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It’s amazing how often speaking ability doesn’t translate to writing ability with foreign language learners. In fact, they use different parts of the brain so it’s not uncommon to meet dazzling conversationalists who can barely compose an intelligible email. If you’re a teacher of language, it’s your job to bridge this gap, not only helping your students to write great sentences, but also organizing their thoughts into complete letters, essays, papers, or even books.

Never fear, because Open Equal Free’s Literacy Resources and Ed Tips are here to help! In this article, we’ll give you a bird’s eye view of teaching writing: how to help your students get past their fears, organize their ideas, and communicate effectively.

Don’t Lose Focus, Write for a Reason!

Why do we write? To communicate ideas, of course! This is perhaps one of the most important rules for teaching writing. The more you have your students write to communicate an idea effectively to another person, the better. Sure, that person can be you, but why not to another student, or better yet, a whole group of them?

Instead of having a student write a biography she quietly turns in, why not have her write a biography of a famous person without stating the name? Then, have her read the biography out loud to the class. If the class can guess who the bio is about, the student did a good job. If the class can’t guess who they’ve written about, she needs to get back to work!

This can work with almost any writing assignment. Instead of making the goal to “get an A,” the goal becomes to “use your writing to communicate an idea effectively.” Not only do students immediately know whether they’ve succeeded or not, but they also understand why they’ve failed, and the reason they’ve failed goes straight to the heart of writing: They didn’t get their ideas across to their readers.

Build Strong Writers, Don’t Expect To Birth Them

It’s one of the oldest plays in the teacher book: Scaffolding. Most teachers know that you can’t take your students from zero to sixty without some steps in between. What many teachers are unable to accept is that sometimes you can’t take your students from zero to two without that crucial step in the middle.

Whenever your students are having difficulty with anything, the best thing you can do is stop, rewind, and break the lesson into smaller pieces. We have a whole article on scaffolding coming down the pipeline, but until then, here’s how to break writing down into manageable bites.

First of all, think long and hard about what you’re teaching. Are you teaching writing? Writing and vocab? Writing, vocab, and grammar? Even if you are teaching multiple things, or expect your students to negotiate multiple new language concepts, the trick is to walk them through them so that they’re only tackling one at a time.

For example, let’s say you want them to write a restaurant review. If you try to get a bunch of beginning language learners to not only organize their thoughts, but also generate vocabulary and decide what tenses and phrasing are appropriate for a review article all at once, you’re likely setting them up for failure. Break it down!

Like all scaffolding, how many of these steps you’ll have to do depends on the level of your students and what your objectives for the lesson are, but, here are some bites you can help them take during your lesson:

Set the Context

In the beginning of the lesson you would set the context and elicit enough vocabulary words and related language for them to use in their writing. Even if they have a pretty solid vocabulary  it just adds another burden for them to carry while they try to learn to write. Why not teach the vocab and phrasing they’ll need separately so that they can focus on organizing their ideas and communicating effectively?

Show An Example

This step can get dicey quickly, especially in contexts where students are used to simply copying from a teacher on the board. The best way to avoid this is by providing the example early on, and then removing it before moving on to any other steps. This could happen after you’ve generated vocabulary and structure, or, depending on your students (maybe they have a lot of vocabulary but not much confidence writing, or maybe they’ve been writing for a while but don’t have much vocabulary around this specific subject).

Generate Some Structures

Another great pre-writing activity is to generate actual grammatical structures students might use. For restaurant reviews, this could be as easy as reviewing simple past tense. For other assignments you may want to generate some language that might be difficult for them. The key, of course, is to modulate how much you give them, and how directly applicable it is to the level of your students.

For early beginners, you may be using elicitation to generate almost every sentence as a class, leaving students to simply arrange the ideas in the appropriate order. For more advanced classes, you may generate a couple of examples that they are expected to rewrite and expand entirely on their own.

Use Graphic Organizers

Generating and organizing ideas and constructing the language to share them are two different tasks. If you ask students to do all of that at once and they face difficulties, a graphic organizer step will help you pull the process apart and give your students the tools they need to build to the point where they can do these steps at once, independently. You can find links to graphic organizers on our literacy page.

Editing & Rewriting

Constructive criticism is great, and providing it is certainly a large part of your job as a teacher, but it is possible to criticize too much. How many new ideas would you expect your students to absorb in a single class? Three? Four? Maybe five? You certainly wouldn’t introduce all of the tenses in first and third person in a single beginner class, it would be too much.

Likewise, if students have made a dozen mistakes in their papers, do you think they can internalize and learn from all of them in one go?

Probably not.

Instead, tell your students that, for each paper, you’ll pick about three to five of the most important conventions errors and focus on those. Remember to emphasize that the focus goes both ways. You’ll be focusing on a few of their mistakes, and you expect them to focus on improving those for the next paper.

Grading

Have a grading rubric. Share it with your students. I’ve never been a fan of percentile grades for writing. How some teachers differentiate between an essay scored at 97% and one scored at 98% without being arbitrary, or over-focusing on conventions, is beyond me. A common answer is to choose a scale, usually from one through five or six. That’s more useful when talking about writing. Then translate the score into whatever grading system your school uses. Need a place to start? Check out this example from Florida.

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Any complete language curriculum is bound to include reading. Plenty of research has shown us that reading and writing use different parts of the brain than speaking and listening, which means the skills don’t translate as well as intuition would lead us to believe and require quite a bit of focused attention.

At the heart of all good language teaching is communication. The goal with reading, therefore, is not to understand the dictionary definition of every word in a block of text, but to be able to understand the ideas that an author is trying to communicate to the reader. For many teachers (and students) this can be incredibly counter-intuitive.

The goal is to navigate concepts, not function as a human dictionary. When reading your own native language, or any language you read fluently, you don’t stop to ponder the definition and grammatical function of every word in a bit of text, but rather your brain quickly sweeps through the writing, pulls out the ideas, and you go on with your happy day.

Because we can explain the dictionary definition of (almost) every word we read, we often assume that this is a prerequisite to navigate the concepts in texts. In fact, this isn’t true at all thanks to the magic of context clues. Take this, for example:

In the above example, if I asked an average intermediate class what word goes in the blank, they would easily respond with “dog.” Your goal as a teacher, then, is to be able to present them with this passage:

…and easily get an answer to the question: “What does canine mean?” without having them check their dictionaries. They use the same skills but the second one is often more difficult for students, especially students without a strong academic background in their native language.

The first is familiar, comfortable even. They aren’t supposed to know what’s in the blank, and using deductive reasoning to figure it out is what they’re meant to do. The second, however, presents them with an apparent lacking on their part. They’re missing something they were supposed to have and need to fix it… with a dictionary.

The excellent reading teacher, therefore, not only teaches students how to deduce those meanings from texts, but empowers them with the belief that they can, and they should. When students become comfortable with unknown words, or even sentences and paragraphs, whole new texts open up to them that they wouldn’t have bothered to pull meaning from before.

They may not understand every bit of that New York Times article, but they’ll walk away understanding the basic, most important facts. Which, in two days time, is about what you or I would still remember anyway. Never forget, partial understanding is still understanding.

So, how do you train students to navigate texts fluently while simultaneously building foundational literacy skills? Easy, with pre-reading and multiple sweeps.

If you’re reading this, you likely read English relatively fluently, so I’m going to use a bit of text from an obscure language as an example: An article from the Esperanto Wikipedia.

Phase 1: Pre-Reading

The first goal with pre-reading is to set the context. Once they have a basic idea of the context, they have a much better idea of what sorts of facts they are looking for: what to expect and where to expect it. You want to make sure to use techniques like elicitation to keep your students active and at the center of the process instead of simply feeding the information to them.

Questions like these should work wonders:

Phase 2: Sweeps

Now it’s time to attack the article itself. The goal here is to give your students a series of manageable tasks to accomplish for each read through, not to understand the entire article at once. Once they get proficient at pulling out important information piece by piece, you can slowly begin to combine the reading tasks into a smaller number of read-throughs.

Here is an example using the same article as before:

Sweep 1 – Dates: Have students read through the article, circling every date.

Sweep 2 – Identify all the proper nouns: Have students read through the article, underlining every proper noun.

Sweep 3 – Identify places vs. people: Have students read through the article a third time, turning the underlines on places into boxes.

Now, your students have have a good deal of the important information in the article identified. More importantly, they feel confident completing simple tasks with the text at hand. The next sweeps lead them to answer actual questions about Stowe’s life.

Sweep 4 – Birth & Death: Read the article and find out when HBS was born and when she died.

Sweep 5 – Bio: Now answer the following questions: Where was she born? Where did she grow up? In what year did she move to Cincinatti? What year did she get married? What was her husbands name?

Sweep 6 – Works: How many books did HBS write? What was her most famous book?

Phase 3: Using the Knowledge

Now that you’ve done all of those sweeps and had students write their answers in complete sentences, do you know what you’ve got? A classroom full of students primed and ready to write whole-paragraph summaries of the article. It’s actually a fairly simple step at this point and how much you do before setting them off on their own depends on the level of your class.

For a very low level class you would work as a group to generate five or more sentences about Harriet Beecher Stowe, then ask them to take those sentences and use them to write a full paragraph. The goal is to model a very basic paragraph of simple sentences “Harriet Beecher Stowe was an author. She was born in 1811. She died on 1896…” and so on.

For a more advanced class, you might generate one or two sentences and have them do the rest, or if they’ve been doing very well, simply ask them to write using the notes they’ve already created.

Keep in mind this sort of reading activity works best with texts just beyond their independent reading ability, it’s the perfect way to “take the next step” and get them comfortable with pieces of writing that are just outside of their comfort zone. For determining reading ability and choosing texts, check out these great articles: How to Test Reading Skills in Any Language, and How to Determine Text Difficulty in Any Language.

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As funding for education in the developing world begins to dry up, resource-rich low and middle income nations have a powerful option to stand on their own, according to a recent UNESCO policy paper. Turning the ‘Resource Curse’ Into a Blessing for Education, which is certainly worth a read, looks at 17 countries and examines their particular natural resource situation and what effect those resources could have on progress towards the UN’s Education For All goals.

The report points to a known but not always understood dilemma in international development: The Resource Curse. Paradoxically, countries rich in non-renewable resources are often the slowest to develop. According to the report, it is possible to not only break that paradox, but effectively funnel the gains from those resources into education. As the 21st century marches on, it’s becoming more and more clear that the richest, most powerful countries in the world will be those that use their resources to develop the capacity of their inhabitants.

“To transform natural resources into a blessing, governments must maximize their revenue from extractive activities, manage them transparently and invest the wealth in sectors that will generate higher, equitable benefits for the population.” Botswana is provided as an example of a country that has successfully used it’s natural resource abundance to expand education within the country.

It’s also a particularly lucrative time to turn resources into realized benefits for a country. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the region furthest from meeting the Millennium Development Goals for education, potential profit from natural resources tripled from 1998 to 2008. Unfortunately, the suggestions given by the report to realize these improvements are fairly common sense: Higher transparency and efficiency in resource management followed by investing revenues in education.

Well, yes, that seems to be what needs to get done, but Sub-Saharan Africa has been facing issues of transparency and corruption for the duration of the development discussion with no silver bullet fired. In the end, it seems to be a reiteration of the resource curse. These countries do, in fact, have the resources within their borders necessary to make lasting progress towards development but due to a host of issues, corruption and mismanagement often being chief among them, don’t.

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Share of the Week is open content stuff so great and awesome that we can’t keep it to ourselves.

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On Sunday, April 7th, a new initiative titled Consortium of International Education Advisors in India was started to promote Indian education all over the world. ”It will target 10,000 international students by 2020. The system will be launched at 10 selected universities this year,” said Manindar Singh, one of the organizers of the event and also co-chairman of National Council on Education.

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But what’s next? Once students are comfortable with their machines, a bit older, and capable of grappling with written (or typed, or spoken) English, there are many resources that will help them continue with their education and become genuine IT experts, for free!

Codecademy

Codecademy is a true innovation when it comes to self-learning by doing. After creating an account, you can choose from several coding languages and dive into interactive activities. You immediately begin performing small operations using the language in question and are consistently pushed to use the information you’ve learned to solve small coding problems such as coding a mini-program to multiply the number of words in your name by nine.

Languages available include Java, HTML & CSS, Python, Ruby, jQuery, as well how to create Apps. With a mixture of hands on and project based learning, Codecademy provides a highly engaging and effective way to get students started with coding.

More Online Coursework

A few new players have come into the game of online course work. Although the three we mentioned in the first article are still good bets (MIT Open Courseware, Kahn Academy, & iTunes U), Coursera and Edx have also come on to the scene as great options for your higher-level learning needs.

Both of these new-comers (As well as MIT Open Courseware) unfortunately require that you sign up for courses and take them in specified time periods. Although there aren’t class times that have to be attended, it’s not possible to direct your students to start and stop them at any time, and thus require some planning to successfully integrate them into your semester/year.

Still, they’re a great way to give your students access to a very high level of instruction in IT and computing skills, for free!

HTML Dog

If the Codecademy interactions are a bit too confusing for your students, or don’t quite get at what you’re looking for, the HTML Dog tutorials are also great tool for learning for HTML & CSS. Here, students also learn by doing, but the actual coding takes place outside of the browser and is a bit more direct (no tricky problems to work through).

There’s a bit more freedom to break up the lessons, and to allow students to experiment with variations in code. You can have them combine lessons into mini-projects, experiment with changing the code to different colors, or displaying different methods, and otherwise take advantage of the freedom of simply using a .txt file as your coding playground.

Youtube Tutorials (JREAM!)

In general, if there’s a program or skill you want your students to learn, Youtube is a great place to search. Generally a search for “[Subject] Tutorial” will turn up a wide variety of options for whatever you enter as the subject. “HTML Tutorial,” “Java Tutorial,” “Networking Tutorial,” and “Facebook app Tutorial” all turn up a ton of options.

If you can get to a location with fast internet, it is possible to save Youtube videos for later use without an internet connection, making this the most versatile of all the recommendations for those of us working in remote locations. You can save videos straight from your browser using savevid.com (so, it will work in an internet cafe where you can’t install programs). To do it with a local program, check out this article on it from PC World, or these programs that do the trick: YTD Video Downloader, KeepVid.

Jream Tutorials are so good they bear mentioning all on their own. When your students are ready to learn a wide variety of high-end IT skills, this is a great place to start. As with any set of Youtube tutorials, students can work whenever they like, go as slow or fast as they like, learn only what interests them, and watch and rewatch the tutorials in any order that suits them.

I’ve personally used JREAM to learn Adobe Illustrator, but it has a staggeringly wide array of tutorials available, HTML, Facebook Apps, Java, MySQL, Python, PHP, Adobe Photoshop, Linux, Code Igniter, to name a few.

Graphic Design!

We talked about some free art programs and tools in the original post on what to teach in computer class, but eventually your students will want to go beyond making pictures to making graphics. Graphics doesn’t necessarily mean flashy computer animations. It generally refers to a more sophisticated form of computer art: Images that provide information, lead the viewer to a conclusion, or give a desired impression.

For general overviews on graphic layout and design, searches in Youtube will generally turn up great tutorials on specific elements of design or how to use certain programs. For more general introductory courses, you an give these a try:

Teach Yourself Graphic Design: A Self-Study Course Outline

Want to Know How to Design? Then Learn the Basics

Infographics!

A more specific project to have students work on that will put those graphics skills to use is making Infographics. Infographics take a lot of confusing information and lay it out in a way that is both pleasing and easy to understand. Here are some great articles that list free tools your class can use to make outstanding informative images: 5 Amazing Tools to Create Your Own Infographics, The 5 Best Free Tools for Making Slick Infographics, and 10 Awesome Free Tools to Make Infographics.

Hardware

A final skill you can mix with Youtube tutorials, and some guides online, is teaching your students about computer hardware. Even simple tasks can teach them enough to keep your computer lab in tip-top shape, for free! If you’ve got spare parts, or even a spare computer, lying around, be sure to make use of them as demonstration tools. If you haven’t got a scrap of hardware to spare, it’s possible to use functioning computers as examples, albeit with more caution and supervision.

Simple tasks you can direct students to do involve uninstalling and reinstalling bits of hardware (harddrive, optical drive, fan, RAM, etc.) or switching those pieces between machines. Of course, there’s the tried-and-true young engineer’s activity of taking a computer entirely apart and putting it back together again, but that should be reserved for your advanced students or less valuable components.

Note as well that some pieces of hardware carry unexpected risks of damage, such as from static electricity. It’s usually considered a small risk by more experienced (and cavalier) IT nerds, but it’s something to be aware of for sure.

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If you’ve kept up with the series, you are now aware of the three major components of literacy: Decoding, Fluency, and Comprehension. If you’ve studied literacy outside of these articles, you’re probably also aware of the decades-long war being waged about which of these skills should be tested for, which deserves direct instruction, and which is “last year’s/decade’s/century’s” methodology.

We’re not going to get into the middle of that messy, messy debate. The goal of this series is to let you know the components of literacy, and therefore of holistic literacy assessment. Be warned that, although these skills do tend to develop in tandem, it is absolutely possible to create young “readers” who can decode and fluently read a block of text quite beautifully while not comprehending much, if anything at all.

Like most long waged battles for the right way to do things, the answer is likely somewhere in the middle. You can’t be a good reader without all three skills and no single skill will ensure that the other two get pulled along with it.

What you assess depends largely on your goals and the resources available. If your goal is to get a snapshot of the overall progress of a school, you can likely choose one of the skills over the other two. If your goal is to get detailed snapshots and track the progress of individual students, you’ll likely need a more involved, holistic test.

If you’ve got restricted resources (and time is of course a resource), you may simply have to make some tough decisions about which skills to test. In the younger grades, emphasis should be placed on decoding and fluency, with the focus slowly shifting to comprehension as students enter the older grades.

If you’re testing students reading in phonetic languages, there will likely be a very clear point after which assessing decoding is all but useless, and that may be rather early on. For a complicated language like English, decoding can still be an issue well into secondary school (with such exciting words as foliage, bordeaux, and pyrrhic being considered English words).

For a quick and dirty assessment of a whole class at a level where decoding is still a relevant skill, the spelling test style assessment from part I will likely give you a good idea of where each individual student, and the class as a whole, stands.

If you have a bit more time, the 60 second fluency test from part II is your best bet to get an idea of the literacy level of a group of students.

For an even more complete picture, a comprehension test (also from part II) will let you know if those skills are creating truly capable readers.

Why mix and match?

If comprehension is truly an indicator of holistic reading, why bother with the others at all? Primarily, because you may not have time to design, administer, and score, hundreds of comprehension tests. Still, there’s also a time where you’ll want to test the other skills in addition to comprehension assessments.

When you ask? When students aren’t comprehending, the other tests will let you know why. If a student can’t answer questions about a text they’ve “read,” where is the deficiency? It may be that they simply can’t decipher the symbols on the page into the words they represent, it may be that the process of deciphering is so slow for them that they’re hopelessly frustrated with any text longer than a few sentences, or it may be that they simply haven’t developed the skills necessary to grapple with concepts gleaned from higher level texts.

The only way to know precisely what the problem is, and how to address it, is with a test that assesses all three areas.

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In this series, our goal is to give educators and NGOs working in non-major world languages the ability to test the literacy skills of their students. In Part I, we discussed the skill of decoding and how to design a simple spelling test that can measure a student’s level in that skill. In Part II, we’ll discuss the two more commonly recognized skills: Fluency and Comprehension.

While we can’t have one assessment that works universally, we can identify basic rules that make it possible to design reading assessments for any context. After reading this post, you should have a basic idea of how to create and use assessments that accurately measure the skills of your students.

For both of these assessments, you’ll need texts that are at the appropriate level for the readers you’re testing. If you don’t have any leveled texts, or fear that they may be off the mark, check out this article on measuring text readability in any language.

Fluency

Once a student has mastered decoding and can mentally transform characters on a page into the sounds that make up a word, the next step to becoming a strong reader is to do this quickly and effortlessly. Fluent readers do not treat every new word as a puzzle, painstakingly dissecting it into consonant and vowel sounds. Instead they are able to automatically decode a word without any conscious effort.

Fluency is a skill, like any other, that is developed slowly over time. It often follows right on the heels of decoding, although many an argument has been waged over how naturally one follows from the other and how specifically fluency as a skill needs to be taught.

Testing fluency is actually surprisingly easy. You’ll need an “on level” text (a piece of writing you would expect most students of a particular level to be able to read successfully), a watch, and a place to record the students’ scores. That’s it. Sit down with the students in a quiet place and ask them to read the test aloud for 60 seconds. If they struggle with a word for more than three or four seconds, it’s fine to feed them the word and let them continue, marking the word as an error rather than allowing it to stop them in their tracks.

Their fluency score is the number of words they were able to read per minute minus any errors. Errors include misread words, incomplete words, skipped words, or repeated words. If you feel a student may finish the text before the minute is up, have them start again from the beginning, adding the second reading to the score as well.

It, of course, helps to have a copy of the text for the teacher to read along to with word counts next to each line, as well as a place to mark down the number of mistakes and to record scores. Ideally, this is out of sight of the student (a clipboard does the trick) to avoid making them uneasy during the reading.

Comprehension

So, they can fluently and quickly sound out words, but that’s only half the battle. Do they understand what they’re reading? Without comprehension, reading becomes a parlor trick–something that can be done on command if asked, but not a useful life skill.

Comprehension can be tested with a pen-and-paper test quite easily. In fact, most literacy assessments out there focus largely on comprehension, assuming decoding and fluency is already present. While this is fine for adult or advanced learners (who are expected to already have mastered decoding and fluency) young learners are building all three skills at the same time.

When designing a comprehension test, it’s important to remember that reading narrative and expository texts often calls upon different skills, so including one of each is likely a good idea. Sequential written instructions are also a beast unto their own, and testing a student’s ability to follow and understand basic written instructions is never a bad idea.

Of course, if time is more abundant than physical resources, it’s absolutely possible to test students using a single copy of the text and an oral interview rather than a written test.

Types of Questions

Comprehension tests generally have three types of questions:

1. Cloze

Cloze questions are more commonly known as “fill in the blank.” These sorts of questions are often best used for simple comprehension questions with easily identified answers. A word or answer bank makes this a bit easier, depending on the task at hand.

2. Multiple choice

Multiple choice questions allow you to ask a wider variety of questions without leading students to give wildly divergent or unrelated answers and are also fast and easy to grade.

3. Written/Open answer

While written answer questions can most accurately assess how deeply a reader understands a given text, it can also be very difficult to score. Any time you use a question that includes a written response, it’s best to also have a clear and well-defined rubric that you will use to score them.

Difficulty of Questions

For comprehension assessment, I would recommend leveling the test with three basic types of questions. Three of each of the three types, for a total of nine, should give you a basic idea of a student’s comprehension ability.

Level 1: Search and Fill 

This is the most basic level of comprehension. Students can search through the text for basic, simple bits of information. Questions should be worded similarly to how they are presented in the text. Essentially, these questions let you know that students can understand the most basic and obvious facts from a piece of text.

For example, if a text says:

Questions might include:

Level 2: Understanding

These questions reveal a more complete level of comprehension. Students finish the text with an understanding of its content and meaning, without having to search for specific answers using clues from question wording. Although still clearly found within the text, information asked for takes a different form from how it appears in the provided passage.

For example, if a text reads:

Questions might include:

Level 3: Drawing Inferences

This level of comprehension reveals a truly complex analysis of the text. The reader is able to guess the author’s intention, unspoken biases, and different possible points of view that can be taken when reading the test.

For example, if a text reads:

Questions might include:

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