Reading Week 7

There were several things in the Smith and Rawley article that intrigued me. First off I thought the reference to people using commercial slogans in everyday life was funny, and true. When I was in college I used to hang out in the music lounge at the PAC. This is where the vending machines were kept. While visiting with friends, or studying, we'd hear people come in and try to decide what snack they wanted. Most of them chose Snickers bars, because "Snickers really satisfies."

The other really big thing in that article was how it aligned with the lesson I analyzed for class. I knew what things I liked about the lesson originally, but now I have a better understanding of why I felt it would work (small chunks of language, repetition, complete stories, etc.).

The King article was also full of ideas that worked in my mind As a language arts teacher I often used video to illustrate concepts we'd been working on in class. Oddly I never really thought about doing that in an ESL room, ironic really because that was something I enjoyed adding to my Spanish learning. It makes sense that video is a good resource to add to the ESL classroom. The use of extended dialogue that is fairly natural would encourage students to listen so they could understand the story. The visual elements help connect to the story more than a radio program does.

When the article talked about using small clips of the film I felt a little less sure about it. One problem I have with that is, to me, it is very difficult to exclude a scene from a movie. The director put it in for a reason, who am I to change their vision? I feel that to not use the whole movie the students lose out on the flow of the story. On the other hand I can completely understand only usin gone or two scenes from a movie to get at a point. (That may make me a hypocrite.)

I was very interested in the section on sub-titles. Last year I tried watching movies in Spanish (after not using Spanish to any real degree for over 10 years). I got a little frustrated and turned on the sub-titles, in Spanish. It helped me understand the movie a little better. As the movie went along I would turn off the sub-titles for a while (I also cheated with English sub-titles for a few lines at a time when I got really confused). As time went on I turned the sub-titles on less often, I was concerned that I was practicing my reading instead of my listening skills. The article backed up my concern. However, I still think that using sub-titles is helpful to get them started on the lesson. Perhaps the sub-titles could be used for the first part of the movie and then turned off, just to help them start thinking in English.

I don't know the answer, I do know that being able to pull in programs that have recently been on tv or movies new to dvd capture student interest much more quickly than those that are a couple years old. Interestingly, students are more willing to give an older (10, 15 20+ years) movie or show a chance over something that came out during their memory.