March 2009 Blog Posts (259)

Text Structure Instruction in Saudi High School Reading Textbooks

A checklist consisting of the general and specific narrative and expository text structure skills was constructed and used to analyze and classify all the reading questions that follow the narrative and expository texts in junior and senior high school reading textbooks used in girls’ schools. Analysis of the reading questions has indicated that of a total of 1282 questions in all twelve reading textbooks, only 35 questions were allocated to text structure: 23 questions covered narrative texts… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:53pm — No Comments

Processing of Cohesive ties By EFL Arab College Students

59 EFL college students took a cohesion test in which they identified four types of cohesive ties in a reading text. Incorrect responses were analyzed. It was found that substitution was the most difficult to process followed by reference and ellipsis, whereas conjunction was the easiest. In resolving the cohesion relationships, the students used the following faulty strategies: an anaphor was associated with the closest noun whether intersentential or intrasentential. When preceded by two… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:51pm — No Comments

Reading Lesson Design in Junior and Senior High School Reading Textbooks in Saudi Arabia

A checklist consisting of criteria for reading lesson design was used to analyze, describe and evaluate reading lesson components, layout and aesthetic aspects. Findings indicated that reading lessons lack many essential components such as advance organizers, interspersed questions, instructions and explanations in the margins. Comprehension questions that follow the reading text within each grade level and across the grade levels did not differ in number nor comprehension level measured.… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:50pm — No Comments

What Saudi College Students Read in the Global Age.

The study aimed to investigate the reading interests of female college students in terms of the magazines they read and the topics they like to read and the topics senior and junior high school reading textbooks cover. Findings of a questionnaire and interviews with female college students at King Saud University indicated that 77% of the students read women’s magazines, 77% like to read about fashion and make-up, 66% read articles about movies and pop-stars, 24% read poetry magazines, between… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:47pm — No Comments

Processing of Advertisements by EFL Arab College Students

The study investigated ESL students’ ability to comprehend and analyze advertisements, to identify the stylistic features of advertisements, to find out the features that are easy to identify, and those that are difficult to identify. Results of a test with 66 ESL college students showed ad features that were easy to identify and those that were difficult to identify. Responses also reflect the difficulty level of the different stylistic features of the advertisement. Correcting faulty… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:46pm — No Comments

Developing Reading and Literacy Skills in Saudi Arabia

The educational system in Saudi Arabia consists of 6 years of elementary school, 3 years of junior and 3 years of senior high school. In grades 1-3, the students learn to read and in grades 4-12, the students read for comprehension. At each grade level, the students use a reading textbook and students throughout the kingdom study the same reading textbooks and same reading curriculum. First the study will define the word identification, reading comprehension, product and process skills and… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:45pm — No Comments

Maximizing EFL College Students' Reading Comrehension

The aim of this workshop is to show English teachers how reading comprehension can be effectively taught to EFL/ESL struggling college readers. The teaching strategies include the following: (1) Helping students understand the book and chapter organization; (2) Predicting the content of a reading text from the text title before reading, comparing a text to a building, writing the topic of each paragraph in the margin, underlining the main ideas, numbering the supporting details, circling words… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:43pm — 1 Comment

Electronic Dictionaries in ESL classrooms

The present study tried to find out the percentage of ESL and translation students who use the electronic dictionary (ED), differences between ESL and translation students in using ED, level at which students started to use an ED, courses in which students use an ED, kinds of ED that students use, i.e. monolingual, English-Arabic, Arabic-English, general or specialized ED, the percentage of words that they find in an ED, kinds of linguistic information that they obtain from an ED, reasons for… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:42pm — No Comments

Electronic Dictionaries and Translation

178 students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and Translation and 10 translation and interpreting instructors were surveyed. It was found that 45% of the students use an electronic dictionary (ED). 99% of those use a general English-Arabic ED, 68% use an Arabic-English ED, 27% use an English-English ED and only 2% use a specialized ED. The students gave 12 reasons for not using an ED in specialized translation courses. It was also found that 70% of the translation instructors… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:41pm — No Comments

Training ESP College Students in Electronic Searching

150 female graduate students at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were interviewed. Since most students are not proficient in English, they are required to take an ESP course when admitted to the M.A. and Ph. D. programs, as locating information in specialized journals is required for their assignments, term papers and theses. Results indicated that 13% of the students use search engines like Google and AltaVista to locate information and fewer than 1% can search the ERIC database.… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:40pm — No Comments

Impact of Web-based instruction on EFL Students Cultural Awareness

I conducted an experiment with two groups of sophomore students majoring in translation. The control group was taught British culture using in-class instruction only, and the experimental group was taught using a combination of online and in-class instruction. Experimental students used the online course from home as the internet was inaccessible from campus. Both groups were pre and post-tested. The impact of online instruction on cultural awareness, the relationship between the online course… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:04pm — No Comments

Online Instructiion and Creative Writing

In the past six semesters I have used online courses in teaching EFL courses to freshman students. Blackboard and Nicenet were used as a supplement to in-class instruction. We used our PC's and internet connection from home. Students posted stories and poems that they read on the internet or in books and liked to share, and wrote short paragraphs related to the themes covered in class and textbook. I encouraged them to write for communication and not to worry about grammatical and spelling… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:02pm — No Comments

Availability of Electronic Resources at Arab Universities.

Latest developments in information technology resulted in a revolution in library and information sciences. Acquiring electronic searching skills together with the availability of electronic resources will enable researchers to access a plethora of up-to-date information and will lead to productivity in research. This study tried to investigate the availability of electronic databases at Arab university libraries, whether faculty members can search electronic databases, and the frequency of… Continue

Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:00pm — No Comments

Posters

I just loved making thise posters! I am glad that i know how to make them i cant believe that it was so simple nd i never knew before... i think it is a very creative way to put up rules, directions, and standards in the classroom. i feel that it will catch a students attention. also if they are made more personally the student will have more of an interest. i know when i go into different classrooms i feel like its more of a learnig environment when it is filled with learning things on the… Continue

Added by Erin Freese on March 3, 2009 at 12:54pm — 1 Comment

Character Poster

last class, in Educational Technology we learned how to make a character poster. I had never experimented with anything like this before. I was so glad I learned how to make this because I feel like it will definitely be a useful skill. As I was creating this poster my mind was going through all the possibilities of all the things I could do with it. I feel like it could be used for so many other things as well... like maybe a giant puzzle or a sweet mural of a boy band for you dorm room wall,… Continue

Added by Casey Boyd on March 3, 2009 at 11:46am — 1 Comment

Reviewing, Reviewing, Reviewing!

Since January, all 10th grade teachers as well as 11th and 12th grade core teachers have been reviewing out the wazoo! The funny thing is--we all love it, and want to see our kids pass the grad exam the first time! This week in particular, we are all stressed and ready to move forward.

In my 9th grade English class, we are writing expository essays with my students fighting tooth and nail to weed out slang, numbers for letters, symbols, and what else, text messaging lingo! We peer… Continue

Added by Tracy Montgomery on March 3, 2009 at 10:16am — No Comments

Character Poster

The character poster project was a new experience for me. I enjoyed creating something that was supposed to be a personal reflection on myself. The actual process, however, stressed me out a little bit.

I am naturally attracted to photography and art, so this project was enjoyable. If I had more pictures of myself I would have probably chosen another photo rather than my wedding shot, but I was still able to accomplish the task at hand. I learned that the spreadsheet template can be… Continue

Added by Kristin McCloud on March 3, 2009 at 9:47am — 1 Comment

Could it happen in schools?

Wow, today I went to a website, Skittles, of all things. (www.Skittles.com)

Yes, the tasty rainbow candy that we all loved as kids. The ones that are the cause of all your children's dental visits.

Long story short, they did something totally disruptive. The got rid of their static, boring website and embraced the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube… Continue

Added by John Costilla on March 3, 2009 at 8:00am — No Comments

The Global Lean Project

Please join the "Global Lean"

blog at http://globallean.edublogs.org
AND NING http://globallean.ning.com

Give the world a voice in a joyful celebration of diversity!

Thanks! Peggy Sheehy

Added by Peggy Sheehy on March 3, 2009 at 7:22am — No Comments

Reflecting on Litearcy Rituals

Entering Activities: Students will enter and copy today’s agenda and begin the sponge, which will read:

According to Ralph Keyes, author of The Courage to Write, many famous authors have followed unusual rituals like the ones below whenever they wrote:

• Ernest Hemingway did not write anything until he had sharpened twenty pencils.

• Mark Twain wrote only while in bed.

• John McPhee always wrote in his bathrobe and used the belt to strap himself in his chair so… Continue

Added by Amanda Addison on March 3, 2009 at 6:04am — 1 Comment