My Teaching Beliefs and Practices Paper Mengran Chen Michigan State University

Stage One: My Incoming Beliefs and Practices

I have been a Mandarin language and culture teacher for one and a half years. Teaching reading is certainly an important part of my instruction, no matter reading the authentic materials in Mandarin or reading about Chinese culture and history. As far as I know, reading has three definitions. Firstly, pronouncing the words. Secondly, recognizing the words and getting the meanings. Thirdly, bringing our experience and understandings to the text, in order to getting the meanings from it. As Charles Scribner, Jr. said, Reading is a means of thinking with another persons mind; it forces you to stretch your own. According to my understanding, reading includes five components: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The five components are closely connected to each other. Alphabetic skills are required to develop fluency, which is vital to comprehension. A fluent reader is able to identify the words quickly and accurately, therefore it is easier to focus on meaning. Besides, vocabulary is vital to understanding the increasingly difficult materials. Therefore, comprehension is the goal of all other four components. Since my students are the beginning learners of Mandarin, they could only recognize some basic Chinese characters when doing reading in my class. But they enjoy making assumption according to the pictures; the words they recognized and body language I made to help them understand. At the end of the year, I expect them to improve fluency, enrich vocabulary and be able to read some simple stories.

This year, I focused on the areas of vocabulary, phonemic awareness, phonics and comprehension. Vocabulary is the one of the greatest challenge for my students to read in Mandarin. Therefore, it has become part of my daily curriculum. Besides, I created various activities, such as songs and poems with rhythm and repetition, to teach phonetic awareness and help building students vocabulary. In addition, I exposed them to the authentic reading materials as much as possible, even though they have limited vocabulary. I believe reading more will no doubt help them reading better. I told my students that reading is a process of communicating with the author, who might be a famous Chinese poet living five hundred years ago, or a Chinese child of your age. And I encouraged them to bring combine the textual information with the information they bring to the text. For example: When we read an article about Chinese New Year in class, I had them make connections and comparisons with their experience of Christmas. As to the assessment of reading, my belief is that the process than the products. As the second language beginners, my students only have very limited vocabulary and reading abilities. But I hope they would enjoy reading and I give praise and encouragement for any improvement they made. They are happy to share with their friends what they read about Chinese festivals and children stories; they are thrilled to find the characters that they recognized from a Chinese newspaper; they enjoy making assumption before reading and sharing ideas after reading. So at the end of the year, I hope they could not only improve their reading skills, but also learn to enjoy reading!

Stage Two: My Outgoing Beliefs and Practices

Affirmations (1) B: Building background knowledge and vocabulary I usually start a new reading text by introducing the background knowledge and help students get familiar with the vocabulary. By having kids brainstorm what they know about the topic, I can get a general idea of their understanding as well as arousing their interest. Children obviously differ in terms of background knowledge and these differences affect their performance on reading tasks. (Mckenna & Stahl, 2009) Thus, a clear idea of students prior knowledge will be helpful in terms of providing assessment. Besides it, adequate progress in learning to read depends on sufficient background knowledge and vocabulary to render written texts meaningful and interesting. (Snow & Griffin, 1998) While reading, I have the kids guess the new words meanings in the context and encourage them make connections with the words they learned before. Vocabulary instruction should relate new words to known word, embed instruction in relevant contexts and include experiences surrounded with meaningful talk. (Duke, Pearson, Strachan & Billman, 2011) (2) P: Practice reading wide and deep Adequate initial reading instruction requires that children have frequent and intensive opportunities to read. (Snow & Griffin, 1998)

Firstly, by looking for the authentic Chinese reading materials, for example: Chinese restaurant menu, advertisement posters, children stories and simple poems, and translating the English popular books or stories into Mandarin, I am trying to provide students with more texts to choose and read. To encourage them to practice, we need to ensure that the appropriate texts, guide and resources are accessible. Besides, I am working on giving kids more time and more comfortable environment to enjoy reading. Practice makes perfect. A large and wide amount of reading is necessary for students to become fluent and proficient readers. (Rasinski & Samuels, 2011) According to Duke, the effective comprehension instruction should provide students with ample chances to emerge with texts. In addition, with many studies suggesting that word learning occurs normally and incidentally during normal reading, wide reading is another hallmark of word learning. (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2011) Secondly, read wide and also read deep. In my view, it is especially important for the second language reading, since the language acquisition occurs while student repeated reading. I usually have the students to practice reading one text for at least two times with different activities such as group reading, pair reading and reading performance. A strong body of research has shown that repeated reading is a powerful tool for developing fluency in struggling and developing readers. (Rasinski & Samuel, 2011) (3) C: Collaboration Just as what Harvey and Daniels said, when you think about it, almost everyone in the nonschool world works in some kind of group, crew, office, team, line, shift, or staff. So bringing social skills into classroom and building a true culture of collaboration is always

my goal and what I keep working on. Group work and pair work plays an important role in my teaching and student learning. I believe, to achieve the future success in the society, the students have to be nurtured with group spirit - respect, how to listen, how to share, how to give feedback, how to ask for help and how to support. Collaboration gives the students opportunities to learn from and with peers. Base on the research, text-based discussion emphasizing collaborative reasoning increased higher level thinking and overall reading engagement more than recitation styles of interaction. (Duke, Pearson, Strachan & Billman, 2011) Also, the research in cooperative learning has shown that working with others promotes student engagement in work and group consciousness. (Turner & Paris, 1995) (4) R: Reading performance In real life, how to engage people in repeated reading for real purposes? Performance! Reading performance is one of my favorite activities in teaching and the kids love it! I had the students make the performance of theater (role play), song, poetry and rhythms. Repeated reading of texts meant to be performed is surely an authentic approach to fluency instruction. (Ransinski & Samuels, 2011) Besides the improvement of fluency, when students are able to interpret and read texts with expression, their comprehension improves. (Worthy & Broaddus, 2001) (5) I: Integrate reading and writing The connection between reading and writing are multifaceted. I apply writing as a strategy to assess students understanding as well as enhancing their comprehension. For example: after reading a book about family, I had my kids create their own book

about their family and read their own books to peers. Sometimes, after reading about Chinese cultures or holidays, I had the students work a small group to make a Power Point or a poster to present what they learn from the reading or the similarities and differences with American culture. Integrating reading and writing can be involved in reading performance as a great step to improve fluency and comprehension. (Worthy & Broaddus, 2001) Furthermore, through reading and writing, students are able to build a richer representation of the content of the texts and deal with the question: how to write so others will understand. (Duke, Pearson, Strachan & Billman, 2011) As to vocabulary learning, writing provides an extremely powerful and convenient setting for fostering word consciousness. The most effective way is to make careful consideration of word choice a routine part of the revision process. (Graves & Watts- Taffe, 2008)

Questions (1) C: Classroom print environment To create an authentic atmosphere in my classroom, I decorate my classroom with many pictures of Chinese famous tourism spots, such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the Terra-cotta Warriors. And I hang some calligraphy work and Chinese painting to make the classroom more culturally emerged. It did make the classroom beautiful and attractive. But obviously, I overlooked a crucial function of the classroom word-rich environment.

A word-rich classroom is a place where students see in the classroom environment, read in a variety of texts, hear spoken by the teacher and other students, and ultimately use in their own speaking and writing (Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2008) Both rich oral and rich book language provide important input for students vocabulary growth. (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2011) (2) C: Choices To feel having control to the class and teaching content, I used to decide almost all aspects of teaching and student learning- assign the reading materials, giving the vocabulary lists that they need to learn and assign the reading tasks. After this course learning, I realized that good learners take control of their own learning. (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2011) When the students are allowed to select the reading tasks, they have the opportunities to mold tasks to interests and values, thus supporting their efforts to make meaning while engaging them affectively. (Turner & Paris, 1995) According to the studies, when students choose words that they need to learn, they learn the word meanings more successfully and retain the meaning longer than when a teacher chooses the words. (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2011) (3) M: Model I have been a student in China for more than 16 years, so my Chinese school experience effects my teaching more or less. Just like many Chinese teachers, I used to tell kids what to do without showing them how. However, watching talented, knowledgeable people ply their craft and share the process behind it and then practicing

ourselves is the key to learning and understanding. (Harvey & Daniel, 2009) The best way for students to experience is to hear it produces by another, more fluent reader, which means that the teachers need to read aloud to students meaningfully and expressively. (Ranski & Samuels, 2011)

Stage Three: My Plan of Action

Affirmation (1) Build an online reading resources sharing website. The problem of limited reading resources is what almost every Chinese teacher is facing. We are busy at creating and searching for authentic reading materials to fit students various interest and reading level. I will work with the technology colleagues in my school and build a website where the Chinese teacher could upload and share the reading resources. I hope it could benefit most of the teachers. (2) Develop a reading website for students. Since I only meet my students three times a week and thirty minutes for one class. There is not enough school time for them to practice reading. So I will start develop a reading website, where students can hear my reading, read the texts and enjoy the pictures. I will organize the books according to topics and levels for kids to choose. (3) Give a presentation to fellow faculty about collaboration.

Time and again, we noticed that when kids have authentic opportunities to read, think and talk together, their curiosity explodes and their questions comes fast and furiously. (Harvey and Daniels, 2009) Next world language staff meeting, I will share my teaching experience about group work and kids collaborative learning. And I am going to show the video of students group work presentation and have a discussion with the colleagues about the teaching strategies of group work. Questions (1) C: Classroom print environment Improving the classroom print environment is a vital part to build a word-rich classroom. Providing a word-rich environment and using it to engage the kids in further word explorations will lay a strong foundation for the development of word consciousness. To start with, enrich my classroom library. It will be a big project that I am going to work on during summer. Luckily, I will take a trip back to China, where I am able to find a sea of authentic reading materials- kids picture books, flyers, posters, sign, maps or even train tickets. I will try to provide a well-stocked classroom library that fits students different reading interest and levels. Moreover, Chinese-English dictionaries will be included and how to use dictionaries will be the first and foremost lesson for next school year. Students also need supportive instruction in learning how to use the dictionary, an important word-learning tool (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2011, P.231) Second, build Word Wall. Starting from the next unit, I will develop a word wall based on the vocabulary we learned from the unit. For example: we are going to learn the unit of Zodiac next week. By having kids draw the pictures of the zodiac or find pictures from

the Internet and add the characters and Pinyin beside it, I are going to create the Zodiac Vocabulary Wall with the students together. With more and more units to learn, the growing Word Wall would be a great resource for kids to review old vocabulary, look up words and practice reading new words. Third, I will apply one space on the wall as the word tree next school year. This will a place that students show the words they learned from reading. The kids would write it on the green paper in the shape of a leaf and paste it on the tree. I believe they will enjoy it and engage in growing the tree together. (2) C: Choices First of all, provide choices of reading texts. The students will be encouraged to choose the books that fit their interest and reading level. And I will give the feedback of whether they made a good choice and give some suggestions. Second, offer choices of the reading activities or tasks. Students get to select the tasks appropriate for their learning needs and interests. They could write a script based on a story, change poetry into a song, rewrite the ending of a story, or involve art and science in the tasks. Third, after reading, the students will get to choose how they will present their final production and how they will proceed it. It gives them more control of their own learning and helps develop students self-responsibility. (3) M: Model

Model my own thinking- think aloud. To make thinking visible for the students, I will share my curiosity before reading, my questions while reading, my inferences, my reactions and my process of inquiry. Model the passion for reading. I will share my reading experience, my curiosity, my honor of books and how reading changed my view of the world. Model fluent reading and give negative examples: change my voice when becoming different characters, raising and lowering the tone and volume at different points, mark punctuation by pausing. Also, I will show the kids the negative example to lead them discover meaning depends not only just on reading the words correctly, but also on the manner in which the words are read. (Rasinski & Samuel, 2011) For example, I will read with a monotone or no pausing and have a discussion with the kids about how to improve it. Model the social strategies. While the students do group work, I will model the way of communication, to learn from each other, to share ideas at the beginning. And I will follow the three steps - I do, you do, we do to practice how to work in groups.

Conclusion
This course is very fruitful for me. Through this courses learning, I gained deeper understanding of the teaching and learning of reading at the elementary school level. With the help of a lot of effective instructions and strategies, my teaching of reading achieved a great improvement. Most importantly, the course inspired me with a bigger picture and idea of how to develop my students into a reader and a thinker.

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