The Teaching Programme

By Author: emaly su
Total Articles: 235
Comment this article

The sparkly studs cheap Chanel jewelry look good with the matching sparkly-studs. You can choose between a small discount Chanel jewelry stud, or a long dangling earring.

This EAP programme was a theme-based course of up to 19 contact hours per week.1 Fourteen of those hours were with the main class teacher, three with a co-teacher, and two with an elective teacher.

Every class shared common features, including work on study themes, preparation for and review of a weekly guest lecture, and the development of formal speaking skills through seminars.

Time was also explicitly dedicated to each of the four skills, and to vocabulary. Within this framework, the main teachers h; some flexibility in determining the teaching programme for individual classes, in particular the allocation of time to different areas of skill development.

For this class a considerable emphasis was placed on reading with speed, intensive and extensive reading all being scheduled in the weekly programme. Students read from ...
... a range of genres including the media and theme-related readings.

The most unusual aspect of the class programme was the inclusion of 20 minutes of sustained silent reading at the end of each morning, with the teacher modelling good reading behaviour by reading silently during this time. The teacher was not engaging in other activities, such as marking, or moving around the room, or in any way overtly monitoring the students.

At the start of the course the principles of and rationale for extensive reading were introduced, and fitted naturally into the first theme of the course (Introduction to Learning a Language). Learners were introduced to the resources of the Language Learning Centre, particularly its library of graded readers, which had been catalogued into bands of difficulty.

Learners chose their readers from this library and read for pleasure only; there was no activity related to the reading included in the programme.

Learners were regularly encouraged to read in their own time, and to read as much as possible but at least two graded readers a week, with reminders of opportunities to renew books. Most students had no trouble in remembering to bring their graded reader each day, nor to return and renew their readers.

A set of New Zealand School Journals was kept in the classroom and a copy given to any student without a book to read, so no one was ever without reading material.

The reason why learners were encouraged to read graded readers was also related to these principles, particularly the first. Results for this class from the Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation 1990), which was administered at the start of the course, indicated that two-thirds of the class did not have mastery of the 2OOO-word level and therefore reading centred around academic texts would not have been successful in extensive reading terms.

Learners would have been encountering too many unknown words in such tests, and this in turn would potentially have interfered with the fourth, fifth, and seventh of Day and Bamford's principles.

The use of graded readers does not, however, signal a focus on reading literature as both fiction and non-fiction are represented in such schemes, and students were free to choose their own reading material.2 Further, while students were encouraged to read graded readers in class, no restrictions were placed on materials they read in their own time.

As a result of this commitment to extensive reading, the learners spent around 100 minutes a week reading silently for pleasure in class which equated to between 16 and 17 hours throughout the course, allowing for evaluation and assessment days at the beginning and end of the course. In other words, almost one week of 'teaching time' was dedicated to extensive reading. Of key interest was whether the students would accept this dedication of class time to such a 'non-academic' activity as reading for pleasure.