Teaching English Literacy in Asia

I was asked to speak at the 7th International Conference on Management of the International Academy of Management and Economics (I-AME) at the Grand Mercure Hotel in Bangkok, last Sunday, May 16, 2010. The audience included graduates of the MBA and Ph.D. programs of the school, and as part of the school’s vision to give its students a more global perspective on management, they held their commencement activities as well as their 7th International Conference on Management outside the Philippines, where I-AME is based.

I was given the task of sharing the experiences and knowledge I have accumulated all these years that I have been working and living in Bangkok, and somehow, give the graduates some insight into what opportunities are available out here for them.

After the talk, the first question was on how applicants, once they are decided on getting a job here in Thailand, should prepare when they apply for work. Here are a few pointers I shared with the group:

Resume/CV – many employers I have met, not just in the field of education, but in other fields as well, always have this observation to make: many Filipinos send resumes that are hard for them to read.

Consider the staff of the Human Resources Department for instance of a certain company, who has to go through piles and piles of resumes sent their way, especially if the job you are applying for has been advertised. He/she won’t have time to scrutinize nor read whole resumes, but will only have time to look for the most basic elements. And these are: your educational background, work experience, and most importantly, are you best fitted for the position you are applying for.

If you meet all those mentioned criteria, then most likely, your resume goes into another basket, which later on, probably your direct supervisor/employer will be looking at for interview considerations.

Here is where your special skills, such as languages you speak, special interests you have that might prove useful for your employer can spell the difference between you getting an interview, or you being added on to a wait list.

You have to make your resume/CV well focused and highly relevant to the job you are applying for. Understood, you may be someone who has had years and years of experience, workshops/professional development events attended, and so on and so forth. But you can’t just cram all that information into your resume/CV. Include only the most recent and/or the most relevant to the job. And try to squeeze them all in one or two pages, maximum of three.

Some employers I’ve spoken to still find these information on resumes/CV that come their way: elementary education, complete with the name of the school, school address, awards the person got on his/her graduation in 6th grade. Some still even include their blood type as well as other personal information like names and birthdays of their children!

No, no, this is not an exaggeration.

The information age started decades ago, and we can no longer make the case of “not being very well informed”, or in the Pinoy way of getting out of ‘now knowing’, just say, “I was absent when that was taught in school!”).

It’s funny, all right, but it’s not entirely a laughing manner when knowing how to write a resume well is what makes the difference between getting a job and not getting a job.

Stay tuned dear readers, for additional tidbits of information on how to apply, successfully, for a job in Thailand. My next article will be on making a list of job possibilities, and on getting to know the places you are applying for.

Also, the two other questions from that conference, which I will tackle on in my next few articles, are :

• a. ( from a mother): If I am decided on a career on education for my child, what advice would you give to prepare him/her for it?
• b. (from a young female MBA graduate): for those of us who are not affiliated in the field of education, are there job opportunities available for us in Thailand?

Education, particularly in the area of teaching English, constantly evolves and as such, teachers are faced with the challenge of adapting themselves to the ever-changing expectations of the trade.

The call nowadays, is not just for the teacher to hold a university degree on education, but to be more versatile, flexible and able to use a cacophony of tools out there to bring the classroom and the real world into one single field. In other words, tools such as the web’s Youtube, for instance, which many of today’s young learners are familiar with, has to become part of one’s teaching, to be seen to be “keeping with the trends”.

In the past, movies like “Stand and Deliver”, which chronicles how a teacher learns to speak the language of the students to reach them, demonstrate how unconventional teaching methods (and the eternal belief in students’ capabilities) are able to produce results that most would think are impossible to accomplish. One such knowledge nowadays, is how to motivate students to actually be interested, participate and be engaged in the topic/concept a teacher wants to teach.

Our High School students today, for one, have so many distractions. With their Blackberrys, their iPhones, etc., many feel the classroom is just one of those things in life one has to endure…until the bell rings and they’re free to access all the social networks they spend most of their waking hours on.

To illustrate my point, here are a few Youtube sites I’ve used with my classes lately. Below the videos, you will find some ideas on how they could be of use in your classroom, from teaching English, to Social Studies, to Science and World Issues

1. Severn Suzuki, a 13-year-old girl from Canada, speaks at the UN Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992. She silenced the world in 5 minutes as she tells leaders to mend their ways to make sure future generations still have a world to live in.

• I recently used this to open up my classes during Earth Week. This can be used to elicit answers to questions like, “After _____ years, what have government and world leaders who have this speech done towards a better earth for future generations?”
• This can also be used in Science class, where studies on the environment are of relevance, for example.
• This can also be used in a Social Studies class, when discussion is focused on responsibility and accountability of world leaders or on the efficacy of organizations such as the UN is being talked about.2. Craig Kielburger was 12 when he started an international human rights  movement  called Free the children, to help children who are exploited in countries like India, Bangladesh and Thailand. Watch him speak at the Ontario Federation of Labor.

• In an Oral Presentation class, great discussions or brainstorming sessions could start off by having students watch this clip. You can then pose the question, “What makes this speech a good one?”
• In a Service Learning class/Ethics/Character Development, you can make a point about what young people can do if they put their heart into it.  Further talk could focus on traits such as being concerned and caring for others; service beyond self.

These are but a couple of the hundreds upon hundreds of videos available out there, which teachers could make good use of. What I find about these clips is that they never fail to catch students’ attention. In the beginning of class, when students are dragging their feet into your classroom, looking like they would rather be somewhere else other than in the school, learning, turn to these clips for some inspiration. After a few minutes of being transported into the world Youtube, most of the time, they will be ready to listen. By then, you would have gotten their full attention.

As a teacher for many years now, I am no longer focused on questions regarding what topics would I need to teach under the curriculum I have been assigned, or what tools should I be using to deliver the best approach so I can ensure effective teaching strategies. I am not even concerned anymore about putting on a “good show” in case my boss happens to drop in, wanting to watch me teach.

I think, for many of us who have been teaching for a long time, and who have realized that this job is more than just ‘work’, there comes a point where you start thinking of your students as your own children. As such, you would ask yourself, ‘so how do I prepare them for life? What do I do I do in class, so they will take whatever I teach within the four walls of the classroom, into the real world? How do I equip them so they become successful at what they wanted to be in the future

In one workshop on Character Education I attended in Singapore in March 2010, the presenter talked about the teachers’ influence as ‘having no end’. We impact our students in such a way that it can either scar them for life, or strengthen them for what’s in store in the future.

I’ve seen teachers teach so well in class. Yet, once outside the safe confines of the classroom, , where it really matters most, they talk badly about their students. They ridicule, they criticize, and yet, they have the gall to go back into class, and spew meaningless words and pretend they like their students. Such lies! And such hypocrisy.

I may not be the best teacher a student can have, but I do try my best to make my words, whether inside the class or not, to ring with truth. I will never, for example, ask a student to do something I myself, am not prepared to do, or have not even experienced.

It’s been hard to transition from being, simply, an English teacher to a teacher of Values! I thought, “Wow, I must become perfect!” But as I found out these last couple of years, you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to keep it real.

In my Grade 9 class this last quarter, I had my students working on a goal for their final project. They had to think of a character trait they’d like to acquire or get better at. The next 3 weeks, they have to keep a journal of their progress, and do a power point presentation towards the end of the 3-week period. One student, while working in class on this project, asked me, “So Miss Hedda, what IS your goal?”

I said, “To be better organized.” It wasn’t hard to look the student in the eye and tell him that, because just a few days prior, I worked on all of my students’ final projects’ guidelines, timelines and rubrics. It used to be hard for me to get organized for a whole months’ work of course work, but knowing ahead of time that I will require that much planning and work from my kids, I also pushed myself to do more than what I would require of them. And that paid off in the end.

By trying to live by the same guidelines I ask my own students to abide by, I have enough integrity to push them to challenge themselves and work on becoming people of better character. It’s not about perfection. It’s about doing the little things that really matter, on a daily basis.

For more information on this project I have designed for my Grade 9 Values class, click here. It contains guidelines, rubrics and prompts. And when this project is done, I will throw in some reflection on how the whole project went, especially on how it has benefited the students.

In an international school setting, the demand and pressure on students to be proficient in writing is quite high. They are expected to write in English in their core subjects; Math, Science, Social Studies and Language Arts, in order to accomplish reports, projects, as well as homework and in-class assignments.

However, apart from the fact that the students in this study needed to learn to write in English as a desired academic skill, it cannot be denied that the main purpose of writing is still first and foremost, for communication. Even when a text has been written for oneself, there is still likelihood for it to be read or communicated to others. Even when the writing is personal and private, it could still be argued that the writer himself or herself serves as a reader, and thus, the writing still holds its communicative value or purpose (Kaplan, 1996).

Now comes the basic question, “What then is the most effective way to teach second language students to write in English?” In this study, reading a story served as a stimulus for the writing activities in class. This is based heavily on Krashen’s (1984) idea that exposing children to pleasure reading and shifting focus from form to meaning in extensive reading helps learners acquire writing ability in any language (cited in Scott, 1996).

Another idea that seems to support the notion of using reading to teach writing in the classroom comes from Lightbown and Spada (1999). According to them, research show that learners can learn a great deal of those not taught to them explicitly .They are able to use their own learning strategies to find out the underlying systems that govern the language they are learning. So the more varied and interesting their learning experiences are, the more opportunities they will have to learn more about the language.

What better way to motivate students to read, and thus, learn more, than using literature texts? There is a genuine feel to literature texts that cannot be found in other materials, particularly those which emphasize pedagogy over experience (Duff and Maley, 1990). Also, literature texts offer learners a wide range of styles, registers and text types at different levels of difficulty. They touch on themes that offer opportunities for learners to react based on their own life experiences.

As mentioned in Vacca, Vacca and Gove ( 1991), suggestion to use a literature base in the classroom reappeared in reading instruction journals in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The rationale for it was, reading should be made an important part of classroom life: “reading literature that makes children wonder, weep, laugh, shiver and gasp.”

“Pieces of literature are used as springboards for writing.” (Vacca,Vacca and Gove, 1991:42). Some of the activities students do in class include writing different endings to stories they read about that are reflected in their own conflicts in life, looking at structures in stories such as the repetitive structure and write stories using the same structure, and encouraging students to gain insights into their own lives using the conflicts between the characters they read about.

Furthermore, “Young children learn writing through exploration. The key to early learning development is not found in a child’s motor development, but in the opportunities he or she has to explore print” (Vacca, Vacca and Gove, 1991:127-128). Reading literature, and then writing about it, offers students situations where they analyze and appreciate aesthetic quality. But of utmost importance is when, students relate literature to their own lives (Oster, 1989), cited from Reid, 1993.

At this point, a discussion of some common types of writing is in order. The following is taken from the second edition of the book “Effective Reading in a Changing World” by Rose Wassman and Lee Ann Rinsky, 1997. According to the authors, the type of writing found in essays, textbooks, and literature is generally classified into four broad categories.

These categories are narration, exposition, persuasion, and description.
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“There is a widely held belief that in order to be a good writer a student needs to be read a lot”. (Hedge, 1988:11).

Harris (1993:81) is also of the same belief as Hedge when he wrote in his book, “Introducing Writing”, that “reading and the consideration of written texts should form an important part of the teaching of writing.” He explains that writing cannot be taken as a different entity from other aspects of language use. He says writing requires attention to reading and to talking, for these are the two means by which writing skill can be learned or acquired.

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A. Writing, A Definition

Writing seems to have taken on different definitions for different groups of people in order to suit their different needs and purposes for writing. Even for professionals involved in the field of English Language Teaching, not one definition of writing could satisfy everyone.

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What is writing and why is there a need to learn it?

In this study, writing will be explored and discussed in the context of  ESL, particularly in an international school environment. Reference will also be made to studies and issues that affect first language writing since quite many of the theories that govern second language writing are also derived, based or influenced by first language theories on writing.

Writing, unlike the other skills of reading, listening and speaking seems to be of a more complex nature, especially in the context of second language use. In Britain, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasis was placed more on reading than on writing. The basis of which was the notion that it was more desirable for people to be able to read than write. That way, they can be educated and/or instructed into a particular belief or ideology.

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“Do we learn Values (in school), just to get an A?” That is how Cheque from grade 11 in the school I teach, opened up his arguments in a debate with other Grade 11 students held last October. Indeed, in this age and time of ipods, network gaming and cyber communities, has Values, as a school subject, become obsolete, even “unnecessary”? And if not, how can it support the Literacy programs in schools?

Looking at the Values classes I teach this year, I believe I have found my answers…

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I have a class of adult learners of 17. They come from different parts of Asia: Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea and Vietnam. They’re mostly intermediate level in their English, both written and oral. The course I teach is called Independent Reading.

The program I use with them is broken up into two parts: two days in a row for 90 minutes each, I teach Reading Strategies. The book I use is called Reading in The Content Areas. I use book levels C and D. I like using this coursebook for two reasons.

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