Week 6: Readers, Ms. Kang MC

The books as the ‘Readers’ Series which I borrowed from a local library near my house were the Magic Tree House: Vacation Under the Volcano #13 (Mary Pope Osborne, 1998), Tonight on the Titanic #17 (Mary Pope Osborne, 1999), and Thanksgiving on Thursday #27 (Mary Pope Osborne, 2002), all is published by Random House, Inc. Each of books usually has 10 episodes and is made up of 70 something pages. These books are called paperbacks, not hardcovers. The cover of each book is illustrated on the main scene, which can express the theme or the main situation. Last year, when I got the letter from my American friend, one of his daughters, who turned to be 3^rd grade, was into reading these books. So as nonnative speakers, the readers might usually be 5^th or 6^th grade students, young learners who are eager to read a lot. Or they might be late learners such as middle school students. When I open the first page, on the left side, it shows various front pictures of this series. And next page introduces comments from young readers, teachers, and parents, those who are fans of this series. For example, I love your books so much that I could read them with my eyes closed. —Gabriel R., As a parent, I thank you for writing stories filled with adventures, fun, and valuable lessons. —M. Nagao.  And the next page, it describes where the author, Mary Pope Osborne, got motivation from and how she collected information and data to write this book about. As a reader, I think, there are a lot of interests in it before starting to read. Plus, as always, main characters, eight-year-old Jack and his seven-year-old sister, Annie, who live in Pennsylvania, appear. This means that every reader can be a main character, if he/she is about to read a book. In addition, the appeared mysterious tree house with books in the woods is the starting and ending point for the adventure related to past events. While two characters were sent to one place to have them worked out the mission given to them at the beginning, no time at all passes in the present time. Besides the tree house belongs to Morgan le Fay, a magical librarian of Camelot during the King Arthur. She could travel through time and space, gathering books. This imaginary person encourages readers to read a book. While two of them are sent to one place, they are able to experience something special, but the contemporary can’t experience. This part is resulted from the author’s wits and intelligences, that is, how important the information of the event such as Thanksgiving, Titanic, and The Volcano in Pompeii is and how the author organize the story with imagination, fun, interest, and logic. With the help of these, readers can get information easily and feel fun and be moved from time to time. First of all, the described words, sentences or situations are not too difficult. In the end, nonnative speakers, especially young readers can figure out the story with comparative ease. This makes them read more and more. But there is one precondition to obtain this: The reader should be ready to read a book for a certain time. Anyway to come back to the series again, at the end of this book, more facts about the event for the readers are introduced. These all elements are absolutely good factors to study especially social study or science for young readers. Besides, some illustrations sometimes shown encourage the readers to read as well. I sometimes recommend adult learners including me to read children books in English as many as possible if they want to improve their English ability too. Of course, as I mentioned above, because the description is not too difficult, it seems childish. But to think of the basic reason why we learn English, I think extensive reading is really great idea for learners. I know spoken language is different from written language. But if we want to improve our vocabulary or phrases with fun, I prefer extensive reading. As we know, there is plenty of repetition in extensive reading. That’s why here in Korea, especially for young kids or young learners, their English teachers use the story telling as one of the strategies in teaching English. Just because grammar, words, and useful expressions are in it, which means learners can acquire them easily. As Dr. LeeEunmee quoted the Dr. Seuss’ “Enjoy your days”: The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. extensive reading is in the same vein, I guess.

 

 

Ms. Kang

I am sorry to tell you this, but it was really hard for me to read and follow your streams of consciousness...You wrote your essay within 'one' block paragraph, and I failed checking out your main points and claims although your discussions were analytic and thoughtful. :-)

 

Thank you for your review, but I am looking forward to seeing your reviews and essays written in a series of  'paragraphs' in the future.

 

Week 6: Readers, Ms. Hong EY (Excellent)

Extensive reading is a wonderful way of learning, a source of enjoyment, and a way of gaining knowledge of the word which is same as ‘catch two birds with one stone’ in the best scenario. As being shown in the Table 1-1., I reviewed ‘Step into Reading’ series books published by Random House. I first read three Step 1 books to see how an author wrote a book for a child who knows the alphabet and is willing to start reading a book. I was really curious about the length of a book, choice of the words, design, technique of creating a story with limited vocabulary and the number of words. I was wondering how accessible the book would be to a learner with a limited vocabulary. After reviewing the books, I found out that because of what I was concerning, the author had to create a new story with the characters in the original story (Finding Nemo), to shorten the original story while organizing by numbers (Cinderella), or to focus on introducing main characters and omit the main story which is familiar with people; the story about Snow White’s step-mother and her prince was mentioned in the book (Snow White). All three books are based on famous, familiar, and interesting stories.

Table 1 – 1.   Review on Same Step Books (Step 1)

Title	Just Keep Swimming (Disney/Pixar Finding Nemo)	Cinderella’s Countdown to the Ball	Friends for a Princess (Disney Princess)
Author	RH Disney	RH Disney and Heidi Kilgras	RH Disney and Melissa Lagonegro
Illustrator	Atelier Philippe Harchy	Atelier Philippe Harchy	Atelier Philippe Harchy
Publisher	Random House	Random House	Random House
Publishing Date	April 26, 2005	January 22, 2002	January 27, 2004
ISBN	978-0-7364-2319-9 (0-7364-2319-2)	978-0-7364-1225-4 (0-7364-1225-5)	978-0-7364-2208-6 (0-7364-2208-0)
Themes	Self-Esteem, Media, Animals	Media, Math, Concepts/Counting, Classics	Rhyme & Alliteration, Friendship, Fairy Tales & Fables, Classics
The Number of Pages	34 Pages	32 Pages	32 Pages
Book Format	Big type and easy words Rhyme and Rhythm Pictures clues	Big type and easy words Rhyme and Rhythm Pictures clues	Big type and easy words Rhyme and Rhythm Pictures clues
Reading Level	Step1: Ready to Read Preschool~Kindergarten ; for children who know the alphabet and are eager to begin reading	Step1: Ready to Read Preschool~Kindergarten ; for children who know the alphabet and are eager to begin reading	Step1: Ready to Read Preschool~Kindergarten ; for children who know the alphabet and are eager to begin reading
Dates Reviewed	September 23, 2010	September 23, 2010	September 23, 2010

Table 1 – 2.  Texts of the Step 1 books (The lines divided by the page of the book)

	Text
Just Keep Swimming (Disney/Pixar Finding Nemo)	Nemo has a dream. He wants to join the school swim team. But Nemo has a little fin. He thinks that he will never win. Dory helps Nemo. She teaches him to go, go, go! Nemo races and races. Nemo chases and chases. “Just keep swimming,” Dory sings. But Nemo thinks of other things. “I will never win. I have a bad fin.” “Just Keep swimming!” Dory cries. So Nemo tries… and tries… And tries… Nemo races and races. Nemo chases and chases. Yippee! Yahoo! His dream comes true. Nemo makes the team. Can Nemo win the first-place prize? “Just Keep swimming!” Dory cries. Watch him race. Watch him chases. Watch as Nemo wins first place!
Cinderella's Countdown to the Ball	Poor Cinderella. Poof! A fairy godmother. One magic coach. Two coachmen. Three wishes come true! Four horses. Five miles to the ball. Six royal doormen. Seven men want to dance. Eight ladies wait in line. The price! They meet. They dance. Nine ladies whisper. Ten fingers touch. Eleven stars twinkle. The clock chimes twelve times! Run, Cinderella! One glass slipper. Tap, tap. Too small. Crash! The other slipper! It fits! Happily ever after! The end.
Friends for a Princess (Disney Princess)	Snow White has seven little friends. Loving, kind, and special friends. Some have big beards. Some have small. Dopey has no beard at all. Doc is caring. Doc is wise. Doc needs glasses for his eyes. Happy is the cheerful guy. Bashful is so very shy. Sneezy always has to sneeze. Grumpy is so hard to please. Sleepy likes to take a nap. Dopey wears a purple cap. All the dwarfs work in a mine. Then they march home in a line. Snow White is there when they come back. She welcomes them and makes a snack. The jolly friends dance through the night. The seven Dwarfs love sweet Snow White.

 

On the other hand, according to the transcribed texts in Table 1-2., Step 1 books does not include more than two sentence on one page and the font size is big enough to be read by children in preschool or kindergarten.

As shown below in Table 2, ‘Toy Story’ Step 1 and Step 2 book were compared since the books are supposed to be differentiated by level even if they are based on the same story. Step 1 book of ‘Toy Story’ includes 53 words which are words or short sentences such as “Want to play?” and “Me, too.” However, Step 2 of ‘Toy Story’ contains 123 words which are full longer sentences than Step 1 book although they are still short sentences. The readers could read the book without reading all simple words which make rhythm and rhyme; the words are key point words but I would say that they are not necessary to understand the story because illustration really helps what is happening in the book and giving clues for understanding. On the other hand, Step 2 has a simple story line.

 

 

You specification table clearly shows how you analyzed these books.  You added your findings and opinions in addition to the table, which made this review more comprehensive. Thank you for your good work.

 

 p.s. Oh, I couldn't edit the images that were included in your review.

 

Week 6: Readers, Ms. Han YM

Book Title: Henry and Mudge-The first book

                         Annie’ good move

                         Family tree

Author: Cynthia Rylant

Illustrator: Sucie Stevenson

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.-1987

Number of pages: 40, 40, 40

Book format: short chapter

Reading level: 2 -Reading independently

 

            

             I enjoy reading.  I usually read for fun.  Reading is a favorite hobby, good passing timer, and most joyful thing to do.  I can imagine, experience everything by reading. I can go to Middle age; even I can be a detective in books.  While reading, I feel happy and relaxed.

             When I got have my own kids, I wanted my kids to love reading, too.  I wanted my kids to know joy of reading.  I bought many books, read them as much as I can.  My husband always read them bedtime story.  They wanted my husband and me to read more and more books until we could not read any more because of sore throat.  Finally they knew joy that books gave.  They liked to listening reading, and then they became to read by themselves.  They read many books, without looking up dictionary or asking unknown words. I thought they were extensive reading.  Especially my son loved reading; he liked more reading than being with his friends.

             After my kids became good readers, I wanted them to read English books.  This time I began to buy English books.  At first I read them English books, or I made them listen to audio books a lot.  Gradually they could read English books. They rarely looked up the dictionary, just sometimes asked me meanings of some words.  It was extensive reading. I did not think they learned meanings of some vocabularies through extensive reading.  They just enjoyed reading.

             The reason I picked “Henry and Mudge” for assignment is that my son liked these books when he was first grade in Korea.  After I read these books, I gave them to my son to read again.  But my son said these books were too childish to read.  I just smiled at my son.

My son is now fourth grader and he has been in USA for one year.              

In The first book of Henry and Mudge, Henry has no brothers and sisters and no friends on his street.  Lonely Henry told his parents he wanted a brother or wanted to live on a different street. But his parents said “Sorry”.  Henry told his parents he wanted to have a dog.  His parents almost said “Sorry’’, but they looked at their house with no brother or sister, and street with no children, they said “yes”.  Finally Henry got a dog, not a short one, not a curly one, not pointed ears, Mudge.  Now Henry walked to school with Mudge not worrying about tornadoes, ghosts, biting dogs and bullies.  One day, when Mudge took a walk without Henry, he got lost.  Henry cried because he thought Mudge would go away.  After crying for an hour, Henry realized Mudge loved him, would not leave, and must be lost.  Finally he found Mudge at empty pine trees.  They never lose again.

             In Annie’s good move, Henry’s cousin Annie prepared to move in next door of Henry's.  Nervous about leaving friends, changing school and packing all hers frilly dresses and shiny shoes and lace hankies, Annie got blotched on all her face.  Henry calmed Annie by crawling under the covers with Mudge.  With new house wish with candles, great big kiss of Mudge’s, all of Annie’s blotches went away.

             In Family tree, Henry and his dog Mudge attended a family reunion.  Henry had lots of aunts, uncles, grandpas, grandmas, and cousins, and had good time with them.  But Mudge would always be the best family of all.

             These book series are more than 18 books, and relate to Henry and his dog Mudge’s adventures.  The author and illustrator of these books have dogs, and love dogs very much.  To them, dogs are family.  In the books, I can feel their love of dogs.  These books make my mind warm and smile.  Reading one of these books make want to read another book.  Reading this series kids may learn about love of family, meaning of living together, friends.  Through extensive reading of these books, children may learn some vocabularies, and some meaning of events. They experience many things indirectly.  Through extensive reading their minds deepen and can be thoughtful.  Although reading is connected every subjects, like math, science, history, etc, and reading help understand these subjects and get better grade, the purpose of reading is not for learning.  Reading must be fun. I oppose to use extensive reading for learning.   Learning through extensive reading is incidental and fragile according to the text book.  Therefore, learning using extensive reading should be continued for a long time and choosing books should be regulated to select only few unknown words exist.  As many books of same level should be read for learning.

             My son continuously reads many different kinds of books, he seldom looks up dictionary, but he obtains a lot of knowledge through extensive reading. Also, through reading he understands other subjects easily.  He is very good at reading concept.  I think it is because of his extensive reading.  Actually, reading helps a lot in learning. However, these know ledges are incidental, my son reads for fun.  I also like reading for fun, and I think reading should be fun.

 

 

Ms. Han narratively tells us how she made use of 'readers' for her son's English education.  I would like to hear more from Ms. Han  in which way she is planning to apply this material in her classroom. I am curous. :-)

 

 

 

Week 6: Readers, Mr. Han SH

 Extensive Reading (Reviewing on graded books)

 

 

Han Seok Hee

 

 

1. Book title, author, publisher, publishing year

 a. The USA, ALISON BAXTER, Oxford University Press, 2008

 b. Martin Luther King, ALAN C. McLEAN, Oxford University Press, 2008

 c. Australia and New Zealand, CHRISTINE LINDOP, Oxford University Press, 2008

 

2. Number of pages

a. The USA : 72pages

 b. Martin Luther King : 72pages

 c. Australia : 72pages

 

3. Book format

 a. All of the three copies are about fact files and audio available with full-color illustrations.

 b. Contents are comprised of introduction, 14-16 topics, glossary, activities (Before Reading,

While Reading, After Reading), about the author, and about the bookworms library.

 

4. Reading level : Young learners, Stage 3 from starter to stage 6.

 

5. My critical review on them

 a. Incidental learning and fragility

   The books have lots of interesting topics and stories by which the learners’ attention is focused on the story not on items to learn and learning gains can be fragile as well as providing quantity of input with substantial opportunities for vocabulary repetition.

 

 b. Grammar and vocabularies

   Each book, stage 3, deals with 1000 headwords and grammatical points such as should, may, present perfect continuous, used to, past perfect, causative, relative clauses and indirect statements with 42-46 glossaries, which is I think appropriate for the target level of readers’ grammatical improvement and lexical expansion by stages.

 

 c. The allurements

   You can lead a horse to water, but we can’t make him drink. I think the most important aspect of Extensive Reading Programs is how to keep our students excited about reading and wanting to read more. From this point of view, the series provide enjoyable reading in English, with a wide range of classic and modern fiction, non-fiction, and plays. Especially, the books I selected were fact files with lifelike full-color illustrations and fun real stories.

 

 d. Quality

   As I know, the OXFORD BOOKWORMS is a good extensive reading foundation and an excellent source of getting award-winning graded reader titles with various genres. The quality of the paper is good for young learners with medium thickness and printing size is a little bit small but clear to recognize. Last, the quality of pictures and illustrations are well taken and chosen for young learners to add interests while before, during and after reading.

 

 e. Before, while and after reading activities

   According to our textbook, an extensive reading program is only one part of a language course. Teachers need to make sure that other parts of the course are supporting extensive reading and that extensive reading is supporting other parts of the course. From this view, after reading a graded reader, the learner can spend a few minutes reflecting on new words that were met in the book and looking back in the book to revise them.

   The books I chose consist of Before, While and After Reading Activities. Doing before reading activities, readers overview the main pictures of the book and match each photos with the names, which can help readers become motivated and focus on the main topic of the book.

While reading, readers rewrite the false sentences with the correct information from their reading chapter by chapter, choose best question-words to the answers, match halves of sentences and words, and complete sentences with the correct words. These kinds of activities are good for better understanding of texts the reader is reading through chapters, however in an extensive reading program, reading should be the main activity and other activities should occupy only a very small proportion of the time so that time is not taken away from reading. For this reason, I think it should lessen the numbers of the While Reading Activities questions to let students focus on reading not elaborate comprehension.

   Doing after reading, readers match the people with the sentences using pronouns (he, she) and linking words (and, because, but, then, who), find words in the box, write an e-mail to a friend about the topic, find out more information about what they want to know more, make a poster or give a talk about it to their friends. These kinds of activities are very good to support and supplement extensive reading with language-focused learning and fluency development.

 

 f. Simplified or Original Texts

   Even though for some teachers and researchers, simplified graded readers are seen as being inauthentic and watered-down versions of richer original texts, vocabulary simplification is also seen as effective vocabulary control providing high frequency words of the language with little low frequency words for their gradual improvement through reading.

   The series I chose includes original and adapted texts in seven carefully graded language stages, which take learners from beginner to advanced level with glossary at the end of each book. I think it deals with proper vocabulary and grammar points within the target level of the series by giving expatiation, for example, …were called tangata whenua (‘people of the land’).

 

 g. Additional resources

   As a teacher, planning and running an extensive reading program is worthwhile, but we need for more practical factors such as how to organize and manage a library of graded readers, how to obtain them, and how many are needed to set up a library.

   The Oxford Bookworms Library offers tests and worksheets, advice on running a class library, using audio recordings, and the many ways of using them in reading programs. It offers resource materials that are available on the website.

 

6. Conclusion

   Last year I went on a business trip to the ministry of education, science and technology for joining a conference. Several teams have been developing new curriculum based on graded readers. I got soon excited as I have been sick and tired of current primary English curriculum. The main problem is how we can choose and provide public schools and teachers with quality graded readers without concern of international copyright, money.

 

 

 

Mr. Han

 

I would like to ask  the same question to you.  If you are to develop 'readers' for your EFL students, what would you do?  This question is connected to your TSL506 class project, too.

Thank you for the review.

 

Week 3 Malcolm X, Mr. Noh JB

Malcolm X lived a short time life, but he left many things to teach and learn to us.

As he was convicted of robbery by a street hustler, he got to spend seven years in prison.

And, in the prison, he educated himself (e.g home- made education) and became a disciple of Elijah Muhammad who was founder of the Nation of Islam.  Because of the letter, he happened to start to educate himself. As he was the most articulate hustler, he couldn’t express what he wanted to convey in letters that he wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad.

In the Charles town prison, he met Bimbi who always took charge of any conversations he had in, and he envied him. And he emulated Bimbi. In the Norfolk Prison Colony, he got hold of a dictionary - to study, to learn some words. But he couldn't even write in a straight line. He was hesitating what to do.

In the middle of pondering with the dictionary, in the end, he started some kind of action, copying the dictionary. He copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks. Then, aloud, he read back, to himself, every­thing he'd written on the tablet. Repeatedly, aloud, to himself, he read his own handwriting. Thinking about those words he had written, he was immensely proud to realize the fact that not only had he written so much at one time, but only he'd writ­ten words that he never knew.

He reviewed the words whose meanings he didn't remember. He was so fascinated that he went on-he copied the dictionary's next page. He started to be interested in studying dictionary. With every succeeding page, he also learned of people and places and events from history. As a matter of fact, the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia to him.

Filling the dictionary's A on a whole tablet, he went on into the B's. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped him to pick up handwriting speed. In this way, he developed vocabulary and his writing skill.

Inevitably, he got to broaden his base words, and he could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying.

He experienced lots of things through the books he picked up, forgetting even he was in the prison.

He read more in his room by himself than in the library itself. He would continue reading in any glow.

To him, reading looks like a well. Through reading books, he widened the sphere of knowledge. He started to have interest for history, slavery, philosophy and people, etc.

In the long run, reading changed forever the course of his life. His homemade edu­cation gave him, with every additional book that he read, a little bit more sen­sitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America.

As a result, he became one of the most articulate and powerful leaders of black America during the 1960s.

In conclusion, Malcolm X got to master vocabulary by copying the dictionary from A section to last one and reading aloud what he had written with visual pictures on it.

Also, he learned to read by reading what he had written, to write by copying the dictionary. Ultimately, for Malcolm X, reading and writing were the most important things to change his life forever.

 

 

Lee says:

 

In genral English writing setting (TOEFL, APA),  A group of sentences makes a 'paragraph' and a group of paragraphs makes an essay. When a graduate level student writes an essay with all separate sentences...he/she cannot expect due grade for that.  Please try to keep TOEFL writing style if you have learned it, or APA if you desire to be successful graduate student.

 

 

Do you have trouble organizing your ideas in paragraphs? Please refer to TOEFL essay style (which you can find resources online) or APA (I strongly recommend it.)  It is your responsibility to keep up with academic expectations that is generally known to students.

 

http://my.ilstu.edu/~jhkahn/APAsample.pdf

Linked above is a sample for you.

 

 

If you have any question, please feel free to email me. I welcome your questions.  :-)