ELL Reading Comprehension: Mixing It Up

Mansion, not manshon: Photo by Nick Romanov on Unsplash

When mansion made the leap from English to Japanese, it somehow came to mean an apartment—though a little higher class than an apaato apartment, which is rented and generally less high quality than a manshon which is purchased. 

This week in EFL class, we read a story that included a mansion and a luxury car with chauffeur. The first time I asked students to draw a picture summary of what we’d read, even though we’d discussed this semantic difference and I’d shown them Google images of the American understanding of “mansion,” the majority of students drew high rise buildings. Also cute little cars, though I’m not sure of the reason for this, other than the Japanese middle school penchant for cuteness. 

So I showed off one drawing of a true American mansion, and I drew my own limousine on the whiteboard. (My drawings always cause a good deal of hilarity--but that's all to the good where learning is concerned!) The next day when we continued the story and the drawing, I noted, “Oh, good! More people are drawing American mansions!” When I pointed out to one student that she’d drawn a Japanese mansion again, she heatedly denied it, and quickly added 2-story wings on each side of the narrow, several-storied building. Actually, quite an effective transformation!

Drawings, I discovered, are a great way to check comprehension, taking all the hesitancy about vocabulary and grammar out of the equation and cutting straight to what the student is actually envisioning. 

My EFL middle schoolers have been plodding through their reading and looking at me blankly when I ask them to summarize. We needed some revitalizing. I take responsibility—I’d had a Ferlazzo strategy in the lesson plan, and then I didn’t look carefully and half forgot to do it, and what I did do, I did all wrong. So back to the drawing board--but getting familiar enough with some of The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox strategies that I could piece them together in different ways. Here are some I used this week:

1. Don’t have EFL students read out loud. At first this puzzled me. I thought I needed to hear and address their hesitancies and errors. But actually, they need to hear a good model. but in that case, how do I ensure they focus on the model and practice? After I read a sentence out loud with students following along in the book, I call on a student to look up and repeat the sentence I just read. Not all the time. Maybe for 1 paragraph. Or to review a paragraph from the previous day. Or 1 sentence from each paragraph. I haven’t yet tried cold calling. What I’ve done is alert the student before I read the sentence, so they’re paying special attention. 
2. As an alternative to verbal summary, draw a picture. This week I had students fold a blank page into quarters—8 frames, front and back. Then, at the end of each chunk of text, after taking questions, I’d say, “One-minute picture!” and set the timer on my phone while students sketched a summary of the chunk.
3. At the end of the whole reading, students acted out the story in groups of 4. No papers allowed. (One tried that.) We reviewed. We talked. We laughed. And I knew that they’d understood the reading.

Adding tools to my toolbox one micro-strategy at a time!