add one metaphor
* add five sensory details.
In his college fiction writing class, Farrington asks students to choose a spot in the story where the main character does something that is crucial to the rest of the story. At that moment, Farrington says, they must make the character do the exact opposite.
14. Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.
Bernadette Lambert, teacher-consultant with the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project (Georgia), wondered what would happen if she had her sixth-grade students pair with an adult family member to read a book. She asked the students about the kinds of books they wanted to read (mysteries, adventure, ghost stories) and the adults about the kinds of books they wanted to read with the young people (character-building values, multiculturalism, no ghost stories). Using these suggestions for direction, Lambert developed a list of 30 books. From this list, each student-adult pair chose one. They committed themselves to read and discuss the book and write separate reviews.
Most of the students, says Lambert, were proud to share a piece of writing done by their adult reading buddy. Several admitted that they had never before had this level of intellectual conversation with an adult family member.
15. Teach "tension" to move students beyond fluency.
Suzanne Linebarger, a co-director of the Northern California Writing Project, recognized that one element lacking from many of her students' stories was tension. One day, in front of the class, she demonstrated tension with a rubber band. Looped over her finger, the rubber band merely dangled. "However," she told the students, "when I stretch it out and point it (not at a student), the rubber band suddenly becomes more interesting. It's the tension, the potential energy, that rivets your attention. It's the same in writing."
Linebarger revised a generic writing prompt to add an element of tension. The initial prompt read, "Think of a friend who is special to you. Write about something your friend has done for you, you have done for your friend, or you have done together."
Linebarger didn't want responses that settled for "my best friend was really good to me," so "during the rewrite session we talked about how hard it is to stay friends when met with a challenge. Students talked about times they had let their friends down or times their friends had let them down, and how they had managed to stay friends in spite of their problems. In other words, we talked about some tense situations that found their way into their writing."
16. Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.
Ray Skjelbred, middle school teacher at Marin Country Day School, wants his seventh grade students to listen to language. He wants to begin to train their ears by asking them to make lists of wonderful sounding words. "This is strictly a listening game," says Skjelbred. "They shouldn't write lunch just because they're hungry." When the collective list is assembled, Skjelbred asks students to make sentences from some of the words they've collected. They may use their own words, borrow from other contributors, add other words as necessary, and change word forms.
Among the words on one student's list: tumble, detergent, sift, bubble, syllable, creep, erupt, and volcano. The student writes:
* A man loads his laundry into the tumbling washer, the detergent sifting through the bubbling water.
* The syllables creep through her teeth.
* The fog erupts like a volcano in the dust.
"Unexpected words can go together, creating amazing images," says Skjelbred.
17. Require written response to peers' writing.
Kathleen O'Shaughnessy, co-director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana (Louisiana), asks her middle school students to respond to each others' writing on Post-it Notes. Students attach their comments to a piece of writing under consideration.
"I've found that when I require a written response on a Post-it instead of merely allowing students to respond verbally, the responders take their duties more seriously and, with practice, the quality of their remarks improves."
One student wrote:
While I was reading your piece, I felt like I was riding a roller coaster. It started out kinda slow, but you could tell there was something exciting coming up. But then it moved real fast and stopped all of a sudden. I almost needed to read it again the way you ride a roller coaster over again because it goes too fast.
Says O'Shaughnessy, "This response is certainly more useful to the writer than the usual 'I think you could, like, add some more details, you know?' that I often overheard in response meetings."
18. Make writing reflection tangible.
Anna Collins Trest, director of the South Mississippi Writing Project, finds she can lead upper elementary school students to better understand the concept of "reflection" if she anchors the discussion in the concrete and helps students establish categories for their reflective responses.
She decided to use mirrors to teach the reflective process. Each student had one. As the students gazed at their own reflections, she asked this question: "What can you think about while looking in the mirror at your own reflection?" As they answered, she categorized each response:
I think I'm a queen - pretending/imagining
I look at my cavities - examining/observing
I think I'm having a bad hair day - forming opinions
What will I look like when I am old? - questioning
My hair is parted in the middle - describing
I'm thinking about when I broke my nose - remembering
I think I look better than my brother - comparing
Everything on my face looks sad today - expressing emotion.
Trest talked with students about the categories and invited them to give personal examples of each. Then she asked them to look in the mirrors again, reflect on their images, and write.
"Elementary students are literal in their thinking," Trest says, "but that doesn't mean they can't be creative."
19. Make grammar instruction dynamic.
Philip Ireland, teacher-consultant with the San Marcos Writing Project (California), believes in active learning. One of his strategies has been to take his seventh-graders on a "preposition walk" around the school campus. Walking in pairs, they tell each other what they are doing:
I'm stepping off the grass.
I'm talking to my friend.
"Students soon discover that everything they do contains prepositional phrases. I walk among my students prompting answers," Ireland explains.
"I'm crawling under the tennis net," Amanda proclaims from her hands and knees. "The prepositional phrase is under the net."
20. Ask students to experiment with sentence length.
Kim Stafford, director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark College, wants his students to discard old notions that sentences should be a certain length. He explains to his students that a writer's command of long and short sentences makes for a "more pliable" writing repertoire. He describes the exercise he uses to help students experiment with sentence length.
"I invite writers to compose a sentence that goes on for at least a page - and no fair cheating with a semicolon. Just use 'and' when you have to, or a dash, or make a list, and keep it going." After years of being told not to, they take pleasure in writing the greatest run-on sentences they can.
"Then we shake out our writing hands, take a blank page, and write from the upper left to the lower right corner again, but this time letting no sentence be longer than four words, but every sentence must have a subject and a verb."
Stafford compares the first style of sentence construction to a river and the second to a drum. "Writers need both," he says. "Rivers have long rhythms. Drums roll."
21. Help students ask questions about their writing.
Joni Chancer, teacher-consultant of the South Coast Writing Project (California), has paid a lot of attention to the type of questions she wants her upper elementary students to consider as they re-examine their writing, reflecting on pieces they may make part of their portfolios. Here are some of the questions:
Why did I write this piece? Where did I get my ideas?
Who is the audience and how did it affect this piece?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
Was this piece easy or difficult to write? Why?
What parts did I rework? What were my revisions?
Did I try something new?
What skills did I work on in this piece?
What elements of writer's craft enhanced my story?
What might I change?
Did something I read influence my writing?
What did I learn or what did I expect the reader to learn?
Where will I go from here? Will I publish it? Share it?
Expand it? Toss it? File it?
Chancer cautions that these questions should not be considered a "reflection checklist," rather they are questions that seem to be addressed frequently when writers tell the story of a particular piece.
CHANCER, JONI. 2001. "The Teacher's Role in Portfolio Assessment." In The Whole Story: Teachers Talk About Portfolios, edited by Mary Ann Smith and Jane Juska. Berkeley, California: National Writing Project.
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22. Challenge students to find active verbs.
Nancy Lilly, co-director of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project, wanted her fourth and fifth grade students to breathe life into their nonfiction writing. She thought the student who wrote this paragraph could do better:
The jaguar is the biggest and strongest cat in the rainforest. The jaguar's jaw is strong enough to crush a turtle's shell. Jaguars also have very powerful legs for leaping from branch to branch to chase prey.
Building on an idea from Stephanie Harvey (Nonfiction Matters, Stenhouse, 1998) Lilly introduced the concept of "nouns as stuff" and verbs as "what stuff does."
In a brainstorming session related to the students' study of the rain forest, the class supplied the following assistance to the writer:
Stuff/Nouns : What Stuff Does/Verbs
jaguar : leaps, pounces
jaguar's : legs pump
jaguar's : teeth crush
jaguar's : mouth devours
This was just the help the writer needed to create the following revised paragraph:
As the sun disappears from the heart of the forest, the jaguar leaps through the underbrush, pumping its powerful legs. It spies a gharial gliding down the river. The jungle cat pounces, crushing the turtle with his teeth, devouring the reptile with pleasure.
23. Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.
For a final exam, Sarah Lorenz, a teacher-consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, asks her high school students to make a written argument for the grade they think they should receive. Drawing on work they have done over the semester, students make a case for how much they have learned in the writing class.
"The key to convincing me," says Lorenz, "is the use of detail. They can't simply say they have improved as writers-they have to give examples and even quote their own writing...They can't just say something was helpful- they have to tell me why they thought it was important, how their thinking changed, or how they applied this learning to everyday life."
24. Ground writing in social issues important to students.
Jean Hicks, director, and Tim Johnson, a co-director, both of the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), have developed a way to help high school students create brief, effective dramas about issues in their lives. The class, working in groups, decides on a theme such as jealousy, sibling rivalry, competition, or teen drinking. Each group develops a scene illustrating an aspect of this chosen theme.
Considering the theme of sibling rivalry, for instance, students identify possible scenes with topics such as "I Had It First" (competing for family resources) and "Calling in the Troops" (tattling). Students then set up the circumstances and characters.
Hicks and Johnson give each of the "characters" a different color packet of Post-it Notes. Each student develops and posts dialogue for his or her character. As the scene emerges, Post-its can be added, moved, and deleted. They remind students of the conventions of drama such as conflict and resolution. Scenes, when acted out, are limited to 10 minutes.
"It's not so much about the genre or the product as it is about creating a culture that supports the thinking and learning of writers," write Hicks and Johnson.
25. Encourage the "framing device" as an aid to cohesion in writing.
Romana Hillebrand, a teacher-consultant with the Northwest Inland Writing Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find a literary or historical reference or a personal narrative that can provide a fresh way into and out of their writing, surrounding it much like a window frame surrounds a glass pane.
Hillebrand provides this example:
A student in her research class wrote a paper on the relationship between humans and plants, beginning with a reference to the nursery rhyme, 'Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies...' She explained the rhymes as originating with the practice of masking the stench of death with flowers during the Black Plague. The student finished the paper with the sentence, "Without plants, life on Earth would cease to exist as we know it; ashes, ashes we all fall down."
26. Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.
Suzanne Cherry, director of the Swamp Fox Writing Project (South Carolina), has her own way of dramatizing the comma splice error. She brings to class two pieces of wire, the last inch of each exposed. She tells her college students "We need to join these pieces of wire together right now if we are to be able to watch our favorite TV show. What can we do? We could use some tape, but that would probably be a mistake as the puppy could easily eat through the connection. By splicing the wires in this way, we are creating a fire hazard."
A better connection, the students usually suggest, would be to use one of those electrical connectors that look like pen caps.
"Now," Cherry says (often to the accompaniment of multiple groans), "let's turn these wires into sentences. If we simply splice them together with a comma, the equivalent of a piece of tape, we create a weak connection, or a comma splice error. What then would be the grammatical equivalent of the electrical connector? Think conjunction - and, but, or. Or try a semicolon. All of these show relationships between sentences in a way that the comma, a device for taping clauses together in a slapdash manner, does not."
"I've been teaching writing for many years," Cherry says. "And I now realize the more able we are to relate the concepts of writing to 'real world' experience, the more successful we will be."
27. Think like a football coach.
In addition to his work as a high school teacher of writing, Dan Holt, a co-director with the Third Coast Writing Project (Michigan), spent 20 years coaching football. While doing the latter, he learned quite a bit about doing the former. Here is some of what he found out:
The writing teacher can't stay on the sidelines. "When I modeled for my players, they knew what I wanted them to do." The same involvement, he says, is required to successfully teach writing.
Like the coach, the writing teacher should praise strong performance rather than focus on the negative. Statements such as "Wow, that was a killer block," or "That paragraph was tight" will turn "butterball" ninth-grade boys into varsity linemen and insecure adolescents into aspiring poets.
The writing teacher should apply the KISS theory: Keep it simple stupid. Holt explains for a freshman quarterback, audibles (on-field commands) are best used with care until a player has reached a higher skill level. In writing class, a student who has never written a poem needs to start with small verse forms such as a chinquapin or haiku.
Practice and routine are important both for football players and for writing students, but football players and writers also need the "adrenaline rush" of the big game and the final draft.
28. Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.
High school teacher Jon Appleby noticed that when yearbooks fell into students' hands "my curriculum got dropped in a heartbeat for spirited words scribbled over photos." Appleby wondered, "How can I make my classroom as fascinating and consuming as the yearbook?"
Here are some ideas that yearbook writing inspired:
Take pictures, put them on the bulletin boards, and have students write captions for them. Then design small descriptive writing assignments using the photographs of events such as the prom and homecoming. Afterwards, ask students to choose quotes from things they have read that represent what they feel and think and put them on the walls.
Check in about students' lives. Recognize achievements and individuals the way that yearbook writers direct attention to each other. Ask students to write down memories and simply, joyfully share them. As yearbook writing usually does, insist on a sense of tomorrow.
29. Use home language on the road to Standard English.
Eileen Kennedy, special education teacher at Medger Evers College, works with native speakers of Caribbean Creole who are preparing to teach in New York City. Sometimes she encourages these students to draft writing in their native Creole. The additional challenge becomes to re-draft this writing, rendered in patois, into Standard English.
She finds that narratives involving immigrant Caribbean natives in unfamiliar situations - buying a refrigerator, for instance - lead to inspired writing. In addition, some students expressed their thoughts more proficiently in Standard English after drafting in their vernaculars.
30. Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.
Jim Wilcox, teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma Writing Project, requires his college students to volunteer at a local facility that serves the community, any place from the Special Olympics to a burn unit. Over the course of their tenure with the organization, students write in a number of genres: an objective report that describes the appearance and activity of the facility, a personal interview/profile, an evaluation essay that requires students to set up criteria by which to assess this kind of organization, an investigative report that includes information from a second source, and a letter to the editor of a campus newspaper or other publication.
Minggu, 04 April 2010
DID YOU KNOW AVOCADO?
It turns out avocados can reduce the risk of stroke and heart attack, because the avocado is the only fruit that is rich fat levels even more than twice the fat content in durian but healthful. We do not need to fear because the fatty avocado including healthy fats, because the predominantly monounsaturated fatty acid oleic that are powerful antioxidants. Fat content of avocados helps reduce "bad cholesterol" LDL cholesterol while raising "good cholesterol" HDL, thus significantly reduce the risk of stroke and heart attack.
This ability is reinforced by the content of beta-carotene, chlorophyll, vitamin E, and vitamin B-complex is abundant in avocados. Actors are generally less than optimal vegetarians get fat intake, because they never flesh (which is always rich in fat). In addition to the adequacy expect fat intake from cooking oil, avocado can be another option to meet the body's need for fat.
Avocado fat is healthy fats, as found in olive oil. In addition to controlling hypertension, the avocado is also rich in minerals potassium, but low sodium content. This comparison is encouraging atmosphere in our bodies alkaline.
Decreased acidity of the body (blood and tissues) will suppress the emergence of disease caused by the condition of the body is too acidic, such as allergies, dizziness, panic, respiratory disorders, digestive disorders. Because the levels of folic acid and vitamin E was also high in potassium avocado is more effective in soaking hypertension and may help expedite the flow of blood.
Different from other fruits, avocados contain almost no starch, a little sugary fruit, but the abundance of cellulose fibers. These factors make the avocado is recommended as part of the menu to control diabetes.
This ability is reinforced by the content of beta-carotene, chlorophyll, vitamin E, and vitamin B-complex is abundant in avocados. Actors are generally less than optimal vegetarians get fat intake, because they never flesh (which is always rich in fat). In addition to the adequacy expect fat intake from cooking oil, avocado can be another option to meet the body's need for fat.
Avocado fat is healthy fats, as found in olive oil. In addition to controlling hypertension, the avocado is also rich in minerals potassium, but low sodium content. This comparison is encouraging atmosphere in our bodies alkaline.
Decreased acidity of the body (blood and tissues) will suppress the emergence of disease caused by the condition of the body is too acidic, such as allergies, dizziness, panic, respiratory disorders, digestive disorders. Because the levels of folic acid and vitamin E was also high in potassium avocado is more effective in soaking hypertension and may help expedite the flow of blood.
Different from other fruits, avocados contain almost no starch, a little sugary fruit, but the abundance of cellulose fibers. These factors make the avocado is recommended as part of the menu to control diabetes.
CHEWING GUM!!!
Benefits of chewing gum:
1. Freshen bad breath, especially for those who like hard-flavored foods like onions and garlic. Chewing gum is very effective to neutralize the odor.
2. Chewing gum can be firmly attached, so it can clean up leftover food on the tooth surface. Often chewed to increase saliva production that can clean the oral cavity and teeth better, so the risk of plaque formation, dental plaque can be reduced.
3. When chewing gum, oral cavity repeatedly biting movement, this smooth flow of blood in the face, and also train the muscles for chewing and biting.
The results from America expert, chew gum every day for 15 minutes can be beneficial for beauty.
Losses chewing gum
1. In waktu chewing gum, sugar stay in the oral cavity for a prolonged period, then the bacteria in the oral cavity will change the sugar into acid that will break down calcium tooth (teeth email) sehingga cause damage to the teeth.
Experts recommend choosing xylitol chewing gum as a substitute for sugar, because xylitol has the taste and nutritional value similar to sugar, but can not be fermented into acids that it is safe for teeth.
2. Results of research in Switzerland showed, often chew gum can damage tooth fillings materials. Therefore, for someone who uses dental fillings with mercury materials should not chew gum.
Since chewing gum can break down the mercury compounds, which can increase the amount of mercury content in blood and urine. Hold Excess of these substances can negatively influence the brain, central nervous system and kidneys.
3. Children who chewed gum for a prolonged period, is likely to have a habit of gnashing teeth during sleep because the muscles tense mouth in a state that can affect the quality of their sleep.
The experts recommend that children do not chew gum more than 3-4 times a day and not exceed 10-15 minutes. Xylitol is recommended
4. Often chew gum for adolescents can be risky to have a square face shape, because the muscles of the jaw may be too well trained so that very rapid growth.
1. Freshen bad breath, especially for those who like hard-flavored foods like onions and garlic. Chewing gum is very effective to neutralize the odor.
2. Chewing gum can be firmly attached, so it can clean up leftover food on the tooth surface. Often chewed to increase saliva production that can clean the oral cavity and teeth better, so the risk of plaque formation, dental plaque can be reduced.
3. When chewing gum, oral cavity repeatedly biting movement, this smooth flow of blood in the face, and also train the muscles for chewing and biting.
The results from America expert, chew gum every day for 15 minutes can be beneficial for beauty.
Losses chewing gum
1. In waktu chewing gum, sugar stay in the oral cavity for a prolonged period, then the bacteria in the oral cavity will change the sugar into acid that will break down calcium tooth (teeth email) sehingga cause damage to the teeth.
Experts recommend choosing xylitol chewing gum as a substitute for sugar, because xylitol has the taste and nutritional value similar to sugar, but can not be fermented into acids that it is safe for teeth.
2. Results of research in Switzerland showed, often chew gum can damage tooth fillings materials. Therefore, for someone who uses dental fillings with mercury materials should not chew gum.
Since chewing gum can break down the mercury compounds, which can increase the amount of mercury content in blood and urine. Hold Excess of these substances can negatively influence the brain, central nervous system and kidneys.
3. Children who chewed gum for a prolonged period, is likely to have a habit of gnashing teeth during sleep because the muscles tense mouth in a state that can affect the quality of their sleep.
The experts recommend that children do not chew gum more than 3-4 times a day and not exceed 10-15 minutes. Xylitol is recommended
4. Often chew gum for adolescents can be risky to have a square face shape, because the muscles of the jaw may be too well trained so that very rapid growth.
KEEP OUR BRAIN AND AVOID FAST FOOD
Eating too much fast food not only causes obesity but also erodes the ability of the brain. This research produced by researchers at Oxford University. They found, in addition to expanding waist circumference, fat-rich diets such as curries, kebabs, burgers and chips can lower intelligence.
Experiments on mice showed they did, the consumption of high fat diet for less than ten days, proved damaging short-term memory and makes them less mentally alert. In addition, these mice also decreased the ability to move.
According to study co-author Andrew Murray, there is a very close relationship between food and ways of thinking about the way bodies work. Diets rich in fat, for example, he explained, related to long-term complications such as obesity, diabetes, and heart failure. Medium-term impact of even relatively short
Experiments on mice showed they did, the consumption of high fat diet for less than ten days, proved damaging short-term memory and makes them less mentally alert. In addition, these mice also decreased the ability to move.
According to study co-author Andrew Murray, there is a very close relationship between food and ways of thinking about the way bodies work. Diets rich in fat, for example, he explained, related to long-term complications such as obesity, diabetes, and heart failure. Medium-term impact of even relatively short
HOW TO START "IT"?
HOW TO START "IT"?
For those of you who want to entrepreneurship, there are a few tips so that you run a business smoothly and on target:
1. Have Dreams
Dream became a successful businessman, had a lot of money, a vacation. Imagine, where money is flowing into your account of what the business so successful. Think of it as detailed as possible. Do not be afraid to dream, because success comes from a dream.
2. Obsession and Hobbies
Try, you pioneered the business from a hobby. So it's all done with heart, would run more smoothly.
3. See Reality
Back to reality. Start with the skills you have. Suppose you're a good cook, you channel your talents to open a catering.
4. Make Plans Gradual
Make a condition of zero, and always looking forward. Do it gradually according to ability (capital, expertise).
5. Various Flats Plan
When business started to walk, make some plans to further develop your business
6. Create a Budget
Create a budget expenditure and income. Separate your daily expenses with the results of operations.
For those of you who want to entrepreneurship, there are a few tips so that you run a business smoothly and on target:
1. Have Dreams
Dream became a successful businessman, had a lot of money, a vacation. Imagine, where money is flowing into your account of what the business so successful. Think of it as detailed as possible. Do not be afraid to dream, because success comes from a dream.
2. Obsession and Hobbies
Try, you pioneered the business from a hobby. So it's all done with heart, would run more smoothly.
3. See Reality
Back to reality. Start with the skills you have. Suppose you're a good cook, you channel your talents to open a catering.
4. Make Plans Gradual
Make a condition of zero, and always looking forward. Do it gradually according to ability (capital, expertise).
5. Various Flats Plan
When business started to walk, make some plans to further develop your business
6. Create a Budget
Create a budget expenditure and income. Separate your daily expenses with the results of operations.
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