From Alisa who teaches both Spanish and Hebrew in Chicago. Hers is an important question and maybe someone in the group can suggest a possible direction, although the questioner herself is a world expert in the field, but in the real way because she walks the walk every day in her classroom:
Amigos,
I was a double lit major in college and just crave paper books…so even though I have them already in download format, I just bought the paper versions of ANATS and the 3-volume set ANATPBI from TDIscovery (this is a commercial version of ANATTY, correct?)
I will take them to our first dept meeting of the year tomorrow – and this year we are under cyclical review – and I’ll urge every member of our WL 1st-8th grade team to buy both resources, either as download and/or hard copy…
I am still parsing the difficulty of using image based/non-targeted approaches while teaching beginners of languages that do not employ a romanized alphabet.
This weekend we had our fall T/CI Chicagoland meeting (we had an amazing turnout of 38 teachers!) and the Arabic teacher came to me w/ similar issues – what to do about the lagging decoding system…
Since non-romanized languages, including Hebrew & Arabic, don’t have a transliterated system like Pinyin, we have to add special scaffolds and steps for our students so that they can access the written system and benefit from all the reading/literacy action.. But this forces us to stay much narrower with our language in use. We just can’t ask our students to hear all the new sounds, derive meaning AND decode all the new squiggles…from right to left!!
I want y’all to think about this and ask around at your workshops and such cuz I want some strategies and answers about how to lay in the written system even as we soak our students in the new sounds and meaning…
It’s a messy topic. In the Hebrew domain, in most instances, the kids are taught the Aleph-Bet (ABCs) in a traditional way – looking at the letter, copying it a zillion times, decoding nonsense words or real words whose meaning they do not know – therefore it might as well be nonsense words…
So many kids usually come to the MODERN Hebrew class in say 3rd grade at a temple based supplementary (after school) program with some word recognition…but many don’t…and the Korean and Hindi kids in my son’s public high school Hebrew class (how cool is that) certainly don’t –
So I have piloted and recommended some basic strategies based on Terry’s cold character reading in lieu of traditional ‘teaching the ABC’s’ so that we can get to compelling content immediately…but I’d love some more group think on this…
I absolutely love and cherish these books that I just got, esp. knowing both you and Tina and your commitment and dedication to busting walls and kicking away obstacles for your colleagues…
I do believe that what you’ve done is revolutionary…I did a workshop on OWI to story at the workshop on Saturday – so powerful…the elementary teachers were so jazzed to give it a try.
All the best,
Alisa