Motivation & Creativity in Reading Lessons by Marisa Constantinides 

Ashley Van Oordt

1. Are your students motivated readers? Why or why not?
I teach elementary school students in South Korea. Most of my students (about 90%) are not motivated readers. I think the reasons for this are that most of them are still learning how to read (i.e. learning phonics for beginners) and are thus not confident reading yet. The other reason might be because the need to learn their mother tongue (reading, listening and speaking) far out weighs the need to learn a second language.

2. What do you do to motivate them to read in class? Please explain with examples. How effective are your methods?
With the little ones, I do introduce fun books in class that we read together occasionally. This is done to inspire them to read more outside the classroom. With the bigger students, I do reading exercises in class at least once a week. We discuss together these exercises together. I'm also strongly considering formally introducing the Reader-Teacher program in class so that students can practice reading more at home.

3. What do you do to encourage your students to consolidate language acquired through reading – in class and out of class?
Reading exercises are consolidated with fun conversational games, board games that require a lot of speaking, as well as worksheets that are done in and outside of the classroom.

TASK
1) Share a link to a book that you have found your students particularly like and were motivated to read. Discuss the book and explain what activities you did which were particularly useful and effective.
One of the books I've read with the beginner students is, "The hungry caterpillar" by Eric Carle. Please see the you-tube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkYmvxP0AJI… See more

Before reading the book, I asked the students about butterflies. Where they came from? What they thought of them? Where they saw them? We then read through the book and discussed all the new words and sentences. Furthermore, we discussed the life cycle of the butterfly and the lessons we can learn from the book. In other words, the application to our lives. Students then read the book together in class again and were then given a script of the story which they had to practice and read to their parents as homework. To review, students read the book again in class at the beginning of the next lesson.

1467 days 20 hours 16 minutes ago

Lisa Wood

Task
What I found out about #eltchat:
There is so much interesting, relevant and proctal infromation there that I can really make use of! I didn't even realise that I was following #elt chat on twitter (I need to brush up on my twitter skills) and I will definitely be attending some of the live chats every Wednesday. I may even nominate a top… See moreic to be discussed!
I like the fact that there is a summary of every chat fpr those who can't make the livechat each week. Nice idea too to offer a badge for people who write a summary. that they can put on thier own blog. I have listened to one podcast (the latest) and am downloading others as I write...It's a shame there isn't one a month. As far as I can see they are bi-annual. I have already added the blog link to my pearltrees account and will definitely be making use of the podcasts and the live twitter chat in the future.

1672 days 9 hours 34 minutes ago

Lisa Wood

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Are your students motivated readers? Why or why not?
Not usually. Many of them are not even motivated to read in thier own language. I think it is for a variety of reasons. Firstly, they are teenagers and have many other things which occupy their time, for example, the distractions of social media and networking. They spen… See mored a lot of their time on line on whatsapp, tuenti, instragram, snapchat...
Reading requires a lot more effort from them and sometimes traditional books may appear less attractive/appealing than the kinds of media they are exposed to thesedays.
Sometimes the reading material may not be very conducive to reading, it may not coincide with their interests or be too easy/difficult to access.

2. What do you do to motivate them to read in class? Please explain with examples. How effective are your methods?
When we read in class, we sometimes do activities such as a running reading. I have the questions and in groups they take one question at a time and answer it. The first group to have all correct answers wins... Another activity we do is jigsaw reading. If a text is particularly long I divide the text up and give each group the fullset of answers. They have to read thier text and identify the questions they can answer. After, they re-group and share thier answers. Finally I give them a copy of the whole text/story and they chack the other groups' answers. I also find that pre-text/story build up works a treat! Getting them interested in the topic first can awaken ther curiosity. Showing them a picture first and brainstroming ideas usually whets their appetite!

3. What do you do to encourage your students to consolidate language acquired through reading – in class and out of class?
To consolidate language we may do quizzes using the langauge (student made quizzes too), further investigation of the subject, games as warmers next class. We may do an extended writing project in groups or pairs. I like quizlet for revising vocabulary.

1672 days 11 hours 41 minutes ago

Charikleia Niouraki

Questions:
1. Some students are motivated but some aren't. Those who don't want to read find texts boring and they read them without paying attention. Afterwards, they don't remember many details.
2. I ask them pre-reading questions, so they have a goal to complete while reading. I also talk with them about the topic of the text and tr… See morey to make them curious. My methods don't work all the time. It depends on the student.
4 No, I don't think that's the case with all the texts in textbooks. When student decide to read something outside of the class, they do so because it's interesting and they want to learn something. Textbooks don't always contain texts students find interesting and they get bored. I usually try to find interesting texts online and I bring them to my classes.

Tasks:
2. I think ELT chat is a place where teachers can talk to each other and discuss different topics related to teaching. It is done through twitter and teachers use a hastag. I think it's really interesting and I would like to take part in it.

1717 days 2 hours 2 minutes ago

Queralt Comellas Angeles

TASK 2

I listened to three of the podcasts, and I found http://eltchat.org/wordpress/ really interesting. The topics were very different, but listening Matthew Noble speaking about a bad lesson, or to Cecilia Lemos about oral correction, just made me think about my own practice, and how … See morehundreds of teachers worldwide are facing problems, issues, challenges like me... I would love to participate, although I don't know whether I am ready to it, or what would I talk about. This iTDi MOOC has been such an eye-opener, and made me realize how much I missed not having this network of EFL/ESL teachers who are sharing such great contents, ideas, advices...

1742 days 19 hours 45 minutes ago

Queralt Comellas Angeles

TASK 1
TASKS
1) Share a link to a book that you have found your students particularly like and were motivated to read. Discuss the book and explain what activities you did which were particularly useful and effective.

For the school year 2013-14, for eighth graders we decided to read 'HOLES', by Louis Sachar. The students, as us… See moreual, complained about the book, even before we began to read it. As days went by, they actually changed their minds. It is the story of a bullied and lonely teenager who, being at the wrong place at the wrong time is sent to a juvenile prison camp in Texas. Once he is there, he learns a lot about himself, and the story evolves little by little. There are three different plotlines in the story, which become part of each other as the story progresses.
We had class discussions about fate, doom and destiny; and about decision making. They liked the fact that the story was about teenagers; they discovered (through documentaries) the justice system for young offenders and they realized how easily you can end at the wrong end of life. They made comic strips, they wrote using first person point of view, from the perspectives of the different characters.
They loved being able to make the connexions between the plotlines, and they liked that justice prevailed when the truth came out.

1742 days 20 hours 38 minutes ago

Queralt Comellas Angeles

1. Last school year I had high-intermediate level students, and for three of the five terms during the school year we had D.E.A.R. Fridays (drop everything and read). 60% of my students were ACTUALLY willing to read, and at least 80% of them were doing so on mobile devices (ibooks, ebooks, wattpad -I LOVE WATTPAD--), so I could say that most of them were mot… See moreivated. The other 40% decided to read children stories -which they only pretended to finish--, or would borrow a book from my shelf (the other option besides reading was doing grammar exercises)

2. When it came to their personal choice, their attitude helped a lot, and sometimes we even discussed some of the books. When we read novels or short stories, the strategies are varied: they read aloud, I read aloud, they have team reading for oral presentations, they have individual reading activities. I try to change the strategies because they usually HATE any books we choose, so it is a matter of jumping into the story and try to make them enjoy it.

3. In class, they share in lots of ways: they get some extra points if they use new vocabulary in their journals or essays, they explain in essays a theme or topic from the novels. Outside? Hmmm that's a tough one... I try to convince the kids on the importance of reading; I read more than 30 books a year, and yes, My name is Queralt and I am a reading addict... :D When it comes to have them read outside, I want to be their choice. A looooooong time ago, I would bribe them with extra points, but I truly believe that reading must be a personal choice, a personal decision, otherwise, students will read for the sake of the reward, and not for the sake of reading itself.

4. Our textbook is a literature book. in fact, they are books edited and published for English native speakers. We use them only during two terms a year, since we read novels in other two, and this year we will have a mini UN model in our highschool, so the readings will be based on real documents. The tasks that are designed in the book most of the time match the learning objectives we set, but I find that in general, that is not the reason students would chose a "real" thing...they dislike textbooks AND reading...probably because they are just teenagers.

1742 days 20 hours 46 minutes ago

Rosanne Dimesio

Where is the quiz for this session? There's no link in the schedule and I didn't receive an email.

1743 days 2 hours 6 minutes ago

Grace Leatemia Lekahena

Task:
#ELT Chat is a chat among teacher all over the world on Twitter. Follower suggest the topic of chat then chat about it for some time. Now, every Wednesday the followers log in to their twitter account and for an hour they discuss topic that they've selected before.
It's really interesting and I would love to join and try it.

1743 days 16 hours 32 minutes ago

Grace Leatemia Lekahena

1. Are your students motivated readers? Why or why not?
My students are definitely not motivated readers. They think reading is boring, especially if the topic is something they're not familiar with.

2. What do you do to motivate them to read in class? Please explain with examples. How effective are your methods?
Well, since they hav… See moree to do reading activities in class, I usually pick some reading materials with the topics that are interesting for the students. And before we do the reading activities, I usually do some other activities first to engage the students either by showing them a video or headline news or do some pre-teaching vocabularies activity. For example if the activity in the reading is True/False sentences, then I use the sentences to play games first, so when they have to answer T/F later on, they are confidence enough to answer.

4. Do you feel that coursebook tasks match up with the reasons readers choose to read a text in the real world? If not, how do you compensate for this?
Sometimes they don't match. So I usually bring some authentic materials to the class, like newspaper or magazine or online news, etc.

1743 days 16 hours 40 minutes ago