RE: "Special English"

I use Special English with my students once or twice a week. I have
assigned it to them as homework in what I call "3-2-1 English". Here are
the instructions that I send to students for doing speaking homework:

http://www.davekees.com/content/view/87/26/ (By the way, if you visit my
website, I'd appreciate it if you click on a couple of the ads of my
sponsors.)

Last night, three of my students called to do their speaking homework
because we will have a class at their office today.

COMPRENDE, AMIGO?

The linguistical theory behind using Special English (and also graded
readers) is summed up in Krashen's Comprehensible Input. Students need
massive amounts of language input that is i+1, or one level up from
where they are at. In this way they have more opportunity to derive
meaning from context and they shouldn't need to grab their dictionaries
for every other word.

There are thousands of VOA Special English reports and stories. This
also goes along with Krashen's idea of allowing students to select what
interests them rather than the teacher assigning something that may not
be interesting. I'm surprised at the kinds of stories my students
choose. I would have never guessed that they would find those particular
stories interesting. They report that they are interested in about 95%
of the stories they have chosen.

TOP-DOWN TOPS BOTTOM-UP

The idea behind my 3-2-1 instructions to the students is to use a
top-down approach. In a bottom-up approach, commonly used in China and
places where a traditional approach or grammar translation approach is
used, students usually learn all the new words and then listen to the
dialog or read the text. In a top-down approach, students don't know the
new words first and have to guess the meaning by context. 

This activates the student's mind much more as they try to make
associations between the words they are listening to and words they
already know. And because the material is i+1 they can guess most or all
of it. These connections to their current language bank and the new
language they acquire will be stronger that if they were just memorizing
words from a list. 

I have them spiral down, after listening, to reading the text, and then
spiral down to where they are allowed to read it with a dictionary if
they were unable to guess the words any other way.

"I JUST CALLED...TO SAY...I LOVE YOU HOMEWORK!..."

When the students call me to do their speaking homework they have the
opportunity to use the new English they have just listened to and read.
They have already heard the pronunciation. They have the text in front
of them. They can draw from the words and grammar to talk to me.
Low-intermediate students will have a tougher time with this task. I
allow them to simply paraphrase the story. To keep upper-intermediates
from simply reading the text or paraphrasing it I try to twist the task
a little. For example, in a news report about education I ask them if
the situation is the same in China. 

FOLLOWING

Although I'm sometimes on a bus or walking on the street when they call
to do their homework, I'm usually at home. So while they are talking I
open the webpage where the Special English story is (www.unsv.com) and
look up the particular story they have chosen so I can follow along a
bit and make sure they are not reading. Just knowing that I will open
the webpage causes them to make an extra effort to make sure they don't
lean too heavily on the text.

"ACCORDING TO OUR RECORDS..."

I also open the online Google Spreadsheet where I keep our class records
and enter into the log that they have done their homework, what story
they did, what new words they learned and whether or not they found the
story interesting. This class log is accessible to all the students so
they can see what stories other students used and thought were
interesting. They can also check their attendance, homework, quiz, test
and average scores.

They don't know it but I'm planning on testing the students after a
period of time on the new words they said they learned to check the
retention. This is just some Active Research I'm interested in. Since I
made a record of their new words this will be easy to do.

KRASHEN WOULDN'T APPROVE

Since I mentioned my alignment with some of Krashen's ideas I have to
add my deviation from Krashen. The idea of requiring the students to do
a task after a Comprehensible Input exercise is contrary to his
suggestions. He feels that such tasks, reports, quizzes, etc. raise the
"affective barrier", creates some negativity, which hinders the students
from enjoyable learning. Of course, my students don't seem unduly
pressured about this. They seem to enjoy it and appreciate the little
pressure I do put on them to practice their English.

TO CORRECT OR NOT TO CORRECT, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Following Truscott's idea that a lot of correction is not going to do
much good I mostly just listen. I feel that 99% of the benefit of the
speaking homework is making the student talk about the subject, not my
corrections of their English. 

"EVERYBODY'S TALKING AT ME, I CAN'T HEAR A WORD THEY'RE SAYING, ECHOES
IN MY MIND..."

A good mobile phone is great for this sort of thing. My Sony-Ericsson
K700 had crystal clear sound with the headset. It was really amazing.
But I lost that phone and am now using my old Nokia 8250. Sometimes if
the connection is not so good between us, I may not catch every word
they say. In this case I let it go believing, again, that for my lower
and upper intermediate students 100% accuracy is not as important as
their effort to communicate. 

After they have done their little report I will then ask them a couple
related questions. "Are you like that?" "Do you know anyone who has that
disease?" "Have you heard about that type of business before?" etc. Then
I thank them for doing their homework. It takes 5-10 minutes.

WHAM, SPAM, THANK YOU MA'M!

The nice thing about my Nokia is that I can use the infrared link to my
notebook computer and a free Nokia program to send SMS phone text
messages to my students. I send them a reminders to do their homework.
One time the message said something like, "What can you do on a rainy
weekend like this? Hmmm, I know! It's a great time to do your English
homework!" I have a macro on my computer that I can use to insert all of
the students' mobile phone numbers in a flash. It's almost like spamming
but they love this kind of spam.

I'm using this kind of homework with all of my corporate students but I
don't use this sort of homework with my 170 college students. That would
be too great a load. 


Dave Kees

===========================================================
davekees-zDpH8GSzhyhWk0Htik3J/w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - Guangzhou, China - skype: 
davekees








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