Pass by when saw a man half dead: ☐ Samaritan ☐ Priest ☐ Jesus ☐ Disciple Who made a question to Jesus? ☐ Samaritan ☐ Lawyer ☐ Disciple ☐ Robbers Quizzes train scanning skills and it is useful discussing this strategy with children. Reading aloud is another strategy to be used with children (Barton, 2006); helps with fluency and intonation; also helps to assess pronunciation. But this must be done with caution: children must have gone through it and made sense of it. Only then should they be asked to read aloud. If they have not understood the text we cannot expect a good pronunciation and intonation, and demoralization could be one of the results. One first step would be teacher reading it before asking then to do likewise; this gives them “time to grapple with the meaning and are aided by the teacher’s intonation” (Barton, 2006: 96).
4.2 Writing activities There are several general writing strategies and among the main ones we can enumerate these (Axelrod & Cooper, 2010): Cueing the reader; Narrating; Describing; Defining; Classifying; Comparing and contrasting; Arguing; Analyzing (visuals, realia, audios…); Designing documents. Most of these are also categories for speaking productions by the children. And we have different kinds of writing: letters, single words only, short sentences, long sentences; we can use form or paragraphs… Any case, an essential part of writing is conveying a message to somebody. It can be a message to myself (when I write personal notes as a reminder of something) but we have a message and a receiver. From this point of view, some activities that we have proposed for reading shouldn’t be categorized as writing: completing gaps in a sentence, correct the wrong words, taking notes for listening, ordering jumbled words or sentences, writing short answers in reading comprehension or listening, etc. These are activities for reading and listening (receptive skills) but not properly writing – productive activities. Getting children into writing is, perhaps, the hardest work among the four sills, especially with boys (Barton, 2006). Motivating them in the process is the key for good results and once achieved, engagement raises, triggering an ascendant trend. Finding efficiently motivating activities is key for success. We won’t ask them to write an essay, but rather short sentences and types of tasks at their reach that could result in motivation rather than demoralizing them. The result of children’s writing is a piece of text, no matter the format. It is usually on paper but word processors are becoming more a more usual, especially in Secondary education. For the Primary stage, handwriting should be preferred for the sake of consolidating the graph motor skills. Giving feedback to pupils on his own results is an essential part of the learning progress. Emphasizing their achievements though correction should also be taken into account, transforming a usually demotivating feedback into an encouraging activity. To do so, correcting should go beyond marking 30
