Say what?!

Teaching Reading

It's interesting to consider how important reading is as a skill. An exercise conducted by one of my colleagues highlighted this importance with myself and a group of my peers. She conducted the exercise using Low German as the language of choice - no one in the room understood the language, much less were they capable of reading it.

The exercise comprised reading a document and completing the task as required - these were the only instructions offered. The task was timed, and needed to be completed in two minutes. Anyone not completing the task would be asked to leave the room, as their language skills were obviously not high enough to continue in the peer group.

 

By the end of two minutes no one had even started the task, meaning we would all have to be ejected from the room. This was a strong message to send to a group of instructors who were dealing with second language learners who were new to the country, and new to the concept of finding work in a foreign place.

To me, this was a very revealing way of demonstrating the difficulties our newcomer clients may experience in their search for work, and in how we as an organisation had set our expectations of our clients.

It was clear from the document during the skimming phase that this was either a list of instructions or an inventory of items, as the bulleted list style of writing was used. However, beyond that any guesses anyone made as to the nature of the task were grossly off the mark, because we lacked the communicative part of the task.

After discussing the client dilemma that this type of approach provided, we were asked to complete the task with a more detailed set of instructions. we were told that this was a set of instructions, and by the time we were finished we should have drawn a picture. We were given clues to the words being used (die Sonne meaning the sun, der Rasen meaning lawn, ueber meaning above, and unter meaning below). Provided with this new set of instructions, many of the peer group were able to draw a minimalistic image of what the instructions were calling for. Most of the task was completing using our own comprehension of where the sun and grass were located in our world with respect to each other, the fact that the sun was yellow and the grass was green, and so on. It became a constructive reading task that allowed us to use previously gained knowledge to complete it, and the ability to explore the language in a communicative way.

I now truly understand the importance of teaching communicatively in the EAL classroom, particularly when it comes to reading tasks.