[MUSIC] Welcome back to Teach English Now!, and the final video in this course. We hope that you have enjoyed your time with us on a journey through these five fairy tales. In order to learn about reading and writing problems, strategies, and an introduction to integrated grammar instruction. We know that we've enjoyed sharing these stories with you to make some of the concepts that we've talked about memorable, usable, and durable. In this video we'll summarize what we talked about in modules one through five. Make sure that you pay attention to the important ideas and if you don't quite understand something, please go back to that module and review the videos or the material again. Don't forget to take notes so that you can look back over them if you forget something. >> So, in module one, we travelled down the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz to meet three different readers. Or, shall we say, non-readers. The scarecrow, the tin-man, and the lion represented the non-readers that we often see in our language classrooms. Do you remember the reading problems? And how you, as a teacher, can help them become better readers? Let's review them briefly. The scarecrow represented ignorance. Which the teacher can combat with information such as teaching students vocabulary, parts of speech, or how to connect different sounds with letters, or groups of letters. With out stiff, robotic tin man, reading was a solitary activity. But the teacher was able to show him how to get involved in reading material, much like you become involved in our story in this module. Some great strategies to get students involved include breaking reading activities into three parts. Pre-reading, reading, and post-reading. And inviting students to evaluate, summarize, and or give opinions about the text. Our last character, the uninterested lion, overcame his apathy through his teacher's ability to intrigue him with immediacy, autonomy, and future authenticity. So we can engage our non-readers with the three I's of reading proficiency. Information, involvement, and intrigue. >> That's a lot of information. Continuing on our journey in module two, we looked at two different philosophies of reading instruction through Coach Hare and Coach Tortoise. If you remember, Coach Hare focused on techniques related to extensive reading such as newspaper corners, reading zones, reading logs, among others. While Coach Tortoise's main purpose was to use strategies to help students understand what they are reading. We shared many intensive reading strategies. Such as breaking down sentences into parts of speech, using a jigsaw activity and a closed passage. Feel free to go back to module two to review these intensive and extensive reading strategies. >> And then in our third module, we presented some key ideas in ESL writing theory. And gave you some useful tips to help your students, just like Hansel and Gretel, to improve their writing skills. We talked about the importance of helping students see writing as a process by breaking down large assignments into smaller, manageable chunks, like bread crumbs, that they can accomplish in stages so that the assignment doesn't seem so daunting. Pre-writing, writing and post-writing are all steps or stages in the writing process. >> We also talked about you can help your student to understand your expectations for the writing assignment by giving them clear guidelines along with an explicit rubric. Providing several model texts will also be helpful to students. As well as having students discuss their ideas and give feedback to each other so they can change their writing through the recursive process. We also discussed how important it is for you, as the teacher, to avoid appropriation by giving your students the freedom to be creative in their writing assignments. Don't take over their assignments or rewrite their sentences for them. Think of yourself as a consultant or a writing coach rather than a director in the writing classroom. >> And then, in the fourth module, we met Jeanie, who discussed specific strategies that you can use with your students in every stage of the writing process. We talked about the importance of giving students time to brainstorm during the pre-writing stage so they can explore many different possibilities for the writing piece. We also focused on the six traits of writing and how students can use those traits to guide them through the writing process. Remember that those six traits are ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions. If you need to review them in more detail, feel free to go back to module four and watch those videos. >> We also shared three strategies to get students past the initial roadblock of choosing a topic. The first strategy was good writing is good reading. The second was good writing is good thinking. And the third strategy to help students open their minds to new ideas is good writing is good speaking. Personally I've tried all of these methods when I've gotten stuck writing a script. They really work. After students generate ideas, we talked about how teachers can help them organize their ideas with another three strategies. Making an outline, using a mind web, and creating paragraph blocks. These were all organizational strategies that will aid your students during the writing process. If your students use these strategies, they will produce better written pieces, making your life as a teacher much easier as you sit down to grade a stack of papers over the weekend. >> [LAUGH] And let's not scare them off Shane, although, in our fifth module we covered a topic that some teachers and students find really scary. Grammar. However, after watching the videos from module five, we hope you felt equipped with concrete ideas on how to integrate grammar into a reading and writing lesson to make students feel more comfortable with it. Remember that while some theorist might disagree, most language specialist believe that explicit grammar instruction is necessary in a communicative class room. >> Yes, Jessica, explicit grammar instruction is necessary, but we must remember not to let explicit instruction on minute, grammar points that are not used very often take over our reading and writing classes. Having learners notice and focus on grammar forms is important, to get learners to use grammar accurately. If you remember, we discussed the idea of you as a teacher, noticing the individual grammar mistakes that your learners make, as well as the grammatical errors that the class as a whole makes. That way, you can spend valuable class time focusing on correcting those errors. Rather than, being like the queen and teaching grammar items that students will never use. >> [LAUGH] In addition to noticing their errors, you also need to guide your students to notice their own errors. Remember that we covered Schmidt's noticing hypothesis, which asserts that in order for students to improve their grammatical accuracy, they must be made aware of the errors they're making. Makes sense, right? How can they fix something if they don't know what's broken. And how can we get students to do this? Well one idea that we talked about is input enhancement. If you recall, we discussed how you can get students to notice certain grammatical features that they are having trouble with, for instance, by having students underlining those grammatical features in their assignments or in their textbooks as they are reading. Give students lots of time to practice with these principles so that they can improve. And that means that you should review your lesson plans and make sure that you incorporated some explicit grammar instruction within them. So what would the students benefit from practicing the most, keeping those grammatical structures in mind as you're lesson planning? >> Great advice, Jessica. Well, I'm sad to say that we are almost to a close. No more metaphors, and no more falling asleep. Once again, I hope that you have enjoyed this series of videos as much as we have enjoyed producing them. We hope that they are sticky, meaning that when you think of extensive and intensive reading you always think of our Mr. Hare and Mr. Tortoise. When you think of writing, you think of Hansel and Gretel's desire to change a gingerbread house into an organic paradise. And when you think of enhanced input, you think of changing a gray gate, red. We believe these metaphors will help you to recall and reuse the techniques we intend you to have in your toolbox here at Teach English Now. >> Okay everyone, how are you feeling about your test? Are you ready for it? Of course you are, right? However, if you need to, go back and watch the videos. Jump on the discussion boards if there's anything you'd like to discuss with your fellow learners. Once you feel like you've learned all the concepts from this course, go ahead and take your test. Good luck and we'll see you soon. [MUSIC]
