ERIC Number: ED253045
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1983
Pages: 15
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Amaba: Learning to Read in a Second Language.
Schlicher, Bobbie
The experiences of a teacher of English as a second language in teaching reading in English to an enthusiastic and illiterate Ethiopian woman married to an American and living in the United States are described. The Ethiopian woman was eager to talk on the telephone, take messages for her husband, go to the store by herself, read to her nursery-school-age son, and learn new recipes. The teacher took the language experience approach to instruction, and began by preparing a unit on cooking pancakes, a desired skill, by combining reading the recipe, making a shopping list, going to the store, making the pancakes, and creating a language experience story based on a wordless children's book about making pancakes. In this and other stories the student created, she dictated the story, which the teacher read back to her, and kept a copy to study during the following week. The first stories consisted of simple descriptions of pictures, and progressed to descriptions with expressions of the characters' feelings, actions, and reasoning, and then to a connected story with a beginning, middle, and end, and finally to a story about a picture of herself in which she compares herself to a nursery story character. In the last story, she showed that she could use literature as a tool for becoming conscious of her own environment and experience. (MSE)
Publication Type: Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A