Theme-based teaching and learning

Theme-based teaching and learning using the theme-based ideas in foreign language teaching look at the various stages in the planning teaching around a theme. It is said that theme-based work construct meaningful learning opportunities for children, so careful planning from the teacher would be important. In addition, it is also said that theme-based teaching is building links and connections in the networks of children’s language resources.

Theme-based teaching focuses on how children naturally learn. The potential of this approach is to provide realistic and motivating uses of language, so creative thinking and skilled organization are used like a long list of activities relating to all areas of the curriculum under one theme. For this, it demands years of practicing and experience. Even the expert teacher will need careful planning of a theme, to prepare sub-themes and to identify the language learning goals. Firstly, find a theme. Secondly, plan content. Thirdly, plan language learning tasks. Next, learn language through theme-based teaching and learn vocabulary.

The most profitable aspect in this approach is that it can be related to all the areas in the school curriculum. In consequence, as students are going to be using real language to talk about topic probably they already know something about, this approach is going to turn out to be absolutely communicative and meaningful. The language learning of children is likely to revolve around chunks of discourse learnt from talk, stories and songs, vocabulary development, and some aspects of grammatical knowledge, together with elementary literacy skills.

These days, self-directed learning has been identified as an important skills for students and student-centred teaching approaches have been popular. However, we should not neglect teachers’ role in the classroom. In order for the teacher to be a successful helper teachers will need to maximize the time and talent of them. Doing this can make big difference in the outcome of students. What I mean by saying this is that theme-based approach especially among many other teaching methods need a lot of efforts of teachers, so we try to be more diligent helper for students.

Learning Grammar

If someone asks me grammar is important with young learner, I would say ‘yes’. I know it is said that grammar has no place in young learner classroom, that it is too difficult for children or not relevant to their learning, but as a teacher we have to open up the idea of ‘grammar’ and to explore grammar from learners’ perspective because there is no need to rush into technical rules and labels that will confuse.


The chapter says we can teach young learners for developing grammar in the foreign language, not by teaching grammar directly, but by being sensitive to opportunities for grammar learning that arise in the classroom. A grammar-sensitive teacher will see the language patters that occur in tasks, stories, songs, rhymes and classroom talk, and will have a range of techniques to bring these patterns to the children’s notice, and to organize meaningful practice.

In my opinion, the matter of consequence , especially teaching English in young age, is teach them in interesting approach. One of the ways can be teaching grammar through children’s stories in structural, communicative and mixed approaches. Recently, there are many English centers reflecting this trend. They emphasis on doing extensive reading to students, at the same time they try to teach grammar through stories. Depends on centers, the way of they are doing can be pattern drills or incidental learning.

Recently, I found a useful site entitled “http://www.kidsfreesouls.com”. It is a site of teaching grammar through stories and its main users will be young learners. It provides famous stories with grammar exercise as well. The questions are like; ‘Write the Answers in brief & underline the Adjectives’, ‘Find out the verbs in the story & underline them. Now, Make your own sentences with these verbs’, ‘Fill in the blanks with prepositions : in, on, near, under, above, from, after, into, etc.’, ‘’, and etc. I found myself not only this site, this kind of sites found it useful in that it provides useful grammar activities with teaching worksheet and I am using for my students as well.

In addition, other language practice activities that offer structuring opportunities as well. For example, questionnaires, surveys, quizzes, information gap activities, chants can be good ways of teaching grammar. Proceduralising activities is also effective. Learners automatise their use of the grammatical form so that it is available quickly and effectively for use in communication.

Learning spoken language

Before you start criticizing others, you have to take a good look at yourself.


회상하다 look back upon (the past) ; review; retrospect; recollect; reflect upon


지난 일을 돌아보다 look back upon the past

학창 시절을 돌아보다 look back upon one´s school days

고려하다 have regard to; take notice of; think of; take (a matter) into consideration[account]; pay attention to; give heed to

앞뒤를 돌아보지 않고 without reflecting on the circumstances

돌아보지 않다 disregard; ignore; neglect; pay no attention to; leave a thing out of consideration; take no account[notice, thought, heed] of

그는 외양 따위는 돌아보지도 않는다 He has no regard to appearance.

살피며 돌다 make a round; go one´s round; patrol

공장을 돌아보다 visit[go] round a factory



* community member
* spiritual practice

How can we learn spoken language? When we think back on my childhood, I picked up my family or people around me’ spoken words and sentences, not written words. I know it is more nature stage. In case of children, if they do not understand the spoken language, they cannot easily live or be one of community members in society. So, to have children learn spoken language is important and this chapter deals with learning the spoken language.


Children need both to participate in discourse and to build up knowledge and skills for participation. To effectively develop the discourse skills of young learners, teachers need to be aware of types of discourse(organization, components, language forms, children’s developing communication skills and cognitive abilities, the importance of working outwards from the familiar, the primacy of marrative, and the educational significance of discourse.

Being aware of some features as a language teacher, we have to support children’s foreign language discourse skills effectively. We can do it by supporting through motivating topics, task structure, and language practice. In addition, short activities for learning the spoken language are also good and if it is with written language practice, literacy becomes less of a struggle and more of a tool that can be used to assist communication. Using dialogues is also effective way of learning. Dialogues provides communicative phrase that child can learn and offer contextualized sentence patterns that are not very like the spoken language.

Still I have been learning and teaching English speaking skills, I try to have some practices such as getting over any fear I might have of making mistakes, being patient by myself, and grasping good opportunities I have to speak with people in English. As a teacher, teaching good spoken skill with thoughts that “learning any language can be frustrating, but frustration won’t help them. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes” is important so that they can have more opportunities to speak out loud.

Extensive Reading Sources

Following sites have useful materials and ideas on extensive reading:

I will add up constantly.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/9613243/Teachers-Guide-on-Teaching-Reading

http://www.extensivereading.net/er/materials.html (introduced from class)

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/forum-topic/extensive-reading-materials (journal 2)

http://www.buzzle.com/ (journal 2)

http://coyote.miyazaki-mu.ac.jp/learnerdev/LLE/andy2.html

Journal 4

Highlight anything that you have learned through this course and discuss why this is meaningful for your learning and instruction?

Through this course 'Studies in Teaching Second Language Reading', I learnt lots of useful, helpful, and practical knowledge, skills and strategies. Since I have been educated in intensive reading method all the time, I was so pleased that I had a good chance to be educated about ER in that I haven't meet chance to be studied in ER even though I knew that it is important and kind of best way of improving of our reading skills.

After learning the feature, dimension, materials, practice of extensive reading, certainly, I feel I learnt a lot about extensive reading. I am also writing my thesis about ER, so all things that I learnt through this course are meaningful to be honest. Through this course, I became to be an extensive reader myself. So these days, I try to read a lot both in English and in Korean.

By doing ER, I feel ER develops learner autonomy, enhances general language competence, and helps develop general, world knowledge, extends, consolidates and sustains vocabulary growth. I would like to deliver my feeling, experience, knowledge of ER to my students and make good curriculum of it.

Reading Strategies for Struggling Readers

Have you ever come across a non-reader? Maybe you have heard of phrases like "I hate to read, it's very boring.' or 'I never touch a book that's gargantuan to begin with.' And you probably don't think about it again, relegating it to the simple theorem - 'To each his own'. Let's look at this from the reader's point of view. Do you know that there are some people who struggle with even simple reading, forget speed reading? You might have experienced this in your school life - students in class who would absolutely struggle through their reading tests. If they were asked to stand up and read in class, they would get nervous and then drag through the piece with a lot of 'umms' and 'errs' much to the annoyance of the teacher. They were left to wonder how it was possible, that while they struggled through the first paragraph of the page, others had finished the entire essay. Now here's what the thing is - people who struggle with their reading have not developed the 'reading strategies' that other 'readers' have, without even realizing it. Therefore there is a need to have effective reading strategies for struggling readers. The good news is that it is possible to have and teach, reading strategies to struggling readers. The best reading strategies for struggling readers have been developed over the years, and that is what we will be discussing in this article.


Reading Strategies for Struggling Readers Explained
After it is learned that a person (usually a child), has a problem while reading, the most important thing that a parent can do for him/her is to start teaching him these reading strategies as soon as possible. This is because the reading strategies for struggling readers are most effective when taught at a young age. The degree of difficulty in learning these reading strategies for struggling readers increases with age. Thus it is most effective when reading strategies are taught and applied at a young age.

Reading strategies for the struggling readers can be divided into two parts:
1.Decoding Strategies
2.Comprehension Strategies
Decoding Strategies
This involves teaching the student phonemic awareness. Which means teaching the students the literal pronunciation of words by breaking them down into bits and pieces. By learning the bits and pieces that make up a whole word, it is possible for readers to be able to pronounce words that are difficult, unfamiliar and long-because they have good phonemic awareness. When a reader skips words or 'fades out' words or uses a wrong pronunciation, or avoids reading completely - there is a need to teach him phonemics. Thus teaching readers the 'sound' of a language (phonemes), becomes very important. After this has been taught, they need to be coached in their use and made to practice.

Teaching the students the sounds of the letters helps tremendously when teaching them phonemes. They learn how to pronounce several combinations of these letters and also learn the fact that letters aren't always pronounced the way they look. Readers also compare words that they don;t know with familiar words to understand the difference. Thus it is necessary to have a lit of simple and difficult words to 'look' and learn from.

One can also use chunking as one of the reading strategies for struggling readers. In this the reader can chunk unfamiliar words. Chunk together parts of a word and then try to pronounce them in parts. Once the entire word has been read in chunks, then try and club the different chunks of the word together to pronounce the entire word. This needs a lot of practice.

Comprehension Strategies
Comprehension means understanding something. While reading a text, a good reader will subconsciously use comprehension skills, so that when you ask him what the text was about, he will be able to answer it. But a struggling reader does not read to understand, he will simply read a text to get it done with, so when he is asked about the text, he will rarely be able to answer in deep.

Comprehension strategies include teaching the stragglers to re-read a text. Not to be confused with simple reading a text again but rather making a deliberate attempt to understand it. This can be made easier if the reader reads the text with a goal in ind-he has to find the answer to a question. So when he reads with an objective, he will pay more attention and learn to read better.

Also rephrasing and then stating a text will help them to read better. When a reader who struggles, reads a text and then relates it back in his own words, his entire concentration is on understanding the text to rephrase it. Read more on reading comprehension.


Reading Strategies for Struggling Readers - Others
Want to help a struggling reader by teaching him reading strategies can be done over the summer. The summer reading strategies for struggling readers will work best. Here are some essential reading strategies for the struggling reader:

•Use different strategies like videos and audio tapes to teach the student phonemes.

•Let him read a very simple text to a younger class so that he becomes confident.

•Provide him with a partner who can help him read.

•Form a 'readers play', where readers will come together and read/perform their texts. They'll make it more interesting by adding costumes, different voices etc to it.

•Struggling leaders work best when they have one to one training - so try to find a coach for them.

•Give positive feedback whenever possible and reward them when they are successful, this will help the stay motivated.

•Make them write out the words and pronounce out loud so that you can correct if wrong. They can also make a note of the word if it looks different and is pronounced different, for better understanding.

•Start using the decoding and comprehension strategies in daily life, when they learn to use it in daily life, they'll no longer have a block towards them and will learn faster.

Read more on

•Speed Reading Techniques

•Speed Reading Tips

•Effective Teaching - Reading Comprehension Strategies

Even if you know a struggling readers who would probably have difficulty reading through this article, (rather ironic, isn't it?) be sure that it won't be a problem for long. After you've taken tips from these reading strategies for struggling readers, there will be no looking back. So read well and teach better. All the best!



By Rujuta Borkar

Published: 3/18/2010

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/reading-strategies-for-struggling-readers.html

Lee, So-ra & YB Concert and 올밴.

As usual, I went to Lee, So-ra & YB Concert.

It was so amasing and exicing that I couldn't stop jumping.

Of course in Sora's section, I was calm and I was crying... and one of my friends was crying too

 when I saw him..

나를사랑하지않는그대에게. 제발, No.1 were the best among her songs, and 담배가게아가씨. 해야 were the best on YB' performance.

Ant by chance, I met 올밴....

                                                     Today was full of luck!!!!!!