English Education

It just about goes without saying that when you are reading aloud to your students, you should read with theatrical expression, dramatic timing, and authentic enthusiasm. Mem Fox says, “There’s no exact right way of reading aloud, other than to try to be as expressive as possible. As we read a story, we need to be aware of our body position, our eyes and their expression, or eye contact with the child or children, our vocal variety, and our general facial animation. But each of us will have our own special way of doing it” (2001, p. 40). When Joyce Zawaly, a fourth-grade teacher, has reading conferences with her students, she listens to her students read a passage from their independent reading book that they have selected and practiced. If their reading is monotone and word-by-word, she coaches them to be more expressive, reminding them of the way she models expressive reading during read-aloud. Joyce even goes so far as to create a different voice f...

Dear readers... Tonight, I would like sharing about Pronoun . Many people ask me “ what is the definition of Pronoun ?” this writing only one of the definitions and a brief explanation about pronoun . A pronoun is a word that is used as a substitute of a noun or of more than one noun. ·          John finished the experiment. He had worked three days to prepare it. [The pronoun he takes the place of the noun John . The pronoun it takes the place of the noun experiment .] ·          Helen and David are excellent engineers, and they plan to open a firm. The pronoun they takes the place of the nouns Helen and David .] The word to which a pronoun refers (whose place it takes) is called the antecedent of the pronoun. Using pronouns in place of nouns relieves the monotony of repeating the same noun over and over. In the preceding example, John is the antecedent of he , and exper...

What does curriculum vitae mean? The words come from the Latin and mean literally ‘the course of your life’ or the brief story of your career. The term is often abbreviated to CV, and these two letters are used to represent the term in this book. In some countries a CV is known as a résumé (pronounced ‘rez-ume-ay’). This is a French word which means ‘summary’. Therefore, given the individual nature of this document, there is no such thing as the right way to construct a CV. Every careers adviser has different ideas about the best way to design and fill in the document. Every employer will like to see this style or that layout. Each thinks that this or that should be included, in this or that manner. This book outlines the way I have found employers to be most impressed, and uses three basic rules that you will find repeated throughout the book: 1.        Keep it simple. An uncluttered document gets read before a fussy one....

Tunmer, Herriman, and Nesdale (1988) define metalinguistic awareness as the ability to “reflect on and manipulate the structural features of spoken language” (p. 136). In some respects, limiting the definition to spoken language is useful—for example, by forcing one to make a distinction between phonemic awareness and phonics. However, I would prefer to remove the word “spoken” from the definition, since this word narrows the scope of the construct “metalinguistic awareness” too much. For example, I would want to consider reflecting on or manipulating the order of words in a sentence (i.e., syntactic awareness) to be a kind of metalinguistic awareness whether the sentence was written or spoken. In the field of reading, the ubiquity of the term phonemic awareness has made many aware of at least one type of metalinguistic awareness. However, there are a variety of subcategories of metalinguistic awareness, each defined in terms of the particular units o...

So how do you get article ideas? Where do they come from? There are numerous ways to find usable, salable ideas. I would like sharing about the great ways to generate ideas . Explore these and find some of your own as well. 1. Take a lot of showers. Ask twenty successful freelance writers where they get their best ideas, and it’s safe to bet nineteen of them will say, ‘‘in the shower.’’ There’s even some science to back them up—possibly something about negative ions. But who cares, as long as it works? 2. Put your subconscious to work.   Remember that one writer in twenty who doesn’t get ideas in the shower? Odds are he would tell you that the best ideas seem to bubble up out of nowhere. That, some say, is the subconscious mind at work. But you don’t have to sit back and wait for your subconscious to start bubbling. You can give it an assignment. Once, Napoleon Hill, one of the founders of Success magazine, was trying to come up with a title for a...

Tonight, I would like sharing an article about another reading aloud strategies. It is Prior knowledge. I was reading a book written by Mary Pope Osborne. It was the week after winter break, but the opportunity to read the newest book in a familiar series was too good to pass up. All but about two of my students had read a Magic Tree House book before this one. The need to activate prior knowledge is often linked to some aspect of the story—understanding a certain kind of character, the place as well as the time period of the setting, or the topic of the story. Before we read on the first day, we had talked a little about Camelot, King Arthur, and the Knights of the Round Table. The avid readers of the series knew that Jack and Annie had performed some tasks for Morgan Le Fay, the librarian in Camelot. I still remember what written was by marry in her book, Reconsidering Reading-Aloud, She said that: “ The prior knowledge to activate for this book also included that of book structure...

Today, I would like sharing about reading aloud strategies. Actually, this article was written by MARY LEE HAHN. She said: “At the beginning of every new read-aloud, you have the opportunity to model book selection and previewing strategies. When we were getting ready to start Weasel (DeFelice), our discussion went like this: “If you were in the library and this title caught your eye, and you took this book off the shelf, what’s the next thing you would do to see if you wanted to check it out and read it?” I asked. “I’d look at the cover,” someone answered. So we studied the cover. I took the book around the room and let every table of students have a good long look and tell what they were noticing: a kid, a club, a swamp, a man with a gun, it’s night, there are birds, they are wearing old-time clothes. “What would you do next?” I asked. Shane said he would look inside the cover or on the back and read the blurb. So I did. “Now what?” I continued. Ethan said he would read the first pag...

Language is very important for us in conveying our ideas, opinion, and our feeling. This statement explained by oxford that language is system sound, word, etc used by humans to communicate thoughts and feeling. We need language when we are talking with our friends, parents, or our teachers. The function of language is a tool of communication that is used to interact and socialize each human being. This statement supported by La Forge (1983:9):”Language is people; Language is persons in contact, language is person in response”. So, language is for communication in this world.             English is one of the international languages in other words Brown (1994:122) says,” English has become a tool for international communication in transportation, commerce, banking, tourism, technology, diplomacy, and scientific research”. English is only one language used by most of people in the world, therefore, ...

To a great extent, our interest in vocabulary growth is motivated by the correlation between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension: people with bigger vocabularies also tend to be better readers. However, before we can draw any implications for instruction from that correlation, we need to understand what sorts of causal relationships lie behind it. It turns out that these relationship are rather complex (Anderson & Freebody, 1981; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). In this section, I explore one particular aspect of the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension: the hypothesis that a significant portion of the variance underlying the correlation between tests of vocabulary knowledge and tests of reading comprehension can be accounted for by metalinguistic awareness. At the end of the chapter, I discuss some implications of this hypothesis for literacy instruction. Anderson and Freebody (1981) suggested three possib...

Basic science research and studies examining influences on children’s development reaffirms that brain development in the early years is influenced by experience that affects learning (DiPietro, 2000; Dawson, Klinger, Panagiotides, Hill, & Spieker, 1992; Elman et al., 1996). So much of the brain is devoted to processing language that it appears to be socially inclined and develops most effectively from interactions with other people. Language is a critically important emergent literacy skill that is known to predict later reading competence (Butler, Marsh, Sheppard, & Sheppard, 1985). This is particularly true for reading comprehension because language lays the foundation for understanding concepts that are important for comprehending meaning in print (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). For example, language development includes understanding a broad range of vocabulary, comprehending grammatically appropriate phrases and sentences (i.e., grammar, syntax), and using words togethe...

A substantial body of evidence indicates that phonological awareness is a robust predictor of later reading skills. Evidence indicates that it is a skill that is acquired during the preschool period, prior to formal reading instruction (Lonigan et al., 1998, 2000). However, efforts to identify environmental causes of the development of phonological awareness have not yielded strong or consistent findings (e.g., Raz & Bryant, 1990; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002; Sénéchal, LeFevre, Thomas, & Daley, 1998). One possible origin for the development of phonological awareness is the development of vocabulary. As noted above, most multivariate studies do not support a direct role of oral language in the development of decoding. However, phonological awareness and oral language are significantly related during the preschool period (Chaney, 1992; Lonigan et al., 1998, 2000; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002), and studies with slightly older children have demonstrated significant concurrent and...

This article  is about development of early literacy skills in readers, especially pre-readers. Read my posting slowly in order to get the information completely! Whereas knowledge of the development of reading in school-age children has been building over the past three decades, it is only within the past 10 years that substantial efforts have been directed toward understanding the development and contribution of reading-related skills prior to school entry. This growing body of research evidence highlights the significance of the preschool period for the development of critically important early literacy skills (e.g., see Snow et al., 1998; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). This area of study is often referred to as “emergent literacy” (Sulzby, 1989; Sulzby & Teale, 1991; Teale & Sulzby, 1986; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Emergent literacy skills are the developmental precursors to conventional reading and writing skills. Whereas traditional approaches to the study of...

The most common cause of early reading difficulties is a weakness in children’s phonological processing skills , the ability to recognize, manipulate, and use the sound structure of spoken language. Children with poor phonological processing skills have difficulty cracking the alphabetic code that connects the graphemes in written alphabetic languages to the phonemes in spoken language. These children lack an effective strategy for decoding an unfamiliar word when they encounter it in print. They tend to rely too heavily on contextual cues to guess the unfamiliar word rather than using knowledge of phonics to decode it. Consequently, their attempts to decode unfamiliar words result in many word-reading errors. Reading grade-level material is difficult, and many of these children begin to develop negative attitudes about reading, resulting in reduced opportunities to practice reading (Oka & Paris, 1986). Prior research has identified three interrelated clusters of phonological proce...