Extensive Reading, but what if...

Rob Waring is putting together an amazing new resource called ER-Central dedicated to all things Extensive Reading.  About 3 years ago I caught the ER bug.  Since then I’ve noticed some bloggers and friends have offhandedly remarked that ER has a kind of culty feel about it.  I’m not sure exactly what makes ER culty, but I would agree that a lot of teachers who have implemented an ER program seem a bit over the top.  I know because I am one of them.  I find myself saying things like, “ER has changed my students’ lives.”  But in a short conversation in a pub during a conference, I rarely have time to talk at length about why I’m so hep on extensive reading.  Actually, sometimes I do talk for quite a long time about ER, but the person I am talking to usually gets glassy-eyed and so I stop.  And I figure if I just write the same kind of things that I talk about at the pub, your eyes will go all fishy-eyed as well.  So if your interested in a nice introduction to ER, I recommend you check out Rob Waring’s article “Graded and Extensive reading—questions and answers”. 

If I’m not going to talk about what makes ER great, what am I going to talk about?  I thought I would write up a list of the biggest worries I had about extensive reading before I started the program at my school and how things played out in the actual classroom. 

Worry: My Students are super low-level learners and the only appropriate material for them to self-select and read has big colorful pictures of a dog named Floppy.  Won’t my students get angry and throw big colorful books at me for trying to get them to read kiddy stuff?

Reality: After a bit of training to help students chose books that they could read without much stress, it turned out that Mr. Fluffy was a very popular guy in my class.  Students read the children’s books.  They enjoyed reading the children’s books.  And according to surveys, the feeling of being able to read and understand a book (big colorful pictures or not) was much more important to them than the book being age appropriate.

Worry: My students have short attention spans.  I usually change up activities every 10 to 15 minutes in class.  Can I really expect them to read silently for 50 minutes?

Reality: Extensive reading is not a magic attention span expander.  I shouldn’t have expected my students to read silently for 50 minutes.  50 minutes is a long long time.  I rarely read for 50 minutes at a stretch.  But 25 minutes ended up being no problem at all for my students.  Which means that I now have an extra 25 minutes of class time 3 times a week to do other languagy things in class.  And my students have 25 minutes 3 times a week to really enjoy their reading.

Worry: I have no way to measure if the students are actually learning anything.  If I set up a bunch of tests which the students see as connected to their ER time, that’s going to really dampen their enthusiasm for reading.  I’m going to spend hours and hours of each week fretting over my students not learning.

Reality: Just setting the last minute of class time aside for students to measure their average words per minute ends up being a pretty amazing evaluative tool.  Students know that their reading speed isn’t connected to their grade.  But they get to watch the number climb from week to week.  And it really does climb.  My 3^rd year high school students who have been reading 25 minutes a lesson, 3 days a week in class have seen their average word per minute reading rate jump from 50 words per minute to 120 words per minute.  Many students are reading at 150 words per minute now and some have crossed over the 200 words per minute threshold.  That means that when they take a standardized reading test, many of them don’t have to (or even try) to use test taking strategies, but actually read and try to understand the entire passage.  And reading in this way does not negatively impact their scores (whoops, think I crossed over into culty territory there…sorry).

Worry: Just because I make students read in class, doesn’t mean they are enjoying reading.  What if dedicating time to reading leads to students feeling some serious resentment and getting even more anti-reading?

Reality: Yes, reading time is reading time.  Students are not allowed to sleep or chat each other up.  I found that when a student starts acting out in class, a few well-timed questions about the book they were reading was enough to bring them back to the text.  I general, I think it’s really important to be nonjudgmental and just find out how they are reacting to the text in front of them.  Do you like the main character?  Do you understand the story?  Are there any phrases you’ve read you want to use yourself?  If the student isn’t digging the book, I remind them they are free to go get a different book any time they want.  Sometimes they do.  Sometimes they don’t.  All in all, keeping students on task isn’t very difficult and opens up all kinds of opportunities to interact with students about a text.  And the more students read, the less I find I needed to try and draw their attention back to the book.

Worry: My higher-level students will read books which are too hard for them and get turned off to the whole ER experience.

Reality: My few higher-level students sometimes read books which are too hard and which they don’t really enjoy reading.  They do this for a while and then go get an easier book.  They enjoy the easier book even more.  Students, when given the chance, are pretty good at regulating their own learning.

Worry: Students don’t actually read books in Japanese.  Shouldn’t I use class time and have students explore language in a way that is more in line with what they do in “real life”?

Reality: Many of my students did not read books for pleasure before joining my course.  Many of them do not read books for pleasure outside of class now either.  But after three years of running an ER program, none of my students has ever said to me, “Kevin, can we cancel reading time?  I just don’t want to read any more books.”  As an added bonus, reading is still a pretty useful skill to have and probably crucial to functioning in the “real world” for the foreseeable future.  And as an added added bonus, if students improve their reading, they will certainly have a better time interacting with friends on FB in English in the “real real world.” 

Three years in with a 25 minutes a class, 3 classes a week extensive reading program has helped rid me of most of my worries: 

l       Floppy…not an issue.

l       Don’t like to read in first language…so what

l       Reading super difficult books…yep, and sometimes super easy books and sometimes just right book.

l       Resentment…nope, only when I have to cancel ER time because of scheduling conflicts

l       Better use of time…reading is still “real life” 

l       Concentration issues…just adjust the length of reading time so it’s not an issue

l       I want to evaluate something…one minute speed reading.  (Actually, I still wrestle with the whole evaluation thing.  I actually have figured out two things that kind of work for assessing student development, but I think that’s really something for another post.)

Anyway, those are the worries I had before I started my extensive reading program.  I just wanted to share them with you.  If you are thinking about implementing an extensive reading program and feeling anxious about the whole thing, I hope this will help you feel a little less nervous. 

If anyone reading this had some worries about an ER program, implemented it, and found things to be different than they imagined, please leave a comment and help spread the calm.  Because—sorry, gonna get just a little culty here—an extensive reading program really can change a student’s life.

Make all the mistakes you want, but just tell me a story

Recently I had short post on the iTDi Blog about how and why I use literature in a language classroom.  Like most of what I write about lately, the post focused on reading activities.  While a good chunk of my classroom time is spent around having students read and interpret texts, I do try and do a fair amount of writing exercises in my class as well.  But not without some mixed feelings.  My students are pretty low level, and when they do write a creative text, their sentences are often riddled with errors.  My friend and mentor John Fanselow has told me, more than once, that if my students are producing writing with an error in each and every sentence, then I’m probably asking them to do something they're not ready to do.  Which puts me in a pretty difficult position when it comes to creative writing activities.  Anything I ask them to do which allows for a modicum of freedom is often going to result in students trying to produce a text which is beyond their current level.

So the question is one of how I can give students the freedom to produce original texts, and at the same time provide the support they need to write sentences which model the type of language I'm hoping they can produce on their own.  Recently, after reading a brilliant post over on Creativities, I decided to have my students play with 6 word memoirs.  6 word memoirs are similar to a haiku in many ways.  As a genre form, they can allow students to focus on what they want to get across, without having to think much about grammar.  And the memoirs they produce don’t have grammatical errors, because in a very real sense, the sentences they write are degrammaticalized.  Here’s a sentence produced by one of my students in class the other day:

“Life unusual, all friends in Australia”

The student was pretty happy with his sentence.  Actually, most of the students seemed to enjoy the activity and without any urging from me, they began to share their 6 word memoirs with each other.  Y-Chan’s “Loves her body more than her,” was particularly popular.  Partly, I think, because R-chan often shares stories about her boyfriend with her friends during class.  In Japanese.  When she is supposed to be doing just about anything other than sharing those stories.

I had planned to just have students spend about five minutes producing a 6 word memoir, but the students were keen and I wondered what they could do with the memoirs if pushed a bit, so I asked them to grammaticalize the memoirs.  Here’s an example of what happened:

“Only old books, very very loved”

became

“I have many books, but I only love my old old book.”

In general, students produced a sentence without any glaring errors.  The two-step process of producing a sentence in which they only had to focus on content, and then fleshing out the sentence with grammar seemed to provide the kind of support they needed to bring their grammar knowledge actively into play.  So I had all of the students write up their original 6 word memoirs on the board and then had them each pick one memoir they liked that was written by another student and grammaticalize it.  Once again, students produced pretty well constructed sentences.  One my favorites was the following conversion from 6 word memoir to complete sentence:

“Young in junior high school, return.”

Which became:

“I was too young in junior high school and had to return to third grade again.”

At this point I could have stopped the activity and maybe I should have.  Students had created short texts focused on personal expression, had striven to produce a grammatically accurate sentence, and had even engaged in interpretation of another student’s creative work.  But the students were having a good time, and as I watched the students compare each of their grammaticalized sentences, I decided to take it one step further.  I asked the students go up to the white board and write their interpreted grammaticalized sentences under the original 6 word memoir.  Then I asked them to pick a new set of 6 word memoir/grammaticalized sentence and write a short short story (3 to 4 sentences long) which expanded on what was written on the board. 

When I do a creative writing activity, I set up my teacher’s desk in the back of the room as an “advice corner.”  This is mostly to keep me from meddling as my students are working on their first drafts.  When I see students struggling to produce, I get all itchy.  This sometimes leads me to  making suggestions, and more often than not, those suggestions knock students right off the path of creativity into a thicket of my own expectations.  So I set up my desk in the back of the room and try to get out of the way.  If students want some help with vocabulary or grammar, they come to me and everyone ends up less frustrated. 

As students wrote and came back for suggestions, I noticed that the language they were producing for the expanded story had, like most of their creative writing tasks, an error or two each sentence.  But the students were working with, and enjoying working with, the language.  I know this for a fact, because when they are not enjoying an activity, R-chan will talk about her boyfriend and the other students will happily listen.  But there was no boyfriend talk in class the other day.  Instead, after a lot of one-on-one advice and 90 minutes of class time, students ended up turning in things like:

“Miss you but cannot meet you”

I miss you, but maybe cannot meet you because I was kidnapped.  I’m sorry my darling.  This is my last letter for you.  I’m really loved you.  Did you love me, too?

and

“Yesterday in bed. Tomorrow, on cloud.”

One day a girl quarreled with hers parents.  That night, she cried in her bed and she was tired from crying because fell asleep.  The next morning she woke up and said, “Amazing.”  Because she was on a cloud.

I think I know what John is getting at when he urges me to make even my creative writing activities level appropriate.  Activities that are set up in such a way that students have an opportunity to mostly use the language that is within, or just within, their grasp are probably going to promote better language learning.  But I also think that, as language teachers, we need to recognize and respect that sometimes the language students want to produce is just not going to be level appropriate.  Which leads me to my own 6 word memoir:

unfolding stories of mistake laden beauty

Tech for Tech's Sake

I have about 15 minutes to write a post before I head off to the airport to meet one of students who is, even as I write this, winging her way back to Japan.  She’s spent the past year in Australia, shopping at the super marker just across from the Australian campus, eating dinner with her home stay family, heading up to the gold coast for Friday surfing lessons.  English is the language she breathes as she moves from day to day.  But not all my students are so lucky.  Most of them are trying to learn English here in Japan.  If I chat with my students on the train after school, we invite a certain amount of scrutiny, the stares falling on us like tiny hammers.  It can take a lot of courage to use English here in Japan.

Lately there have been a number of presentations at conferences and blog posts about how technology is a tool, how it should meet the needs of the students and enhance what happens in the classroom.  Most people seem to be of the opinion that tech for tech's sake isn’t very useful.  But what if you really have no idea how students are going to react to a new web site or novel ways to explore English with their smart-phones until you give them the space to try it out in class? 

For the past three years I’ve been working with my students to develop their vocabulary through the use of vocab cards and vocabulary note books.  I was pretty much of the opinion that opening up a notebook and dashing down a word, a meaning, and a sample sentence was the easiest way to go.  A notebook doesn’t run out of batteries, you don’t have to find a hot-spot, you can hand a friend your notebook and quiz each other.  I couldn’t see how spending class time to get the students to learn and use Quizlet, the on-line flash card site, could further the goals of the program.  But after reading some posts by Sandy Millin and catching a Tweet from Leo Selivan、I decided to give it a try. 

I wrote up a set of 24 words drawn from Paul Nation’s modified General Service List, booked an hour of computer lab time, and then spent the time necessary to introduce the site to the students.  This meant that I had to watch as students sweated over their username (because a username to a high school student is absolutely not an easily remembered combination of their first and last name, but an expression of personal identity) or forgot to check and fill in certain boxes insuring they had to start over again.  Halfway through the 20 minutes it took to get every student signed up, I had decided that this was a terrible mistake.  And once students started working with the card set, I didn’t change my mind much.  Most of the students ignored the sample sentences, which I had checked against COCA to ensure I was using the vocab in a way that might actually be useful.  They would listen to the word pronounced once by activating sound, but once they thought they had gotten the pronunciation, they basically ignored the sound in general.  I spent some time working with individual students to help them use shadowing techniques when using and listening to the cards.  But if I really wanted the students to get more out of Quizlet, I realized I would have to book at least another hour or two in the computer room.  Vocabulary notebooks and word cards in conjunction with electronic dictionaries with a pronunciation button were looking pretty good to me.

But then one of my students, S-chan, suddenly shouted out, “I got 100%.”  She had just taken a Quizlet test on the word cards she had been studying.  In all the chaos of getting students logged on to the system and struggling to get them to use the site more effectively, I hadn’t noticed S-chan working her way through the cards.  She had her headphones on and had been completely silent.  Maybe that’s why she shouted so loudly.  I watched as she pulled out her cell phone and snap a picture of the computer screen.  “I’m sending this to my mom,” she said.  She said it to the whole class.  She said it to herself.  And she said it with a kind of joy she rarely shows in class.

I’m not sure that S-Chan’s 100% success makes using Quizlet 100% worthwhile.  But it made me rethink why I should or should not use tech in my classroom.  Sure, I have ideas of what I want to see happen in my classroom.  But those goals and my ideas for class are like the lopsided world maps of early cartographers.  We never quite manage to sail over the sea of learning the way I think we will.  My learners chose what and when they learn.  For some of them, tech is going to give them the best chance they have for learning.  Whether I think the tech enhances what happens in class or complements my goals is superfluous.  So maybe there is a case to be made for using tech for tech's sake.  Not all the time.  But sometimes.  Maybe all that wasted time with passwords and broken internet connects and the like can be worth it.

I’m going to meet my student at the airport in 10 minutes and counting.  English was the language she breathed for the past year.  But not all my students are that lucky.  Tech for tech’s sake.  In an EFL environment like Japan, maybe there is no such thing as tech for tech’s sake.  Every new site, every way to explore language or get exposed to English in different ways has a value that can’t be measured in what I see as wasted class minutes.  Maybe for some of my students, tech might mean learning.

Finding Universality in Telling Details or How Sandy Millin Rocked me with her IATEFL Presentation on PSP

In the corner of I.H. Newcastle’s large, well-lit “Personal Study Program” room, the one with the slanting ceiling and at least one teacher always on duty, there is a couch.  It’s not an especially fancy couch.  It is, if I remember correctly, olive colored.  The cushions look indented, like it’s been sat in and enjoyed for a while.  It looks comfortable.  It’s a place where students can sit and chat.  It’s also one of the small details that Sandy Millin threaded throughout her IATEFL talk on the ups and downs of her school’s Personal Study Program. 

Some of the other telling details included a list of Internet resources available to her students on the PSP computers.  I’ve included a list of the sites that I currently use or think could be effective for my own learners, but which hadn’t really been on my radar::

          

-         Lyrics Training

-         BBC Learning English

-         BBC iPlayer

-         Quizlet

I also learned that while a fair number of the PSP students use Quizlet, the most used internet resource in the PSP is the BBC iPlayer simply because it is the easiest, a kind of path of least resistance learning tool.  And best of all, I learned later in the presentation that students can get stuck in a rut and use the same resources over and over.  By best of all, I don’t mean that I think this is a Wahooo-I-Love-It great thing.  I mean that I am currently going about instituting a similar self-study time and dedicated room in my own school.  And I’m pretty sure that my students could easily fall into the one-and-only-one-resource-rut.  It’s something I hadn’t really thought about before I watched Sandy’s presentation and an impediment to learning that I think I can help my students avoid now that I’m aware of it.  I’m thinking about setting aside some mandatory after school time once a week for resource training.  There might be a terrifying student uprising some grumbling, but it’s better than letting the students watch and re-watch the entertaining videos on Learning English Kids for an entire semester.  So thank you very much Sandy for getting me thinking about “task variation.”

In fact, as I was watching, I managed to take three notebook pages with ideas sparked by Sandy’s presentation.  From setting up specific corners in the room for conversation, reading and listening, to breaking the one hour study session down into 20 minute blocks to help students maintain concentration and make better use of their time. 

Lately, when I attend a conference, I hear a lot of presentations which are given in a special tense I’ve started to think of as the highly probable conditional.  It’s a kind of airy tense peppered with cans, mights, coulds, and mays.  Or perhaps it’s not really a tense.  Maybe it’s a genre, one that can be recognized almost entirely by what it lacks: an absence of direct reported speech from students, a clear indication if students enjoyed what is being discussed, and details that give the material a sense of specific place and time.  No matter how good the ideas presented might be, I feel like I’m standing on a rocking train and trying to hold onto a subway strap made out of smoke.  

I should probably admit that I’ve used this tense in my own presentations more often than not.  I’ve also written dozens of blog posts in this genre.  Usually because I have a desire to make what I do in my class, in my specific context, more useful for a wider audience.  I’m worried that if I add in too many details about my class, teachers will shake their heads, shrug, and think, “Yeah, but my situation is different.”  But the fact of the matter is, different doesn’t mean non-applicable.  Watching Sandy’s presentation, I was struck by how it was the narrow focus on I.H Newcastle’s Personal Study Program which allowed me to contrast it with my own teaching environment and fill up page after page with notes.  So in the future, I think I’ll go over my presentations and cut out as many of those auxiliaries of probability as possible and replace them with the kind of concrete details that made Sandy's presentation so useful to me.  Because sometimes an olive-colored couch is more than just a place to sit and chat.  Sometimes it’s the spark of an idea for redesigning an entire program.

Motivation Lights a Fire and Other Myths of Learning

A pneumatic device built by (the slightly
tragic) Joseph Priestly, whose careful
observations of combustion eventually
led to the demise of the Phlogiston Theory. 

When I was in high school, I was slightly mad about phlogiston.  Phlogiston theory, for anyone who doesn’t share my interest in discredited scientific ideas, was the theory that things burned because they contained a special element called, not surprisingly phlogiston.  When something was on fire, the fire eventually burned out because there was no more phlogiston left in the substance.  Now let’s say you took a piece of wood, which everyone was sure was just chock full of phlogiston, lit it on fire, waited a few seconds, and then covered it in a glass globe.  After a few moments, the fire would go out.  But the wood still had plenty of phlogiston in it.  Why did the fire go out?  Well, if chemists at the time had know about how combustion really worked, they would have been able to say that the fire had used up all the available oxygen in the air.  But the scientists didn’t know how combustion really worked.  They thought it was all about phlogiston.  So they came up with a different answer.  Air could only hold so much phlogiston.  When you covered up the wood, you limited the amount of air and soon the air was saturated with phlogiston.  It became phlogisticated.  It was a clever workaround for a pretty major bump in their theory.  And it was also almost the complete opposite of how combustion actually worked.

* * *

Yesterday I sat down with my notebook to watch Jill Hadfield present on Motivating our learners: actualizing the vision (the presentation is available on the session list on the IATEFL site).  I’ve never met Jill Hadfield in person, but I certainly would like to.  She has a nice, easy going way of speaking.  My wife was listening in as I was taking notes and said at one point, “That woman sounds smart, but she has a warm voice.”  Jill had picked up the concept of future ideal selves from Self Psychology and modified it so it could work as a self-awareness raising tool in the language classroom.  When I was a social worker in Chicago, we used some similar techniques, what we called forward thinking, to help our clients reduce risky behavior and improve their quality of life.  So I actually thought the basic idea of having students go through a fairly structured process of imagining their ideal L2 self and then carefully mapping a route to that self was a great idea.  I’ll touch on some of the greatness in Jill's presentation very soon.  But first I’m going to get a bit nit-picky.

Jill started off her presentation by talking about motivation.  In fact, one of her first slides defined motivation as, “the explanation of the reasons behind human behavior.”  And she pointed out that motivation was an important concept because motivation was, “the most common term teachers and students use to explain what causes success or failure in learning.”  And here is where I kind of found myself getting a bit lost as to what exactly was being talked about.  You see, if we know the reasons for someone’s behaviors, I’m not exactly sure we need to get into the whole concept of motivation at all.  Let’s take a specific example.  Let’s say student A decides not to study for a test.  You could ask the student why they didn’t study, and they might say, “I didn’t feel motivated.”  But if we dig a bit further and try and get at why they didn’t feel motivated, the student might be able to give us all kinds of concrete reasons.  They felt overwhelmed by the amount of material they needed to learn before the test.  The test material was so difficult they didn’t know how to study.  The material was so easy, they didn’t think they needed to study.  But in all these instances, the problem isn’t really with motivation.  The problem is born out of the student’s failure to see how to be successful and the teacher's lack of guidance on how to take the steps necessary to be successful.  The idea of motivation adds an extra layer to the situation, and like most extra layers added to things, it obscures as opposed to reveals. 

But in a way, this is a minor point, and one that I think Jill inadvertently makes herself, because once Jill got past the idea of why students should generate an ideal L2 self (motivation), the whole idea of motivation dropped out of presentation.  Instead, it focused on how to ensure that ideal self was realistic, then discussed how to help learners break down the becoming into a series of concrete attainable steps.  Here are just some of the really rich and novel ideas Jill touched on for helping students get to that ideal L2 self:

- Counterbalancing the vision: it’s not enough for a learner to just imagine what kind of L2 self they want to become, they also have to have think about the kind of things that could get in the way of achieving that goal.  Taking time out to use our experience as teachers and to help students identify common road blocks and ways to overcome them on their way to their ideal self is going to make the learning process that much smoother and that much more successful. 

- Unifying the vision: not only do learners have an ideal self, they also have an "Ought To Self," the self that's composed of their ideas of what peers, parents, and friends think they should be and do.  As teachers, we can help our students listen to some of the useful suggestions that this Ought To Self has to offer on reaching an ideal L2 self.  Things like good study habits, asking for help, and talking out in class, are the kinds of advice the Ought To Self might be aching to offer up if our students listen.

- When students have an image of their ideal L2 self and have translated that self into a set of goals, then a teacher should help compare those goals with the course syllabus.  Some of the goals will be attainable within the syllabus.  Others will require work outside of the classroom.  And if, as a teacher, you're flexible enough, you might be able to find room in the syllabus to help students attain goals which couldn't have been anticipated before you met the real breathing dreaming learner who actually showed up in your class.

- Think about group dynamics and have your students think about group dynamics as well.  Every student is going to have their own ideal L2 self.  And they aren't necessarily going in the same direction.  So getting learners to think about and take part in the negotiation necessary for everyone to be moving forward even if they are heading in different directions seems like a very reasonable step to take to make sure that as many students as possible are going to be satisfied with what is going on in class.

These were just a few of the ideas that Jill dealt with in her 30 minute presentation.  There's much more.  And I'm hoping that this blog post has got you interested.  Just as I'm hoping that IATEFL puts the presentation back up on the Sessions page of their site.  It was a presentation full of thoughtful ways to get your students to be more thoughtful about their learning.  And even better, it was filled with clear and memorable examples about how learners can really map, in small achievable steps, a path to their ideal self.  And I think small achievable steps, much more than motivation, is what matters when it comes to language learning.  Yeah, maybe 'motivation' is the most used word when teachers and students talk about successful language learning.  But at one time, phlogiston was the most used word when people talked about fire.  And as far as I can tell, neither phlogiston nor motivation can tell us very much about the real reasons for why sometimes the fires of learning are more than enough to light up every corner of our classrooms.

As many flavors of failure...

I came over to Japan for my first English language teaching job on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.  It was 14 years ago.  I was living way out in the countryside and always looked forward to our big prefectural trainings.  At that time, the program directors gathered up the assistant language teachers twice a year and plunked us all down in a hot-spring hotel for three days.  During those trainings, I first learned how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet as a tool for pronunciation work.  I learned about how to help students adjust to ambiguity in the language classroom (something I recently revisited thanks to the spring issue of The English Connection).  And oddly (or perhaps not oddly at all), I met John Fanselow for the first time.  He gave a lecture on partial information which has stayed more than partially with me for over a dozen years. 

I also remember one more presentation from the first training I attended. It was only thirty minutes or so long.  It was given by a very unassuming high school teacher from Japan.  He wore a short-sleeved cream colored button-down shirt with a brown necktie.  He stood at the front of the room and started telling us about his bullet-train ride into the conference.  He hadn't brought much cash with him, so he bought a cheap Japanese lunch-box before getting on the train.  He put his luggage and Japanese lunch-box on the rack above his seat, nodded to the business man sitting next to him, and then promptly took a nap.  When he woke up, he felt a little hungry, so he pulled down his lunch box.  He was pleased to find that, even though it was a cheap lunch-box, it was filled with all sorts of strips of beef, some fatty tuna, and quail eggs.  He was particularly happy about the quail eggs as they were his favorite.  About half way through eating his lunch-box, the businessman next to him also woke up from a nap, stood up, and took down his own lunch-box.  But as soon as the businessman opened the lunch-box up, he seemed to get very angry.  The presenter said, "I wasn't sure why he was angry.  I guessed that maybe he was disappointed in his lunch-box.  It wasn't as nice as mine.  It was the kind with sausages, not steak.  Fried fish, not sushi.  I felt very bad for him."  Then the presenter started laughing.  A real solid laugh that, I think, made everyone else in the room want to laugh as well.  "In fact, I was feeling bad for him when he turned to me and said very quietly, 'You are eating my lunch-box.'  That's when I really started to feel sorry for him.  And a little bit sorry for myself, too.  I tried to give him his lunch-box back, but he said he didn't want it.  Then I tried to give him money.  But I remembered I didn't have any cash.  And he said he didn't want any money.  So I finished eating the stranger's lunch-box.  It was very embarrassing.  But it was a very delicious lunch-box." 

Then the presenter asked us, everyone in the room, to tell each other a story about some kind of mistake they had made in their life.  There were no rules.  We were just supposed to think of some mistake we'd made and share it with the people around us. Most of us had only been in Japan for a few months at that time, so we all had a lot of mistake stories to tell.  I remember I shared my story of using dish washing liquid as shampoo for a few weeks before a Japanese friend spotted what was going on and gently suggested I head to the drug store.  Everyone told stories.  And that unassuming Japanese high school teacher in his brown necktie walked around and listened to our stories and laughed with us.  Then, when we were almost out of time, he said, "this is how I start my first class of the day.  I have one or two students tell a mistake story.  It makes people laugh.  It also makes making mistakes seem very normal.  If you have time, try and have your students tell some mistake stories."

* * *

Today, one of the first teachers I met on-line, started bogging.  Her name is Sophia Khan.  I could write a lot of words about the whole lot of things Sophia has done for me over the past year.  But instead I will just mention one.  Sophia helped me understand the different meanings of production when I suddenly got very confused about basic ELT terminology.  She did it in a way that left me feeling relieved and not even the slightest bit foolish.  Her first blog post is a musing on mistakes, a celebration of failure.  In it she writes:

we know just from our instinct as teachers that it’s ok for students to make mistakes, that making mistakes is good because it means they are pushing their boundaries, and because realizing something has gone wrong can help fix things. So it’s ironic really that teachers don’t extend nearly so much compassion and understanding towards themselves, when they make mistakes in the classroom.

When I first read this, I found myself thinking, "Because it's different for teachers!"  For a moment, maybe a heart-beat longer than a moment, I honestly saw my mistakes untying my students from their ideal futures, leaving them unmoored and drifting off course. But it was only for a moment.  I have more faith in my students than that.  Just as I have slightly less faith in my influence as a teacher.  I guess it comes down to a matter of perspective.  When our students see a mistake looming up ahead of them--its vague outline of shame as large as their imagination can make it--it's not surprising that they might veer away from it.  Veer away from speaking at all.  And when teachers see their own mistakes as pushing learners into a bleaker future, it's probably difficult to see those mistakes as something less than a kind of fundamental transgression against what it means to be a teacher.  But both of these ways of framing a mistake is based on the Nth conditional, the conditional of fear.

This year I have made a handful of what I consider to be serious mistakes.  I pushed a student to do more than they could to prepare for a speech contest.  I compared a student to another learner in the room during a class.  I repeatedly told a student who was trying his best, but starting from a point far behind the other members of his class, that he was doing a great job.  But "doing a great job" had nothing to do with what he was truly worrying about.  In all of these cases, I felt shame.  In all of these cases, the first thing I did when I recognized my mistake as a mistake was go to the student and apologize.  I said what I thought I had done wrong and said how I would try and do better.  One student laughed and said she didn't think it was a big deal.  One student continued to avoid me for a few more weeks.  And one student said he didn't care, as long as I would give him some sample university entrance exams, immediately.  

* * *

There are all kinds of mistakes.  There are as many flavors of failure as there are shades of success.  Taking time to laugh about our mistakes can be a great way to create a space in which mistakes don't loom so large.  Likewise, celebrating our failures as a chance for growth also seems like an important way to help shift the Nth conditional of fear to a more concrete present of hope.  But just as we still debate about how to correct our students' errors, there's no one ideal way to manage our own slips as educators.  If you can laugh, laugh.  If you can treat yourself with compassion and reflect and learn, by all means, reflect and learn.  But if once in a while a failure leaves you feeling buried in sadness, if all you can get out of the experience, as least for a little while, is tears, then by all means, cry away.  And if you need an extra box of tissues, just give me a ring.  I usually have one handy.

(note: I have searched and searched for the name of the presenter who shared his ideas about mistake stories, but have had no luck so far in finding him.  If anyone who reads this post has some idea where this idea came from, or who the mystery teacher in the brown necktie might be, please let me know.)  

MyShare, MyStory of a 40 minute workshop

On Saturday, the Kyoto chapter of JALT held their annual MyShare event.  I had a full forty minutes to present on using a writers’ workshop method in the reading classroom.  I’ve written pretty extensively on the Writers’ Workshop technique here and have made the presentation notes available on Google Drive as well.  But as a quick primer:

The Writers’ Workshop method is a (semi-)formal structure that allows participants to move beyond immediate emotional responses to a story.  There’s not much a writer can do to improve their story when all the feedback they have amounts to a statement like, “I loved this story,” or conversely, “I really hated this story.”  There is also the fact that reading a story is a highly subjective experience in which a whole lot of the story is created through the interaction of a reader's personal experience and the actual words on the paper.  Before critiquing a story, the writers’ workshop method allows participants to agree upon just what everyone thinks happens in the story, to find common ground about the 5W and 1H of the story.  While a second language reading class is not focused on rewriting a text, it does often contain a discussion component.  Writers’ workshop activities help students work with and develop the language they need to engage in more meaningful discussions about a text.  The method requires multiple readings of a story to:

-          Identify the major events in a story. (can be done individually)

-          Time-line the events to understand how they relate to each other temporally (group work)

-          Take the events from the time line to create a cause and effect map of events in the story (group work)

-          Create character sketches of each of the main characters in the story. (can be done individually)

-          Explore how a character's actions and reactions build a sense of character that remains constant or changes over the course of the story. (group work)

-          Write a description the story’s setting to see if the readers have a similar idea of where the story is taking place. (individual work/group work)

I went into the MyShare event with 4 short stories and a description of each of the above activities. I asked the participants to form small groups, pick a story, and then we went through some of the activities together.  I’ve only run the writers’ workshop method in my reading class a total of four times, and all at the end of the last school year, so while I was hep on sharing the technique, I was also hoping to pick up some good ideas for my own classroom.  Here are some of the tweaks that participants came up with over the course of our forty minutes together.

Time-Lining:

I got a lot of questions about how time-lines should be written.  I honestly had no idea that writing the events on a time-line could be done in different ways.  So I asked participants to time-line the story in the way they felt would be most helpful for them or their students.  I’m glad I refrained from giving any specific directions.  By leaving it up to the participants, I ended up with two new ideas for time-lining.  One of the ideas came from a group that included two instructors from the Japan Center for Michigan Universities.  They explained how, by creating separate time lines for each character in a story, learners could compare how events overlap or fail to overlap between the characters.  As we discussed the multiple-time-line idea, it became clear that this way of time-lining a story can help more advanced learners become a bit more aware of how point of view is intrinsically related to plot. 

A separate group, this one including Gretchen Clark (a Twitter friend) and Elsbeth Young Herron (a Facebook Friend) created a time line with events on the top and characters’ reactions to the events on the bottom.  It’s a nice tweak that can help students realize how events in a story only have importance in relation to how they impact the characters within a story.

One of the difficulties our students face when reading in a second language is realizing that, as when reading in the L1, words on the paper are only going to provide so much information.  When learners lose the thread of the story, it might not be the fault of failing to understand the words on the paper, but because they are required to take an imaginative leap beyond what they find on the page.  It’s the subtle difference between a collection of plot points and a story.  The plot is merely the events on paper, the moments in time that a writer chooses to reveal to give a story its basic shape.  But the story cannot be reduced to plot points alone.  Part of the fun of reading is making the leap and adding in those implied moments which give the story its full form.  Helping students realize their role in actively creating the story during L2 reading might mean holding their hands a bit and showing what kind of parts of a story are often left out.  I had made a suggestion that teachers could do this by preparing a time-line with a few implied events already slotted into the right places.  A participant in the workshop suggested that instead of including these implicit events on the time-line itself, you could list a few implied events at the bottom of the time-line worksheet and challenge students to figure out where they should be placed on a completed time line.  This seems like a very sensible way to get students to take a bit more responsibility for deciding what role they take in building the story from a text.

Cause and Effect Mapping:

The idea of cause and effect can’t really be overstated when it comes to short narrative texts.  A novel sometimes really does feel as if things are just kind of thrown into the story.  Readers are often more tolerant of this kind of ambiguity, willing to let these kinds of moments slide past, because there is so much else to hold onto.  But a short story has a much greater sense of overall cohesion.  In fact, because of its compact nature, most events in a short story are connected to numerous other events in the story in a kind of web of cause and effect. 

As a first step for cause and effect mapping, I usually have students pick main events from their time-line and rewrite the sentences on separate Post-It Notes.  Students then pick two Post-It Notes that they feel are connected in some way, grab a fresh Post-It Note and write a sentence to make that connection explicit.  But talking with teachers as they put together a cause and effect map during the MyShare workshop, it became clear to me that, depending on the level of the students, it might be just as worthwhile for learners to pick up two seemingly unrelated events and to write a sentence which explains their causal relationship.  Especially for higher level readers, finding ways to express these more subtle connections could help learners build a fuller multi-dimensional mental representation of the story, to internalize it at a deeper level.

We also discussed how the cause and effect mapping activity could be expanded to provide more opportunities for learners to play with the language of the text. By the time students are engaged in cause and effect mapping, they’ve already read the text three times and copied or paraphrased sections of the text onto their time-line.  Instead of having learners simply copy sentences from their time-lines onto the Post-It notes, learners could instead draw a quick picture to represent the event.  Then, when they are working on cause and effect mapping in groups, they could use those images to help them try and retrieve the language that they used on the time-line.  Another idea is to turn the cause and effect mapping activity into a game in which one student picks two of the Post-It notes and their partner has to write a connecting sentence.  The activity could be timed and the pair with the most connecting sentences after five minutes is declared the winner.

Post Writers’ Workshop activities:

After my presentation was over, I headed back to my table.  During the break time, Gretchen Clark asked what I did with the stories after we had been through the writers’ workshop process.  And the simple answer was not very much.  I’ve only run this technique four times in class, using 3 different stories.  Usually, my next step, after I feel the students have a good handle on the story, is to move on to working on a different skill set.  I have the students write summaries of the story, or focus in on the vocabulary and grammar aspects of the text which gave the students the most difficulty during the writers' workshop process.  I might do some tabling work with those grammar points.  I might play some vocab games.  Gretchen suggested letting students work with the whole story again.  She thought that letting learners work further with the full text might be useful for the students to make the language their own.  She suggested giving the students a chance to retell the story in some fashion.  The students could take their time-lines and cause and effect maps and then hop onto Glogster and create a poster of the story.  Then using the poster, students could retell the story in a later class.  Another participant brought up Story Bird, and suggested that students could use this tool to recreate the story and then use the Story Bird book version of the story to also retell the story to classmates.  Both of these web-based tools seem like a fantastic way to get the students to engage in more production-based activities as well as to reengage with the language of the text multiple times.  Glen Cohrane, a teacher I’ve recently met on Twitter, took it a step further and suggested that instead of having students retell each story, you could go through the writers’ workshop method with a handful of stories and then have students form groups based on the story they liked the most.  They would only have to create a Glogster poster or StoryBird book for the story in which they were most personally invested, giving the students a greater sense of autonomy around the language they were working with in class.  At this point we had a pretty large group of people participating in the break-time conversation, so I don’t have detailed notes about who said what, but some other ideas for working further with the story included rewriting parts of the story from a different characters point of view or doing a dramatic reading of the story.

A Final Thought

So there you have it.  I went in with an outline of how to use the writers’ workshop method in the reading class and walked out with a much richer series of activities for bringing a story to life.  When I first presented at a conference, about a year and a half ago, I felt a whole lot of pressure.  I thought I was the expert in the room and that I better have a whole lot “good” to pass on to the teachers.  But over five presentations in the past year or so, I’ve come to realize that the less sure I am before a presentation, the more room I have for participants to bring their own experiences to bear on what we are discussing.  In some ways, maybe an effective workshop/presentation is similar to reading a good story.  The best parts aren’t always found in the bullet points flashing up at the front of the room.  The real story is the leap that participants are willing to make, the faith to share how what’s being discussed might play out in their own classrooms.  So a big thank you to the thirty or so teachers who took that leap on Saturday.  You’ve made my classroom a much better place for your willingness to join me, if only for a moment or two, a few feet off the proverbial ground.