In the section that follows, I will tell about what I observed in Ahmed’s reading and writing learning while working with him for five weeks. I will tell about the materials, methods, practices I observed being used with Ahmed and my suggestions for additional approaches.

 

a. In Reading:

 

    Since Ahmed came in speaking no English, and he even did not know how to write his name, the curriculum was too hard for him. Therefore, his ESL and regular classroom instructors brought in other resources. Mrs.Tyler used most of his school district’s curriculum and also incorporated visuals and activities based on the topic that he had.

 

     Every week in his regular class, Ahmed had a book with five to eight pages and two to four lines on each page to read, and a worksheet with five questions to answer. The first question is about the title and the author’s name. In the second question, he is supposed to state the subtitles in the reading and their number. In the third and fourth questions, he is asked to answer a comprehension question depending on what he read. In the last question, Ahmed should draw something that interested him in the reading. However, every week, Ahmed returned his worksheet with no answer because he could comprehend the require reading. Yet, when Mrs.Tyler reread the book three times and gave him a summary about it, he can only answer the question orally with much of help, he pointed to the pictures or said yes or no, but most of the time he answered with “I do not know”.

 

      Many Arab learners face difficulties in reading. The difficulties back due to the fact that English words are much different than the Arabic words. A root of three or four consonants and a word pattern construct the words in Arabic. For example, when the root k-t-b combines with vowels pattern, it produces maktaba; library, ketab; book, and kateb; a writer (Ryan and Meara(1991), Abu-Rabia and Sammour (2013), and Swan and Smith (2013)).

 

 

 

     There are many approaches I will suggest based on what I learned in my classes that can help with Ahmed’s reading comprehension challenge. The first approach is phonemic awareness. That is the ability to hear and identify individual phonemes in spoken words (Yopp, 1992). “Phonemic awareness has been found to be an important precursor to learning to read”(Diaz-Rico, p.170). The student will be more able to read the words if he grasps the principle that letters represent phonemes. By using this approach, the learner will understand that words can be divided into individual phonemes, which will help him to use sound-letter to read. Matching sound to letter is an example of an activity that can be used to help the learner to understand that one letter sometime has several sounds.

 

The second approach is using the three-stage reading process; into, through, and beyond reading (Diaz-Rico, p.172). In into reading, the teacher helps the learner to develop his background knowledge through the new one by using different activities such as field trips, pictures, movies, and graphic organizers. Next, in the case of through reading, the teacher helps the student by reading the text, using keywords: first, next, and last, using story elements; character, (who), setting (where), and plot (what), paraphrasing unclear words, and showing pictures that can explain context. The final stage is after reading. The educator summarizes, rereads the text, and questions the student who, what, when, where, and how. Finally, Gibbons, P. (2009) also recommends several approaches.  The first approach is bottom-up, which is an approach that able the teacher to start with the learner from sounds and letters to a complex system. Another approach is a top-down approach, which ables the teacher to read the whole passage to the student.

 

     Besides these approaches, it is important to do an ongoing assessment to ensure that the learner makes progress. There are several activities that I will suggest to assess student progress based on what I learned in my classes. These activities are matching pictures and patterns and uppercase letters to lowercase letters, same-different, odd item, and sequencing story cards in meaningful order. Another activity is a picture- cued items. The teacher shows the student a picture along with a written text, then the student will hear a request from the teacher that asks him to point to the word that he read or heard. A true or false activity can also be used with the picture-cued activity (Brown, 2010,p.232) .

 

Another Reaging Challange:

 

On the contrary, Ahmed also had a challenge in differentiating between lowercase letters “b” and “d”, which makes reading and writing more challenging, affects his communications with others and slows his learning progress. According to Mrs.Tyler, this issue can be seen with many students either L1 or L2 English.

 

To solve this problem, Ahmed’s ESL teacher taught him a method called “bed”.

 

     His teacher hung up a picture of a bed on the board. The left leg is a left-hand thumb up that is a euphemism of letter “b” while the right leg of the bed is a right-hand thumb up that is a euphemism of letter “d” and the letter "e" is between them. With using student’s left and right hands, he will associate the letter “b” with his left hand and the letter “d” with his right hand. This method worked very well, and I noticed that he has used his hands while he was reading words that had the letter "b" or "d".

 

 Activities can be used:

 

     Beside the bed method, I learned that there are several activities could be used to help students as Ahmed in separating lowercase letters such as “b” and “d” according to Sayeski and Paulsen (2003). The first suggested activity is the answer check holes activity. By punching holes underneath the uppercase letters on a folder, the answer is written above the holes on a paper inside the folder. The student is asked to write the lowercase letters on the holes in order to match them to the uppercase letters. To check the answer, he can pull the inside paper down then verify the answer. Another activity is matching cards. The cards have symbols and pictures in the corner, and the student is asked to match cards by pairing identical symbols and pictures in the corner. The students are provided with a self-checking system. The last activity is the Model-Lead-Test approach. The teacher demonstrates what is expected of the student by modeling the skill, then leads the student through the skill and asks him to respond. Finally, the teacher checks the student’s performance of the skill.

b. In writing:

 

     In addition to reading challenges, Ahmed had some writing challenges as well. Every month, Ahmed have got a writing journal to work on. He had to draw a picture and write his description of the picture under it every day. His journal can easily show his progress in acquiring writing skills.

 

Figure 1 is the first journal he wrote on October first. He drew a picture and wrote some letters under it “ I Yl Tkhsrt”. However, these letters did not give any meaning for the reader. The key problem that was observed is the inability to spell words correctly.

 

According to Ryan and Meara (1991) , the difficulties that Arab learners face in reading and writing words in English are based on lexical structure and orthography of Arabic since Arabic is right - left direction of texts not as the English language. Moreover, the other reason could be L1 transfer. This sentence had no vowel letters, and the Arabic language does not have vowel letters. 

 

Perfetti & Dunlap (2008) explained that the reason for Arab learners to have difficulties in the vowels in English is due to the fact that the learners determine vowels by relying on the context while in Arabic the readers fill in the vowels based on the context. Since Ahmed was in second grade and he was a newcomer, that means he attended a school in Saudi Arabia and passed first grade.

 

Thus, he passed the Arabic writing skills requirements for first grade, which some of them are: a) the learner must be able to write words that have three or four letters; b) the learner has to be able to identify vowels; and c) the learner has to know how to fill in the vowels based on the context. Consequently, Ahmed might think that English vowels are unwritten similarly as Arabic vowels. The last reason could be the difference between L1 and L2 system. According to Burt and Peyton, vowels are not written as letters in Arabic, so Arab learners of English may face difficulties with vowels (p.5.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1

 

 

 

 

      Hence, to solve the problem his ESL teacher asked him to explain what he wrote or what he meant in a way for her to figure out the words, then if she succeeded in that she would write it in the words’ table on the board. Subsequently, he can practice on them every meeting. Another way to make the journal more appropriate to Ahmed or beginning learners is to ask the learners to complete simple frame sentence such as “ I like ….. because …..” (Diaz-Rico, p.191).

 

 

Vocabulary challenge:

 

 

 

      Similarly, I noticed that acquiring vocabulary lists is hard for him as well. According to Swan and Smith, vocabulary is difficult for Arab learners since there are a minimal number of words in English that are borrowed from Arabic, therefore the learners will have a negative transfer.

 

     To increase Ahmed’s vocabulary words list, Mrs.Tyler used (CVC) that are words that follow the pattern consonant-vowel-consonant. These are considered the simplest words and the starting point of many phonics programs. These words highlight the short vowels such as the “a” in cat, the “e” in bed, the “i” in fin, the “o” in top, and the “u” in sub.” (Gunn, C). The other methods that the teacher used are blending words, which are two or more consonants, when combined make a certain sound and two sounds are heard such as “bl” in “ black” and “blue”, digraphs words, which are two consonants, when combined make a certain sound and one sound is heard such as “ch” in “chin” and “ouch”, diphthongs, which are two vowels, when combined make a certain sound and not necessarily the sound of either vowel present such as “oʊ” in “boat” and “ goat”, and the word family which is:

      “A group of words that share a common base to which different prefixes and suffixes are added.           For example, members of the word family based on the headword work include rework, work             working, workshop, and workmanship, among others” (Nordquist, 2017)

 

Figures 2 and 3 are examples of his work on these methods. Furthermore, to increase his vocabulary, several worksheets focusing on vocabulary were given to Ahmed such as choose the correct word to fill in the blank in a sentence figure 4 or multiple choice figure5, and color the vowels and the consonants figure 6.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6

 

suggestions for other approaches:

 

       Based on what I  learned, I have a few suggested approaches that can help Ahmed with vocabulary acquisition. The first is using the word formation practice that includes compounding (rain + bow = rainbow) and blending (international + network = Internet). The second, increasing student word list by using charts, graphs, cards, or pictures. Third, using words prefix, suffix, and roots gives the learner the opportunity to increase his vocabulary faster. Finally, using activities such as word wall, crossword puzzles, words order and words’ map.''

 

 

Grammar errors challenges:

 

       Grammar errors are yet another issue that can be clearly seen in Ahmed’s journal. In figure 7, Ahmed drew a picture and wrote one full sentence under it, but his sentence possessed grammatical errors. This also another example of L1 transfer’s influence as the student used “and” after each word, which is a rule of Arabic grammar. Other grammatical issues were found in Ahmed’s journals are be verb, and the progressive. Swan and Smith mention that the present tense in the Arabic language is used to form the present progressive, so using be verb with verb-ing is difficult for most Arab learners. Most of the time, Ahmed, omitted the be verb and only used verb with -ing.

 

 

      To solve grammar errors, I noticed his ESL teacher used flashcards of people doing some actions "picture- cued items" to teach him the present progressive, and pronouns he/ she is v+ ing or they are v+ing, figure 8 is an example of them. Additionally, he has been worked in worksheets that focus on specific task after they were explained by his ESL teacher such as common nouns (figure 9), proper nouns (figure 10), plural nouns (regular e.g car = cars, and irregular e.g woman = women; figure 11), complete sentences with correct nouns (figure12), and contractions (figure 13).

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 13

 

 

Suggestions approaches for ​teaching grammar:

 

      According to Diaz-Rico, grammar can be taught either inductively or deductively. Each one of these two ways has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. One advantage of teaching inductively is that the grammar is used as a tool for communication. While the disadvantage is the grammar learned does not support learning clear structure. On the other hand, one advantage of deductive teaching is the easiness to recall and production form that be taught into a test. Additionally, the disadvantage is teaching grammar must be slowly (p.255).

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      There are several activities that can be used in both teaching and assessing grammar and help Ahmed. The first activity is picture-cued tasks. This task has pictures for different people doing an action. Then that learner will be asked to either describe the action or point on the heard one. The second activity is vocabulary tasks such as word order, and fill in the blank. The last activity is conversations ( Brown p. 269- 270).