Teaching Reading and Writing: Heuristics

Chapter 8 of Kuma's Beyond Methods is titled Activating Intuitive Heuristics, and understandably focused on good teaching tasks for teachers to incorporate in order to strengthen students' skills of induction and deduction, among other things. Heuristics "refers to the process of self-discovery on the part of the learner." It can also refer to "a method of teaching allowing the students to learn by discovering things by themselves and learning from their own experiences rather than by telling them things" (Kuma 176). I am very familiar with and consider myself to promote this philosophy of teaching even though I did not previously know the technical term for it. I think that the application of the idea to the teaching of reading and writing is an interesting and practical use of heuristics.

Section 12, chapters 26, 27, and 28 also focused on teaching reading. Something that stuck out to me right away upon reading was the mention of "importance of developing sound-letter correspondences for beginning reading" (Richards 276). Although I am aware that as ESL teachers we will be teaching students very basic English dependent upon their level and will be working with students who do not speak a high level of English, it is important for us to teach spelling and phonics the correct way. Too often, we are taught how to spell based on how a words sounds. How many of you have ever heard the old adage 'Sound it out!" when asking someone how to spell a word? Obviously, we should not eliminate this method altogether, but there are many instances when it does not hold true and it can be extremely confusing to native English speakers, not to mention English language learners. I encountered something similar in my practicum experience; the teacher was reviewing a phonics lesson and a few of the examples given did not precisely correspond to the correct sound, so she simply told the students not to worry about them. It's such a hard thing to effectively teaching spelling to students. Hopefully the orthography class I am taking can leave me with a clear pedagogical focus when trying to teach spelling.

Anyway, back to the chapters. As i was reading through chapter 27, I really thought about the ideas and methods they were presenting on how to teach reading effectively, and I really found it hard to think critically about these ideas since it was such a long time ago that I learned to read and once we know how to do something second-nature, we tend to have trouble explaining it. However, many of the strategies discussed I have seen displayed in my practicum classroom. In the intermediate ESL class, the teacher reads aloud from the novel while the students follow along at their desks. She often stops to explain words or ask the students what they think the word means, ask questions, and make inferences. These behaviors show exemplary teacher modeling. I also found the discussion of extensive reading to be very relatable. My grade schools often took part in extensive reading, participating in stop, drop and read programs as well as another program where we recorded the number of minutes we read independently and then were given prizes for the total number.