Resource Materials for Teaching Language Resource Materials For Teaching Language Leaving Certificate English Syllabus Resource Materials for Teaching Language Preface These Resource Materials for the teaching of language are intended to supplement and develop the ideas and approaches outlined in the Teacher Guidelines. Their purpose is to suggest generic strategies to teachers who can then select, adapt and apply them to their own situation as they see fit. The materials can be photocopied as required. Copyright 1999 Tom Mullins, the named contributors and the In Career Development Unit. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce material contained herein on condition that such material be reproduced only for classroom use and be provided to teachers and students without charge. Any other reproduction for use or sale is prohibited. Acknowledgements The role of Tom Mullins (NCCA Education Officer for English) is acknowledged for researching, writing and editing these Resource Materials. Acknowledgements are owed to the NCCA Executive and to all members (past and present)of the NCCA Leaving Certificate English Course Committee for their sustained commitment. Acknowledgements are owed to the ICDU Section, Department of Education and Science, for the research grant and the administrative support that enabled these materials to be produced. Acknowledgements are owed to all the contributors who wrote original pieces specifically, and most enthusiastically, for these materials. Acknowledgements are owed to the following teachers and educationalists whose comments and suggestions on various sections were of benefit: Helen Cooney, Bertha McCullough, John Looby, Juliet Mullins, Declan O’Neill, Hal O’Neill, Terence O’Reilly. For permission to use materials acknowledgements are owed to: Faber and Faber, London: for Mushrooms, Sylvia Plath; for an extract from Someone Who’ll watch over Me, Frank McGuinness The Examiner, Cork: for photographic materials Flamingo HarperCollins: for an extract from The Best of Myles, edit. Kevin O’Nolan The Gallery Press, Co Meath: for Good Friday, 1991, from Pillow Talk, Paula Meehan The Irish Times, Dublin: for photographic materials and for Shadow on Flo-Jo Legacy, Elaine Lafferty INPHO Photographic Agency: for photographic materials from Hoping for Heroes The Mainstream Publishing Company, Edinburgh: for photographic material from Everest Calling, Lorna Siggins, 1994. The O’Brien Press: for an extract from Under the Hawthorn Tree, Marita Conlon-McKenna Penguin Books: for an extract from The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845-1849, Cecil Woodham-Smith; for an extract from A Life, Hugh Leonard Radio Telefís Éireann: for photographic materials Vintage: for an extract from Little Angels, Little Devils, in Managing Monsters, Marina Warner. Design by Artmark Resource Materials for Teaching Language Contents Page SECTION A: Approaches to Texts 7 1. Making Language Live 9 Part 1. Developing Advanced Reading/Comprehending Skills 9 Part 2. Strategies for Reading Texts: Study Skills 17 • Completing 17 • Predicting 23 • Comparing 27 • Underlining 37 • Segmenting/Labelling 43 2. Developing Language Awareness 46 • Genre 46 • Sentences and Syntax 64 • Punctuation 69 • Some Perspectives on Spelling 74 • Paragraphing 80 3. Developing the Art and Craft of Rewriting 86 Commentaries on students’ texts. • Narratives • Arguments 4. A Note on English and IT 98 Appendix 1 100 Full texts of incomplete exercises Resource Materials for Teaching Language Page SECTION B: The Writers Speak . 105 1. The Language of Information 108 • Jim O’Donnell 109 • Tom Humphries 113 • Dermot Gilleece 117 • William Reville 121 • Brendan McWilliams 124 2. The Language of Argument and Persuasion 128 • Martin Drury 129 • Nuala O’Faolain 131 • David Gwynn Morgan 136 • Garret FitzGerald 141 • Martyn Turner 147 3. The Language of Narrative 151 • John McGahern 152 • John Quinn 156 • Éilís Ní Dhuibhne 159 • Patricia Donlon 163 • Tim Robinson 165 4. The Aesthetic Use of Language 170 • Hugh Leonard 171 • Paula Meehan 175 • Tom McCarthy 177 • Eavan Boland 180 • Brendan Kennelly 184 Bibliography 187 Resource Materials for Teaching Language Introduction These resource materials were produced to help teachers to meet the specific needs of the new Leaving Certificate English Syllabus in relation to the teaching of advanced reading and writing skills. In Section A the focus is on a variety of strategies which should facilitate a thoughtful and active approach to developing comprehending skills and increased language awareness. Teachers will need to select from the strategies outlined those ones which they can most productively use with their texts and their students. Unless these strategies are embedded in real and relevant contexts of thought and learning they will not be effective. Section B takes an entirely different approach. Many students are quite unable to reflect on their own use of language; they remain largely unaware of how their texts appear or sound to others. Also, they lack the knowledge and skills required to improve and to develop their compositions. It was thought that if they could see writers of all kinds reflecting on their own texts, this might stimulate a more reflective and conscious approach to the act of composition. However, teachers should find many other uses for the material in this section, as well as finding these thoughtful and original texts of much personal and professional interest. Resource Materials for Teaching Language Resource Materials for Teaching Language Section A Approaches to Texts “Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; . but to weigh and consider.”* *F. Bacon Resource Materials for Teaching Language Resource Materials for Teaching Language 1. Making Language Live Part 1: Developing Advanced Reading/Comprehending Skills ‘Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours.’ John Locke Traditional approaches to comprehension assumed that by focusing on the understanding of each individual word and sentence the whole meaning of the text would be revealed. However, what tended to happen was that while students made sense of the small parts they did not realise how these achieved overall meaning within the total text. Students failed to understand or respond in a significant way to the meaning of a text although they could explain and understand each word and sentence. At worst they failed to interpret and integrate the text and simply made serviceable local meaning to survive teacher questions, the lesson assignment or the examination. Contemporary research on reading and comprehending concluded the following: ● Comprehending is a dialogic act, not an act of receiving a pre-packaged meaning; meanings are constructions and interpretations. ● What the reader brings to a text is the lens through which the text is interpreted; meanings are culturally contingent. ● Meanings do not emerge from a text sequentially, like carriages emerging from a tunnel, but gradually come into focus, like a photograph forming in developing solution. ● All attempts at reading are attempts to make meaning; comprehending is a meaning-making activity and must always be approached in that way. ● Texts should be contextualised and approached initially to obtain their general sense; subsequently the component parts can be examined. Look at the following diagram. Then reflect on what you see and how you came to see it. I couldn’t see it either! Resource Materials for Teaching Language Topics for reflections: ● How does one come to see the meaning in the image? ● What ways of looking help? What ways of looking hinder? ● Where does the meaning come from? Is it from the page or from the ‘looker’? Comment To actually see the word TIE one needs, as it were, to step back from specific parts and shapes; seeing the overall pattern that the individual shapes make reveals the meaning previously obscured. Looking too closely at the individual shapes inhibits seeing what is actually present in the form of a meaningful word. It is only when the overall meaning is perceived that it becomes interesting to see how it is constructed and how all the parts fit together. Methodological Implications This insight has significant methodological implications not just for the reading of short texts but also for the reading of long literary texts. Traditional linear reading actually can militate against overall comprehension of a text and frustrate the dialogic interplay central to the reading act. In the case of long texts, to initially establish an outline of meaningful perspectives in terms of action, conflicts of value, relationships and thematic concerns and then engage in selective rereading for specific purposes is a more beneficial approach for developing overall comprehension. These new understandings about how readers relate to texts and how meanings are made clearly signal that traditional approaches to the teaching of advanced reading skills need, at the very least, to be reconsidered. Quite often classroom practice amounted to testing reading rather than teaching the interpretative skills of reading; students were expected to give answers without being shown how to arrive at these answers. The difference between the two approaches is clear in the following exercises. A comprehension text is followed by a series of questions (a) in the old mode and (b) in the new mode. Teachers should find it of interest to experiment with these approaches with their students