4.1 Reading activities

contrary, with 11-12 years, this skills have been fully achieved and the moment for productive creativity has arrived. In this cycle, writing can be given more presence.

- We must take into account the multiple intelligences theory in some way. Activities should be varied and it is desirable to cover all the intelligences: Bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, naturalistic, and spacial (Morgan & Fonseca, 2004). We would like to add the spiritual intelligence and its sub-skills, but still we do not have much literature (Castro Cavero, 2012). Of course, we cannot address all the intelligences in every classroom period, but we should include along the year at least a bit of each, and it would be desirable to do so for each parable / story we work with. Harmer offers a selection of activities for each of the eight intelligences to help teachers in producing of selecting for classroom use (2007:91).

Regardless the intelligence they focus on, there are some kind of activities that always work well with primary school children. Songs and chants, games, physical response activities, coloring, cutting, drawing, sticking, smart repetitive stories, and simple, repetitive speaking activities have a clear instructional value. We could very easily match all this activities with one or more intelligences. Our challenge is getting children fully engaged and motivated and, at the same time, cover all grammar objectives we stated from the outset. Through engagement we will develop children skills more easily.

There are four language skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Reading and listening are receptive skills; writing and speaking are productive (Harmer, 2007). Reading consist in making sense of a written text, whilst listening refers to an oral one. The order we will follow in its presentation is that of the KET examination; there are a lot of materials for its preparation (Dymond, Kenny, & French, 2005) (Cambridge ESOL, 2008) (Cambridge ESOL, 2007). KET examination consists of 3 papers: Reading & Writing (9 parts or exercises included), listening (5 activities) and speaking (2 activities). We will make a few considerations about the features of the activities that we propose based on theoretical grounds but, at the same time, our tendency will be working the parables with activities as similar as possible to those of KET. Our primary aim is to know Jesus teaching on the Kingdom of God, but we can do that at the same time we get ready for KET.

Generally speaking, specialists consider children should be introduced into English beginning with listening and speaking, which is the natural process of acquiring language; then, reading and writing come (Phillips, 1993) (Taberski, 2000).

4.1 Reading activities

To make sense of a text students have to grasp the meaning of words, sentences, phrases and the text as a whole in itself and, at the same time, the grammatical links between sentences (cohesion). But full understanding of a text implies connecting with prior knowledge (coherence) and widening, if learning occurs. There are also many different ways to read and quite different types of texts that influence reading sub-skills, this is, reading skills that are part of a main one (Cambridge ESOL, 2005)

(Spratt, Pulverness, & Williams, Melanie, 2005): Scanning or reading for specific information, reading for detail, extensive/intensive reading and skimming (reading for gist or to get a general idea of a text). Any of these sub-skills should be, up to a certain point, promoted in our children as they could benefit of them in their lives. Activities to work with a text can be oriented to develop each of these sub-skills. For example, a gap-fill exercise, or wh- questions focus on reading for specific information while a task activity asking to give a different ending to a story drives reading into whole text meaning.

There are many types of writing, in length, layout, topics and types of language; all these features are determined by content and intention of the text. Some are: letters, articles, information brochures, stories, postcards, leaflets, textbooks, poems, ad, etc. We will limit our project to one specific category: stories / parables, i.e., narrative texts. English teachers and other colleagues won’t have such a narrow scope and will work more extensively with other genres. Our activities will be developed for stories.

In the third cycle children are becoming more and more fluent in their mother tongue. Research has shown that reading skills can be transferred to reading English, provided lots of opportunities for extensive reading are available and texts have a degree of difficulty that correspond their age (Spratt, Pulverness, & Williams, Melanie, 2005). For this to be true, both authentic and simplified texts should be combined. We will do both things. First time we offer students a parable / story, all words and phrasings that fall outside the KET lexis or inventory of grammatical areas will be simplified or its meaning offered at the end of the text. This last technique is specially intended for proper names. Later, when comprehension of the text has been fully achieved, original version will be considered as well. Anyway, most of the selected parables / stories’ lexis and grammatical areas fall inside the KET target objectives.

The process to adapt parables will be as follows: text from the parable / story will be copied from the online version of the NIV®, then pasted into the Oxford 3000® text checker and the result analyzed. All words signaled as odd, will have to be simplified, substituting the original for any other as similar as possible and included in KET lexis; the use of a Thesaurus could be helpful. After this has been done, most of the words will be KET target. But a final revision of the text will have to be done by carefully checking that for the first use of the text all words and grammatical areas are inside our list. If not, and only in the case of lexis (not grammatical areas), we will check if they are included in the PET vocabulary list. Before simplifying these, we will evaluate based on our experience, if it is necessary for children, and will follow this rule: all words included in PET but not in KET will be considered for simplification, but no one outside PET. Words that appear in PET for the first time deserve a special attention by teacher to see if children can follow the reading easily; it would be helpful underlying them in teacher’s notes. Having a clear list of KET / PET specifications and thanks to the length of the selected parables and stories, this is not a very time demanding task.

As we are in RE, there are many words specific to this field that have to be learnt. They won’t be in KET / PET lexis. We can recognize three categories in this group (examples follow):

- Proper names: Christ, Jew, Judea, Jerusalem, Bible, Gospel, Jesus, Testament, Apostle…

- Religious argot / jargon: Christian, justification, eternal, heaven, hell, salvation, pardon (as forgiveness), priest, holy, consecrate, faith, faithful,… Many of the first category belong to this one as well.

- Common words that relate someway: donkey, cross (as a place of killing), mercy (to have mercy on somebody), pity (as having pity on somebody),

None of these words or expressions are in the target list for third cycle but are content words for our purposes. Its meaning will have to be taught and used for receptive and productive skills. Teacher will underline in personal notes to take them into account. Most of them are familiar to children in their mother tongue and they will easily recognize them. Explaining this words will be crucial for progress in the subject, as some authors have experienced (Webster, 2010) (Dubruiel, 2006). Explaining and exemplifying this vocabulary correlates with engagement of children in classroom learning and liturgy.

Reported speech is not easy for 6th graders, and receptive skills are easier than productive ones. Many of them won’t be confident enough to transform from direct to reported speech but most of the classroom will be able to distinguish the correct phrasing. In order to help them see and progressively understand correct reporting, a reported speech quiz will help and is a very easy to elaborate-and-use activity (Beare, 2014).

Activities for reading should make reading (inter)active (Barton, 2006). Some of the types of activities that we will produce for working with parables are these: moving and matching, quizzes, etc. Here are a pair of them:

Moving and matching activity: The Good Samaritan. Each pupil receives a set of pieces of paper inside an envelope. Each paper with a character or a description on it. Instructions are written on the envelope: “The good Samaritan. Group in pairs the characters and their description, one for each”:

Samaritan / was traveling; robbers / beat and stole the Samaritan; priest / passed by; innkeeper / accepted taking care of the Samaritan; Lawyer / questions Jesus; neighbor / the man who was attacked.

Quiz. The Good Samaritan. This activity is projected onto the screen and one of the pupils is asked to use the mouse to tick the correct answer on behalf of classmates who are pointed out by the teacher. Tick the correct answer (only one is correct)

Gave money to the innkeeper: ☐ Samaritan ☐ Priest ☐ Levite ☐ Robbers

He had oil and wine with him: ☐ Samaritan ☐ Priest ☐ Levite ☐ Robbers