Visual aids for teaching

I have an obsession with digital archiving. Before this winter break started, I was at the Payap Linguistics Institute library, rummaging through castoff books. There I found A Workshop Guide for Primer Construction by Katy Barnwell (1985). It was an instruction manual for creating early reading books for people in pre-literate societies, specifically in Nigeria, Africa. The last couple days I've been scanning and digitizing the book, and I finally finished it tonight.

The appendix entitled "Supplementary Teaching Aids" made me twinge; when I was teaching in Kinmen, I would alternate between spending no time on making visual aids, and spending an entire evening on them. I knew that flashcards held the kids' attention and made for some great review games. But I hated it that often, flashcards wouldn't get used more than one week at the most, and then we'd be on to a new lesson with new words. And I also thought it a waste of time to do something well if it couldn't be re-used.

Barnwell has some good insights on the reasons why visual aids are important. For me, who started out as a volunteer teacher who would play games and make learning communicative and interactive, supplementing or supplanting the non-native English speaking teacher's routine of ABCs, book-work and flashcards, this was instructive. While my role and teaching philosophy was valid for creating interest in English learning, the 'older' techniques also were new once. And they have a very basic part to play, especially in mother-tongue literacy, which is Barnwell's focus here.

She gives the following reasons for using visual aids:

• Preventing the students from memorizing when they should be reading
• Holding the attention of the class
• Keeping the student interested
• Making repetition practical
• Helping to test students' progress
• Giving the teacher an opportunity for initiative and creativity

She follows these up with page after page of inexpensive, creative ways to make and present flashcards, posters, phonics wheels, and more. For instance, did you know that white wrapping paper makes cheap posters? Did you ever try tacking a poster to a strip of wood so it could be rolled up for next time? Or did you ever think of stringing fold-over flashcards on a clothes line in the front of the class?

Read more here.

IBLP/King Car teachers in print

Several weeks ago, I was forwarded a citation by Danette Frazier, my former co-teacher at Kai Xuan Primary School in Kinmen. The author of one of the articles in this book is Shu-Chuan Wang-McGrath, a Taiwanese doctoral student at the time of research, and a dear friend of Danette's. In 2007-2008, she followed the team of IBLP/King Car English teachers in Nantou, Taiwan for around two months, collecting data for her dissertation. (This was later published as Wang, S. (2009). A qualitative study of english as a foreign language learning (EFL) by rural taiwanese students with christian native-english-speaking teachers. Indiana University of Pennsylvania).) The article below is a condensed version of Wang-McGrath's dissertation, focusing on power relations between the American teachers and their Taiwanese co-teachers, in the context of the Americans' desire to share their faith. The names of the American teachers have been changed, but these were my friends, as I was also working for the same organization in a different part of Taiwan.

Thailand's Real Religion

I've only been here in Thailand eight weeks so far. So what I have to say about Thai culture is inevitably half-baked. Also, it's a little dangerous to criticize in the way I'm going to, which is why I'm posting here, not on Facebook.

Riding my bicycle back from the Big C superstore yesterday gave me some time to think... "What is the real religion in Thailand?" I think the state religion here is spirit worship and king worship -- enforced by social pressure and fear. If you disrespect the spirits, you will get a curse on you. If you disrespect the king, you go to jail for maybe ten years.

I didn't put Buddhism as the state religion because I'm generalizing from my experience in Taiwan that Buddhism is a veneer on the outside, with only a few truly dedicated followers, while spirit worship is something that every family participates in, a tradition that started thousands of years before Buddhism came around. Buddhism is more prominent in Thailand than in Taiwan, as monasteries have been centers of education, the king is supposed to be some kind of Buddhist-Hindu incarnation, and every man gets to be a monk for at least a short time once in his life. But I think spirit worship runs deeper and is included in the Buddhist blessings and ceremonies.

So, if spirit worship and king worship are the state religion, what is the folk religion? The heart religion in Thailand? It's got to be romance. Romance, the kind that Thais, especially women, watch on TV every night on soap operas called Lakorns. Romance promises beauty, sex, love, and power... and maybe a happy, committed relationship -- things everybody really wants, to the point of idolatry. Even though these shows are horribly melodramatic, they also have every good thing that Thai Christianity lacks: passion, arguments, violence, truth, love.

These qualities have been banished from religion by Buddhism and syncretism, but not from the life of the people. People get excited when they see something worth fighting for. They will suspend their reason to follow the story because it picks up their emotions and slams them together again and again. It's because in these structured little stories, there is a good guy and a good girl who are destined for each other. And we know that by the end, they'll be together despite the third lovers who try to barge in. That's an absolute truth.

Would to God that we can rescue these elements -- passion, arguments, violence, truth, love -- and put them in their rightful place in the divine romance of his chosen people.