Started: January 23, 2019
Finished: February 2, 2019
Why I Read This Book
This is a book I read for professional development. More specifically, I read it for DELTA Module 3.
The Review
Okay, so I have to make the same disclaimer I make with all books I read for professional development--it's not pleasure reading, and you wouldn't expect it to read like pleasure reading.
That being said, the text is clear and easy to read, and th author does a good job of summarizing a lot of academic studies for the non-academic layperson.
I'm reminded, in a good way, of the readable accessible style of How Languages are Learned, a book I've praised repeatedly (HERE and HERE) on this blog for being very readable.
And indeed, this book is part of the same series: Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers. It has a lot of the same format, style, and even similar illustrations. (I checked, but couldn't find out if it was the same illustrator or not.)
As far as the content...
This is the first book I've read that deals solely with young learners. But it overlaps with language acquisition generally, and besides all of the other language acquisition books I've read have had sections on young learners. So much of this is review for me. So I read through things that I've read through a thousand times already--Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, Chomsky's Universal Grammar, Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, the Critical Period Hypothesis, et cetera.
I complain, but it's probably my fault for reading another introductory text. At this stage in my career, I should be moving beyond introductory textbooks and exploring stuff in more depth. And at least Pinter writes readable prose, so I didn't particularly mind reviewing it.
And I think that's about all I have to say in general terms before getting into my notes and nitpicks.
Notes and Nitpicks
* I've praised this book for being readable, and on the whole it is, but there were a few confusing passages. Most of them occurred when Annamaria Pinter was summarizing someone else's studies.
For example, p.59, when talking about the negotiation of meaning, Pinter writers,
"Oliver found that all the children in her study negotiated meaning. However, when comparing their use of these strategies with that of adults, Oliver found that they used meaning negotiation strategies in a different proportion. They focused on constructing their own meaning rather than facilitating their partner's meaning." (p.59)So what does that mean? From the sentences that follow, I'm guessing it means that children focus more on asking questions to understand what their partner is saying, and not on using comprehension checks to ensure their partner understands what they are saying. But it's all very confusing.
Another example is on pages 48-49.
"In 2001 Marcos Penate Cabrera and Placido Bazo Martinez investigated the effects of two types of story input in their English classes. One story was told to the children using simplified checks, and supporting gestures (interactional modifications). The other story was told using the original story text with interactional modifications. The children's understanding was measured afterwards using a comprehension test. The results showed that the group of children who heard the story with interactive modifications understood the story significantly better. The children were also asked in an interview for their opinion about which type of storytelling was easier to understand. All the children considered that listening with interactive modifications was easier..."But how does this work? I thought only one group heard the story with interactional modifications? So how could both groups report that it was easier?
I'm being a bit unfair here in that I'm nitpicking a couple paragraphs from an otherwise well-written book. But I do need to qualify my praise of the book by saying that some confusing sentences do exist. And while I'm complaining, a couple of the illustrations are mislabeled. (For example on page 60, the text refers to table 5.2, when it's actually 5.3).
* Pages 13-15 talk about Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles, which at one time was considered doctrine in the English language teaching community, but has increasingly been under scrutiny lately. See L is for Learning Styles by Scott Thornbury and A Guide to Pseudoscience in ELT by Russ Mayne. This book, however, was published in 2006, so I think it was before the backlash.
* I mentioned above that I already knew a lot of the basics about the theory. But it would be an exaggeration to say I learned nothing from this book.
One of the things I thought was really useful was the section on motivation. Young children have no external motivation to learn English. They are in the class simply because someone else is making them, and they don't yet have the capability to think about how English will benefit them in their future careers. Their only motivation to learn English is if the teacher makes it fun for them.
It's common sense, but in my own classes, I'm capable of forgetting this sometimes, and wondering why my young learner students aren't more motivated to learn English.
* Whenever I read a book on English teaching, I'm probably guilty of a lot of confirmation bias. I love the parts of the book that give theoretical justification to what I'm already doing in the classroom, but I complain about the parts of the book that ask me to do something different than what I'm used to doing. So take my opinion on these things with a grain of salt.
That being said, I was very much onboard with the parts of this book that advocated using stories and poems in young learner classes, as this is something I've long been passionate about doing anyway. (Pinter also talked about how children around late elementary school enjoy wordplay, puns, jokes and riddles--something I've also noticed and exploited in my classrooms.)
In fact, I got two really good poems out of this book, which I'm going to add to my poem a day project. In the appendix, Annamaria Pinter includes two poems that she says could be used in the ESL classroom: Cats by Eleanor Farjeon and Mice by Rose Fyleman. Both are perfect for ESL learners, and I fully plan on using them in my own classes in the future.
There were a few parts of the book, however, that I thought wouldn't work in the classroom at all. Some of the parts from chapter 8, "Learning to Learn", in which students are encouraged to reflect on their own learning. It's good in theory, I suppose, but I could just picture some of my teenage students rolling their eyes at the self-reflection questions. Some of the proposed topics for lessons also struck me as not likely to engage the imagination of teenagers. Although to be fair, I think some of these topic lessons are just meant to be examples. Pinter does acknowledge (on pages 24-25) that the best lessons are when you find a topic that the students are interested in, and then build the lesson around that.
* The view of grammar teaching, especially for the younger children, is similar to what Michael Lewis advocates in The Lexical Approach. Vocabulary and grammar are interdependent. By teaching children set lexical phrases, we are also teaching them grammatical structures.
Video Review
Video review HERE and HERE (I went into 2 videos) and embedded below
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Language
No comments:
Post a Comment