Adults Learning English : the Role Pleasure Reading Plays in their Success
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.
1. The texts/stories are highly interesting for my set of learners. It includes the stories of Gloria Estefan, Jaime Escalante, the Star Wars movie and China’s Cultural Revolution, to name a few. Gloria Estefan, is a famous singer whose career nearly ended with a bus crash. The story outlines her long struggle to regain health and to be able to sing onstage again. There’s Jaime Escalante’s story, which was featured in the movie, “Stand and Deliver”. It highlights Escalante’s dedication as a teacher and how he was able to turn a group of students around from ones predicted to fail in life to a group of dedicated young people who beat all odds and passed the AP Calculus exam. Their passing the exam helped save their school’s accreditation and earned them credits in College, paving a much brighter future than what their other teachers predicted they would have.
Apart from the varied and interesting stories, the texts lends itself to so many different interpretations and it easily encourages exhange of opinions and ideas among students.
2. The reading strategies the coursebook teaches are very useful and effective, and the organization of the book itself makes it easy for students to follow the steps they have to do to finish assignments.
The second part of my program is a 90-minute session further divided up into four parts: Words Work, Read, Share and Journaling.
The students choose a book of their own to read in the beginning of the program. Then once every 4 days, for 90 minutes they work in small reading groups of three or four. Each group decides at what order they will do the 4 parts of the program.
For Words Work, they choose 7 new words from the story. They find the meaning of each one and write sentences for each. For Read, they simply spend the time reading quietly on their own. Journaling means they reflect on their reading and write a journal entry related to it.And in Share, they simply share what they want to share withthe rest of the group. It could be the reflections they wrote in their journal, the characters in the story and whtehre they agree withthe characters’ action or not, lessons they are learning from the story, etc.
After about 2 months now, I hear a lot of positive comments from students about the class and how it impacts them as learners, especially as readers. Because of the nature of the activities where they are expected and encouraged to do all four skills; reading, writing, listening and speaking, they feel more confident about their English.
They also say they are able to use the skills in reading strategies in their other classes, especially research. The skills they have learned and practiced in my class have been useful for them to summarize their readings and most especially, to have a better understading of their readings.
One important reason for this, I believe is the pleasure principle. I believe that one can never learn in an environment that’s threatening and anxiety-laden. I think this is more especially true when you have adults just learning to get better at their English.
Because there is less pressure and no emphasis on the quantity, but rather on the quality of their reading, they are free to explore, to think deeper and most of all, to enjoy what they are reading. And because there is room for everyone’s opinion, and there is no ONE right answer, everyone feels free to share his/her thoughts, and so, they practice their English.
And so it is therefore important, that reading becomes an enjoyable activity for learners, that the texts/stories they are reading are highly interesting, and that they are given opportunities to share without fear of ridicule of correction when they are working in groups.
Hedda has been living and teaching in Thailand the last twelve years. She has taught in a Thai private school, several language institutes, a government school and currently, is teaching in an international school in Bangkok. Beside a degree in Nursing, she holds a Master of Arts degree in English Language Teaching.
Category: Teaching Strategies
About the Author (Author Profile)
Hedda has been living and teaching in Thailand the last fifteen years. She has taught in a Thai private school, several language institutes, a government school and currently, is teaching in an international school in Bangkok.Subscribe
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