Questões

TEXT:

Making homework count

By Stephanie Hirschman

October 8, 2024

Homework and independent study can make a massive contribution to students’ progress, particularly when classes don’t meet daily, or students aren’t living, working or studying in anglophone environments. There are several issues to consider when setting homework.

Why students are doing homework is a fundamental question which can cover a wide spectrum of reasons. The most obvious is that it offers both teachers and students a chance to check on learning and identify areas for further review and consolidation. Exam preparation courses make use of homework to consolidate and accelerate learning and deliver results. Finally, some institutions require teachers to set homework and some clients, for example parents, believe that a course with homework offers better value for money.

Whatever the reason behind setting homework, be clear with students about how they’ll benefit from the assignment, how to do it effectively, how long they should spend on it and how it will be marked.

The homework that many people expect from a language course is “more of the same” exercises, that is, those that offer extra opportunities to practice grammar or vocabulary from the lesson.

It is also possible to bring in practice from other online or print sources, but this can sometimes be problematic, especially for lower levels. Make sure that the resource you choose maps onto the lesson content without placing extra demands on students, for example, by introducing a completely different context or topic with unfamiliar vocabulary to practice a grammar point. You also need to make sure that terminology is consistent – students who are expecting to practice present continuous may not recognize that it is also called present progressive. With lower levels, go over the instructions and/or demonstrate one of the exercises so they know how to get started.

It's worth mentioning here that flipped learning may also be a useful approach to homework. This is where students preview part of the lesson plan (like a reading or listening task) or research a general topic independently before class in order to maximize opportunities for communicative activities during the lesson.

Other types of homework include semi-controlled practice of target language. Students could write personal sentences including vocabulary items or grammatical structures from the class – note that they may need training to do this. A sentence like, “The milk went off,” is not as effective for learning as, “We had no milk for the coffee this morning – it went off because we didn’t put it in the fridge last night.” You may wish to provide some question or example prompts as support.

An unusual and motivating type of speaking homework is a personalized bingo game. Students create their own bingo card, which might be a 4x4 grid. In each cell, they write a key word or structure from the lesson that they wish to practice during the next few days. They carry the card around in their pocket, and every time they use an item of target language, they can tick it off, aiming to complete a line. This is especially suitable for students who are living, working or studying in anglophone environments. Teachers can monitor progress regularly and even offer small prizes.

The question of what teachers actually do with homework also has multiple possible responses, which will depend on the teaching context. At one end of the spectrum, if there is good buy-in from the students, teachers may only need to point them towards a selected set of “more of the same” exercises and make sure the answers are accessible for self-checking. Make it clear that you welcome questions if anything isn’t clear and test regularly to check understanding.

Whatever choices you make about homework, here’s one final tip. It’s best to complete assignments the day after receiving them and not on the same day. Research on spaced repetition shows that reviewing information after around 24 hours, “just before you forget it,” is the most effective way to boost retention.

Adapted from: https://www.linguahouse.com/blog/post/makinghomework-count

Acesso em 25/10/2024

Text II

                               Reading Comprehension Instruction

      There are widespread and erroneous perceptions that children must know all of the words before they can comprehend a text and that they must comprehend it at the literal level before advancing to comprehension at the inferential level.

      Recognizing some words is clearly necessary and central to reading. It is important for children to acquire a set of strategies for figuring out the meanings of words and apply these strategies so that words are recognized automatically. Four groups of strategies exist: (1) common graphophonic patterns (e.g., at in cat, hat, bat), (2) high‐frequency or common words used in sentences (e.g., the, a, or), (3) word building (e.g., morphemes, as play in plays, played, playing, playful), and (4) contextual supports gathered through the meanings of sentences, texts, and illustrations. These word recognition strategies are taught as children are engaged in reading and are considered effective in fluency instruction.

      Vocabulary and reading comprehension growth occurs side by side even for beginning readers. They each require explicit instruction and lots of reading of stories including repeated readings to teach phonics, to develop sight vocabulary, and to teach children how to decode words; guided retelling using questions that prompt children to name the characters, identify the setting (place and time), speak to the problem, tell what happened, and how the story ended; repeated checking for information; and drawing conclusions. Teaching strategies to children early, explicitly, and sequentially are three key characteristics of effective vocabulary and reading comprehension instruction.

      For those who are learning English as second or foreign language, take advantage of their first language knowledge to identify cognate pairs, which are words with similar spellings, pronunciations, and meanings in English. To identify the degree of overlap between the two languages is a strategy that has been demonstrated to be effective for Spanish‐ literate children: learn the words for basic objects (e.g., dog, cat, house, car) that English‐only children already know; review and practice passages and stories through read‐alouds in order to accelerate the rate at which words can be identified and read; and engage in basic reading skills including spelling.

(PHILLIPS, L.M, NORRIS, S. P. & VAVRA, K.L. Reading Comprehension Instruction (pp. 1‐10). Faculty of Education, University of Alberta.   Posted online on 2007‐11‐20 in: http://www.literacyencyclopedia.ca)